Pardon me, but letting alone the notion that any reasonable person with the means to follow those stories would have cause to dismiss them, the Hunter Biden stories have hardly been addressed. Hard to be part of for-profit reality TV without being covered.
Consider how widely available high-speed broadband through Starlink might change some of these things once that makes living in the interior of the country more desirable. I think we may end up seeing a sort of reverse of the industrial revolution's migration pattern over the coming decades.
I grew up in Des Moines, it's a rather nice place to live and raise a family. Great amenities, pleasant(relatively) traffic, good roads, decent airport, quality schools, etc... there's plenty of compelling reasons to live there - especially at that price.
Boring at times, but it's a lively enough city and you can still park in front your destination for free, which I've always appreciated.
I love the article despite the partisan political bickering on the tail end. There's more common ground available on these issues from Trump's right wing supporters than what might appear so at first. There's an artfully constructed corporate smokescreen of fear propaganda intended to make those common interests unpursuable. It makes us mutual boogeymen and causes us to intellectually inbreed - liberals and conservatives are not healthy ideologically without good-faith interchange.
Many of you haven't noticed yet, but contemporary AAA devs realized years ago how much easier to make something compulsive than compelling and substituted addiction for fun, taking inspiration from slot machines and abandoning past masterpieces.
Shooters aren't enjoyable enough to justify this shit. Other genres are more respectful of your time, money, and efforts than to dribble content you purchased at a rate just slow enough that you'll keep playing. Your time and attention are valuable non-renewable resources. Consider how well you're spending them.
You'd pursue this despite acknowledging that the target of your spite would escape unscathed? I don't believe polite words can describe depravity that deliberate. Your proposal isn't a tax, it's an impotent tantrum bereft of solutions which fails to address any causal corruption rooting our contemporary second Gilded Age.
That idea isn't possible. First problem is stocks aren't easily liquidable at scale.
Lets' think on the scale of the individual first: say this hypothetical person has 50 grand in stock options from their company. It's not a ridiculous number, perhaps they've been sitting on it for 5 years or so, building a nest egg. Say they've got liquidate stock to pay a 5% on that wealth amounting to $2500.
In systems this complex you've got to play out the cascading effects, your first, second, and third order effects. It's the most complex game in the world, balance patches are tricky.
First Order problem: Liquidating $2500 in stock costs more than $2500 in stock, the share price will drop once supply floods the market. This sucks for this hypothetical worker... but this is a far larger problem than just them.
It's not just Mr. Hypothetical, everyone has to pay taxes on their stock.
Second Order problem: A significant percentage will not have the liquid cash to pay these taxes and will have to liquidate their stock. We'll have a stock market crash every April, I guarantee it. Everyone's liquidation will further devalue others' stock.
Third Order problem: the wealthiest and most solvent will plan for this - it's what they do. They'll treat this like a circa 2011 Steam Summer sale and buy everything... and I mean Everything. This hypothetical tax law designed to spite them is the greatest favor possible.
I know what we'll call it: "The Running of the Bears".
>The real issue is government having a monopoly on tax revenue and not pushing a penny far enough.
I definitely agree with this but is it even possible to incentivize that? Sometimes I wish we could put an honest "I" in IRS and sic 'em on the government.
Just earlier this week I was talking about this concept over drinks with my uncle, who has a PHD in Economics.
- though I didn't mean to imply that the entire tax gets offloaded downstream. That was clumsy.
My point is that taxing corporations without inordinately harming their employees and consumers' standards of living is impossible. Even worse, it grants a competitive edge to established corporations over lesser competing firms, which lack the connections or resources to navigate that tax code as efficiently.
It just isn't healthy for the market or effective at its purpose. If we're serious about maintaining healthy competitive markets and a public with purchasing power, we should consider different options.
The curtain drew back when the established Wall Street players, powers, and entities undeniably colluded in plain view to shut down trade during the Gamestop debacle, revealing just how unhealthy, manipulated, and unfair the NYSE really is for the small-time investor.
Our situation clearly is very far from ideal, but that only makes the ideal more important to define and restore in my estimation.
As far as I can tell, healthy stock exchanges have three purposes:
1. Facilitate mutually beneficial exchange between entrepreneurs with creativity and investors with capital.
2. Determine the value of competing businesses and assets through active, decentralized trading and aggregate speculation, effectively churning the standings and keeping score.
3. Induce transparency by opening corporations' dealings to the public, inseparably tying corporations' actions and plans to their valuation.
When the market is healthy nobody is in command, the market is distributed, the game is competitive, fair regulators arbitrate minimally, traders' churning keeps score, failure-capable corporations are responsive to public pressure, and new competition with fresh ideas can enter the market competitively.
Brilliantly, it's an ecosystem powered by greed and insured by selfishness, the basest and most reliable of human emotions - the animal root. Yet the ecosystem is delicate, reliant on all those elements being in place and functioning.
Save the traders' churning like a system clock, everything else in the US market is broken or corrupted in one way or another.
Corrupt government meddling picks winners, the market centralized, there is collusion, the regulators are captive and incestuous, corporations which control public opinion are too big to fail, and new competition is consumed by the established corporate giants or crushed underfoot.
Now to get back around to your question, stock is special because it's the only part of the market still functioning properly and it isn't exactly money, but value equivalent to a percentage of the company. Stock shares abstractly tokenize the ownership of a company and their nature is volatility in varying degrees. Aggregate speculation driven by share trading is the most efficient and accurate model we've developed to evaluate "all the things" and it serves the same function as a heartbeat or a system clock cycle. Taxing that trade in the market's current fucked-sideways status would be disastrous.
Think: making a 46yo cheeseburger enthusiast run wind-sprints in pads on a Texas summer day or overclocking a minitower with a GT 430 that hasn't been cleaned once in the 10 years it's spent on a chain-smoking Brooklyn Taxi Cab accountants' office floor - levels of disaster.
The unfortunate truth about corporate taxes is they're not really possible. There are two possible outcomes.
1. The business cannot absorb the levied tax into its overhead and shuts down. Production and operations cease. Said business doesn't buy materials or supplies, workers become unemployed, and customers do not shop. Result: a net revenue loss in sales, payroll, and income taxes.
2. The business can absorb the levied tax into its overhead... which is then offloaded onto the consumer whose buying power and standard of living decreases.
Follow the money long enough and you'll find most taxes are paid by the individual consumer in roundabout and convoluted ways.
I appreciate your comment though I disagree with what seems to be your interpretation of dominion. Good lord I love this board, people actually converse. I upvoted you too, though I take issue with a couple of your points.
I don't believe anyone ever has or ever will have dominion over the outcome of their actions within any domain - regardless of power they may otherwise wield. The only certainty in life is uncertainty after all. So, I don't find the presence of uncertainty an acceptable lower bound. Additionally, believing our contemporary body of medical knowledge is complete to the point where we aren't currently making mistakes tantamount to mercury laxatives seems to me, dangerously hubristic.
Being able to make choices unconstrained by experts and authorities who believe your decisions are wrong, is the essence of freedom and the impetus propelling all forward progress. Free Inquiry demands we embrace others' self-determination and latitude in their decisions, respecting the near certain presence of unknown unknowns.
More average people now are reading scientific literature than ever before, which should be cause for rejoicing. Sadly, we seem to be ignoring that opportunity and abandoning all semblance of rational, data-driven science.
Rather, we're corrupting Science with Religion, skepticism with faith, breaking into factions mutually recognized as heresies. The data are twisted to fit expectations, not dispassionately observed. We're twisting men of science into priests, models into dogma, literature into liturgy, and inquiry into inquisition. We're not going to notice the unknown unknowns until they've already sunk in their fangs and got a mouth full of buttcheek.
Eating horse paste is a desperate measure taken by people struggling to maintain dominion over their healthcare decisions. Most patients who've taken matters into their own hands and gone yay for the neigh would have much rather taken Ivermectin packaged for humans prescribed by their doctors. That choice has been stolen from patient and doctor alike via bureaucratic action.
The loss of individual bodily autonomy, doctor-patient relationships, and dominion over one's own healthcare is at stake and those won't be easy human rights usurpations to correct.
I like it but the proposal either needs to be more persuasive toward universities' limitations or those institutions need to be allowed to fail and be replaced with something more aligned with a university's mission.
Generally, universities are insolvent, being propped up by infinite government-backed loans leveraged against students' future earnings. In turn faced with an endless supply of funding, they've become wastrels and signed up for too many bills which they must cover by incessantly demanding more funding from debtor students. The model created a feedback loop that most universities will find terminal once policy changes out of necessity.
I'm afraid they will likely only hear "retake classes infinitely" as booting students severs revenue. Failing students however, makes that revenue renewable. Corruption is cancer both financially and morally.
This seems unlikely.