The €25k working capital requirement seems a little prescriptive to me (in the US there is nothing like that for non-finance industries, although some businesses need bonds which pay clients/customers if you fail to perform), but it's also the case that most businesses are going to need more than 25k in working capital once they're beyond the startup phase, and outside of tech you typically have working capital requirements that grow with increasing revenue, meaning your accounting profits can be growing but you can still run out of cash since you spend it before you can collect it.
I'm sort of an AI skeptic but I have been seeing this guy's essays for years now and he has always been super pessimistic on AI progress.
I think a much more reasoned critique of AI is that of Tyler Cowen, whose argument is basically that most processes aren't constrained by lack of intelligence but by organizational and social factors which mean for AI to be useful you have to redesign organizations and work to take advantage of what AI is good at. Since most organizations are fairly bureaucratic that takes a while, especially in the large industries that are the most economically important.
Ed's criticism of the large AI companies seems particularly misguided to me since they are the ones actually advancing the technology and seem to have real moats given their access to large amounts of training data from their users. I don't see any possible future in which 5 or 10 years from now there is less AI than we have now and I would expect usage to be much higher.
> What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?
Setting aside money to pay for a relative who can't provide for themselves, protecting assets if you are professional who faces high chance of being sued (e.g. surgeon), providing for children from a first marriage if you get married and predecease your second spouse.
Perpetual trusts are different from irrevocable trusts, which have legitimate use cases. I don't really see how irrevocable trusts would be gotten rid of. In most states all trusts are irrevocable by default and there is a huge body of law dealing with trusts. Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.
I think the limit it can reach without carried forward losses is 20% because that's the top long-term capital gains tax rate. The other thing I can think of is if you sell a QSBS business, then your capital gains are taxed at 0, and you wouldn't pay income tax at all on that money either. So it's in theory possible that someone could make millions tax free from selling a business, but that's a rare case and one the tax code explicitly allows for.
There are all kinds of irrevocable trusts that exist to remove assets from your taxable estate so that they can be passed to heirs without paying estate tax. Raising the estate tax (which is already 40%) would just make planning to use these techniques more attractive.
I find him more interesting when he talks about non-AI topics. Lots of other interesting people are like this too. I'd rather get my knowledge on AI from people who have unique insights into it. Scott has a lot of unique perspectives of his own, but his views on AI are bog-standard for his social group.
I don't think it's obvious that you were talking about health insurance, which I consider fairly distinct from property, casualty, liability, and life insurance, which are all quite large markets in themselves. The reason I made a distinction is because health insurance is quite different from other lines of insurance because healthcare is federally regulated while other insurance is regulated at the state level.
As mentioned the problems with the US healthcare system are numerous, complex, and interrelated. I don't think they have a simple solution, nor do I think they are insurance problems at their core. For example the cost of drugs in the US vs the rest of the world has very little to do with insurance.
What does a better insurance process look like? Outside of health insurance, which is complicated for a variety of reasons, most insurance is pretty easy to procure. I got an umbrella policy recently and it took about 30 minutes of talking with an agent and answering pretty reasonable questions.
Can you point me to an example then? It's not linked in the article as far as I can tell and it's not easy to find on their website if it's there. I don't count simulations because I used to work with simulations regularly and they often fail to translate to the real world.
They've never translated it to the real world though. So saying the problem is "too easy" when they have no public (as far as I know) demonstration that they've solved that problem is a stretch.
> But frontier models have become really good, and running vending machines is too easy for them now.
Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines unprofitable? Not aware of any demonstration that it can actually run that business successfully.
The only time I see non-competes as reasonable is when someone sells a business. It seems fair to put a territory restriction on a seller so the new owner doesn't have to immediately start competing against the person they bought out.
He's a pretty successful angel/early stage VC investor so he's not some random guy. His point doesn't seem to be that there's nothing to be learned building a successful business but that the existing methods are so formulaic they drive profits down since everyone copies the same ideas. Looking at the recent batch of AI companies that are being funded this does seem to be what's happening.
No, you can do cost segregation to classify some of the real property as Section 1245 (which is accelerated vs Section 1250). People doing this and then selling is how they get unexpected tax bills.
I don't know how these specific loans are structured but in real estate it's relatively common for a loan to be interest only with a balloon payment (the principal) due some number of years in the future. So in theory you could just pay off the balloon payment with a new loan and repeat the process.
The step up in basis happens when you die, so the estate has no capital gain. Then the debts are paid, then the heirs get whatever they're supposed to get.
Minor nitpick. The step up in basis actually happens when you die (not when your heirs receive the assets), and your estate has to pay off creditors before distributing assets. So the debt is paid off first, then your heirs get whatever is left over. Net result is the same though.