Here in Denmark we received a new tax structure just recently, and one of the items was that people could cash in a sort of “forced tax savings”, which had been 1% over a number of years when the economy was moving very fast. The economical aspect of this isn’t terrible interesting (for this discussion).
But apparently the interest for doing this have been so large that it has crashed the website of the organization which controls this forced saving, because people were interested in seeing how much money they had in their forced savings.
That is the true problem of the internet in its given form. Anything extraordinary happens – and websites can’t handle the traffic. This has been seen multiple times throughout the years, and it is basically a distributed denial of service attack. Sites can’t handle traffic and shuts down. I tried this morning and could still not access the web site, and I tried yesterday around noon. It is a good thing it isn’t a critical service.
I remember back in 2001 when the twin towers were hit. Every news site I knew was down and where impossible to reach. Suddenly the television news channels received a significant boost, because people couldn’t get their news online and we were forced back to early 90s instead.
Imagine something important happens and you have to get access to your home bank, but the bank is down because everybody else is trying to access it as well. Not a comforting thought.
As more and more of our services and daily life starts to be accessible mainly (only) via the internet – this is a problem which will escalate.
Question is if the companies who aren’t ready will want to pay for being proactive with such things, or they’ll just ignore the problem because it is “extraordinary” events which cause it ….. well, extraordinary or just people wanting to get some money.
A friend of mine worked in Denmark and said that 60% of his salary went in taxes. Is it still like that? Here in Oman it’s 0%.
Hi.
I don’t think many people actually hit a taxation of 60%, when only viewing tax. However if we factor VAT or other forms of indirect taxation, I guess it is possible.
Most people seem to pay around 40-50% in income tax.
As an update, the website in question is still mostly unavailable
Some people disagree:
http://www.version2.dk/artikel/10208-vedr-atps-it-direktoer
Actually no. The link/blog doesn’t cover the point I was making.
It wasn’t whether or not ATP should be able to handle the traffic, but it is an illustration of how vulnerable the net actually is, when something a little extra ordinary happens.
And that is a possible dangerous prospect as more and more of our lives and administration of same is being handled through the Internet.