I'm not sure I agree with that statement just looking at our own tax bills...
Also, my point was I feel that I get nothing for my taxes in California already!
I will give California public libraries which I rediscovered recently after Covid, that's probably the only service I appreciate with my tax dollars currently!
Thanks both - I actually did put a paragraph about this in the blog then took it out as the blog was too long, there are definitely differences between married vs. single in US/UK, but I wanted to look more at the worst case scenario.
Most of my friends/colleagues are not aware that for at least single tax filers, the difference between UK/California is less than 5%, I think its assumed Europe is significantly higher, and that's not the case anymore as the US bureaucracy has grown!
Thanks for all the info - I would add Prop C to the list and almost added it as an example to the blog, which was meant to solve the homeless problem in San Francisco by essentially doubling the amount of money spent per homeless person from $40k/yr to $80k/yr by adding another tax for companies inside the city.
Not only has the homeless problem gotten worse since they introduced it, its also driven a few companies out of the city like Stripe, and in my opinion its the policies, not the funding which is the issue.
These are all examples of the government raising taxes, expanding, and not being accountable for any results that the increased spend was meant to bring
Thanks for the info - funnily enough after I posted this I spoke to a tax strategist this morning who also laid out a bunch of things we could do to reduce our tax bill. The problem as you say, is this type of person isn't accessible to most people, and expensive!
I know us Brits like to complain, but when I drove there last year the roads were all brand new and fantastic compared to what we have over here in California!
I did think to add some caveats about the NHS, my sister works there so I'm aware of all the issues there. However, I would rather choose that system, over the one here, which is extremely expensive, and doesn't even look after you if you lose your insurance for whatever reason.
I think overall, I would say the UK has a lot of challenges, and if I was still living there, I would actually feel ok to pay more taxes to support those services, because I'd be using them.
As opposed to here, where I pay almost the same rate of taxes, and feel like I get nothing in return!
Do you live in UK or US? I used to live in the country too - and was able to take regular trains in less than an hour from my house to London.
Compare here, we have a Caltrain that only runs once an hour during the day, is slow, and to get to city requires switching to the Bart, which is also slow, and so filthy too, its much easier just to drive into the city, avoiding the potholes, and hoping your car doesn't get broken into when you park late downtown...
UK has it way better without any cherry picking :)
Thanks, I did actually start work on getting that data but as the blog was already very long, and it would take hours to find and analyse the data, I decided against it. Maybe a future blog!
Thanks for the comment. I wasn't aware of that point on the high top marginal tax rate, I can only comment that it's been in place for a long time (since I moved here) and I don't get any sense personally that it will be expired when California is constantly looking for ways to increase taxes.
Re. healthcare, from past people I've hired and let go and friends who've been unemployed, perhaps as they're all in tech with higher incomes, it seems pretty accurate. I remember one employee had to setup Cobra to continue keeping their healthcare plan, and it was actually more expensive than what the company was paying for some reason! Terrible system in general...
Re. 401(k), I understand these are privately managed accounts, but the rules around them are dictated by the government, and can be changed as many countries are doing in general. And there are penalties for withdrawing before 59.5years, which I would call the "retirement age" on these plans. I completely get the math of deferring taxes on your investments, and employer contributions, but I prefer to find other tax strategies that lock in tax savings today and also have more freedom around what we do with our money, these plans are pretty restrictive and I suspect will only get more restrictive in future as I mention in the blog.
I could be wrong, but this is one of many examples I've heard about since moving here, the general theme being they want more powers to get our data and audit us. Since moving here, our experience is the IRS is way more aggressive and invasive with tax filings and penalties than we ever experienced in the UK too. And don't even get me started on the exit tax, which for some reason kicks in after 8 years if you're on a green card, requires you to list every asset you have worldwide, and then pay capital gains on it, if you ever decide to leave the USA one day!
The pricing looks higher than Plaid. $1.50 is way more than the $0.30 per linked bank Plaid charges.
However if your customer/sales support is superior you could win just on that. Plaids is terrible. Support tickets go weeks without responses, I need to speak to a sales guy just to enable UK/Canadian connections and still haven’t heard back after weeks of chasing. Other tickets can get left for similar amount of time too.
Plaid should get out of the way and make it fully self service to enable countries/features when you’re getting started, or fix their support/sales team so users aren’t waiting weeks to hear back from them just to enable a couple of countries they already support or confirm pricing.
With regards to pricing they also make it difficult as they don’t really explain the pricing well when you enable production either. They talk about “accounts” when their API talks about “items”. After enabling production my first bill confirmed (as no sales person ever responded to me on my question) that account was item, and not accounts the institution holds which would be extremely expensive! They don’t provide any examples on how the pricing works either, so you kind of have to figure it out after you enable production. AWS docs give a pricing example to help users understand how it works. Plaid should do the same or (again) improve their sales/support to answer questions on it promptly and not leave users hanging for weeks.
Anyway glad to see some competition here, if Stripe can match the $0.30 pricing, add UK/Canada and provide faster/better support they can win this market if Plaid doesn’t sort out support/sales quickly.
I need to update the code as I didn't use the BatchSpanProcessor and as a result all my calls are taking 2-3 seconds vs. a more reasonable 300ms.
My only issue so far is the stability and maturity of the project. Now they're at V1 stability of the main SDK looks better, but the instrumentation libraries are still all over the place and need some cleaning up/maturing.
I like the vision though and we're keeping an eye on the project as it matures.
Sharing my blog with learnings and full working source code on how to get OpenTelemetry tracing working with Google Cloud Run as it wasn't straight forward and took a few hours of debugging to get it all working! Hopefully will provide a good example of how to write Python gRPC microservices, get them deployed on Google Cloud Run and instrumented with end-to-end tracing for anyone interested!
As a founder in the monitoring space, and now heading up the core monitoring team at Netflix, I had a chance to work with Zebrium and have to say the technology is impressive. Unlike other anomaly detection services, they've done a lot of work to get decent incidents without too much noise completely unsupervised - this is definitely the next generation of observability and Zebrium has a clear head start in this space!