Try to drop your pre-existing beliefs about the topic for a moment (rich people bad, FedBots evil, etc) and ask why this attempt at persuasion has been brought to your attention.
Who benefits from the agitation that occur in your mind when you read this?
Beacuse the US IRS has been underfunded to a greater and greater degree over the past decades and only recently has seen the benefit of increased funding allowing the resources to investigate and pursue the tax dodgers that have always been there.
You're hearing current reporting on the current results of recent funding increases.
You didn't hear this a year, two years, or five years ago .. because it hadn't happened yet.
I’m satisfied very wealthy people who owed taxes paid them. I pay all my taxes, I expect the same from the other top 40% of Americans who have a federal income tax liability. Why would I not be happy to hear this news? This is what I voted for. “Promises made, promises kept.”
For the biblically inclined like yourself, start at Romans 13:6-7, Matthew 17:24-27, and Matthew 22:15-22. Matthew was a tax collector before being called to become one of Jesus' disciples.
My own secular belief system is in shared contribution to the cost and support of civilization. If I alone pay, that is insufficient. We must all pay what is due for the system to effectively function.
This is a very QAnon way of responding to news. Just add in "who's pulling the strings?" and you are pretty much there. You make no assertions, don't engage with the news itself at all, but just "ask questions".
Ahh yes, internet-connected mass schizophrenia thanks to abusive leaders, anonymous/artificial internet commenters breaking humans. They team up on bad ideas trying to get their justice. Buckle up for more of this.
You missed the initial step where they engaged with the news enough to process it and realise that rich people paying taxes they owed was in some way bad for their political team and needed to be undermined.
Canticle for Liebowitz. I was at a beach rental on vacation and it was on the shelf. Started about 7 pm and didn’t stop until I was finished, about 4 am.
So it's not possible to keep a business private? Are we talking from the government or from other people in the private sector? I know the former isn't possible, but it would be nice to have some isolation from some of the crazier elements of the internet.
I was in DC on a boondoggle maybe 15 years ago and had a meeting with an old-time staffer (and lawyer) for the Senate Finance Committee. Attached to the Democrat side of the SFC for what it’s worth.
He had been on the tax policy scene long enough to see the pre-1976 carryover basis days and the post-1976 step-up basis days.
He was adamant that a return to carry-over basis would be a shitshow for IRS administrative purposes and fervently argued for the current step-up at death law.
This is a Chesterton’s Fence situation.
The collective “we” seem to forget that many of these ideas have been tried before. This “soak the rich” idea (look at the CRS report and see the reference to an exemption for the little guy so we can tax the billionaire) is one such idea.
The other idea — floated by our current president — is to crank up the capital gains tax rate. This one has been tried (and reversed) before. It would be instructive to find out what those politicians Back In The Day were thinking when the capital gains tax rate went up and why it went down again.
A little bit of humility and history might save some optional wounds.
All good points. I submitted this because it at least mentioned some of the issues with attempting to collect taxes on death. The idea of realizing and taxing all gains upon death is quite popular among the terminally online.
If you claim talent is everywhere, the onus is on you to prove it. Disproving a sweeping generalization requires a single instance. For instance, I'm looking out of my window, and I don't see any talent - ergo, talent is not everywhere. Facetious, but not entirely.
I'm asking the OP to prove, or rather, even begin to attempt to argue, and I quote, "opportunity is everywhere," which is only part one of their baseless claims! That's why I asked them to support their argument with evidence. The article provides some evidence that opportunity is not everywhere.
"Opportunity is everywhere" is another way of saying that, starting from any situation, you can improve your lot by being creative and taking the initiative. It would be hard to prove either way, but in my experience there is some truth to it. Our limitations are largely self-imposed.
I don't understand your "moral sewer" comment. Opinions are just that, opinions. Morality only attaches to actions.
This is like pulling teeth; so much for the guidelines about generous interpretation, no cross examining, etc.. The article is about jobs and life, I'm didn't ask to get into a debate about "What is the true meaning of opportunity?"
I'd really like to see where these jobs are at the moment because I'd like one so I can stop busting my ass in embedded for 1.5x median income.
Every time I search it looks to me like all the jobs that take people that just barely know React have a big long list of other requirements that are unstated and/or nutjob hiring practices and other hoops to jump through. Maybe all you need on the job is React but it looks like passing the interview is a nightmare even compared to the interviews we give for people writing embedded and systems software. The prevalence of LeetCode is surprisingly massively more common for React developer interviews it seems than it is for people like me that actually need and use that kind of knowledge regularly.
So something doesn't add up for me here. My anecdotal impression was that the frontend has a much larger amount of people that are fighting over very limited spots and is thus hyper competitive (and maybe even downright corrupt in terms of hiring practices), even if the job itself is probably the easiest if we are judging based on "CS cred" or background knowledge requirements about computers or whatever. And that makes me think once your in it that I'm going to feel compelled to work 60+ hour weeks because the danger of losing the job and needing to win the hiring lottery again is so great.
React is the programmer equivalent of the phenomenon of the starving artist with a liberal arts degree. Maybe you have a chance to strike it rich, but most just wind up unemployed or in a chop shop on some horrible contract.
If you feel you are underpaid, you should leave regardless. Re React jobs, its probably harder now to get in due to the VC bubble bursting a bit after zero percent rates went aeay, but it used to be a very viable path to earn double median US wages after a year or less of experience.
You are down pretty hard on it, when the reality is more conplicated. I personally don’t know many developers who actually work 60 hour weeks, though a lot work intense 45 hour ones thay feel like 60. 60 hours a week is a lot man, if you are working that much you should take a breather.
Yeah, everyone on this site and places like Blind says they are making a lot of money. Reality seems a bit different. Any startup has something of a hard cap at just around $200k salary for a senior. That's in the Bay Area, and for specialty occupations (AI infra, Linux internals, and the like). That number is not 3x median. Pretty sure those rich React devs exist only in dreams.
If we confine our comparison to only California, I couldn't find median individual income, but median household income is only 14% higher than the nationwide median, so it seems likely that individual income in CA tracks similarly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N
I don't think it's a weird comparison at all: households include dual-income-no-kids households too, and they would skew the average higher. To raise a family in the Bay Area one parent has to stay home, or a lot of money has to be paid for childcare (to the tune of 20-30k per year per kid).
I don't think this is quite the "gotcha, you are actually rich!" that you wanted this to be.
And hey, I googled the numbers too before posting ;)
idt we can simply blame the next rung up the ladder. we live in a culture that increasingly glorifies mediocrity and flattery. the hiring managers and engineers alike have been reared to believe the only difference from one person to the next is sensibilities, so any judgment on talent is a failure to support
The CEO/C-Suite/Board is responsible for the behavior of the company; they set the rules, and steer the "ship." They decide what money is allocated where.
I'm not sure who is glorifying mediocrity, that's an odd one.
Close, but actually large PE firms call the shots. A small number of them control most tech, that’s why all these companies look like cookie cutter copies of each other.
PE firms do exert massive influence, but they aren't really the day to day business drivers. Even including the board is tenuous. Board members are often out of touch with the business and just rubber stamps - look how well the OpenAI board performed. If you think Sam Altman should have been fired, they failed, and if you think he should not have been fired, they failed.
Mediocre employees are easier to control which leads to a more predictable business that doesn't do much but also doesn't seem like a big risk to shareholders.
Plus since mediocre employees are easier to replace you can use layoffs as smoke and mirrors to buy more time for coming up with your latest grift.
If the amounts are small, don’t bother lending to the company. Just make a capital contribution.
Loans must be interest-bearing. This makes your life as an entrepreneur more complex. Your tax return and the corporate tax return will cost more to prepare.
Optimize for simplicity in legal structure, bookkeeping, and tax return preparation.
(1) Why corporation?
(2) Why C corporation?
(3) Unless you’re injecting multiple millions of your own money into your new venture, whatever perceived tax benefit you can imagine will be dwarfed by the overhead and cognitive opportunity cost of getting clever.
(4) If you add investors, the first thing they’ll want to do is clear all the bullshit off your balance sheet. Why add it in the first place?
Just contribute capital, unless you can think of a damn good reason to do otherwise.
It's worth going to https://flyertalk.com and reading the forums. These are the people who play the airline status games.
Status with an airline is useful for (a) free upgrades, (b) lounge access, and (c) better phone service when you need to fix things.
I have Diamond status on Delta. (Top tier before their invite-only tier).
Upgrades. The only value I get out of it is that I can book a generic economy seat and immediately get upgraded to Comfort+ for free. I rarely get upgrades to First Class since Delta sells out the seats to real people for real money. I'm frequently #1 of a bunch of people on the upgrade list for nonexistent First Class seats.
Lounge access. I have the Delta Reserve Amex card that gets me into the lounges anyway.
Phone service. This is really an indictment of the shit service that airlines give. For a while, even with the priority phone service I would be on hold for an hour or so. It's far better now, admittedly.
Delta is making it drastically harder to achieve status in 2024. In all probability I am going to go free agent and fly any airline that gets me where I want to go, when I want to go, at a reasonable price.
The airline miles are useful. I don't think I've paid for a flight for my kids with money once in all the years they've been at university in other states. But that's just a "charge enough money on a credit card" thing. It has nothing to do with status.
Lounge access is a really good one. I have an AmEx as well, and it includes Priority Pass (which I like), Centurion (which my home airport has), and Delta lounges (if I fly Delta, though I usually fly either United or Southwest).
