I have 7 grandchildren with the oldest being 10. My daughters are very strict about not providing their kids with devices that have internet access. The only one of the 7 who has a phone has a flip phone with no internet access. There simply is no reason to provide young children with access to the internet.
I got my first computer when I was 26. It had taken 30 days to arrive and when I got word I could pick it up, I left work an hour early, rushed to the computer store, and was into my apartment by 4:30 or so. I unpacked and set things up on my dining room table. The next thing I knew it was 4:30am.
Things have been pretty much the same in the 48 years since.
Completely ignores the true distinction between wealth and income taxes.
Person A has one billion dollars. Holds it in cash in a vault deep in a mountain he owns. He does not earn any wages.[1]
20% income tax: $0.00
01% wealth tax: $10,000,000.00
[1] Every billionaire controls their taxable income. Unlike wage earners, billionaires have 100% control over how much taxable income they have each year. They make choices.
They can have the vault in the cave. Or they can put money into artwork that grows in value and only generates income upon sale. Or a million other ways they can choose to control taxable income.
Every citizen should bear the same burden of paying for the cost of running a modern society. The taxes Musk pays should cause him to experience the same impact to his financial life as experienced when a worker earning $75,000 a year pays his taxes.
It's a fairness and moral issue. If we changed from income taxes to wealth taxes, everyone will have the same issue. The billionaire will experience paying taxes on money that was previously taxed as income; as will the $75,000 worker who saved every dime he could spare to create life savings.
What isn't ethical or moral is for the wealthy to create the rules of who bears the burden of paying for the cost of running society; only to later complain when those who got the short end of that stick want to create a fair system.
Moreover, the vast majority of wealth held by billionaires has never been taxed.
Except that billionaires don't hold cash but assets. And they did not necessarily pay taxes on the value of those assets. The idea that billionaires have vaults of cash in mountains is not a sensible basis for any argument.
Once again, a billionaire focuses on income: something only workers are forced to have. Billionaires only have income if they choose to have income.
Billionaires obviously do not need to earn wages in order to survive. If they do, they choose to do so.
And they are not required to invest their money. They do that voluntarily for the obvious reason that it makes them more money after taxes. They 100% control whether they will have any income at all.
None of the rest of us get to make that choice. Yet, isn't it amazing how income is the test for the amount of taxes we pay. The wealthy control the rules and they have chosen income - earned by workers - as the measure of how much everyone shares in the cost of operating society.
>they want to keep attorney client privilege so they can outright lie
As a trial attorney for over 40 years, that is an incredibly offensive take. Attorney/client privilege is usually litigation related and a prime example of the nature of conversations involve our advising our client of the prospects of prevailing at trial and whether to engage in settlement discussions with money amounts involved. If some day you are sued and you have a conversation with your lawyer about your financial worth as well as how much you are willing to pay to the person suing you - and that information ends up being turned over to the person suing you - you won't be so snide about the importance of attorney client privilege.
I started with dBase but quickly moved to foxbase which was much faster. Foxbase was renamed FoxPro when DOS moved to Windows and soon thereafter Microsoft purchased FoxPro. Since FoxPro was a dBase derivative, there were high quality conversion interfaces between Access and FoxPro (and all dBase dialects).
Aside: I was such a fan of Foxbase that the very day Microsoft's acquisition was announced (circa ~1992), I invested $10,000 in Microsoft. I sold maybe 10 years later for $100,000. Stupid Stupid Stupid.
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