I bet the two sources won't agree on what values go into the denominator and / or numerator of their effective tax rate calculations. It can be as simple as the 3.5% being a calculated rate on revenue rather than profit
You can't just throw revenue in the denominator, though. Business tax is assessed on income. If you're going to make a claim about tax rate using an unconventional metric, you need to be explicit about what you've done; Reich isn't.
Yeah, screw Robert Reich! Always looking out for the workers who make up the majority of this country. Why won't he look out for the poor multi-national corporations, who have no one to advocate for them or their tax rates?
It was income you dicks. Someone above crunched the numbers. Why do you hate rob reich so much your willing to make shit up and get mad at him about it?
Your parent post isn’t suggesting it’s always the same user submitting, just that users submit a lot of posts from this person.
Can’t say I agree, though. I don’t recall ever having seen one of his posts on HN, and a cursory search suggests they’re not even upvoted that much. Highest I found was under 30 points. But my methodology is flawed, as I basically searched for the name.
Sure, and there are a ton of ways to shifting income around. For example selling a subsidiary in lower tax jurisdiction patents and then paying for their usage. Another example is Hollywood accounting where productions pay exorbitant rates for equipment and catering to affiliated companies. This inflates the costs so the movies end up unprofitable despite smashing box office.
Income != profit. Income is revenue. It sure would be nice if businesses were taxed on income, given that’s how people are taxed and all. Aren’t corporations supposedly people now thanks to citizens united?
I appreciate your polite corrections with well sourced info! Being a bit silly, I’ll say you’re a shiny beam of knowledge in a dark expanse of confusion
Interesting, it seems like this might be a UK vs US thing. All the non-dodgy UK results for "income" I found agree with what I thought e.g. "Income less Costs = Profit" [1]
The one exception is HMRC (UK equivalent of IRS) which, for the purposes of corporation tax only, defines income like profit [2] (with some technical differences, but the same spirit). But for other purposes (e.g. personal income tax) even they use it to just literally mean cash received without subtracting off outgoings.
Using it in this net sense seems very odd to me, but maybe that's because I'm British. "Income" and "outgoings" look to me like symmetrical terms, and no one would consider outgoings to be after subtracting off money coming in (would they?!)
That page says that "net income" message the sense you meant it and "gross income" means the sense I understood it.
It does say that unqualified "income" means the net version but it's a push to say that makes it unambiguous. (And, at I said on a sibling comment, this seems to be a US convention.)
This is incorrect as anyone who has looked at a financial statement or taken a first level accounting class will know - Revenue is the top line, the gross income and lastly net income, the two reflecting the removal of various costs/expenses as per GAAP.
There is no real concept of sources legitimately disagreeing here. There is tax law, which Meta uses to calculate its tax liability, and then there are lies.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
The user-provided location would only be used for the initial bootstrapping. After it connects, the Starlink network itself will localize the receiver to within 1 km.
If the user inputs a bogus lat/lon, it would simply fail to connect. There's no way to 'spoof' your location on this type of global satellite comm network.
EDIT It will be interesting to see what anti-censorship and anti-DOS hardening features are coming in future software updates. Full GPS denial bootstrapping is the most obvious, and actually this should be possible without needing to input a location. Adding offline update packages, so signed anti-denial firmware updates can "sneakernet" across oppressive regimes to recover DOSed terminals, would be even better.
From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.
Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks.
At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.
If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.
You don't care that massive unaccountable corporations control all our data, devices and connectivity, and can lock us out of all of that on a whim or accidentally, and refuse to fix the problem?
This could happen to anyone. It can happen to people trusting Apple with their data, to people using Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other big cloud platform.
This deserves everybody's attention, and also a massive lawsuit to force these corporations to treat our data more responsibly.
While humans have historically mildly reduced their working time to today's 40h workweek, their consumption has gone up enormously, and whole new categories of consumption were opened. So my prediction is while you'll never live in a 900,000sqft apartment (unless we get O'Neill cylinders from our budding space industry) you'll probably consume a lot more, while still working a full week
I don't want to "consume a lot more". I want to work less, and for the work I do to be valuable, and to be able to spend my remaining time on other valuable things.
You can consume a lot less on a surprisingly small salary, at least in the U.S.
But it requires giving up things a lot of people don't want to, because consuming less once you are used to consuming more sucks. Here is a list of things people can cut from their life that are part of the "consumption has gone up" and "new categories of consumption were opened" that ovi256 was talking about:
- One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds, mobile phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders, and paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.
- One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 30 years ago.
- One can give up imported produce and year-round availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing, or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a luxury 50 years ago.
- One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.
- One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas, walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options. That could save over a thousand dollars a month per 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.
I could keep going, but by this point I've likely suggested cutting something you now consider necessary consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.
> - One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds, mobile phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders, and paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.
It's not clear that it's still possible to function in society today with out a cell phone and a cell phone plan. Many things that were possible to do before without one now require it.
> - One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 30 years ago.
Maybe you can replace these with the cell phone + plan.
> - One can give up imported produce and year-round availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing, or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a luxury 50 years ago.
It's not clear that imported food is cheaper than locally grown food. Also I'm not sure you have the right time frame. I'm pretty sure my parents were buying imported produce in the winter when I was a kid 50 years ago.
> - One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.
Agreed.
> - One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas, walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options. That could save over a thousand dollars a month per 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.
Yes but in urban areas whatever you're saving on cars you are probably spending on higher rent and mortgage costs compared to rural areas where cars are a necessity. And if we're talking USA, many urban areas have terrible public transportation and you probably still need Uber or the equivalent some of the time, depending on just how walkable/bike-able your neighborhood is.
> It's not clear that it's still possible to function in society today with out a cell phone
Like I said... I've likely suggested cutting something you now consider necessary consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.
---
As an aside, I live in a rural area. The population of my county is about 17,000 and the population of its county seat is about 3,000. We're a good 40 minutes away from the city that centers the Metropolitan Statistical Area. A 1 bedroom apartment is $400/mo and a 2 bedroom apartment is $600/mo. In one month, minimum wage will be $15/hr.
Some folks here do live without a car. It is possible. They get by in exactly the ways I described (except some of the Amish/Mennonites, who also use horses). It's not preferred (except by some of the Amish/Mennonites), but one can make it work.
I've been alive slightly longer than that. And can't say life today is definitively better than 50 years ago in the USA.
It was the tail end of one income affording a house and groceries for a family. So to afford the same things, for many families requires almost double the labor.
A lot of new medical treatments, less smoking and drinking, overall longer life spans. But more recently increases to longevity have plateaued, and an epic of obesity has mitigated a lot of the health care improvements. And the astronomical increases in health care costs means improvements to health care capabilities are not available to a lot of people, at least not without greatly reducing their standard of living elsewhere.
College and university costs have grown exponentially, with no discernible increase in the quality of learning.
Housing prices far outpacing inflation of other goods and services.
Fewer intact families, less in person interactions, and the heroin like addictiveness of screens, have ushered in an epidemic of mental illness that might be unprecedented.
Now AI scaring the shit out of everyone, that no matter how hard you study, how disciplined and responsible you are, there's a good chance you will not be gainfully employed.
I frankly think the quality of life in the world I grew up in is better than the one my kids have today.
But if we take "surprisingly small salary" to literally mean salary, most (... all?) salaried jobs require you to work full time, 40 hours a week. Unless we consider cushy remote tech jobs, but those are an odd case and likely to go away if we assume AI is taking over there.
Part time / hourly work is largely less skilled and much lower paid, and you'll want to take all the hours you can get to be able to afford outright necessities like rent. (Unless you're considering rent as consumption/luxury, which is fair)
It does seem like there's a gap in terms of skilled/highly paid but hourly/part time work.
(Not disagreeing with the rest of your post though)
You aren't wrong and I agree up to a point. But I've watched a couple of people try to get by on just "cutting" rather than growing their incomes and it doesn't work out for them. A former neighbor was a real Dave Ramsey acolyte and even did things like not have trash service (used dumpsters and threw trash out at his mother's house). His driveway was crumbling but instead of getting new asphalt he just dug it all up himself and dumped it...somewhere, and then filled it in with gravel. He drives junker cars that are always breaking down. I helped him replace a timing chain on a Chrysler convertible that wasn't in awful shape, but the repairs were getting intense. This guy had an average job at a replacement window company but had zero upward mobility. He was and I assume is, happy enough, with a roof over his head and so forth, but our property taxes keep rising, insurance costs keep rising, there's only so much you can cut. My take is that you have to find more income and being looked upon as "tight with a buck" or even "cheap" is unfavorable.
Ouch! Man this is a terrible take on the world. I know you mean well and that the majority of the world agrees with this, but to be honest, I have been having real thoughts about letting the make it till you break it mentality go myself. things are getting more expensive and I dont think im willing to live a life running from paycheck to paycheck... Not sure why I am going to do about it, but I know that feeling is there.
I've given up pretty much all of that out of necessity, yes. Insurance and rent still goes up so I'm spending almost as much as I was at my peak, though.
>I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.
Of course it's changed. The point is that
1. the necessities haven't changed and have gotten more expensive. People need healthcare, housing, food, and tranport. All up.
2. the modern day expectations means necessities change. We can't walk into a business and shake someone's hand to get a job, so you "need" access to the internet to get a job. Recruiters also expect a consistent phone number to call so good luck skipping a phone line (maybe VOIP can get around this).
These are society's fault as they shifted to pleasing shareholders and outsourcing entire industries (and of course submitted to lobbying). so I don't like this blame being shifted to the individual for daring to consume to survive.
Voting in people who can actually recognize the problem and make sure corporationa cant ship all of America's labor overseas. Blaming ourselves for society's woes only pushes the burden further on the people, instead of having them collectively gather and push back against those at fault.
I suppose so, but that takes decades of change. I don't see any solution right now though which is what matters to many.
As an aside, every thread I see here has a comment by you lol, that's some good effort but maybe take a break from such strenuous commenting, I say this sincerely as I also used to get into all these back and forths on HN and then realized, much of the time, it's a waste of my own time.
So you are agreeing with the parent? If consumption has gone up a lot and input hours has gone down or stayed flat, that means you are able to work less.
But that's not what they said, they said they want to work less. As the GP post said, they'd still be working a full week.
I do think this is an interesting point. The trend for most of history seems to have been vastly increasing consumption/luxury while work hours somewhat decrease. But have we reached the point where that's not what people want? I'd wager most people in rich developed countries don't particularly want more clothes, gadgets, cars, or fast food. If they can get the current typical middle class share of those things (which to be fair is a big share, and not environmentally sustainable), along with a modest place to live, they (we) mainly want to work less.
>If you want to live in a high cost of living area, that's a form of consumption.
Not really a "want" as much as "move where the jobs are". Remote jobs are shakey now and being in the middle of nowhere only worsens your compensation aspects.
Being able to live wherever you please is indeed a luxury. The suburb structure already sacrificed the aspect of high CoL for increase commute time to work.
I also do think that dismissing aspects of humanity like family, community and sense of purpose to "luxuries" is an extremely dangerous line of thinking.
In most places (SF may be somewhat of an exception in terms of relatively unaffordable housing in both the city and any accessible suburbs) 30-60 minute commutes are pretty normal. At least a lot of the companies are probably in the suburbs/exurbs anyway. I'm not suggesting living in the middle of nowhere but, in a lot of places, urban vs. exurban living is a choice especially with companies that are often exurban.
I mean, yeah? Does any market work like that? If you want an apple, you pay the person who has the apple to take it from them, you don't pay the other people who want apples. Not really following where this is going
I think FIRE was basically just a fad for awhile. I say this as a 52 year old "retiree" who isn't working right now and living off investment income. It takes a shitload of wealth to not have to work and I'm borderline not real comfortable with the whole situation. I live in a fairly HCoL area and can't up and move right now (wife has medical needs, son in high school, daughter in college). I'd be freaking out if I didn't have a nest egg, we would be trying to sell our house in a crap market. As it stands, I don't really want to go on like I am, my life is a total waste right now.
It's not a "fad," it's a mathematical observation that investing more generates more returns. Maybe the media was covering it more at some point but the concept itself is sound. You are in fact FIREd by the same definition, it's just that in your case it seems you would need more money than you have currently due to the factors you stated, but that's not the fault of the concept of FIRE in general. And anyway, there are lots of stories of people doing regular or leanFIRE too, it doesn't require so much wealth as to be unreachable if you have a middle class job. For example, https://www.reddit.com/r/leanfire/s/67adPxZeDU
If you think your life is a waste right now, do something with it. That's actually the number one thing people don't expect from being retired, how bored they get. They say in FIRE communities that all the money and time in the world won't help if you don't actually utilize it.
We could probably argue to the end of time about the qualitative quality of life between then and now. In general a metric of consumption and time spent gathering that consumption has gotten better over time.
I don't think a general sentiment matters much here when the important necessitate are out of reach. The hierarchy of needs is outdated, but the inversion of it is very concerning.
We can live without a flat screen TV (which has gotten dirt cheap). We can't live without a decent house. Or worse, while we can live in some 500 sq ft shack we can't truly "live" if there's no other public amenities to gather and socialize without nickel-and-diming us.
Let's kill this myth that people were lounging around before the Industrial Revolution. Serfs for example were working both their own land as well as their lord's land, as well as doing domestic duties in the middle. They really didn't have as much free time as we do today, plus their work was way more backbreaking, literally, than most's cushy sedentary office jobs.
pre-industrial? Lots of tending to the farm, caring for family, and managing slaves I suppose. Had some free time between that to work with your community for bonding or business dealings or whatnot.
Quite the leap to go from "pre-industrial people" to "Antebellum US Southerners", and even then the majority of that (hyperspecific) group did not own slaves.
>you'll probably consume a lot more, while still working a full week
There's more to cosume than 50 years ago, but I don't see that trend continuing. We shifted phone bills to cell phone bills and added internet bills and a myriad of subscriptions. But that's really it. everything was "turn one time into subscrition".
I don't see what will fundamentally shift that current consumption for the next 20-30 years. Just more conversion of ownership to renting. In entertainment we're already seeing revolts against this as piracy surges. I don't know how we're going to "consume a lot more" in this case.
Boomers in a nutshell. Do a bunch of stuff to keep from building more housing to prop up housing prices (which is much of their net worth), and then spend until you're forced to spend the last bit to keep yourselves alive.
Then the hospital takes the house to pay off the rest of the debts. Everybody wins!
> Le Parisien (a big French billionaire-owned newspaper)
They're all billionaire owned. As an example, left wing newspaper Liberation has Kretinsky among the owners
Yeah, "Le media" and "Mediapart" are "left wing" newspaper and not billionaire owned, there is right wing too, but they are smalls.
Libé isn't owned by Kretinsky but Patrick Drahi, Kretinsky owns Mariane (right to far-right now...).
But anyway yeah, in France (and in other countries too ) there is a media oligarchy.
Huskies excell in organising a pack of usually smaller dogs. Otherwise they're more of a domesticated wolf than a dog. Also a rodent and bird killing machine, cat chasers when not kept in check. That's anytime they're further than a leash length from their owner.
I like them, but would probably never own one unless I'll ever own and regulary use a dog sled.
I doubt it heavily. CF has control over a large chunk of the global internet - they're not going to go thru their clients one by one and make sure they're doing age verification. That's absurd and far too expensive.
The alternative to that is either:
1. UK blocks cloudflare (unlikely, come on now)
2. UK gives cloudflare a pass (fairly common)
3. Somewhere in-between. Maybe UK cares about highly visible people behind cloudflare like 4Chan but not others.
Yeah that's option 3, for now. But they won't go after cloudflare in the general case because it's too risky IMO. And cloudflare will only comply to the absolute minimum they can get away with, because they can't burn money auditing every single customer behind cloudflare.
I think if that were true, there would have at least been an attempt at a court case at the very least. But AFAIK every case they have been involved in, they've won. I am not defending their content, merely a right to exist, especially when you're not breaking any applicable laws.
If you want to talk about content that objectively breaks laws... 8chan hosts monkey torture videos.
> Cheetah robot can run 10.3 km with a 3 kg (465 Whrs) LiPo Battery
> the 33kg robot runs at 22 km/h (6
m/s). The total power consumption from the battery pack was 973 watts and resulted in a total cost of transport of 0.5, which rivals running animals’ at the same scale. The 76% of total energy consumption is attributed to heat loss from the motor, and the 24% is used in mechanical work
Cheetah was the robot built by Ben Katz, which then went on to electrify Boston Dynamics' dog.
Given we've had no major energy density or motor efficiency breakthroughs since 2015, I bet the above still holds. That's a 30 min run at full throttle BTW. So to escape the current killer bots, try to run above a 2h marathon pace for 30 minutes.
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