What is the difference if you answer in 10 minutes, 6 hours or 24 hours? Are you competing on time of response so if you're fast you're getting the deal?
I can only speak for myself - I produce exec/board materials.
Often a request will go out to several people and I can get ahead by responding first. Sometimes someone will reply to me quickly and the edge I bring is properly digesting their response and then going back quickly to them with questions. Others might accept they have a reply and then wait until they are pulling the paper together to realise they are missing key data.
I don’t read or action all emails instantly, but I am very aware of the ones I need to, or when I am in a period of high focus that needs information fast.
In an ideal world I’d be in an office with all the people I needed around me, all with the same focus and priorities, but that is rarely the case. So to excel at my job I need to make connections fast and respond fast. (Note this isn’t just email, this is just for my communications in general.)
Replying quickly looks like you care and you already know what's going on. It also suggests that you'd be willing to have even more synchronous conversations (phone calls, trips together, etc.)
Doing it during business hours matters more than off hours outside of major deadlines or event prep.
With many organizations, if you want to give this impression and also shut down communications to focus, you need blocks of time outside of business hours where you focus. For example, I know a responsive executive who cannot be reached from 6am-9am every weekday, when most people aren't trying to get hold of him. This is when he writes and reads. Even then, his assistant fields communications so he doesn't seem to have disappeared.
Not saying you should do this or that it's for everybody.
Exec asked for some business information information while traveling.
I replied promptly, sending a link to a webpage, within the proper process for secure data sharing according to company policy. This required exec to visit our internal website to view the information.
A teammate emailed the information directly, violating policy and good data stewardship.
CEO replied to teammate's email with a big group thank you for "emailing the information quickly".
When AI agents replace search engines this will be even bigger problem. May be you'd need aggregator of competing agents, like 1 chinese, 1 western and compare their results.
One possible reason is many low hanging fruits, after WW2 with all that cheap industrial base and new technologies emerging from the war and almost no regulation with cold-war budgets.
You could use the tech and build it fast.
Check the "Secret history of Silicon Valley" by Steve Blank:
The most interesting part is that it is based on realtime LiteOS that was build long time ago for IoT applications. It's not a time-sharing OS like AOSP is.
It's a bad law and should be repealed/reworked as it was a rushed decision of "we need to answer somehow and show we've done something" behaviour.
However "the government (knew)" is just a lot of unconnected bureaucracies and it's expected they won't work very well together. Someone in the 100s of thousands of people knew something, but the decision makers were not aware or didn't know whom to trust.
It's the same problem Stalin had before the Hitler's invasion. Many reports that it'll start any day now, but these were reported repeatedly for 6 months beforehand. It's false positives that drown the real positives.
It would be great to repel the patriot act. But it wont happen. That's the one that allows the government to spy on its citizens. They aren't going to give that up.
"...I don't usually cover topics like that on this channel.
As regular viewers know, my videos are mostly about rap and rapping, with my goal being to become the number one crypto-nerd gangster rap channel on YouTube. However, sometimes I do get distracted by other topics.
Anyhow, Bloomberg reported this week that Saudi Arabia is scaling back its medium-term ambitions."
How will any oil-dependent finances deal with the end of oil? By saving and diversifying. Norway's got the savings down good, and in a few decades they should start thinking about diversifying. Until then, they're in a great position because they didn't spend all their oil money on weapons and instead put it into savings for their people.
This is a bad solution to taxation. It brakes the long-established tax practice of "realization principle".
Suppose the same principle was applied to a home owner. At the end of each year your property is evaluated and you're taxed on the difference between last and this years price. You own an asset and this asset is valued by the rating agency as more expensive than before. Now you have a liability that you need to pay and if you don't you'll be in big trouble, because you owe the money to the government.
So independently of your own actions & impossible to predict you will need to plan for this expense. How many homeowners and rentiers would like that?
The "realization principle" in tax law specifies that income is not subject to tax until it is "realized" through a taxable event, such as the sale or exchange of an asset. In the US this was established in early 20th-century U.S. Supreme Court cases such as Eisner v. Macomber (1920). In this case it was established that mere appreciation in value does not constitute taxable income until a sale or exchange occurs.
Europe is not very business friendly. This regulation will make creating businesses even harder. When governments need more revenue they need to create more opportunities to create that revenue, not squeeze the current business tighter and tighter. Startups are risky, adding additional risk would just kill more of them sooner.
BTW, it's easy to fix "loan against my equity" evasion by classifying the "money has been loaned" as a "realization" event.
Wealth tax is a long-established practice in Germanic Europe. The list of countries that collected it in 1965 is kind of interesting: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. Most of them eventually abolished it.
It made more sense in the past, when speculative valuations were less common and capital flight was less of an issue. It was collected from wealthy people, who could probably afford to pay. And it served as an additional incentive to invest your wealth productively. But then globalization arrived and made the drawbacks bigger than the benefits.
There is still a wealth tax in Germany which is, in fact, enshrined in its constitution. However, the tax has not been collected since 1997 due to legal issues regarding its calculation. Back then, the constitutional court decided that wealth in the form of properties would have to be taxed more. However, instead of adjusting the calculation, politics instead decided to suspend collecting the tax. Ever since, there have been multiple political initiatives aimed at restarting the collection of the tax, none successful so far, despite a large majority of Germans (70+%) being in favor of collecting the wealth tax.
>Ever since, there have been multiple political initiatives aimed at restarting the collection of the tax, none successful so far, despite a large majority of Germans (70+%) being in favor of collecting the wealth tax.
Gee, I wonder who could possibly be financing voices to oppose a wealth tax at the government level. Maybe we should tax the wealthy to stop them from doing stuff like this.
In some states there are, which is also a bad & unjust practice. The difference is that the rates are between 0.49% and 2.5% and reassessment period differs between the states/localities (these are local taxes).
This is way less that the proposed Norway taxes and "value" can be established much more justly than a "startup shares".
> This is way less that the proposed Norway taxes and "value" can be established much more justly than a "startup shares".
The Norwegian wealth tax is 0 up until ~$150k, then 0.7% local tax and 0.3%-0.4% to the state.
So 1%-1.1% above the threshold. But this is of taxable value which for shares is discounted 20%, so the actual tax rate is ~0.8%.
But again, for unlisted companies, the taxable value is the taxable valuation of company assets excluding goodwill, so in practice, it's even lower than that.
The principle of taxation without value exchanging hands will lead to bad consequences, this is the point I'm trying to make.
What will Norwegian's representatives do they will do. It's stupid and will lead to bad things down the road. Norway is rich and can afford stupid politics for now.
It's also morally wrong, but morality and taxes are not the same.
In the US property taxes largely go to fund public schools, local police/fire/emergency medical service, parks, roads, sewer, water, and trash collection.
Generally the amount you need for such services is more a function of how much non-vacant land you have in the area than how much vacant land, so unless switching to just taxing vacant land was accompanied by some tax on something else to cover the aforementioned things it would not work very well.
The fairest system would be a flat tax per person, surely. Each person will use a pretty average amount of state resources. It's expensive to live in California, after all.
It wouldn't surprise me, though I've usually seen that applied as a reductio ad absurdum to show that the notion of a flat percentage as "fair" is arbitrary because surely a flat tax would be even fairer - on the basis that it highlights how flattening out the tax curve can make the burden on the poorest unsustainable.
> Suppose the same principle was applied to a home owner. At the end of each year your property is evaluated and you're taxed on the difference between last and this years price.
This is exactly how state property tax is assessed in the US. You're not taxed on just the difference but the entire assessed value of the house. There have been cases of seniors who have bought and lived in their homes for 30, 40 years having to sell because they could not afford the tax after the value of their home went into the stratosphere. Similarly for poorer neighborhoods experiencing gentrification when property value shot up beyond what the original buyer paid, and they are forced out. When objections are raised on how a wealth tax would be infeasible to administer, my rejoinder is local governments levy it all the time, on the middle class, they just call it a property tax.
Usually, you get a credit or deduction that can only apply to future tax liability in the same category. Ex: Capital losses are stuck with capital gains in the USA and can only be applied to $3000 of your income per year otherwise. These rule systems are usually incredibly self-serving.
> Suppose the same principle was applied to a home owner.
Norway does apply the wealth tax to home owners. Though there is a discount factor for different types of assets, and the value of your primary home is discounted by 75%. There's also a minimum threshold.
There is a difference between a well-established market with "value" that is established and something much more speculative like other type of assets.
If people there are OK with these taxes and don't vote them out it's their choice. My point is that it's a bad and wrong solution with bad consequences.
> If people there are OK with these taxes and don't vote them out it's their choice. My point is that it's a bad and wrong solution with bad consequences.
Norway has had this tax for decades, and done just fine.
Taxes are levied on economic activity. In capitalist systems the main economic activity is created by companies by direct tax on profits or direct tax on labor they buy (wages for the workers).
Count the number of companies created and grown in the last 20 years and see the trend. If it's going down your tax revenues will decrease. So indeed number of companies created is a very good proxy for future tax revenues.
Taxes are levied on all kinds of things that are not economic activity. Including, in Norway, on ownership.
> Count the number of companies created and grown in the last 20 years and see the trend. If it's going down your tax revenues will decrease. So indeed number of companies created is a very good proxy for future tax revenues.
Even if it was that simple, that does not provide even a correlation - much less causation - with wealth taxes, which Norway has had for decades. E.g. we'd expect to see changes corresponding with changes in the wealth tax rates.
Yes, I agree with you that taxes can be levied on property too, but to pay for those taxes economic activity is needed. I don't see how it's different though.
Companies and people need to generate money to pay for these. Profits are created by economic activity. When you increase the risk for companies to die by creating a cost that is not easily planned you decrease your future revenues. just basic math...
- in EU there are large peering exchanges to swap traffic
- in USA no peering exchanges exists and you need to pay for your traffic most of the time. Few big operators in US and they enforce this.
Looks like some deal wasn't renewed and they lost a big chunk of cheap pipe or/and some of their upstream providers decided to do something with routing.
Also, Hetzner is way bigger in the EU than in the US. Good access to services hosted by Hetzner is thus more relevant to EU ISPs, because customers in the EU will probably use more services hosted on Hetzner infra. This gives Hetzner more leverage in the EU to negotiate beneficial conditions with regard to its uplinks and peering agreements.
What is the difference if you answer in 10 minutes, 6 hours or 24 hours? Are you competing on time of response so if you're fast you're getting the deal?
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