Florida has a problem with insurance fraud, which is what drives the rates up. If you can afford to self-insure, the expectation value of doing that is much better than the EV of using a commercial insurer (who has to price in the risk that you are an insurance fraudster)
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your suggestion, but shares are already treated as ordinary income when they vest (when the shares are released to you and you first gain the right to sell them).
If a company pays you $1M of shares, the IRS treats it exactly the same as if you were paid $1M of cash and you used it to buy the shares. The capital gains work the same too: you pay capital gains tax on the difference in value between when you receive the shares and when you sell them. That’s how it already works.
So if your company gives you something worth 1M, then yes, you have to pay taxes right there, that's not what I mean, I mean on the cap gains.
A company gives you options but at market value, they are worth $0 when they give them to you, just like if you incorporate a company, shares are worth some nominal amount.
You give the equity - not the realized gains later.
The problem with cap gains is they are deferred. Musk takes loans against his equity and never pays taxes.
Musk can move to the lowest tax regime, pay taxes on massive cap gains, and then move somewhere else. That's bad.
To avoid that, the equity is allocated instead of the cash and it's allocated at the start, not the end. Or in the relevant locale.
It means he owes state of Cali 1/3 of SpaceX, irrespective of where he moves.
Another way to do it, would be to make people pay up when they change tax domicile.
So if Musk moves from Cali to Texas, he has to pay his tax bill on the way out at 'market rates'. And he's 'zeroed out' when he moves to Texas. Any further gains made in TX, he pays in TX.
That becomes a problem with private ownership etc.
A state can justify and sustain higher taxes on the wealthy by offering government services which indirectly benefit the wealthy (the externalities you mention). But it doesn’t follow that an arbitrarily poorly-ran government can sustain arbitrarily high taxes on the wealthy.
There’s some manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions to the problem of taxes and services.
California, for example, spends a lot of money to get not-great public schools, and has housing costs that are out of control. So if you’re importing new hires from other states, and pay them a lot to live here, and personally pay high taxes on top of that… that doesn’t seem like a Pareto-optimal point.
At some point, the wealthy will decide to move someplace that looks more Pareto-optimal. Better externalities, lower taxes, or both.
The type of people who move from CA to WY for the tax benefits are the type of people who pay more taxes than they use in government services (even with very low tax rates). That means WY can offer more government services to the rest of its residents, making it more hospitable.
> who pay more taxes than they use in government services (even with very low tax rates)
They rely massively on government services. They depend on an educated workforce. They depend on law and order to prevent their workplaces from bandits. They depend on massive navies that allow goods to be shipped across the world without concern. They depend on courts to enforce contracts so that they can build their business on contracts rather than having to establish personal trust with everybody they do business with. They depend on a stable currency. They depend on a regulated finance market. They depend on a massive pacified customer base.
I've only scratched the surface, there's lots more.
>The type of people who move from CA to WY for the tax benefits are the type of people who pay more taxes than they use in government services (even with very low tax rates).
Ah yes, the government services the people will need after these locusts move in and price generations of locals out of their homes.
I'd argue that it is that interesting of a problem because it gives outsiders (us) insight into AirBnB's marketplace dynamics.
It has long been obvious that many scammy hosts exist on the platform, and it ought to be easy to detect such hosts if they bother to try. Yet, that never happened until now.
So what changed? I would bet that until now they have always worried about having enough inventory to sell, and that now they are noticing they have too much inventory. That changes the dynamics from "be extra nice to those who bring the inventory, and even tolerate a little fraud from them" to "be extra nice to those bringing the dollars".
I do wonder if this is an early sign of a coming recession.
I want to start by saying I think the AfD is detestable so that you don't get the wrong idea from my question:
In other parts of this thread we have people saying that the AfD must be banned because they are a threat to democracy and that the German constitution has provisions which prevent amending it to weaken the guarantee of democracy...
But how do you then reconcile the idea that people must be prevented from voting for the party they wish? Is that not undermining democracy when you only let them vote when they vote "correctly"?
I don't understand how this can be asked in good faith. How does Germany believe that sometimes democratically elected governments can be dangerous? Germany?
You don't understand how they may have a historical election or two that led to some kind of event proving that sometimes the people need to be protected from themselves short-term in order to preserve their constitution and democracy long-term?
I'm not sure whether or not I'd call it a kludge, but the workings are totally unlike the A-3 scrambler.
Splitting audio into bands and voiced/unvoiced content is basically how many "modern" low-bandwidth voice coding techniques like LPC, MELP, or CLEP work (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_predictive_coding). The point of that processing is to compress, not encipher, the voice data.
Analog scramblers, like A-3, by contrast, shift the frequency content of the speech as the means of encipherment.
The point of the SIGSALLY voice coder is simply to keep the amount of key material for the one time pad reasonable. Even with that compression, each OTP record lasted only 12 minutes. MELP, which is a current DoD vocoder standard for use in secure voice channels, produces intelligible speech rates as low as 600 bps.
The part that is definitely a kluge is the key synchronization method. It seems that they did not use a PLL (which had already been invented by that point) to keep both ends in sync and instead relied on highly precise frequency references and turntables driven by synchronous motors with hundreds of poles.
The primary factor (in my view) is that we pay healthcare providers (doctors and nurses) 2x to 3x as much as other developed countries.
That creates knock-on effects throughout the healthcare system:
* Doctor time is worth $xxx/hour, so every second counts. We hire a bunch of support staff to make sure doctors aren't "wasting" time on paperwork, taking vitals or talking to patients. Now it costs more to run a practice.
* Doctor time is worth $xxx/hour, so we need to make sure that health insurance only pays for procedures that people truly need. That leads to insurance companies hiring a bunch of doctors and nurses to adjudicate claims (that's expensive, plus fewer doctors practice medicine). It also leads to denied care.
* Doctors have a lot of money, so if a procedure goes bad and you want to sue someone, they make a juicy target. Now you have higher malpractice insurance, so doctors bill even more.
* Doctors are afraid of being sued (see previous), so they often order more tests than necessary to prove they are providing adequate care. Those tests cost money.
The cause of high doctor salaries is an artificial shortage of doctors. Medical schools collude to limit the number of medical students who matriculate each year, which squeezes supply.
We could very easily fix the American healthcare system in about 10 years by simply allowing doctors and nurses trained in other developed countries to practice here, plus forcing medical schools to accept more students.
Regarding the latter, there is no shortage of qualified applicants:
1. Nearly everyone who starts medical school finishes. Matriculants are so statistically overqualified that hardly anyone washes out.
2. Medical schools have silly-stupid entrance requirements which have little to do with being a good doctor. Beyond GPA, you need many hours of volunteer work outside of class, extracurricular activities, and often research experience. These admissions requirements are imposed because there are simply too many qualified applicants for the number of slots and med schools need some "fair" way to cull the herd.
Don't forget that the leader of Dawn Project has financial conflicts of interest:
His software company, named Green Hills, supplies the RTOS for Mobileye, which formerly supplied driver-assistance hardware and software to Tesla (and continues to do so for other car companies). Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
So he has a very real financial incentive to convince the world that Tesla's system is bad.
> Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla wouldn't stop using their tech in ways they did not approve of, turning back all the safety limits to allow the public to do things Mobileye knew were unsafe. Mobileye publicly called them out, saying that Tesla was "going to hurt the interests of [Mobileye] and hurt the interests of an entire industry, if a company of our reputation will continue to be associated with this type of pushing the envelope in terms of safety".
This is one of the reasons why S/X ADAS performance famously got significantly worse in late 2016 with HW2, they had of course been working on their own tech but because they'd already built their brand around ADAS they felt compelled to put it out unfinished when they no longer had the Mobileye system to sell.
