It's always funny to read this sort of thing because it's like you're so close to connecting the dots but don't quite get it.
Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?
It may be a horshoe (the poor need to manage every peeny, the hyper rich distort society to minmax their riches), but the American Dream died decades ago. You can't just follow some financial wellness workshop to "save money" when you can't barely pay rent as is. Hard works correlation with wealth has decreased dramatically, very quickly
> Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?
Many if not most rich never got rich, they happened to be born rich. In the situation I'm talking about, the said family has been wealthy for two centuries. And my in-laws are significantly less well-off than the generation before. Their ancestors may have been gifted in some way that got them rich in the first place, but there have definitely be some regression to average since then and their management of their wealth has been much less efficient than the one of my parents for instance (who aren't wealthy today, but are still clearly better than their own parents).
In fact I suspect that these people are obsessed about taxes because they know their fortune is ever going downhill because they lack the thing that made their ancestors successful so they spend their efforts trying to salvage their wealth instead of making one of their own.
It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.
The rest of your comment seems to be a political commentary on whether inheritance is legitimate. You're entitled to your opinion, but it comes across a bit like sour grapes to me.
> It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.
I've written the opposite actually. They would be much better off if they tried doing something else with their time rather than spending it avoiding taxes. The amount of effort (and money actually, tax attorney aren't cheap) would be much better invested elsewhere.
Edit, a fun fact I thought about: they are donating to charity so that 66% of the donation could be deduced from taxes. And yes, their main motivation is tax exemption not the charity cause (which is a nice side effect). Which means they are willing to pay a 50% premium to give money to somebody else than the state. Now talk about rationality and how it makes them richer.
You take out a few % a year to pay for your cost of living. For example, you rent a house, or take out a mortgage and pay for the house over time using the few % a year.
Even ignoring all tax considerations it's often better to buy with a mortgage rather than full cash.
For example a few years back you could get 1-2% mortgage rates in the UK. Right now it's more like 4-5%.
Ignoring tax fun, if you have 10 mil in a share index returning say 7-8% annually and you want to buy a 5 mil house then your best strategy is to sell say 500k for the deposit, then sell just enough to pay the interest + minimum repayment in all following years.
I agree with you that driving manually will become a luxury but it's important to recognise that it will manifest as a discount on self driving, not a surcharge on manual.
The only way in which I can see a surcharge on manual happening is if it becomes so incredibly rare that it becomes a niche product, or if there ends up being a bias e.g. it turns out that the pool of manual drivers is now biased towards people who like to drive in a risky manner.
If anything, in a competitive market that is able to price individual risk appropriately, the cost of manual insurance for you or I should be lower in the self driving world, because most other drivers are now "superhuman" and thus we should get into fewer accidents.
And historically has this competitive market manifested itself? Or have insurance companies instead vastly changed from their 'distributed risk' origins and instead act more as corporate entities with profits at the forefront, where the moment you actually use them the cost of being insured rises?
I don't think insurance companies need to distribute risk from auto insurance. They do, however, need it for property insurance. Floods, earthquakes, and fires and level thousands of homes quickly. There isn't any risk like that for driving.
I think that categorising it as hoarding is a bit of a loaded stance.
I own a home and I have assets that I use to pay my daily expenses. I am, by your definition, asset rich. I don't need to "do" anything other than maintain the investments. (I also do work, but that's besides the point).
On an intellectual level I realise that if we are to have a public sector it needs to be paid for, and that I'm never going to be the arbiter of exactly how the money is spent.
But at the end of the day, I sit here and think, how much do the police, military, and the other basic functions really cost, and is the right way to do that really to say -
Hey, you bought something, give me 20% of that!
Hey, you earned something, give me 20,40,45% of that!
Hey, you sold something, give me 20,28% of that!
Hey, you died? Give me some of that!
etc. etc. If you minimise nothing and just do the "golden path", then you end up paying well over 50% when you stack it, and it feels more like theft than a "trade for civilization" as some like to put it, because I know that it doesn't cost that much.
In my country taxation functions less like "we need this to run the Government", and more like "it's politically popular for us to redistribute". Which is logically how democracy is always going to function, but it doesn't mean that I have to agree.
I prefer to pay for things that I derive benefit from and I think my family, community, country etc benefit from, I prefer not to pay for things that don't, it's honestly no different to me than say, I'll buy a TV if I want one, I won't buy a 100 inch TV because I think that's unnecessary.
>and it feels more like theft than a "trade for civilization" as some like to put it, because I know that it doesn't cost that much.
And ironically enough, it costs money to figure out how to optimize budgets and labor. So your tax minimization is just ensuring that the government always performs the greedy algorithm instead of focusing on a proper traversal of the problem. It's a death spiral.
Also, we can never really say how much something costs. Most funds for taxes go to welfare. Guess what the classic conservative economic administration always targets...
When the government is us there can be disagreement about what thresholds of taxes and services are best for society. Thinking only individually misses the forest for the trees. Private industry's record is just as messy as that of government. Thankfully voting gives us a voice. Private corporations listen only to share holders. (Unless they have competitors which is increasingly rare.) Yet corporations also get to lobby with their deep pockets, and sometimes control communication mediums themselves.
Because most of the time it takes a nice, feel good story and immediately sets the tone.
It's like having a casual chat with a colleague and then they trauma dump about what happened to them when they were 15 or whatever. Like okay, cool, take it to therapy, this isn't the place, you're just making things awkward for everyone.
If that home is over 10, 13 or 20m dollars... you can pay tax on it. If you have siblings, I assume it would be divided between you, so multiply value by siblings.
If you got a home worth that much, you can pay some taxes on it.
1,500 homes sold for over 10m in a year. We're talking about the richest of the rich. That's exactly who should be paying some taxes. The people bitching about losing 'their' home this way... are either a) delusional or b) looking for a way to protect their incredible wealth.
Is your family home worth more than 10 or 20m dollars?
I can pay taxes on one dollar. It's the principle.
In my country our threshold is significantly lower by the way - it's around a million, so bog standard houses get hit by it.
I think that inheritance taxes are wholly equivalent to wealth taxes, e.g. "you have a thing, I like that thing, give me that thing", and therefore morally wrong.
I could agree with them on the basis that the money were minimal and solely used for security e.g. police and military, it's an insurance policy against theft, the Government has a monopoly on force and that's better than warlords.
It's not used that way though, so I reject the premise.
Basically, you don't believe in government except to protect you from others who might take, while you have would have to ability to take advantage of others freely. No basic humans should be satisified by the government.
That's exactly what the ultra wealthy seem to generally believe too. Sorry that many of us reject your premise that you should be freely protected to screw over everyone else and think that's a moral decision (it's not, but I won't waste my time).
The greatest privilege I suppose I have is that I am able to consider a bog standard three bedroomed terraced family house as being normal regardless of how much bad Governmental policy has managed to inflate the market value.
There are different things that make house/apartment above normal. One is of course size and age. But other things like location have big influence as well (check apartments in central Manhattan).
Instead of trying to analyze hundreds of different what-makes-house-above-bare-minimum aspects we can simply use the price as a good indicator of the underlying value.
And 1mil house is definitely not bare minimum. It is clearly above average.
I'll hand it to you that a $1mm home is definitely valuable, however in my case, living on an island, it's not like I can trade it for anything much less valuable, so it's pretty much non-fungible if you assume I will move from a home I own to another home I own nearby. Sure, if I sell here and move to North Dakota I'll be a wealthy individual there, but I am not going to be doing that. Also, if I sold this and rented, I would have a payment that's 50-65% of what I have in this mortgage, but then even if I have a large equity gain from selling I still have to assume I'll use that money over time to rent, so I'm even again. Homes here are more of an impediment to financial success than in most places. People move away from Hawaii, where they grew up, because it's so unaffordable for normal folks. I am lucky that I am well-employed when I have a job (not right now) and can afford to pay this huge payment in order to secure my children's future housing. They will certainly be well-off with a paid-off home here, but that's rarer these days with a lot more people with new families renting here. I'm not really sure what your point is about the home value in this situation. On the mainland it's a little different because you can move 60 minutes away from most places and find cheaper housing, even if it isn't your favorite place. Here on the islands, you can't just move to a cheaper place, everything is expensive here unless you want to move into a literal shack.
> I'm not really sure what your point is about the home value in this situation.
Everything started with another account saying "In my country our threshold [for inheritance tax] is significantly lower by the way - it's around a million, so bog standard houses get hit by it."
So my point is that 1mil house is not a "bog standard house", whether we look globally or in the USA-only.
Sure, there are some spots in the world in which the average price of the house is going to be higher. But that's irrelevant. It only means that the location is what making that house exceptional.
I understand your practical considerations/explanations about living in an extremely costly place where everything (housing, food, etc) is expensive. But the decision to stay there is on you. "if I sell here and move to North Dakota I'll be a wealthy individual there, but I am not going to be doing that" - is the crux of the issue.
In my mind, the main issue with the pandemic response is that it became an exercise in crowd control rather than a discussion amongst equals.
Had the Government at the time said - hey, look, we have two options here - we can lock down for a good few months / a year, it might get rid of the virus, it might not, but it's worth a shot; or we can just sack it off and take the hit - then I think we'd have had fairly similar compliance, and a lot more respect long term.
What happened instead was just this constant kind of psychological warfare - it's just a few weeks, actually it's just a few months, okay you can go outside again, actually go back indoors - and everything was ramped up to 11 - getting on the tube was perfectly safe if you were needed at work, but not if you wanted to see family - etc.
It felt completely schizophrenic - those of us who actually looked at the data could tell straight away that "it's just a few weeks to flatten the curve" was a bald faced lie.
For many I think that it pulled back the curtain on the kind of behavioural manipulation that goes on, and now it's difficult for a lot of people to believe that the Government is actually acting in our best interest.
It just uncovered that no, the government is not acting in our best interest, it's acting in its best interest. Sometimes these two might align in some areas, but that's coincidental.
One of the frustrations is that there are two alternative options to domestic lockdown.
1. International Quarantines
2. Respirators
Both only need to apply until capitalism does its innovation thing and creates nasal vaccines or testing such that it’s possible to eliminate the virus
Offering a “your life will suck” or you suck down SARS2 and if you roll a double you get long covid, looks like less of an appealing choice when you can do 1 and/or 2 until the virus is contained
There's a lot of other reasons people are furious with the medical system. One of my gripes with covid is that it absorbs a lot of this righteous anger into anti-mask anti-medicine yahoos.
This is something that's part of the ethos behind the "thin white line"... which is a toxic ideology similar to the police "thin blue line". Essentially they want to paint all their critics as a number of stereotypes:
1. The tinfoil hat wearer. Anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-who-knows-what, these incoherent loonies are angry because bigfoot is putting floride into the frogs and making them gay
2. The drug addict. Addicts are randomly violent rapists that will claw you to death if suggest they use less drugs or put out their cigarette. Btw I didn't just throw sex assault in there; it's not fun, but this is literally a stereotype from drs/nurses, because there is a higher prevalence (long story on that, but IMO mostly psychos just love drugs, so there's a high correlation; causation is murkier)
3. The fatty, the drinker, the non-complier. This asshole will ruin their body, then blame their doctor. Similar to the drug addict without stereotypes regarding conduct.
4. The primadona. Just they same person that insults the waiter, but now the waiter is the doctor. They expect you to handle them with kid gloves while you wipe their ass, and they'll complain about it anyway.
Medical staff literallly think all their critics fall into those categories. A substantial number of them think they should be able to just kill their patients, just like cops think they can kill people.
There's a really toxic culture that goes unaddressed. They have terrible relationships with a number of underprivileged groups. It may be a stressful job, but it has a hidden culture of abuse and us-vs-them mentality.
There's issues in the profession, systemic and addressable, but there's also a major people and culture issue.
Headshots are pretty vulnerable because no-one really cares if it's fake, as long as it actually looks like you. But there are a number of areas of photography that don't really have to worry about AI because the entire point is capturing the moment.
For example, wedding photography. A picture that looks like you and your husband dressed up doesn't cut it. It's the moment, capturing everyone together, the crowds, etc.
The best I can imagine is that you could have someone walking around with a basic phone (or CCTV) wide angle capturing everything in low res, and then an AI could take those images and create convincing looking upscaled versions of them with interesting perspectives and composition etc. I still think though that people will want the real deal.
There actually is a guy doing fake wedding photos for people who lost theirs (in fire, didn't have backups, etc) or didn't have the nice wedding they hoped for, and it's quite a successful business.
Another case, it's very popular in Asian cultures to go on a trip around Europe and get "wedding" photos in wedding dress in front of famous castles. There's no reason why these photos couldn't be generated with AI since the moment is fake already - and it's all about the photo. I worked for a company that was driving these people around, they spent max. 10 minutes at each location.
Sounds like the 90s and Glamour Shots all over again. The point of those photos was to look expensive to send the message that you're someone important who is worthy of such spending of resources. Once it becomes available to everyone, it no longer has that value.
Those wedding photos sounds like they are all about the bragging rights. And most likely actually going there, will continue to have much higher bragging rights. Might even get even higher if (AI) simulations become widespread.
Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?