The proposal in the article is to tax wealth at an annual rate of 2%. Not realized gains. Not unrealized gains. Wealth.
Under such a system — unless I've badly misunderstood something — if a billionaire's assets decreased in value over the course of a year, they would still pay 2% on their assets. I can't think of any sense in which a decrease in the value of one's assets would be defined as income.
I have an opinion of the wisdom of a wealth tax, and I could be wrong. Regardless of my opinion, I think it's indisputable that a wealth tax and an income tax are different and that conflating the two makes a debate on the merits much more difficult.
Seems silly to debate a hypothetical tax you extrapolated from a single sentence.
The "billionaire's tax" Biden proposed earlier this year is closer an income tax that also includes unrealized gains and only if there are tens of millions in unrealized gains in that year.
That said: you pay property tax even if the value of your home declines. It's not that crazy.
The whole point of proposals like the one the entire linked article is about is to make it seem like vast sums of money can be raised from seemingly small taxes on a few wealthy people by definining those taxes as an annual percentage of total wealth rather than income. The framing is meant to trick readers into mentally comparing the 2% tax it proposes and the 0-0.5% tax it claims the wealthy are currently paying with the familiar 20-40% or more they have to pay on their own income, when in reality the two are calculated in vastly different ways and the article gives readers no way of putting it in any more meaningful context.
I'd compare the 2% tax to the average yearly gain in the stock market. Based on https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/average-stock-m... it appears that the overage again is about 7% to 10% depending on how you figure it. The rule of thumb that I've heard in investing is 5%.
Therefore, my conclusion is that a 2% wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy on average wouldn't even keep them from gaining wealth; they would just increase their wealth more slowly.
I find the article pretty clear, though brief and not very well written. The actual report it's discussing is crystal clear.
The situation is that the wealthy keep getting wealthier without generating any taxable income. Obviously a minimum income tax rate could not possibly solve this problem unless we also redefine income.
Sure, but I think this is an example of markets working well. Customers don’t want to have to adapt to a new platform every year and are willing to pay for that service. Microsoft recognizes that desire and provides backward compatibility. Microsoft charges a price above what it costs to provide the service but below what their customers are willing to pay. Both parties win. Seems like a good thing.
Rarely have I seen "both parties win" used in describing dealing with Microsoft.
There is tons of documented history of their anti-competitive behavior and deceptive practices. It is not very often that a CEO of a company in a market that is "working well" is called to testify in front of Congress.
You seem to have changed the topic. As the previous poster was saying, them doing this particular thing for money is not bad. It's good. The fact that you're for some reason pulling in unrelated things that Microsoft has done presumably means you agree, but it's a mystery as to why you don't want to say so.
I understand that my boss is not my friend, but to describe oneself as a “subject” is not something I relate to. In fact, I think it’s absurdly dramatic.
It’s not though - when you look at what really “drives” the relationship. You trade your labor for money in a system designed to keep us so anxious, we will accept as little wage as possible, by the same capital owning class.
We are subject to their desires as they are bound, by law, to choose profit for shareholders over employees.
We are their subjects. “Ain’t no war but class war” applies to us in tech as much as it does to the miners a mile underground in PA.
I’m sorry, but your description of a relationship with an employer doesn’t match mine at all.
I don’t feel anxious. I feel comfortable.
I don’t accept as little as possible. I negotiate with the knowledge that I have options.
I don’t toil in the mines for 80 hours a week to barely afford to feed myself. I spend 40-50 hours a week doing something I rather enjoy, and for that, I’m paid a salary that affords a lifestyle few could have imagined even fifty years ago.
I understand that my employer would pay me less if they could. Then again, if I could find a plumber who could fix my shower for $200 instead of $250, I’d patronize the former, all else equal. Does that make the plumber my “subject”? I don’t think so.
Your employer can also choose to terminate that relationship at any time. No problem, you could just get a job at another shop, right? Except when the black swan appears and all the other companies are doing layoffs and freezes, flooding the market with talent while limiting positions. Then, in that hour of crisis, is the true nature of the relationship revealed at last.
As software devs. we can save, right? :). Not sure the same logic applies to people on low wage jobs. Or people like the characters in the movie "Nomadland" (which is supposed to be true to life)
I know the feel, but I also think this is misplaced anxiety. Work can be difficult, stressful, feel pointless, etc, which is why we get paid to do it. And you need some level of stress to get over the hump and get it done, to fight off complacency. The problem starts when we start blaming the person telling us what to do, for having to do it.
Is being on call really a sign of low status? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure most doctors have an on-call schedule. And if you think doctors aren't in a high-status profession, I reckon your standards are wildly different from my own.
Long hours and little respect probably will vary from one employer to the next. However, I've been working as a developer for about ~10 years - most of it with a mid-size insurance company but the last couple with a large bank. I work longer hours than most of my colleagues, but I've rarely put in more than 50 hours in a week, and my average is probably closer to 45. And my non-engineering colleagues have always treated my fellow engineers and me with respect and an appreciation for the difficulty of what we do. If anything, they've usually been a bit too deferential.
YMMV, but I think our profession is probably among the best in the world for workers. If my child were about to enter the working world and had the ability + interest, I'd absolutely recommend this as a career.
I don't think on call is a sign of low status, but I think OP is correct that programming is a low status job. People respect the business guys with the big ideas, not the implementors and tbh I think that's fair. It's still one of the best jobs in terms of benefits, but you have to be willing to accept that your life as a corporate programmer is mainly carrying out someone else's ideas.
Being on call is just one sign, just as IT is more than just programming. Also the vast majority of doctors, especially the high status ones aren’t on call.
However, being on call is representative of something. Your electric company has linemen ready to respond at 2AM because they provide a service which needs to be available 24/7. However, good luck trying to contact your dermatologist, accountant, physical trainer etc at 2AM.
For all practical purposes, above a certain level of management, you are implicitly on call all the time. However, the bar to clear to engage you gets higher the further up the leadership layers you go. A manager of a handful of teams comprising about 100 staff gets engaged for less serious fires than the CEO, but both are "on call". It might take the board of directors chartering a helicopter to get to the CEO's fly fishing cabin during the CEO's vacation if a situation warranting such presents itself, but the CEO is absolutely on call 24x7x365.
The complexity of what engages the on call person I suspect is what connotes status. Called for clearing out disk space: low status. Called for application outage that has stumped multiple technical teams: higher status. Called for a production outage impacting the next day's C-level reports that requires engaging other management: higher status. Called for heading off a shareholder proxy battle: even higher status.
Note here complexity doesn't solely reside in the technical realm, but frequently is rather a blend of technical factors, social factors, and quickly making impactful decisions in low-information situations.
> The researchers can't say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness
My immediate thought was that people suffering from depression might eat more “junk food” due to the depression and that their poor diets might lay waste to their gut biomes. Of course, there may be other studies that contradict my hypothesis.
In this particular case, do you think non-US governments could protect the interests of consumers in their jurisdictions in a way that is less unfriendly to the businesses that want to sell to them?
We do have the Associated Press (AP), which seems similar to what you describe. That said, even such sources can be guilty of ideological bias if they choose to report certain facts and not others. In practice, I think AP is pretty even-handed, but I think that is as much a result of their editorial process as it is of their focus on factual reporting over opinion/analysis.
Ah yeah I forgot that AP is American, it's my go-to place for non-italian news, yeah ok nevermind my reply then.. interesting the point you make about their bias, not being there and following the scenarios in person I can only read it from across the ocean so I didn't know that...
I think that's what the GP means by centralized control becoming worse. That is, information is less centralized now, and the sources that used to be at the center are now complaining about the issue.
On linux, I use ssh-agent. My key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa is encrypted.
When my shell starts, it boots ssh-agent (add "eval `ssh-agent`" to your ~/.bashrc)
Still in the shell boot, it tries to add the ssh key to the keychain (add "ssh-add" to your ~/.bashrc), and it asks for my private key password. Once I enter the password, my key is unlocked for as long at ssh-agent is running (usually until I shut down my computer).
My password is a long, I only need to enter it once a day so it's not really a problem. You can add multiple keys to the ssh-agent (ssh-add mykey.pem). The private key must have these permissions: 0400 (chmod 0400 mykey.pem).
Or you can restrict the file with the key to a specific user and only run the process as that user.
The point is, you haven't actually solved the problem. It's not magic. In a 2-system authentication scheme, where headless access is necessary, a key needs to be somewhere in plaintext accessible to the process. You can obfuscate this, or add OS controls, or hardware chips, or ssh-agent, or keystores, or web-services for keys, but it doesn't change this reality.
This is a great point. Non-compete agreements reduce risk of losing otherwise unprotected information to a competitor and probably increase retention of valuable employees. So preventing employers from using these agreements would increase risk and turnover, and employers might (read: probably would) decrease offered compensation in response.
Now, this effect might be dwarfed by the upward pressure on compensation caused by greater availability of alternative jobs for employees, but it’s not obvious to me that would be the case. I’d be interested to see some empirical studies on the subject.
I disagree with the assumption here that employers are offering increased compensation. When it's standard practice to have non competes _and_ they take years to be out of effect then you don't get competition that would require increased compensation for employees.
At this point even if a competitor jumped in and offered no non competes for the same wage, it wouldn't matter as no one can work for them. The mechanisms of capitalism require little to no barriers to entry and industry wide practices like non competes add large barriers which prevent the normal supply and demand mechanisms
Under such a system — unless I've badly misunderstood something — if a billionaire's assets decreased in value over the course of a year, they would still pay 2% on their assets. I can't think of any sense in which a decrease in the value of one's assets would be defined as income.
I have an opinion of the wisdom of a wealth tax, and I could be wrong. Regardless of my opinion, I think it's indisputable that a wealth tax and an income tax are different and that conflating the two makes a debate on the merits much more difficult.