Property taxes are not wealth taxes. Two houses side-by-side with the same value, should have the same property tax assessed. One is owned outright. The other is mortgaged to the hilt and its 'owner' has very little wealth from it.
I don’t understand this “loop hole”, who is giving loans that don’t have to be repaid? Surely the collateral will be sold eventually to repay the loan and service the interest?
If you are a good customer of the bank and the LTV of the collateral is very low, then you will get a very low interest rate. If the collateral pays dividends (which are also taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income), then the dividends can service the interest. Meanwhile capital gains keep accumulating tax-free.
With post covid interest rates this strategy very rarely makes sense. Even people like zuck getting fully collateralized loans against their stock will still have to pay close to 5%. There are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to take a 5% loan, but they are few. It does not make sense to just roll loans over forever anymore. Thats why all the big tech stocks pay dividends now. Founders dont want to sell and they dont want to take loans.
Buy borrow die also leads to massive estate taxes which is why billionaires use trusts instead. Buy borrow die is best for people with around $50 mil in assets because they dont have any estate tax.
Refinance the loan with another loan or just use a revolving credit account with no fixed term.
If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield. If you have $4B of stock they might let you borrow $1B for what would be ~4-4.5% using that stock as collateral. You can theoretically take out a margin loan for up to 100% of the stock held in an account, but that’s risky due to margin calls.
The idea is to let the cost basis step up to the price of the asset at your death which will eliminate the capital gains that would’ve been owed. Then your heirs sell a portion of the stock to pay off the loan and keep the rest.
> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.
Can you elaborate more on why you don’t think a property tax is not a wealth tax? My understanding is that a wealth tax is a tax on the value of an asset. The asset could be a variety things that have net worth
Also, not all states apply property taxes the same. In my state, my house is assessed often by the government and then my taxes rise based on the value of my house.
Property tax is a tax on specific property (usually we are talking about real property, but I've paid e.g. property tax on a car). It is usually irrespective of wealth.
Someone who buys a house with cash and their neighbor who is underwater on their mortgage and at risk of insolvency will pay the same tax.
Note also that you rarely see property taxes on e.g. valuable jewelry because unlike real property and cars, both of which have ownership centrally registered, jewelry is not centrally registered.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying the distinction on the “wealth” is specific to if the person owns the whole property. If they fully own the property then it could be considered a wealth tax. However, many people don’t since they have a mortgage so it’s not taxing them in their net wealth.
I wonder if there were any climate change alarmists around 20,000 years ago; telling everyone that the planet was doomed if those mile-deep glaciers covering New York ever melted?
Even if they knew it, climate change on the scale we're experiencing today wouldn't be as big of an issue for them because their populations were tiny and entirely self sufficient by hunting and gathering from local sources.
Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.
Right. Our food staples, and especially barley, wheat, rice, and potatoes all produce more calories per acre at higher CO2 concentrations.
That's because RuBisCO is a terrible enzyme that only barely works; photosynthesis works better the more CO2 you feed it. RuBisCO actually evolved in a higher-CO2 atmosphere and is optimized for that one, not ours. Terrestrial plants today are basically an alien species trying to adapt to a marginally (from their POV) frontier planet.
Now, you could argue that this climate model or that climate model increase net productivity once you take into account land use patterns, population shifts, blah blah blah. You can make these models say whatever you want them to say. Truth is, biomechanically, more CO2 means higher yields with same inputs on the same land, and we are very good at making land suitable for agriculture.
I wonder if 'STOP or I will vote for your opponent' might work. Then again, if that worked, you might just start receiving messages asking you to vote for their opponent instead.
Absolutely. At its core, AI is just another algorithm that is subject to the same 'Garbage In-Garbage Out' principle. As more and more of the data used to train the models, is itself generated by AI; the feedback loop you describe gets stronger.
The same question will be asked in a few years to the robotic companies. If robots are so valuable to do certain tasks, why sell robots to consumers at all? Why not just put the robots you make to work in your own factories?
As article says, the coffee machine didn't 'collect' or phone home a TB of data. It just saturated the local network looking for data to collect. This doesn't cost Keurig or any other IoT device company a single cent. It might have been a bug, or maybe not. Without some bad press, like this post; they have no incentive to change anything
Oh let's be charitable! A parameter measured in ms is mistakenly thought be measured in s. Hilarity ensues.
Real world example: þe Windows registry DWORD time periods seems to invite 10^-3s granularity for totally inappropriate timescales. Perhaps its considered a "best practice" by the dick heads that decide to do these things, who knows? Why bother considering how a sysadmin might actually want to use the knobs and dials and what is an appropriate value for a parameter.
I could probably find a better example but this is recent: Smoothwall has an agent (IDEX) that you install on a Windows domain controller and one of its functions can be to harvest DHCP data and pass it onto the firewall so that it can track sessions. The upload period is a registry DWORD value.
I fixed a "problem" by stopping IDEX trying to upload data a thousand times per second. I will also point out that switching on this functionality and the periodicity setting is only applied by editing the registry - there is no GUI for this. The dReal world example -ocs are clear that you should initially set 1000 as the period.
For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.
This is what I suspect. A retry every X milliseconds actually being used against a variable nanoseconds, a broken loop condition that ends up always retrying, something like that.
Not making an accusation, but it reminds me of a chat transcript oddity I saw while using opencode back in August. It replace a syllable of a word with a punctuation mark that has the same pronunciation or HTML entity. It was something like "...the &litude of that waveform..." but I can't remember exactly, nor which model I was using. I just noticed it and thought, that's weird. A few days later I read about text watermarking and figured it may be that.
Happens on paid too. Every once in a while, one of my conversation names will have random Chinese characters in them. I guess distillation goes both ways.
Its the letter thorn, which was turned into y in print back in the day because ... cost. It was originally the leading letter in the (or thee) instead of th.
Nowadays, and for quite a lot of the past, people like to riff on "ye olde shoppe" and the like to imply "ye olden dayes".
The problem, as I don't really see it, is that a possible cost cutting measure in printing seems to have swung back and changed the English alphabet. I don't really buy the official explanation for the loss of thorn. I think it simply wandered off and got bored, it looks quite like a p too. I gather that it originally sounded slightly different to "th" but English has largely lost that distinction.
Oh good, you responded! I'm aware roughly of the history of thorn, but I was specifically wondering about it being used only once rather than on all the instances of "th", or at least all the instances if "the".
It's impossible to tell the difference between being malicious and being ignorant.
With this particular company, everything else they do is malicious so I won't ever give them the benefit of the doubt.
I tried to use a reusable pod in one of their machines the other day and when I shut it the handle broke off leaving me rather confused. Turns out in the closing head of the machine they stuck in 4 big metal spikes to destroy anything put in there. There is absolutely no reason to do this, none, other than being dicks. Had to get out the epoxy and repair the handle of a friends machine.
Exactly. The whole thing is weird and creepy and wrong.
I understand why a TV would keep track of what I’m watching so they can sell the data. I think it should be illegal. It’s horrible. My TV isn’t connected. But the reason they would do it fits in my brain. I can see how they got there.
How a coffee machine got to running network probes… nothing. It seems like some sort of Internet of Things DEFCON presentation topic made up by putting random words together.
So to think that on top of that they were purposefully causing so much traffic on the local network is just a few steps too far for me to think that part was intentional.
The reason is that probably the coffee machine vendor doesn't know what is going on. They probably got that module from.some third party, like "hey, you want to cheapen your smart coffee machine? - take out network stack!" and then they don't have to hire developers doing all the work to implement a network configuration system and all that stuff, but have a simple API for the App telling you coffee is ready
I think the reason to use a coffee machine is because it's an innocent device that doesn't require any data whatsoever, so nobody would ever suspect it of something so nefarious.
They're explicitly taking advantage of their customers' trust, and deserve to go bankrupt.
The funny part is that the manufactures shitty QA made this a much bigger thing that it could have been. Had the machine done a scan once every week, which is more than enough for their purpose, diffed the result locally and pushed the few kB of data to the internet, then no one would have noticed anything.
Yes, it's malicious and completely unnecessary, but incompetence has potentially made it a PR problem.
I was talking to the guy who used to run our ITSM system at work. He said a team was trying to query the system 10x per second to check for updates, which was causing performance issues. Assuming it was a bug, he went to the team to have them tone it down. He was shocked when they fought with him over it. It was working as designed and they didn't want to check less frequently, despite there being no logical reason to do this.
This may be working exactly as designed, as it costs them effectively nothing to constantly scan.
I don't understand giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that is actively spying on its customers, which in some jurisdictions would be illegal.
All these companies make their money as 'feeders' to the advertising industry, they just sell a different device to consumers in order to achieve it.
Selling devices to consumers is a solved problem. The problem we're currently trying optimise solutions for is selling consumers to the advertising companies.
Maybe they literally just don't care about how much traffic they put on your network. Maybe the thought is "1 tb of traffic internally is very low utilization of the network over the course of a month".
Whatever they're trying to accomplish with these scans would probably be impeded in some way by this much volume. Like it'd compete with the link it's using to phone home or overload whatever on-device processing it does with that data. The man in the article who discovered this called it a bug, I agree with him.
I'm not saying there's no malice, it's just that maliciously spamming the network would get in the way of the malicious spying they actually want to do.
When the cost of the action to you is 0, why not do it as fast and as frequently as possible until you get your intended benefit.
Even the act of engineering rate limiting costs you more than just having this run wild over your customers networks because the vast majority of people buying these machines do not have the inclination or skills to detect this activity.
Here that means no lawyers, no discovery, $100 to file in plain language, and a company employee (not a company lawyer, or a contractor, or a temp employee) must attend or they default.
$15k damages.
Reasons it could happen? Imagine grandpa has a tech come out 4 times, because his network is super slow. EG, this thing pounding his wifi for its scans.
Grandpa gets his money back. The company? Well, it has to spend money talking to a lawyer, because even though a lawyer can't attend small-claims court, they still consult.
They also have to send an employee to small-claims court, just have to deal with it. In the end it costs the company thousands of dollars maybe even over ten grand. It costs you a hundred bucks and you get your money back. That sort of asymmetry is beautiful, and if everybody availed themselves in small claims court, it would be far better than any class action lawsuit.
Grandpa is definitely not getting $15k in damages, and Keurig can deal with this with their in house lawyer that they're already paying a salary for. They're definitely not shelling out big bucks here. It'd be cheaper for them to let the default judgement happen than to actually show up.
In which case, your grandpa gets his money back, plus filing costs, plus serving costs, and if it's a default judgement, no one to argue against the gas costs, and time costs you tack on.
Please show me how this is suboptimal? Especially with LLMs to write the demand letter, and walk you through the process.
And 'using their in house lawyer' still has time cost, as does dealing with the routing and pondering the service letter. And accounting paying up. There is no aspect of your 'worst case' where it's bad. It's still all pluses. And if as I suggest, lots and lots of people do it, then they end up with a loss on that product.
If each case is $1000, or even $500 payout, how much profit does that take? Profit on 100 units? 50? If a product is horrifically bad, and everyone runs to small claims court, that's disaster for a company.
I'm not saying any of this is bad at all. I'm saying you can't expect the $15k damages you mentioned in your post that I first replied to. It won't cost Keurig anywhere near that even with fees and such. That's why I quoted it specifically in both of my comments.
> If each case is $1000, or even $500 payout
How many people are going to spend $500 on service techs coming out to their house? So far we've got a report from one guy who figured it out with no damages at all, and therefore no case for a small claims court. Since it was found to be defective 10 days after first use, it's probably still eligible to be returned for a refund, so even the cost of the machine isn't eligible.
> If a product is horrifically bad, and everyone runs to small claims court, that's disaster for a company
This much I can agree with for sure. While it is definitely bad, I don't think flooding small claims courts is going to be a viable strategy in this particular case.
I get it now. Looking back at my post, I left out something important. 15K is the maximum damage allowed in small claims court where I live.
For whatever reason I didn't finish that sentence, and just said 15k. Sorry about that.
Where I am, you can get back the cost for sending a registered letter by courier to have it served, signature required. Also for the demand letter. You can get money back for filing, the $100 for example. Lots of little incidentals.
To me, it's when the damages are smallest, that small claims court is the biggest benefit. Losing $30, suddenly becomes a bill of $200, after it goes through small claims court.
But anyhow, I'm just happy if you like small claims court to some degree. I just think we should all use it more.
local area network traffic was sent out and received by the device to the tune of 1TB of traffic. not internet data but local area network data which is not ideal for a coffee machine either way you slice it. if it were some kind of local bonjour or whatever the open standard is called service that was just alerting the network of their name it would be understandable but the coffee maker is streaming the equivalent of about 17 high def movies every day to the local network.
I mean, it wasn't clear to me without the explanation (I too thought it used 1TB of public internet data), but it's clear now that it is accurate (it literally used 1 TB of private network data)
It might not seem to be anything (people will assume private network traffic is free) but there is a cost - it's capacity that could be used for other purposes, eg. home alarms.
I think it boils down to each individual's personal experience.
If you live surrounded by people who will hurt you, steal your stuff, or act in reckless ways if they think no one is watching; then pro-surveillance sounds more appealing.
If instead you feel that the people around you will behave even if no one is watching them; then privacy concerns take precedence.
I don't necessarily live in an area where I expect people around me to behave. Most people do and I have some good neighbors, but its also a rural area with a drug problem.
I also don't want surveillance to protect me though. Its my job to protect myself, and ideally to be part of a community that looks out for each other. It isn't the governments responsibility to protect me if said protection comes at the expense of my own freedoms.
I don't want to be a rat in a cage just so I can feel safe.
>If we find ourselves with way more money than our share, then we say, "oops, how embarrassing",
And just who gets to decide when someone has more than their 'share'? Is it just money that people are not allowed to have too much of, or do you have the same feeling about other things like intelligence, friends, talents, looks, etc.?
I don't read in the Bible that Jesus did say, sell everything, as a message to every person. It was a challenge to a particular wealthy individual whose wealth was a moral stumbling block. He did teach a lot about money, in particular the dangers of loving money, and the importance of sharing with others.
I do not believe our goal in life should be to seek wealth, or poverty. Having genuine peace, or being generous, is not related to your wealth. In my lifetime I have been given a child's money jar and a car from a well off friend when I was stuck. The money jar still gets me.
While I think there are many atheists on HN, I think there are many who have religious convictions, myself included.
The author says everyone who has too much money must feel ashamed and give it away. This is consistent with most of the 'tax the rich' crowd. Members of this crowd are almost always talking about other people and not themselves (e.g. Bernie Sanders).
I merely asked who gets to decide where the line is drawn between 'too much' and 'not too much'.
I also asked all those envious people who want to take money away from those who have it; if they also think some people are 'too intelligent', 'too talented', or 'too attractive'.
Rich is just a word that is over-used to push political agendas. It is a relative term. I am rich compared to a huge segment of the world's population. I am poor compared to the top .1% of people.
'Tax the Rich' politicians will never give you a number when you ask just who they are talking about. It has to be fluid. Bernie Sanders used to rail on millionaires until he became one. Now he only says billionaires.
With regards to Senator Sanders, inflation is a thing. Also the massive increase in the cost of housing that increased the middle class net worth. He has been remarkably consistent about the segment of the population he wants to tax.
I'm also poor relative to the to 0.1% of people, but I still make a ridiculous amount of money compared to the minimum wage worker. If were better able to provide for everyone by taxing me more then I'd be all for it.
> Rich is just a word that is over-used to push political agendas. It is a relative term. I am rich compared to a huge segment of the world's population. I am poor compared to the top .1% of people.
i agree. "capitalist" is the word for what people really mean when they talk about "the rich"
Computers are generally useful because we have come to trust the output. How many people would use a spreadsheet that posted a disclaimer that stated (some of the calculations might be wrong, don't use the output without first checking each total manually!)?
We didn't "come to trust the output." Boolean logic means the output is deterministic so if a computer program is coded correctly and memory is error corrected we should be able to trust the output due to the physical principle of causality. Now with LLMs output is non deterministic and that still can be useful but it is not similarly constrained. We should think of llm less as ai (there is no intelligence and any simulation thereof is human derived from training; there is no artificial) and more as a useful generative tool in some contexts. Want to code something well represented in the training set, great tool. Want to solved a math problem where the machinery to solve it already exists just has not been put together by humans yet great tool. Want to brainstorm great tool. Want a decision by an agent with skin in the game of life, poor tool. Human output only tends to be verifiable and skewed toward valid because there are consequences for bad output. We should stop expecting to rely on llms for decision patterns that are not well represented in the training data.
That's an interesting example because spreadsheets are commonly and famously riddled with data errors and mistakes in their calculations. Despite this, many businesses are run successfully on the backs of them. Maybe a spreadsheet which acknowledges openly that it could contain errors would disincline a business user from trusting it; ignorance is bliss.
But these are different errors. A sum of a column is always correct. Maybe it's not the answer you're looking for, maybe it misses an entry, but the sum is correct.
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