> “It was a choice. It was a choice that was made at the start of the civil war. It was the most accurately predicted massacre in human history. We had two and a half years to stop it. We had the full weight and the full capability of US-intelligence-level collection tools,” Raymond tells me. “We knew everything.”
the massacre is a horrible event but this proves how "liberation" had nothing to do with the massacre. it had to do with other political convenience
it literally talks about another massacre this time classified as actual genocide and nothing was done.
I don't understand what you wrote about US interests. The nukes you can think what you want but this is a theme for decades that they will have nukes next week. (there's a country that has reasons to worry about nukes because it's within range, but that is not US that's Israel... also last year we were told all nuke programs in Iran were defeated very strongly;)
Do a search for "Meta" in HN and their 2022 layoffs of 11000 people is one of the most-voted posts with over two thousand upvotes. Now in 2026 it barely registers as news.
It was for plausible deniability because of regulatory scrutiny. Regulator's dead now, so now there's no downside and only upsides to spying on your users.
i am guessing that they just dont really need to pretend to care anymore. e2e messaging was a big marketing push, not ever an ideological thing. i assume they no longer believe the marketing benefits outweigh the downsides.
I doubt it, E2E isba huge part of Whatsapp's selling point considering it's exclusively a messaging app. Instagram is primarily a social app with messaging features.
You're thinking of Apple. WhatsApp backups are not stored by Meta. Apple is the company that breaks their "end-to-end" encryption by backing up the encryption keys to their own servers.
Yes. I believe a small percentage of Apple users do this. Unfortunately that doesn't prevent Apple from reading your messages from the backups of the vast majority of people you correspond with.
There's no direct data on high school prevalence, so I am assuming overall drug statistics are a decent proxy. Overdose deaths are really bad in WA even relative to US on average.
Canada is significantly better in this regard. We are picking between Ontario and Alberta with a possibility of Quebec if they issue an invitation.
When I was a new grad moving to the US and deciding where to live and work, the biggest draw of Seattle was its lack of income tax. Of course this particular $1 million threshold wouldn't apply to me until I'm very late in my career, or have a lucky year, or get married to a high-income person (the $1 million threshold applies to married couples, not just individuals) but Seattle loses a lot of its appeal if it's not financially advantageous. Of the other tech hubs, SF beats Seattle on weather and jobs and New York beats it on urban lifestyle. Or if you want to avoid income taxes, why not go to Florida or Texas.
I wonder if introducing income taxes will impact Seattle's tech hub status going forward. Sometimes people talk about how much these measures will lead to rich people moving away, but discouraging high-income people from moving there I think is a bigger long-term impact.
Tax rates under 2% of property value should not "flabbergast" anyone. I prefer a state having a high property tax rate and cheap housing over an income tax. I'm sure most Texans do, too.
> Tax rates under 2% of property value should not "flabbergast" anyone
The national average effective property tax rate is, IIRC, below 1.5% for all property and below 1% for owner-occupied homes. It is really not surprising that people coming to Texas under the popular illusion that it is a tax refuge whose property tax expectations are set by the places they are coming from are flabbergasted by Texas’ property taxes.
They tend to size up when moving here and are expecting the rates from back home. Not saying it's a logical thing but what tends to happen. This is more of a comment on how people aren't really taking everything into account when just moving because "no income tax".
The current governor is proposing cutting property taxes in ~half by eliminating the school district portion and instead funding schools directly via the state's budget surplus.
Remains to be seen, as the next legislative session isn't until 2027.
I mean, most property developers are playing shell games to avoid the requirement of having to build school districts anyway in Texas from my experience living there. Build small developments up to just short of the line where it's required, then continue development as a different legal fiction with what turns out to be ultimately the same beneficent owners. Texas education system leaves much to be desired.
The system is simple. Your development hits a certain size, you have to build and fund a school for the community through fees if you're renting. So they go just short of the line, and crap out two developments and no schools, and leave the populace to figure out the rest. That isn't following incentives. That's being an asshat.
Cliffs in policies will always lead to players working around the cliffs.
E.g. in NYC there is an additional 1% sales tax on home sales above 1 million dollars.
So nobody in the market would ever sell a home between 1m and 1.01m as the tax increase is greater than the sales price.
These are failed policy implementations (in the above example the tax should be marginal, not thresholded)
Any policy which does not account for individual actors optimizing financially is a badly designed policy.
There are numerous similar examples re: CRE when requiring subsidized housing units for certain sizes of development. Often it's more lucrative to build smaller and get around subsidized unit requirements.
You can call them "asshats", but I'd rather live and discuss policy in reality.
Many of these new, clearly strictly punitively intended, taxes aimed at the wealthy will have the same logical outcome.
Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result
>Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result
Ah, you're one of those.
See, this clever little aphorism of yours is the constantly reached for salve of the "wiseguy". "Everyone would do it if they were in my position; so I'm not going to bother myself about it. Let's work around it."
Problem is, in reality, that isn't the case. Most people will sit there, look at the regulation, realize the development is likely going to attract families or soon-to-be-families, and would realize, yeah. Okay. Need to accommodate that. They approach it in good faith. Then you come along and start acting in bad faith. Your bad faith implementation for maximized extraction creates knock on problems, that create knock on problems, that now are everyone else's problem to solve. Eventually, with a high enough concentration or frequency of such agents, we enter game theory territory, and escalation tends to happen quickly from there.
Historically, this comes with a brand of solutions for people like that. It'd stew to a point, then generally involved an entire community not seeing a damn thing while someone came to physical harm in a tragic accident. Or just straight up Wildcat demonstrations.
Communities/ planners don't want that. So they make regulations that are a good faith attempt at curtailing spirals of reasonably foreseeable problems. A wiseguy comes along and creates reasonably forseen problems through non-compliance.
Are you noticing a pattern yet? You being a bad faith asshat isn't the policy's fault.
That's your fault for being a garbage human being, and maybe just a bit our collective fault for making the world such a comfortable and safe place for humans with garbage mindsets drawn to bad faith in all things business. Nevertheless, the gradient is clear. Do good faith business. Everyone wins. Do bad faith, and you win til it's worth someone's time to ensure you lose.
Too damn smart to learn the virtue of self-restraint, too damn stupid to recognize the threat too many of you pose to everyone else. Or how quickly things go bad once people start catching onto the games you seem to delight in playing.
I don't understand your point or why you are sure of that? New Jersey consistently ranks as having the highest average property tax rate of any state, and it also has relatively high income tax rates.
This is mainly caused by having a ridiculous number of tiny towns and tiny school districts, each with redundant services and employees.
My small NJ town has its own school district, containing a single K-8 school. Yet it has both a superintendent and a principal.
Grades 9-12 feed into a regional high school, which also has its own school district containing just that school. It also has its own superintendent and principal.
I don't think "redundant" is a strong word for this situation.
Sorry but I'm not spending an hour doing math on employee counts just to satisfy an HN commenter. There's no universe where it is sane and reasonable to have 4 separate highly-paid school superintendents in a 3-town area (towns feeding into the regional HS) with total population of only 25k, especially as these schools don't even rank particularly well.
And that's not even accounting for the principals. Think of it this way: if a country's navy has only a single boat, does it really need both an admiral and a captain?
TX: Average Effective Rate: Approximately 1.36% to 1.6% (some estimates range up to 1.8%) of a property's assessed fair market value. The typical homeowner in Texas pays a median annual property tax of $4,108
WA: Effective Rate: The average effective property tax rate in Washington is approximately 0.75% to 0.79% of the home's value. State mean the median annual property tax payment is roughly $4,361 to $4,729
Take this into account. People move from places with high cost of living where their 2 bedroom house nets them easily $1mil. They sell that and move to Austin where they can afford a much bigger house. They think they win not paying income tax and then their property tax bill drops and they are paying $16k per year. Enter the flabbergast.
If the house is paid off it can be a lot cheaper to support it than you probably expect.
For example my house is paid off. My total yearly spending comes out to under $25k/year. That omits irregular things like the occasional need to replace a broken appliance, or upgrade to a new computer/phone/tablet/watch, or get a new car.
Looking at how often those irregular things happen and how much they cost, another $7k a year reserved for that would be sufficient, assuming in any years where that is not spent the left over is carried forward.
That's $32k/year income needed to live comfortably in my house. My house is worth a little less than half a million according to Zillow. I'd guess a million dollar house would cost about twice as much to insure, and is bigger so costs more to heat or cool. Assuming 2x insurance and 2x electricity costs would add another $3k, suggesting $35k/year income needed for a million dollar house, at least if my standard of living is acceptable.
It's more nuanced than that. Say someone moves from California where their property taxes were based on the purchase price of the home, they then buy a home in Austin where it based on the property value and they size up. It is a sticker shock of the taxes. Not justifying it, it is just a reality of what happens here.
Who are the "good" immigrants? It's a topic that's been talked about a lot recently but most countries, and I imagine states too, prefer that people with more money or income potential move there versus people with less.
> The tax would apply only on the amount of income above the $1 million threshold, so a person making $1.5 million, for example, would be taxed on the final $500,000. It would apply to an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 households in the state, with collections beginning in 2029 on the previous year’s income.
It's a sliding scale tax. Someone making a million will barely feel it. Someone making 50 million will feel it a lot. Objectively, anyone making $50 million should feel it a lot and be taxed heavily. Nobody is making $50 million under their own power.
I know numbers are hard for the ultra rich. I've mostly only posted this for all the poor souls only making a mil a year. I want them to know this won't impact them.
Nobody is making $50M a year in W2 income. Maybe a couple pro athletes? But if you're making $50M a year it's all stock and that doesn't fall under this, and once you have enough of it there are ways to actually realize it as income and never pay taxes on it.
This is not about the money at all, it's about getting an income tax on the books. In a year or two they'll lower the limit a few hundred grand. They're start removing exemptions, they'll add more brackets, and before you know it Washington will have California's tax structure and the people who live there will not be any better for it. But the government will be bigger, and the people will be poorer.
It's not about whether rich people should or should not feel it. It's not about whether they should or should not be taxed heavily. This isn't a normative question - it's about incentives and mobility.
It's about what their alternatives are, where they choose to be domiciled, what job-creating businesses they take with them, and what effect that has on the state's economy over the long term.
As it is, California and New York have the highest income tax rates in the nation, and are both experiencing large net domestic out-flows. Florida and Texas have no state income tax and have been the largest net recipients of domestic migrants for several years.
The person earning $50m a year is profiting on the labor of hundreds of thousands of people. Rent seeking on their labor and skills, relying 100,000x more on the infrastructure that made them rich. No one makes $50m a year in a vacuum, they do so by utilizing the economy they live in and rely on.
If that's the way you see it, you are also free to do so. Labor is a market and the laws of supply and demand are at play just like any other market. Go start a company and hire some people. This is Y Combinator's Hacker News after all. The world needs more founders.
The comment you’re responding to claims that wage labor is exploitation on the part of the employer. That they can become exploiters themselves is usually not a convincing argument to them.
It’s also like telling someone with just eighty bucks to their name and debt up to their ears that they can try to win the lottery.
Imagine for a second if supply and demand were actually the only forces at play for these businesses run by billionaires… - forgetting oligopolies, blatant antitrust, lobbying, the revolving door between government and the c-suites, legal tax evasion, etc.
We don’t live in a fantasy world simulation on a frictionless plane where anyone can be a billionaire if they just pull up their bootstraps.
You don’t clear $50m a year by paying people what they’re worth. The wages are unfair, by definition, if there is someone able to skim away that much at the top.
Your definition of “unfair” is quite peculiar. By your logic, the same salary for the same work can go from being “fair” to “unfair” depending on how many employees you have.
No, it's as simple as income ratios between the lowest and highest paid employee in a company. Above a threshold starts to be completely divorced from their respective work ethics and general intelligences. It's more just an abuse of systems that have been built up over time specifically to allow for that level of exploitation.
Quoting supply and demand in labour is just insulting and indicative of someone maybe getting a bit too high on their own supply.
Ah yes, all the 50k makers are dependent on the very altruistic nature of the 50mil earners who all got there under their own power and without any systematic abuse, grifting, or generational wealth to get them going. Won't anyone think of these poor folks? They'll now have 49x0.099 mil less yearly income to charitably pay their indebted employees bonuses.
Well the tax is on income over $1M so yes someone making $1M will pay nothing. Technically that's easy for anyone to say, assuming they actually read the article at least.
Raising income taxes for those making over $1 million while cutting taxes paid by people making under $1 million makes it cheaper (in employer cost for the same disposable income; looked at a different way, it provides more disposable income for the same nominal pay) to hire workers across most of the income spectrum of any industry (even in tech—most workers in the field aren’t making over $1 million/yr).
The only people making more than $1M in W2 income are in fields where nearly everyone is going to be making that. Highly specialized physicians come to mind pretty quickly but I'm sure there are "lots of" (relatively speaking) attorneys making that too, and probably some other fields where it's more doable than something like tech or sales.
There is no way this meaningfully changes the income distribution of hires in any industry.
I didn't say it changed the income distribution within thr industry, I said it made hiring for the vast majority of roles less expensive in terms of disposable income provided (or, holding nominal pay constant, provides greater disposable income at the same pay.)
That is, its not a negative economic incentive except for people who have a very large amount of income taxed as regular income where that income is not dependent on the ability to have other people with more normal incomes working in close proximity.
Maybe that's a good thing? I miss the Seattle of the 2000s that was less overflowing with tech and more a mix of incomes.
I for one support the tax. The dichotomy of being a liberal state with a regressive tax structure needs to stop. Slippery slope argument aside this tax is a good first step. Income tax while imperfect seems to be the best system we have to tax the rich and not the poor.
Washington also has a capital gains tax now, 7% on long-term capital gains above $270k, and 9.9% on gains above $1 million, exempting real estate and retirement accounts.
The bigger news is that it would be WA's first-ever income tax, along with the tax on capital gains income they just introduced. You can look at any historical example of introducing income tax in the US to see that the rates always expand to lower brackets over time.
I lived in the Seattle area and would be affected by some of these taxes. I moved to California recently. WA lost its tax advantage, so If I’m now going to be paying the same taxes, I might as well enjoy better weather and schools for my kids.
Have they even filed the forms yet or is this another instance of "let's tweet a thing and let some of the public believe Y (new) while X (old) is actually still true"?
There’s no point in listening to anything this administration says. Top to bottom they all just say shit. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it has some basis in reality and sometimes it’s wholly fabricated.
Hegseth called Anthropic a supply chain risk. This tells you absolutely nothing about if they are or are not actually a supply chain risk. It doesn’t even tell you if Hegseth thinks they’re a supply chain risk because, again, they just say shit.
Do whatever you can to stop the nightmare MAGA project they invented this week and ignore whatever they’re saying because it doesn’t matter.
Iranian here! Lived most of my life inside Iran. I don't view US's actions as a favor to common Iranians. That's naive. No one wants war and bombing of civilians. Our misery is caused by a mix of religious extremism, theocracy and foreign intervention (in the past, Mossadegh, etc.) among other things. First and foremost I hold the regime responsible. For most of my life, I witnessed firsthand how they pushed us step by step closer to confrontation with the US, yet there's no single bomb shelter in Tehran or any major city for people to run to after 47 years of this shit. How would you feel in this situation?
Their opposition to Israel is not from a humanitarian and moral standpoint, it's purely religious. They have no shame admitting this. You just have to listen to one of the 5 state TV channels in Farsi. I even think Palestinians would fare better if not for these extremists on either side!
All that said, the supreme leader is the one who commands the murder of innocents in the streets, so he had it coming. Good riddance and he died like the rat that he was. But as to what happens next? No one knows. Also I personally don't think US is doing this because they want Iran's oil. I believe they want to put pressure on China to not get Iran's cheap (under sanctions) oil. That seems more plausible to me.
The US is doing this because Netanyahu visited Trump in the White House 7 times last year. It’s not about oil, protestors, or nuclear weapons: it’s about Israeli hegemony in the region.
Kinda sorta... The reality of the situation is much more complicated. The narrative and actions of the Islamic regime don’t quite corroborate "Israeli hegemony in the region" as the sole purpose of this conflict. Their narrative has not been one of defense in the past; it's always been offense. When they talk about Israel, they talk about Quds (Arabic name for Jerusalem), Quds' freedom, and annihilation of Israel. Even the foreign arm of the IRGC forces are named Quds! They operate in Syria and Lebanon, right next to Israel's border. That's why I said that their enmity with Israel is not from a moral standpoint or, evidently, even defending Iran. It takes two to tango!
Obviously, all this is not to say that Israel doesn't have a hegemonic stance. Probably even Arab nations have those dreams too!
You're seeing this vast field of geopolitical shit show through a tiny crack of news and social media from the last year.
I've asked this question to an Iranian colleague and his response was that it was extremely welcome and even though they know there will be collateral damage, it's better than suffering under a regime which have killed and will continue to kill many more people than what these strikes will do.
Any time we drop bombs we set ourselves up for more pearl harbors or 9/11s. Just stupidly foolish decision most people involved won’t have to see the consequences. Especially since we’ve destroyed our soft power. What is the next step? More stupidity. We are Americans we all cheer for spectacle regardless of reason. My fellow citizens are stupid and I don’t support the troops anymore or any military that has let all this happen.
> “It was a choice. It was a choice that was made at the start of the civil war. It was the most accurately predicted massacre in human history. We had two and a half years to stop it. We had the full weight and the full capability of US-intelligence-level collection tools,” Raymond tells me. “We knew everything.”
reply