Please do not take HN threads further into hellish ideological flamewar. We want curious conversation here.
Also, please keep personal attacks off this site. Not ok here.
Edit: you've been posting so many personal attacks and breaking the site guidelines so repeatedly that I've banned the account. That is seriously not cool here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Oh get over yourself. It was perfectly intelligible. You just choose to not to try and understand the post and push it off to some claim of not being able to choose to just ignore it like there is some magic going on.
While I have strong skepticism of anything from the Government, I literally cannot find any reason that NATO or the USA would have any reason to to start a conflict with Russia inside Ukraine without provocation.
Having just finishing the war in the middle east, I'm sure the military complex would have a vested interest in joining / starting another conflict.
What about using a conflict to deflect attention away from a market breakdown?
What about using a conflict to drive a post-COVID recovery?
I'm not saying it definitely has to be one of these reasons, but I can think of many off the top of my head. Why are you so certain that USA or NATO nations would have no reason to start a conflict?
Nobody has put an armed conflict with Russia on the table, with the idea of sending US troops into Ukraine explicitly ruled out. The only responses being discussed are economic sanctions, which would slow a post-COVID recovery and would not distract from the domestic economy, and arming and training Ukrainian insurgents from bordering NATO countries. Your conspiracy theory just doesn't make sense in this context.
Neither Russia, nor NATO plan any real war here. Ukraine - maybe, because it seems pretty convenient to grab some land in Donbas, given that West is ready to activate sanctions against Russia even before the first shot. Russian buildup is just big enough to put pressure, aggressive NATO rhetoric is to demonstrate "non-negotiability" of any limitations to NATO expansion.
Ukraine is not member of NATO and not an ally of NATO states, just a rather unreliable partner in security cooperation, a corrupt democracy with stagnating reforms that does not want to commit to the diplomatic agreements negotiated with the help of the West. There is no reason for NATO to participate in any military conflict there.
Human Fundamental Rights are just nice things that most of us have agreed upon sounds nice and is probably a good thing. This generally is maintained by the UN
Sure it does. Quite a few European countries have a top tax bracket in the 50% range. Denmark's capital gains rate is 42%, more than double what Bezos pays here.
Indeed. But it is not clear to me that Denmark's system of not distinguishing between the two is better than the US system of allowing long-term investments to incur less of a tax burden than short-term speculative gains.
I suspect the US could raise capital gains tax fairly substantially before it made sense for Bezos to move himself, his assets, and his company out of the US.
Maybe you're right. Maybe not. I don't know. I have somewhat the opposite opinion though — I believe people in his position have all manner of resources to facilitate the movement of assets.
> I believe people in his position have all manner of resources to facilitate the movement of assets.
Sure... and yet, Bezos hasn't moved his assets somewhere with zero capital gains tax, like Switzerland. There are clearly benefits to being in the US that are worth the 20% tax rate to him. I think a lot of them would still be present if it were 30-40%.
Do you know how you don't pay capital gains tax? You leverage your assets and are given credit. That way you don't need to sell the assets to make use of them.
Guess who typically does this? The very wealthy. Guess who doesn't do it? Less wealthy people.
Many of these tax laws that are enacted end up affecting people who are upper middle class and don't affect the mega rich at all.
> No one is going around breaking windows to give window makers jobs.
Not literally no. But metaphorically it does happen all the time:
Maybe. I don't know the specifics of it. I was listening to a podcasts and they were explaining the general principle of how leveraging works with regards to Bitcoin.
The point I was generally making is that more complicated tax laws normally don't tax the people that they purport to target and normally end up affecting those that are a couple of rungs down in the class hierarchy that everyone pretends that doesn't exist in most Western Societies.
For example. This was a few years ago. I saw a headline where I think I paid (relatively) a greater proportion of tax from my small Limited Company than one of American coffee franchises paid in the UK. Due to them doing some tax wangling with Ireland. If I were to do the same, I would have HMRC investigating me and I wouldn't be able to afford such an investigation. They probably have a dedicated tax compliance team. I don't.
