Not really - renewable curtailment and negative wholesale electricity prices happen but not frequently enough that you can generally afford to leave a capital intensive investment like a bitcoin mining setup, a water desalination plant or a hydrogen electrolyser idle 90% of the time waiting for cheap electricity.
And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.
Might be true in the US, but here in Europe we see this quite often. Prices don't have to be negative, it is enough if they are cheap (we pay for water too). And in some locations there are already projects like this [0] where they built a hydro-electric pump station with a dam for storage plus a desalination plant that fills the reservoir from seawater in one location.
Why hydrogen? It has an extremely potent greenhouse effect and is obviously the leakiest of gases - the leakage alone could make it more environmentally damaging than actually burning natural gas.
And have you seen how hydrogen burns or how easy it is to trigger an explosion? I wouldn’t live anywhere near a “jerry rigged” hydrogen storage facility.
It was amazing. Multiple applications running on different servers/machines all working side-by-side on a single desktop workstation. Effectively every GUI application could automatically be run in "client-server mode" (using the terms in the traditional sense not the inverted-X11 sense) without having to write any architecture or OS specific client code.
Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers").
Effectively the web browser became the universal "graphical terminal" in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal "textual terminal". Thus X11's "killer app" just slowly became irrelevant.
Where are you getting your numbers? The numbers I’ve seen indicate that non-household electricity prices in Germany have been stable for decades - fluctuating around the 35€/MWh mark until the crisis in 2021 - which affected all European countries - and is currently back at roughly that level. Taking into account of inflation, the wholesale cost of electricity in Germany has fallen slightly over the last 2 decades in real terms.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
Not true. Basically every nuclear plant ever built has been, if not directly financed by government, backed a guarantee to purchase every MWh produced at a fixed (or index linked to inflation) price. Hinkley Point C - under construction in the UK - are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh produced (in 2012 prices index linked to inflation - so already this has risen to £133.81/MWh and the project is still years from operation). This guarantee lasts 35 years once the plant becomes operational. For comparison, current wholesale prices in the UK are roughly half this.
I feel that the ergonomics of bash completion took a hit as the configurations got “smarter” and “helpfully” started blocking file or directory name completion if it thinks it wouldn’t be appropriate to have a file name at the current cursor position. Instead of blocking, the default should always be to fall back to filename completion.
Sometimes I’m close to disabling/uninstalling all completion scripts out of irritation as decades of muscle memory are frustrated by this behavior.
It’s like that bad/annoying UX with text fields where the UI is constantly fighting against you in order prevent you from producing “illegal” intermediate input - e.g. let me paste the clipboard here goddammit - I know what I’m doing - I’ll correct it.
There is the complete-filename function that only completes filenames in bash, bound to M-/ by default. You can use that in any place you want a filename where "complete"(the function normally bound to tab) would do something you don't desire.
There are a collection of other non-context aware completion functions that are bound by default too, useful for example when you when you wish to complete hostnames in a for-loop.
zle has what is largely a significant superset of this, the documentation is spread about between the zshzle and zshcomp* manpages.
There is one particular command I occasionally use that has totally broken completion for files, so I've taken to just using 'ls X Y Z' to get the right completion behavior and then changing 'ls' to the right command as the last step.
I agree that is annoying. It's waaay less confusing to complete a filename and then get an error from the actual program than it is for just ...nothing to happen so you get confused and have to `ls` to check if the file actually exists and it does and so you think tab completion is broken for some reason and you copy & paste the filename and then finally you get the error that explains what is going on.
It should at least print a message like "file foo.exe exists but it isn't executable".
If you get into this position what you can do is `ls <tab-completed-path>` or other command to put the filename in the previous command's argument, then you can access it via !$ or !^ (or use !!:1 or your shell's notation for indexing an argument that was already in the previous command).
It's not a fix but it'll save a little time sometimes.
I have come to absolutely despise web form inputs with front end email validators that are broken. Input field hints to type your email, so you start typing. As soon as you type the first letter it goes red and says “error!!! Invalid email!”
It’s because of a fundamental difference between how capital gains tax and income tax are collected.
Capital gains are deferred - so as years pass you’re working up a tax liability but most countries recognize that forcing collection every year is not practical given the often illiquid nature of capital gains and the difficulty around valuation.
I’m from a country which has no exit tax on capital gains and notoriously a certain wealthy telecoms magnet - having been resident all his life - moved to Portugal just before realizing billions of capital gain. Thus despite earning multiple billions through businesses activities in his native country, he effectively paid zero tax.
I myself have benefited from this lack of capital gain exit tax as I moved to a country with very low capital gains tax. So despite the fact that my modest equity portfolio earned most of its growth while I was living in Ireland, when I sell, the Irish government will get nothing.
The problem, it seems to me is the method of valuation for the deemed disposal and/or the fact that it can cause a “liquidity squeeze“ for the tax payer.
I don’t see a simple solution - maybe other than getting rid of capital gains taxes completely and collecting more consumption taxes, for example, but I’m sure this would just open up a range of other tax evading loopholes.
Capital gain tax is stupid anyway. It's one of the first tax that should be removed.
You can tax business at home by land/revenue/resources usage/ip protection taxes. As it is owners in different jurisdictions pay a different (or sometimes no) tax on selling shares. Selling itself is something you want to encourage, not discourage. It's a pointless tax that penalizes exactly the things you want to encourage.
You think that someone moving to Portugal to avoid it is unfair but then a share holder living in 0 cap gain jurisdiction in the first place would pay 0 anyway.
IMO corporate income tax is the first that should be removed, with a corresponding shift to income taxes. Those can be as progressive as you want, have much lower compliance costs, and don’t distort behavior in the same way. Thought in practice I’m not sure how tax collection from foreign owners would work.
- No PIT on dividend income, which is fair since CIT has already been paid on the money earned by the firm(and paid bt by you as a shareholder in that firm)
- CIT payable only on dividend distribution, not yearly so if a firm keeps on re-investing in the firm paying salaries/suppliers and investing in growth they don't pay any CIT.
Another side effect of 1) is that it would cause companies to distribute dividends rather than doing stock buyback since dividend would have a lower tax rate(0%) than the STCG/LTCG tax rate on stock appreciation.
This is how estonia does it, so we already have some data on effectiveness of this.
It is at least not wildly regressive like consumption taxes are.
It would be better to tax IP protection, inheritance, resource use and land only but realistically if we get rid of capital gains the tax burden will land squarely on wage earners doing all of the actual work who are already taxed more than the people who own their productive output.
There are many ways to make consumption taxes not regressive. You can implement refunds up to certain threshold. You can use the revenue to fund services used by lower income families. You can tax luxury good at higher rates.
EU countries already realize it's the case with IT services (everyone wants their share with digital tax) and with big supermarket chains (big issue in Poland). It's just painfully slow for them to connect the dots and introduce a general solution.
> There are many ways to make consumption taxes not regressive. You can implement refunds up to certain threshold. You can use the revenue to fund services used by lower income families
Every one of those "solutions" is just a patch on the basic problem that consumption taxes are fundamentally regressive.
Go tell someone living paycheque to paycheque that it's okay, you'll get a rebate every quarter for the extra tax they paid, or worse, on their annual tax filing, and tell me how that'll make their household budget actually work.
Honestly, when I read ideas like this, I realize just how massive the disconnect is between the lived experiences of the relatively well off and the working poor...
Except consumption correlates with income and wealth, and it's already not uncommon for states to exempt necessities like food and clothing from taxation, which keeps them affordable without a convoluted bureaucratic system. Implemented correctly, consumption taxes are less regressive than property taxes, which prop up rents and constitute a barrier to home ownership for working class people.
There are arguments to be made against heavily taxing consumption to encourage economic activity, but you're oversimplifying this by disregarding the indirect costs of alternatives and looking for problems instead of solutions. Not that I think the one you commented on is a good one.
The attraction of consumption taxes largely IS that they are regressive. That's certainly why people like Bob McNair pushed them.
A billionaire who spends 0.2% of their wealth every year, paying a 100% consumption tax on that would still have a vastly lower relative tax burden than somebody who spends their whole paycheck but only pays 50% consumption tax.
Australia has a "good" system for this (or fair system) - when you leave the country you either choose to pay CGT based on the value at that date, or Australia has a claim on the assets when you eventually sell.
If you cease to be an Australian resident while overseas, we deem some of your assets – generally those not taxable Australian property – to have been disposed of for CGT purposes. This may mean you become liable to pay CGT.
You can choose not to have this deemed disposal apply. But if you do eventually dispose of the assets, we consider the whole period of ownership – including any period when you're not an Australian resident – when we calculate a capital gain or loss for CGT purposes.
I do not think so. It varies a lot. The last time I looked at UK law you were liable for CGT for a long time after you left the country just to stop people leaving for a short time to evade CGT, but it was not the case a few decades ago.
With all countries you need to check the provisions of double tax treaties. There is likely to be somewhere that has no or low CGT that has a double tax treaty with where-ever you are that lets you dodge this sort of provision (at least partly).
Then there are things like using trusts (another thing you could get away with in the UK that got cracked down on in recent decades).
I believe in the UK it works like this: if you leave the country you are not liable for CGT even if you realise gains, unless you return within 5 years then you have to pay tax on any gains you realised while you were away. With some caveats.
If I buy a house for $100k, and next year some idiot pays $1M for a very similar house three streets down, did I just magically make $900k? Should I be taxed on that gain immediately? Should I be forced to sell part of my property to cover it? What happens when that sale occurs at a much lower price, due to my need to liquidate, did that lower the prices of all the houses in the neighborhood back to normal? Does only the first person to actually pay the tax owe the tax?
That's the reasoning we're applying if we tax unrealized gains on stocks (or any other asset). We take what the highest bidder is willing to pay for some tiny percentage of an asset, and assume that means everyone else could get the same price, yielding these theoretical valuations that have no bearing on reality.
Property taxes have a similar problem but that is a whole other can of worms. I'd love to live in a world where the local tax assessor is obligated to purchase your property on demand for 80% of what they say it is worth -- surely they would jump at the chance to realize an instant profit, right?
You simply can't establish value without an actual transaction. Without a buyer and a seller you are just making up numbers.
> Should I be taxed on that gain immediately? Should I be forced to sell part of my property to cover it?
In much of the US, you made a loss, since your property taxes will go up the next year.
> I'd love to live in a world where the local tax assessor is obligated to purchase your property on demand for 80% of what they say it is worth -- surely they would jump at the chance to realize an instant profit, right?
> That's the reasoning we're applying if we tax unrealized gains on stocks (or any other asset). We take what the highest bidder is willing to pay for some tiny percentage of an asset, and assume that means everyone else could get the same price, yielding these theoretical valuations that have no bearing on reality.
We take what the highest bidder is willing to pay, as well as what the lowest seller is willing to sell for. So it's a completely fair way of fixing the value. If you think the price is too high, then why aren't other sellers rushing to sell for the same? If you think the price is too low, then why aren't other buyers rushing to buy?
Because different market participants have different views, risk tolerance and needs. The market argument only works for very high liquidity public stocks. Even then it's unlikely Musk or Zuckerberg can sell their equity at the price of the day. It completely fails for smaller businesses.
The monetary (note: monetary) value of anything and everything is determined by when the minimum value which a seller accepts to sell it for is equal to the maximum value a buyer accepts to buy it for.
If you by some hacker magic know of any way to circumvent this fundamental logic, then you will become the richest man in history within less than a year, since you will then buy for less than anybody is willing to sell for and sell for more than anybody is willing to buy for.
Yes but it assumes the whole thing.
Just because someone is willing to buy a chunk for X doesn't mean there are enough buyers for all chunks at this price.
How can you only see one side of the transaction? Just because somebody is willing to sell a chunk for X doesn't mean there are enough sellers for all chunks at this price.
The agreed price for the last executed sale is the de facto value of anything traded. This has been a fact for hundreds of thousands of years by now.
The whole point is that it isn't.
Liquidity availability is big part of finance.
In your specific example of other side - yes - just because someone who needs to sell a chunk for reasons like an emergency, retirement or consumption needs doesn't mean they are happy to sell the rest of the chunks at that price.
Market based valuations only work in case of very high liquidity publicly traded assets and only if you don't own a significant %.
This makes your argument weaker, not stronger though. If there isn't liquidity market based valuation doesn't work.
>>This has been a fact for hundreds of thousands of years by now.
It isn't and never was. Liquidity was always big part of it.
You still argue like there aren't two sides to every transaction: A buyer and a seller. You're only talking about the sellers perspective as if the buyer side is something abstract and non-human. Do you think anybody would purchase anything for more than they think it's worth because of "liquidity"?
> If I buy a house for $100k, and next year some idiot pays $1M for a very similar house three streets down, did I just magically make $900k?
Of course you did! Assuming that "some idiot" is actually representative of the market.
Go sell your house for $1M ASAP, move somewhere else for $100k and keep the $900k profit.
> You simply can't establish value without an actual transaction.
Not perfectly, but you can definitely estimate it pretty decently for tax purposes. And you talk about the highest bidder in a market, but remember it's also the lowest seller. Markets are not generally distorted by "idiots" paying 10x. That's a straw man.
Yes you did, because now you can mortgage your real estate for that value and live in luxury. This is how most people make a good living, not by working or investing.
How does that work? Mortgaging is selling a portion (in an abstract sense) of a house for cash, with an obligation to buy that portion back in installments.
So parent has mortgaged their 100k house for a million - now what? How do they get out of their obligation to repay the mortgage - that is, buy the house back again for at least a million - without incurring penalties?
If there weren't repercussions for defaulting on mortgage payments, anyone could just trick lenders into buying their house immediately.
The parent is referring to the "buy, borrow, die" strategy of wealth accumulation. Would that work in your parent's specific circumstance? Maybe? Maybe not? But taking a low interest loan against assets as a method of wealth generation and tax avoidance is both a viable strategy and an extremely popular one.
That is a good point -- though perhaps a better solution there would be to simply make the use of an asset as collateral into a taxable event, and treat money borrowed against it in excess of the original value as capital gains.
I know this is a very common technique that people use to effectively liquidate assets without incurring taxes, but I think it can (and should be!) solved without penalizing people who simply hold an asset.
No, a mortgage is a loan. You don't "make" any money by taking a loan since you obviously have to pay the money back.
Don't worry that if a loan was considered "making money" it would be taxed as income... which would make no sense at all. In fact, disguising transactions as loans while not intending to repay the money is a well-known tax evasion scheme, which tax authorities always keep an eye on.
You made money before taking the loan, as your property increased in value. Taking a loan is a way of realizing the profit, but you can of course also sell your real estate.
The money is paid back during the course of decades, when that money will be worth 1/4, 1/3 or half to what it is worth now. And your real estate is ripe to be mortgaged again for another jackpot payout.
Hundreds of millions of people all over the world do it, and tax authorities applaud it. Who do you think writes the tax code?
> You made money before taking the loan, as your property increased in value. Taking a loan is a way of realizing the profit, but you can of course also sell your real estate.
That's incorrect on both counts. You did not make money and the loan is not a way to realize the profit since you have to pay it back, as explained before.
I think this illustrates that finance and accounting are very poorly understood topic and are easily used for sensationalism.
There's nothing sensational about it, and I'm disappointed that you cannot see this thing for what it is. Ask people among your relatives who own real estate and you will realize that a lot of them mortgaged their real estate to pay for new cars, vacations, investment in a business, kid's education.
The money is paid back over a long period of time, while the currency depreciates in value and the real estate appreciates in value. The amount of people who have made a fortune through real estate appreciation probably outnumber by a factor of 10 to 1 the amount of people who made a fortune by business or a working career.
If I purchase shares in a company and then sit and do nothing, and the valuation increases by 10 times, then have I made money or not? I can sell the shares or I can mortgage the shares by borrowing against their value. Should that value increase be taxed?
If I purchase real estate and then sit and do nothing, and the valuation increases by 10 times, then have I made money or not? I can sell the real estate or I can mortgage it and borrow against its value. Should that value increase be taxed?
> I can sell the real estate or I can mortgage it and borrow against its value
You make money if you sell. You don't if you use the asset as security for a loan.
This has been explained several times.
A loan is a loan, whether it is a secured loan or not. A mortgage is a secured loan whose security is real property.
You are effectively claiming that getting a loan is making money. Obviously you do not see that this is clearly not the case when thinking about it through a mortgage, but would you make the same claim with credit cards or a personal loan to buy a car, or a secured loan against, say, your car? My guess is that you wouldn't although it is the same thing as getting a mortgage.
Instead of repeating myself, let me hear your side of the argument. If my property increased 9 times in value and I can:
A) Sell it and get that money right now, or
B) Mortgage it and get all or part of that money right now, then pay it back in the future.
By what kind of logic have you not made money from the value increase?
> You are effectively claiming that getting a loan is making money.
No, I said that you made the money when the value increased. Your ability to take a loan against it is the evidence that the value in fact increased. I never said anything else.
If your mortgaged house depreciates while you are still paying off the mortgage, you still need to pay the original, un-depreciated amount. You'll also probably need to pay interest accumulated during the time the property was mortgaged, which means you can't use it to avoid inflation.
What lender do you know of who will voluntarily reduce your mortgage obligation if the property depreciates?
> If your mortgaged house depreciates while you are still paying off the mortgage, you still need to pay the original, un-depreciated amount.
Mistake in logic. The money you received as a loan doesn't depreciate in value if the underlying asset depreciates in value. And vice versa.
As for interest, if your real estate has appreciated by a factor of 9 as in the example we're discussing, then interest rates are of minor concern to get the jackpot payout. As you certainly know, you wouldn't have to take out a loan corresponding to the entire value of your asset, and neither would most banks give it.
After you've paid it back, you still own the property which is 9x the value, or maybe more. So you can cash out instantly, without having to move out. And you get to pay it back in 30 or 50 years time. By that time, the money is worth half or less than half than what it is today. And your interest is much less than inflation. And you can deduct the interest from your taxes.
Well if you force collection on gains every year, what happens if the value of the asset goes down? Will the government pay you back? Opens up a huge can of worms...
You get a credit against future gains. Same as when you sell an asset at a loss, the tax man doesnt pay you tax - your losses are available to offset future losses.
What did the Irish government do to entitle itself to a chunk of the appreciation of your equity portfolio of presumably non-Irish companies? What did they do to contribute to that equity growth?
Governments collect tax in lots of different ways: income taxes, sales/consumption taxes, import taxes, capital gain taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc,
What’s so special about capital gains taxes that requires the government to have had some sort of active involvement to be justified?
Capital gains are theoretical. You do not have that as money, but the state does want it as money. They are not what someone paid for your assets, they are what someone THINKS someone else might pay. Most smaller companies cannot be sold easily, and of course, the government is unwilling to take that as the valuation being zero (because what someone is willing to pay right now is in fact zero). And the government is unwilling to take any risk (they take cash only). So they're taxing money you do not have available to spend, and may not have at all.
Think of it as taking a $10k diamond with you. It's worth something, but ... maybe next year artificial diamonds double the size of your diamond start costing $500, and your diamond's value goes to $550. The difficulty is that the government demands "10%", which is $1000 in taxes on the "value" of your diamond now.
So for a big range of company sizes it's effectively a tax on nonexistent assets. This would not be the case for a huge (let's say revenue of 500k or more) company.
But the government chooses not to tax those big companies.
Perhaps the simple solution is to give those small business owners the option of selling their business to the government at whatever price the government feels it is worth.
Any claim of valuation is really only meaningful as a purchase offer.
The problem is that the government is financed by a ponzi scheme based on selling very steep GDP growth, very steep increases in the labor force. In other words, the German government as it functions today is financed by having sold the increased income in labor taxation of the next 10 to 30 years to the banks so they could spend it already. Only ... that income doesn't exist.
The labor force is shrinking (especially if you look at it in terms of how many hours of labor are performed, irrespective of who does it, or when). In other words, the German government has sold the labors of Germans for about the next 15-25 years ... and Germans aren't able to actually do the work that has already been sold. Someone is about to get very badly burnt, and so there is a big fight who takes the loss. The government has the guns, doesn't want to pay, in fact they want big companies to keep delivering their goods. So those government guns will be aimed ... at workers. The only ones they can be aimed at without BIG consequences for the people with the guns.
So, now, under current taxation, the government has to more than triple any increases in taxation, which they need to just maintain current services. Once to pay for what the government needs. Once to pay back the principle of the loans they already made. Once to cover the interest on those loans (because 20 years loans on average at about 3%, let's say total interest coast over the length of the loan is about 100%). And on top of that they have to add what they need to pay extra due to labor force shrinking. In other words, elected representatives are going to find that they both have to do A LOT extra in new taxes for any initiatives and even if they raise taxes the effect of that will not nearly be what they expect.
And taxation on labor is already essentially 50%, so obviously percentage increases are going to be incredibly unpopular. Plus there's the additional difficulty that the problem is not money. It is that the very real assets behind money (ie. work, performed by a human) are becoming scarcer, while the drain on those resources (the welfare state, ie. old people) is increasing.
For the next 20 years, minimum (the time it takes to go from newborn to productive citizen), the government has to shrink the services they provide, at least in terms of labor. And since people aren't about to have another baby boom, it's going to be longer. Oh, and I would much appreciate if the German government managed to do this without putting the Nazis back in power.
And this is a worldwide phenomenon, modified by immigration and modified by a few years depending on the exact country, so you can bet your firstborn quite a few parties are going to get elected on the message "we'll just steal it from our neighbors militarily", like the Palestinians are doing. But this approach is on the cusp of becoming really, really popular worldwide. So it's not really that Trump is causing 100 wars worldwide, it's having a totally unsustainable system: either people need to be accept a lot less than they currently have, or they can go to war and make it FAR worse. Needless to say, it is a certainty they'll want to go to war.
And btw, as I pointed out, this is not a money problem. It is a problem of labor resources. It is about the amount of labor, not the division. So every system has the same problem: nothing can be solved by switching from/to capitalism, socialism, fascism, communism, ... as no system is able to create labor, only redivide who labors and who gets the rewards. None of these systems increase the amount of labor and so the welfare state is doomed under every system.
TLDR: the government has to spend about 50% less per 20 years. Not in terms of money, but in terms of actual people working for government (including hospitals, schools, eldery homes, ...). 50% of government jobs have to disappear for every 20 years this lasts, and at least once.
You would think this would make the government invest a massive amount in AI and robotics, anything required, in the last years they can maintain spending without extreme pain. But, of course, nothing remotely like that is happening.
The real problem is a social contract that was sold to people long ago without any secure funding source.
Now those social services (free healthcare, retirement benefits) are baked into entire populations' expectations and life planning. Give it 20-30 years, then these services can neither be provided nor paid for.
Our only real hope is tech progress unlocks much faster economic growth, even with dwindling numbers of people.
Despite tech and AI being pretty much the only lifeline Europe has to get itself out of the pit it dug (population collapse while simultaneously promising the world to retirees), they are still strangling the nascent tech scene.
In 30 years are we going to have a European economy that is entirely dependent on foreign AI and robots to prop up a society of old people?
So you want to implement taxation by having the government offer money to people? I understand the sentiment "money where your mouth is", but ... seems unlikely to be very useful to keep government spending up.
Capital gains aren't theoretical. A capital gains tax is levied when gains are realized by selling an asset. (e.g. I receive a dividend on a stock, or I sell a stock or my house for more than I paid for it.)
I think you're confusing a capital gains tax with a wealth or asset tax.
If you lived in Ireland in that period, you benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads, bought things in shops, so and on so forth.
Regardless, the idea that the government can only tax you if it directly gave you sufficient benefit, _in your assessment_, is of course nonsense. Taxes are what you owe to the society you live in, not about what society owes to you.
If you are lucky enough to be internationally mobile, this does not exempt you from contributing to the communities you spend time in as you travel around the world. You cannot expect to arrive in a country, earn money from it, and depart again without paying your fair share of taxes.
If you do not like how a country has structured its tax law and what priorities it has as a society, you are of course always free to not move there in the first place.
> benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads
That is a terrible basis for argument: we mostly each get similar usage of services (roads, police, yadda yadda) which should be an argument for a fixed amount of tax per person (a poll tax).
If you wish to argue that we get what we pay for: then rich people pay wayyyyyy more so they should get more government services???
The wealthy surely don't get better policing: instead the wealthy pay heaps for their own insurance and security systems.
Be careful making any argument based on services received for money spent because the well off pay a lot and don't receive a lot for it.
Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place. The entire concept of property becomes pretty meaningless without some very basic concepts of a legal system and territorial integrity. Without that you can only own what you can physically defend.
Wealthy people and large companies do generally employ security, but that is merely supplemental. They enjoy the backdrop of a society where the vast majority of people at least recognize the basic concept of ownership, and where protection from external state actors is provided. More to the point, they live in a system where most people see negative expected return from just killing them and taking their stuff
Abstractions like insurance further require a system where agreements can be made and mostly enforced, and where the need for the insurance is low enough for the premium to be workable.
The small security team at any given company is there to handle the the exceptions that don't conform to the larger society's rules. It doesn't replace that protection entirely. You'd need a standing army for that, and you'd have to work full time just to maintain its loyalty.
Even with no direct services whatsoever, people benefit from society in more or less direct proportion to their wealth -- and arguably the benefit accrues exponentially as wealth increases, given that this enables the exponential growth of capital.
> Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place.
What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income.
My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less.
There's a balance to incentives.
I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.
I find this softer position much more amenable than your GP comment.
However, you conflate "businesses" with "entities that pay only some minimal poll tax". It turns out that progressive tax does not preclude complex society. Corporate tax does not kill business on touch. All you've argued for is the existence of the Laffer Curve.
Commercial activity predates currency, and is omnipresent across every tax system that has ever been tried. Where money, there trade. Where trade, there value-add. Or at the very least, combing the beach for pretty shells.
There are tribes without the concept of personal property or money, that make things and build value. No tax can extinguish human creativity.
I'm cagey about secondary effects, but I'm cautiously optimistic about debasing the trait of self-enrichment. I see no reason to take on faith that people acting out of self-actualisation would build a lesser technology. You know you're on a site full of nerds, right?
The existence of the internet protocols is a case in point.
Conversely, I prefer a world without facebook and robocalls.
...such as corporate welfare, political influence, favourable prices on public land and institutions, regulatory capture?
The acid test for your frame is whether you would have made as much wealth on a desert island, with no market, no value-added inputs, no communication and no currency. If so, then great, you truly did not depend on society. I admire your self-reliance.
Otherwise, you have benefited from the sum effort of every human, living or dead, in the chain of causality leading up to the circumstances in which you made your pile. I'll leave natural resources aside.
I _love_ that a bunch of libertarians are seasteading. More should go. I am happy to write off tax debt for anybody who goes seasteading for, let's say, five years.
If your raft calls into port for trade, then you pay duty and sales tax, but at that point you've admitted defeat. It's not like they'll accept your raftcoin anyway.
Where I live we have the option to put capital holdings in flat-rate taxed accounts, based on the size of the investment. I thought this was common elsewhere too.
When I hear “type theory” - I think Martin-Löf, Girard’s Proofs and Types, Curry-Howard, etc.
Which is not a “theory of programming language types” - although the subjects are not completely isolated from each other.
Then again, it’s been decades since I actually studied this stuff and haven’t really followed either subject since.
As far as the latter is concerned (programming language type systems), as an engineer, I’ve seen nothing in mainstream programming languages that advances the state-of-the-art compared to what was known back in the 1980s - when Hindley-Milner became mainstream and Luca Cardelli wrote the seminal survey papers on the subject.
I know this is supposed to be a joke but I don’t get it? Type theory isn’t particularly heavy in terms of jargon compared to other foundational theories like category theory or set theory. These are highly technical fields of study so of course they’re going to need specific language. It would like complaining about a doctor using “fancy terms” when discussing complex medical procedures.
To give a non-cynical answer: a good reason to look at type theory - if you’ve been exposed to computer science - is that it treats syntax and syntactical manipulation as foundational and can be viewed as the branch of mathematics that ties syntax and with the notion of computation.
And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.
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