As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
The last thing CA or SF are is starved of revenue.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.
Which country doesn’t tax their companies or people? Whether it be tariffs, income taxes, sales taxes, VAT, property taxes, minerals taxes, etc., all countries tax.
Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers.
You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
(which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there, which also means they're not counted in the EU's GINI coefficient. Almost no US citizens do the same, because of how the tax system works)
Hard to take you seriously unless the EU rich domiciled there, stayed there permanently, and didn't get the benefits of their home EU countries, benefits that come from taxes they do not pay into.
Wait, what? This is about company executives and high-paid consultants who essentially stayed in Dubai just enough to be tax-domiciled there. Or even just their companies with just a mailbox at a lawyer office in Dubai.
No, the EU rich very much physically stayed inside the EU, fully enjoying the benefits of those countries without paying tax.
Doesn't work for US citizens because global income is taxed in the US.
I don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often.
They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:
Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),
Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),
Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).
Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.
Exactly, concentration of attention onto singular figures as role models should be avoided; kind of like how we agree that it is healthier for the EU citizens to have a more diverse market than concentrated monopolies.
We do have to recognize that we have societally dropped the ball by allowing media companies brainwash the population into thinking that money and fame is unquestionable success; this has allowed the corporate mouth pieces to blow so much hot air into the bullshit they spew, that turds end up floating to the top.
What is clear as day is that we live in a world where Brandolini's law is being exploited constantly: that there is a constant fight to DARVO the heck out of our perceptions is undeniable.
We need to normalize bringing receipts to back your claims...
How to teach the average person not to follow the siren's song of populism and rage baiting?? That, I have not yet figured out.
If you search "cumtown Nick Mullins Jordan Peterson" on YouTube that should get you there (yes it's crass but in the context of Jordan Peterson it's funny)
I’m trying to build 1 decent iOS mobile app per month.
Most recently released one was My Vocab Quest[1], a vocab mastery app with lots of word packs. It uses some gamification mechanics to make sure the user puts in the reps.
Current apps in the hopper are centered around:
(1) Recovery from cosmetic surgery. There are several balls to juggle for days, weeks, and months after a surgery. The app helps the user follow surgeon instructions, promoting physical and mental recovery, as well as medical and dietary changes. Makes use of phone features including contacts, calendar events, notifications. I’m learning to build an App Clip for it and hope to partner with some surgeons to get it promoted in their offices.
(2) Assisting older Americans to be more independent for a little longer (a parent of mine has early stage dementia). Helping the user maintain a regular schedule, take their medications on time.
(3) A dating ideas / meal ideas and agreement app. It helps increase creativity for date ideas, learns from how predictable you are, and facilitates agreement between the users.
The socialist sense of “private property” refers specifically to ownership of physical (or at least, nonfinancial) means of production, other than by the workers whose labor is applied to it.
It does not refer to all ownership by individuals of real and personal property, restrictions on other personally-held property are separate concerns from the abolition of private property, and socialists regimes, including those in the Soviet bloc, frequently have retained private home ownership, which is not fundamentally inconsistent with socialist theory.
There was a lot of private property in the socialist countries. I am not sure from where this thought even came to you. What was impossible was owning big private enterprise. But small businesses - like a restaurant or a shoe repair shop were allowed. You were also allowed to own houses, cars, appliances, clothes and almost everything else. Land was a bit weird - you could own, but not too much - basically stuff that was small enough to evade the collectivisation process.
The only reason capitalism works is because it turns everything into a struggle for existence, which is the best motivator. Every company is forced to compete (assuming there is no moat created by politics eg. Intellectual Property or contract law) or the company will go under.
But it also means that the people who can’t compete in this type of Darwinism only survive because of the empathy of others who do (whether that be family/friends, politics, or charities).
I’m worried about the breadth of industries that PE has infected in the US.
Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.
The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
> Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.
US law enshrined both refugees and asylum seekers as separate categories of immigration specifically to deal with human rights issues observed in the 20th century. While that doesn’t mean any person anywhere has a right to be a citizen in the US, it is closer to true than your statement suggests.
“Sanctuary policies” are about enforcing the 10th Amendment. The Federal government alone is responsible for immigration policy. The states should not have to participate, and sanctuary policies are a public declaration that they won’t (usually because local law enforcement knows that it makes their primary job of enforcing the criminal code harder if residents won’t testify).
The reason we haven’t reformed US immigration laws is that everyone agrees it is broken, but nowhere close to a supermajority agree on _how_ it is broken or the steps needed to fix it. See “gang of 8” negotiations circa 2013. This is the inevitable outcome of the founders making Congress slow/stagnant by default. Also damn near half of the voters being propagandized with immigration ragebait for decades.
When my family came over to what is now the USA, immigration was as simple as paying for your own boat trip and passing a health inspection. It was hundreds of years of very “open borders” before Congress decided to go hyper racist and xenophobic in the 1870s.
It’s worth poiting out that Republicans have long insisted that “we can’t reform immigration laws without _first_ kicking out all illegal immigrants. It’s neither a reasonable expectation that we can do that, nor is it a reasonable precondition for reform negotiations. It’s also hilariously false that all recent immigrants vote for Democrats — that demographic is FAR more likely to be Evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic Christian, which heavily vote towards Republicans (not to mention all of the Socialism/Communism haters from Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela who think Democrats are somehow equivalent to “far left”).
Nullification doesn’t harm US law. It is the escape valve people in the US use judiciously when US law becomes unruly and malicious.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
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