The Paradise Papers: How Ridiculously Easy It Is for the Rich to Avoid Taxes
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The IRS just asks you if you have offshore holdings, in which you either tell the truth or perjure yourself.
As far as I can tell, a lot of the labyrinthine layers are designed so that maybe you can lie to them without actually lying. Or at least say that to yourself.
I bet a lot of the nouveau riche from developing countries use a service like this not to avoid taxes, but to avoid their shaky government from nationalizing their bank accounts.
Say an offshore foundation is set up to benefit your family. You then make a loan of $10MM to it, that is then invested in some company. The foundation receives annual dividends of $1MM from this company, which are given (through a loan, salary or a sort of stipend) to your son living abroad.
Do you own or control this foundation in the eyes of the law? The answer could be either yes or no, depending on the country you live in. Sometimes the answer isn't a clear yes or no either.
I understand this doesn't mesh with multi-party signatures on the blockchain, but that's at least an argument to be made that you constructed a situation where you couldn't access it as a manner of evading being forced to do so, so it kinda breaks that you do still have access to it.
https://www.ped30.com/2017/11/06/tim-cook-has-some-explainin...
It doesn't seem like perjury is such a big deal. Nobody is arresting Tim Cook for perjuring himself in front of Congress. Clapper did it too. Sessions as well. In fact, it has become a regular occurrence. It seems you're nobody until you've lied to Congress.
First, let's set aside corporations like Apple earning foreign income and not repatriating it or claiming Ireland tax jurisdiction or special treatment EU doesn't like. For this story, I'm specifically interested in the mechanisms citizens use to evade taxes.
To me, the journalists are conflating 2 situations:
1) hiding money & assets (rich people like to hide money from spouses and their divorce lawyers, or hide them from lawsuits)
2) not declaring money to evade taxes
A lot of the money that the rich store at the islands has already been seen by the IRS and taxes were paid on it. Therefore, I'm not getting a clear picture of which situation dominates...is it hiding money or evading taxes? If its evading taxes, I'd prefer the author explain that in more detail. Outlining the opaque layers of ownership doesn't really explain the tax evasion part.
I ask this question because I read a book about "protecting your assets" and the techniques that author Jan D. Weir talks about overlap with hiding legally obtained money that all lawful taxes have been paid on.
2. Avoidance is not evasion. These really shouldn't be lumped all together because there is a massive difference.
3. Even if they get rid of all pure (Cayman Islands style) tax havens tomorrow, the rich won't be paying more in tax. They would then go to more respectable jurisdictions, such as Luxembourg, Switzerland, (for non Americans) the US, Singapore, etc.
If we, the UK tax payers, gave you the eduction, the opportunities, the law systems, the safety provided by our armies, foreign office, judicial systems, social safety nets and care from our health system, as well as all the other tangibles and intangibles that I could probably list for a couple of pages, you should pay back your share into the society. And yes, that's a percentage, not a fixed amount.
The social contract of societies is being broken by these avoidance schemes. You luck out in the business lottery, then you pay up to help the rest of us. You'll still be stinking rich.
And in the eyes of most people there's not much difference between avoidance and evasion, just the law.
I think that's where a lot of the problem stems from, as long as the politicians keep saying "it's ok, but we need to tweak this and that" and giving sweetheart deals out to the rich not available to the rest of us, the public think "this is really not ok, it's totally unacceptable", we're going to keep getting Trumps, Farages, Le Pens and Brexits happening in western democracies.
I think the general feeling is that the rich "got away" unpunished with the 2008 crash and now the scale of their tax avoidance is emerging, on top of the income gap widening, it's only going to get worse and politicians seem unwilling to change course and if they don't we'll all be in for some really nasty surprises in the next 10/20 years.
As long as there are smart people, you will have avoidance. The capital gains deferral is a simple example of something that is hard to fix. And there are a ton of situations like that.
If this was an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that it can't actually be solved. You can get rid of tax havens, but tax avoidance has existed for 2000+ years. In fact, in most cases, you don't even need to go "offshore" to secure great tax benefits.
There used to be a window tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax. Guess what? People avoided it by bricking up their windows.
However, the rich did not cause the crash of 2008. The banks did. The rich took a hit in 2008; just like anyone. I know plenty of (previously) rich people who were wiped out because they were overleveraged at the time.
Their net worth did come back, because the government essentially gave a ton of free money away via QE, leading to massive asset price increases since 2008.
WRONG. Will this meme ever die ? Rich have always been paying extreme majority of the tax revenue. For example according to this recently released official report [1] in regards to the tax reform, In 2019 people earning >=$100k will make up 23.4% of number of tax _returns filed_ and contribute to 78.6% of all individual income tax revenue.
So if top 23.4% is ok with tax avoidence then the others really dont have much say. If the bottom 76.6% want more whatever they need to figure out a payment plan on their own.
[1] https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=5036
Say you're rich today.
You had the opportunity when you were 18 and an adult to move country and live somewhere with a regressive tax regime. You didn't, because those countries suck, don't start moaning about it now you're earning good money.
Now you're rich and you're cheating the system because you don't like paying your fair share. Your fair share is a percentage. Without the percentage based tax system we can't afford to be a great country for businesses. You want to move to a regressive tax regime because you've got all the benefits already, but can't because the electorate don't agree so you're now "avoiding" tax. Or maybe even Daddy/Mummy made all the money and you want a free ride.
That's simply you trying to have your cake and eat it. You've already benefited from a progressive tax regime where the rich pay more because they can afford to. Previous generations paid for your opportunity to make it big. Paid for gangsters not to turn up and take over your business. Paid for no corrupt politician throwing you in jail and stealing your business. Paid for the roads and postal system and educating your employees and giving you the courts to pursue late payers. It paid for the opportunity you or your Daddy/Mummy had.
But somehow we should change the rules for you?
But, on average, within 2 or 3 generations your family will be middle class again. They won't agree with your temporary stance. Your own descendants will, in all probability, be against your stance.
It's not that it's "WRONG", it's that you want the best of both worlds, a fantastic country protecting you and nurturing you to do business in, and paying a small amount of taxes.
Tax avoidance requires nothing more than creative thinking and an understanding of the law. Any decent engineer here on HN could easily understand and find ways to avoid the law legally, and pay less taxes (for themselves or for clients), if that is what what they want to do with their lives. Tax law is surprisingly similar to software engineering.
It might make me an asshole, but I would happily move to a low tax country and not pay any tax when I have the opportunity to book a massive gain. Hello Monaco? And that is how many people feel, because once you're past a certain point, you just don't get sufficient value back from the system.
As an example: if I make €1m, I would happily give back 100-200k to society. What I am unwilling to do however, is part with €400 or 500k. So one will try to find a way to bring down that tax bill. Life would be much better if all taxes would be reasonable -- as someone with wealthy friends, tax avoidance is a waste of effort and time, but necessary.
You act as if it's a divine right to be able to live in country X. It's not. Wealthy people will frequently and happily move if it makes sense to do so. And many developed countries will give them tax incentives to move! Find other ways to incentivize them to stay in a specific country. Taxes aren't everything, but push someone past a certain point, and they will look for alternatives.
When you take all taxes into account, it is actually shocking close to a flat tax of 29.5% for the top 40% of earners. The top 1% pays about 0.5% percentage points less, the rest of the top 10% pays about 1 percentage points more, and the 60-80 percenters pay about 1 percentage point less. Even for the bottom 60 percent, it's not drastically lower they pay from 17.4%-25.3% [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/19/heres...
This is an important point. There is nothing wrong with not paying taxes that you are not obligated to pay.
Stories like this are just clickbait for "hate the rich" readers.
And it seems there are many. :)
To be honest, I think that's quite a reasonable inference.
You may argue that having assets offshore so they can't be reached in say a civil suit is also "something illegitimate." But I strongly suspect you'd organize your startup as an LLC or corporation, for precisely the same reason.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The name is fine and the authors (extremely basic) facts are wrong.
Luckily, there's plenty of good coverage on the topic. For example, I really enjoyed the (German) mini-podcast by the NDR: http://www.ndr.de/info/podcast4360.html
However, I read it all, and they seemed to know their stuff. They knew about using lawsuits to move money out, and they knew about using fake insurance policies to move money back in. I don't think most people know that - I only learned them recently.
Is it true that they can easily hide this money? It seems like a complicated process. Once you have an account, how does one do anything with it?
Is it illegal or is this perfectly legal? If it is illegal and there is an enforcement mechanism, this is not that different from drug smuggling or just theft. Of course it happens, but we should be looking at the scale of the problem.
Can anyone do it? They claim its for the rich but they also claim the filing fee is $100.
The non-hacker response:
We don't want no politics.
Maybe if you own a piece of a company, nobody knows about it and you sell it without your tax authority know it, you can get it deposited somewhere. But normally such sales require extensive documentation to IRS.
So what you most likely evade is the capital gains tax on your stock investment profits done from the tax heaven.
If you still want to live in the country you owe money, you can then get an ATM or Visa card that lets you access your foreign account and pay for the minor things, but you may not be able to buy a house and put it on your credit card.
Many countries also have a limit on how much you can pay for with cash, and how much cash you can even transfer across borders without declaring it (10,000 EUR in EU).
The Danish and Swedish tax authorities have been watching both activities in the last 10 years: if you somehow transferred a million dollars to the Cayman Islands, they might ask a few hard questions. If you were using a Visa card to pay for a hotel or restaurant, that came from a tax heaven, they might have found you too through another project that analyzed foreign Visa usage that wasn't consistent with tourists.
No significant high profile arrests came of it though -- they mostly settled without significant penalty. The tax haven money transfer resulted in approx 150 million USD extra tax (which is a good for just 125 man-years spent).
The credit card investigation gave approximately 70 million, but of that just 10% was actual penalties -- in most cases it seems like the money was treated as income adjustment.
Sadly, the Danish tax authorities were then embarrassed by the biggest tax fraud ever, on a far larger scale then factory owners stashing money in Cayman Islands -- a massive 2 billion dollar fraud involving claiming back withheld dividend tax under double-taxation. They've only found 15% of the money so far...
e.g. if I hide all my money in a trustee fund with an unregistered document, and I get it back by showing the bank the trust contract plus a signed document from the trust asignee, and none of those are registered anywhere (which the article calls secret documents), wouldn't it be trivial to falsify both of them, specially now that most accounts became public?
The moral arguments to support them are even younger.
And these guys are the scandal?
I'm not suggesting there is no abuse happening here, or that its so binary as one side is morally good and the other side is morally bad, I'm just offering perspective to the limitation of your argument.
I wouldn't want to rely on offshore laws to enforce trustee fraud.
The US's tax policy is to tax income when it's brought into the country. One can debate the pros and cons of that policy, but it was a very intentional choice. Calling compliance with that law "avoiding taxes" is like calling an average American who deducts mortgage interest a "tax avoider": they're complying with the letter and the spirit of the tax law. Its implementors considered the pros and cons and decided that, on balance, the mortgage interest deduction made sense. Someone who isn't paying taxes they don't owe is not a "tax avoider."
As an example, this article's sole proposed way to get the cash from a trust is patently illegal:
> When your Uncle Joe dies, the insurer pays. The cash goes into your bank account tax-free. How can the taxman prove otherwise? You have a policy and Uncle Joe’s valid death certificate issued by your own government. The money is home free.
… which they gloss over with:
> If the phony insurance policy is too gruesome for you, you can find something more appealing in the summaries of the multitude of methods on the IRS website. A simple workaround would be to get a credit card from a foreign bank and pay it off through your secret bank account.
This isn't "a simple workaround," it's a recipe for getting prosecuted for tax fraud – and quite possibly going jail, since it would be clear that this was intentional fraud.
For a few perspectives that cover the issue better, start here:
* https://www.irs.gov/businesses/income-from-abroad-is-taxable (the IRS's own statement on hiding income offshore). "In addition to reporting your worldwide income, you must also report on your U.S. tax return whether you have any foreign bank or investment accounts." This isn't some theoretical risk; if, or more likely when, this account gets discovered, they'll be prosecuted.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/offshore-tax-havens... (look for examples how someone can actually get the money into the US without paying taxes; you won't find many, if any)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversy and https://www.cbsnews.com/news/swiss-to-let-banks-lift-secrecy... (2013; history of US pressure on the last few countries that are or were part of the worldwide banking system but didn't disclose transactions)
* https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-08/proxy-fig... - Matt Levine's summary (quoting the FT): "Otherwise, the Paradise Papers seem to be 'dull reading,' and they describe plans that are 'mostly, if not totally, legal' -- 'Some are not even questionable from a legitimacy point of view.'
This sentence of the NYT article a good summary of the US's tax policy:
> “I would have told the guy, ‘You’ve got this money offshore — just leave it offshore,’” Mr. Pfeifer said. “And he did.”
Again, there are pros and cons to that policy, but this article doesn't try to point those out, it tries to paint people complying with the letter and spirit of the tax law as unethical.
You can also sell a security without making that a taxable event which allows you to earn interest from money that would have been paid as taxes. Thus, lowering your lifetime tax bill.
Finally, because of the way our Tax system is setup such that deductions don't apply to say Social Security 'income tax' becomes a bigger deal for the rich. So, gaming the system becomes more viable the more money you have.
The US tax policy deliberately draws that line, though, on the grounds that there's only 2 ways for that trust to exist:
(a) the income was earned outside the US. The US says this isn't taxable until or unless it comes into the country for corporate or personal use. See slides 10 - 12 of https://www.irs.gov/pub/int_practice_units/FEN9434_02_01R.pd... for more - basically, if any party treats it as a personal bank account, it's not a trust.
(b) the income was earned inside the US, and thus already passed through the US (and taxes were paid on it) before it was moved to the trust. Moving it to the trust isn't a taxable event, and any gains will be taxed if or when they are brought into the country (see (a)).
Don't trust me, though, form your own opinion. These are good summaries of what an offshore trust can and can't do:
* https://www.irs.gov/pub/int_practice_units/FEN9434_02_01R.pd...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_trust
* http://nomadcapitalist.com/offshore-trust/ (covers a few countries)
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/08/offshore-tr... (UK-specific but interesting)
> have an intermediary do so
A trust can own all shares of a new corporation. That corporation can then buy US property.
Trusts can similarly lone money to a someone who then buys a building in the US with that money.
> For a modest 22% commission, the service will deliver suitcases of cash to New York or Vancouver. Guaranteed.
Given that the author leads with how the superwealthy aren't paying the 20-30% tax rate that he claims the average tax payer does, it seems weird to call a 22% service fee an effective avoidance mechanism.
Most other means of transferring/delivering assets come with costs - costs which depend upon the urgency, the physical security, etc.
Someone storing 1bn offshore doesn't bring it all home via such a service.
Still, I find it kind of odd it costs so much. I though Hawala banks transfer money for just a few percentage points.
See, a random communist bum have just managed to illegally sell a part of a state company for n gazillions.
He has not a single chance to make even as much as 1% of that in his whole life.
If you were him, will you settle with that 1% and have 100% certainty that all traces are cut, or keep the whole sum and spent the rest of his life in fear.
Or maybe you just need a quick $100k to keep an ex-lover quiet, but your spouse keeps too sharp an eye on the joint accounts, and you would rather pay extra to not answer any uncomfortable questions.
That's not about the taxes; but about drawing a contrast between services extended to VIPs that are completely unavailable to mundane folk. If I want cash, I have to go somewhere else with a card and push buttons on a machine, which may still charge me $3 for my trouble. And I can only do that if I have already paid all applicable taxes on the money in the account. And I'm pretty sure that if I ever got an actual suitcase of cash from my bank, they would rat me out to the cops before I even touched it, who would then seize it during a pretext traffic stop about 100 m outside the bank parking lot, for their civil forfeiture party fund.
Maybe true in some circumstances, but not in all. I'm a US based person who recently did a large transaction in another country. The money is in my partner's account (I do not have a bank account in the country).
I wanted to know if I needed to pay taxes in the year I actually bring the money to the US or for the year I did the transaction. I consulted a tax accountant, and they said it has to be the year I conducted the transaction - regardless of whether I brought the money into the US or not. The only condition where I would not pay is if somehow I cannot control the money (e.g. held in an account I cannot control). But as long as I can tell my partner to buy goods with it, it is taxable in the US.
This is for individual income tax - rules may be different for businesses.
If you earn less than $10K, you pay 0%; that makes sense, then if you earn $150K, you pay close to 50%... OK you could argue that this still makes sense. But then if you earn $200 million per year, you still only pay 50% tax - This makes no sense; the tax rate should follow a Lorenz curve which mirrors and offsets income inequality.
To earn $100K+ as a professional using nothing but your brain is bastard-hard. It takes a toll mentally.
Someone who owns stocks and is earning $500K+ per year from dividend payments while sitting around in their underwear all day doing nothing should be taxed at a much higher rate than someone who earns $150K by mutilating their brain every day. That seems extremely obvious to me.
The most infuriating thing about the current tax system is that the magical $150K number (where the tax rate suddenly levels off) is in fact the exact point after which earning money starts to get easier. This is exactly the point when the tax rates should start really sloping up - Not the point where they should level off!
Also, I think that the argument about protecting rich people so that they can have extra money to invest back in the economy is no longer valid. With innovations in crowd funding, large numbers of people can now easily pool their resources together to fund very significant and meaningful projects. Rich people these days are only interested in monopolising markets; not adding value.
For instance, suppose you're a happy go lucky guy who doesn't need much sleep and have a happy home life, and I am a grumpy dude who hates everyone around me and hate my co-workers.
Should I pay less in tax?
Tax policy should be based on our collective values regarding such things as what incentives we want and to what extent we want redistribution. It should not be related to punishing people who are enjoying their lives.
I don't think it should be classified as income; it should get its own category and be taxed much higher. We don't want to encourage people to sit around and do nothing just because they happened to decide to buy a few Apple or Amazon shares 20 years ago.
Maybe the tax rate would be correlated to happiness, but that's OK; maybe it will average out the human experience... That seems fair.
That’s an inaccurate summary of the current consensus about capital gains tax policy. The logic for a lower capital gains rate is:
* people with capital should be incentivized to do something with it (other than put it in a mattress, ie, in cash/money markets)
* the person with capital probably has relatively limited ways to deploy it themselves. Someone with a retirement account probably can’t, and usually shouldn’t, take that $50,000 and start a business with it (even though that income would generate compensation for them, which you’d propose taxing at a lower rate). At the other extreme, someone with a huge business would have reinvested the profits into the huge business (instead of taking a distribution and trying to invest it) if they thought that was the most productive use of the capital
* given that not all holders of capital can deploy it productively themselves, and that we don’t want them to sit on it (or deploy it poorly because they’d pay higher taxes if they didn’t), the next best thing is to encourage them to provide that capital to others.
Experts argue how much lower the capital gains rate should be, or even that capital gains and income should be taxed equally, but basically no experts[1] argue for a higher rate, nor that a lower or equal rate encourages “people to sit around.” Of course, there’s a chance that you and, say, 1% of mainstream economists are on to something.
[1]: Don’t trust me; form your own opinion: https://www.google.com/search?q=does+anyone+argue+that+capit...
We don't actually have a lower capital gains rate, we have a lower long term capital gains rate, which, insofar as it has logic beyond “its the kind of income that predominates among the superrich”, seems to be loosely grounded in the fact that income earned over a period greater than one year would be overtaxed if treated as simole current-year income in a progressive tax system.
Of course, a simple solution to this is simply to tax long-term gains as income but allow either advanced or deferred (or both) recognition of income, regardless of source, with some defined quantitative limits.
If you are making $200 million, then you are most likely paying 20% in taxes as you probably have incorporated and you are being taxed at a capital gains rate.
Hell if you are making that much, you could incorporate in a foreign nation with little to no taxes and then refuse to repatriate the earnings and just loan yourself money the money at 1% interest rate. Loans aren't taxed.
The largest banks like UBS, Bank of America, HSBC, JP Morgan, etc have floors dedicated to wealth management who will help you dodge taxes.
Can you reference the study or data supporting the assertion that making money gets easier after $150k per year?
Tangentially, income is (rightly, IMO) not based on effort or how easy the work is. I could punch the wall all day long, and end every day with bruised, bleeding knuckles, but even though that's hard work, no one's going to pay me much for that. Income is generally based on the value other's perceive because of one's effort.
The idea is to get them to spend freely and the trick is finding the breakpoint that changes the behavior. there will always be countries welcoming the rich and as luxuries become more available in more areas this will only increase.
so find the balance
How does this not lead us to a race-to-the-bottom? If any reasonable person had the discretion, they'd pay as little tax as possible. Many of the "wealthiest" Americans play the "Declare Declining Real-Estate Value as a Loss" game to avoid paying tax altogether. [1]
There is no lower limit that people will simply pay without question. You can always frame even a minuscule percentage-based tax as a problem given a large enough income by looking at the absolute values paid. That this is given as a rationale for lowering tax is pure propaganda.
1. https://www.thenation.com/article/without-the-amt-donald-tru...
What you're missing are the three factors at play in cost:
1. The tax rate itself
2. The cost of avoiding it
3. The cost of getting caught
We have control of 1 and 3 not just 1, and we can exert influence on 2. The double-Irish hole is closing.
I don't.
But if your ability to avoid taxes is mostly due to your wealth and you can end up paying less in taxes than a normal family then something is obviously out of sync.
To avoid ("legally" or fraudulently) taxes is to push the burden onto the people who are paying their appropriate amount of taxes.
But to contribute to a corrupt, warmongering government, is also wrong.
What you can do - what I do - is choose to live in a higher taxed country that isn't nearly as bad with respect to how it spends tax money. And so long as you pay more taxes to the country you live in, you end up owing none to the US.
US military is not particularly known for its altruism. You may want to rethink the internal logic of your argument here.
Since you aren't in the U.S., though, I guess there isn't much you in particular can do.
People say "social contract". When did we opt in, and can we opt out? It's being enforced without consent. We pay for things we don't want. Whether this be never ending wars around the world, or the welfare state such as the ponzi scheme known as social security.
You can opt out with the US government as well - it's just a bit more complicated to do so.
Because others contribute to your body's production. Your position only works if you are truly prepared to ask nothing from the state - not defense, not roads, not clean water, not law enforcement. Most people who take the "taxation is theft" position don't recognize how much they benefit from the existence of the state.
You are an emergent phenomenon - to claim "ownership" of anything is pure hubris, and reflects a dangerously limited understanding of causality.
(no, I'm not on board with the idea, but that's the gist. IMO it's a transparent rhetorical trick, but the emotion it drags along sure seems to convince/strongly-reinforce-convictions-for a certain set of people.)
You know, stuff paid for by taxes.
But the low earning morons cannot see through this - those in power manage to use their latent enviousness of the rich to convince them that the taxes are for all those social benefits that they get. One cannot and should not argue with a moron.
Can we have a special politics section so we can keep it separate? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it is becoming disruptive to the technical, scientific, and business side of the site.
There should still be standards, but the standard should be a combination of interesting, relevant, well-written, and professional.
Perhaps a tagging system would help, but HN is allergic to features.
HN does not have any unique angle or personalities that can comment on these topics, and it basically devolves into a "blue team good, red team bad" and a few -50 libertarians in every single article. A Markov chain could write the comment threads.
One wonders if one could construct a quality system for message boards that uses markov chains to predict common comment patterns and then reduce their visibility.
This would create a system similar to Amazon's "statistically unique phrases" view of books. Might be interesting to play around with.
For this article, I'd say, it does qualify +5 on informative, and 0.5 on flamebait. It clearly worth attention
- Ignore the article.
- Ignore the comments.
- Participate but try to raise the level of discourse.
Note how complaining in the comments about how political stories are a problem is not a solution. That's because it's at best being ignored, but more likely adding noise to the discussion or starting an obfuscating thread about it, like this whole thread.
The only thing complaining does is possibly make the comment writer feel slightly better by being able to vent, but at the expense of everyone else. I hope you and the others at least got that little bit out of your comments, because at least there's some small benefit to this thread then (that's not meant to be snide, I truly do think it's a better outcome than this being a complete waste of time).
> Rather than critically discussing why you don't want the feature you deflect from the idea.
The argument, as far as it exists, is constructed as follows:
1) I do not like content X.
2) Observes content X is being upvoted.
3) We should get rid of content X.
4) There are a lot of people who agree with me (= argumentum ad populum, and furthermore lacks data).
It is basically the same as arguing with the mod system (which is on every website a big fat no-no), but then under a guise of not getting the candy you want (apparently then its OK).
You know there's a much simpler solution than complaining about it? You can work around content you dislike by submitting and upvoting content you do enjoy. Or another option is leaving, going to another website, or getting something useful done.
The top reply at the time was a low level deflection of the idea rather than a constructive feedback of the idea / feature as others did above. Deflections don't constructively argue for one side or the other. It is merely to shut down an idea and stop discussion.
My simple solution to upvote articles you find interesting stands. That way, you're able to vote on this website, and every unique visitor has a say on the matter here. Its not unique to HN, a lot of websites work like this (Reddit and lobste.rs for example).
Take for example myself. I am not from the USA, so I could say anything related to USA politics or US business or US hiring isn't of my concern. Reality is though that I'm not interested in quantum mechanics. Someone who's a JavaScript developer might not be interested in security. Someone who's interested in UNIX system administration might not be interested about Microsoft Office. And so on, and so forth. And someone who's living in a villa and bought all the villas around him might not be concerned with the privacy of the general population. That's everyone's fair right, and all of these individuals are going to have a certain signal to noise ratio on HN, as well as a vote (as explained above). There is not one single HN visitor who will enjoy each and every article on the FP. And blimey, be thankful of that, because every interesting article which doesn't exist means you got more time for something else.
You can already manually hide articles you are not interested in. Alternatively, if it really bothers you, you could write a simple blacklist with keywords which would then be hidden from the list. But don't make your problem someone else's problem. Don't make it appear that your apathy regarding politics should be the status quo. Just like we're not all into quantum mechanics, some of us are interested in politics.
What certainly doesn't help is complaining about it. Should I complain in threads about quantum mechanics how I find it boring, how I find it a waste of time, and how we shouldn't discuss or upvote it? I'd get grilled. And for good reason. It is disrespectful to those who do find quantum mechanics interesting. So I GTFO of discussions about quantum mechanics because it isn't my league. If you find politics boring, it probably isn't within your league either. So, sure, stay away from it. You got so many tools within grasp to use for that.
Also I agree and I enjoy seeing politics discussed. You are conflating my defending of someones discussion around the structure with the site / features or focus of the the sites content with me defending their argument. Two different things here.
You're not demonstrating how or why the solutions I have offered are not applicable. Why are these solutions I offered perfectly valid for someone who's not into quantum mechanics or JavaScript or Android or Windows, yet they somehow don't work for someone who's not into politics (however vague that definition might be)?
As for my argument being that people are not allowed to question the structure / content of a site: yes, they are allowed, just not in a thread which is about something else. This thread is about "The Paradise Papers: How Ridiculously Easy It Is for the Rich to Avoid Taxes" not about whether politics are allowed to be discussed on HN (which is itself a political argument by proponents of political apathy). Are you a proponent of moderation complaints ("downvoting", a form of argumentum ad misericordiam) in threads? No? Then why would you be a proponent of people who complain they find an article or bunch of articles irrelevant or offtopic?
I'm all for a meta forum where people can rant their ass off about how X or Y is ontopic on the website. A website I visit regularly (Tweakers.net) has such a subforum where people can submit things like spelling mistakes or complain about moderation. Let the complainers together enjoy their cesspit of complaints, being directed to it, while such complaints in the threads themselves are downvoted to offtopic (0) or troll (-1). GLHF wasting your time on that, having people vent their frustration already helps them with their problem.
Your solution was that I write a script to blacklist certain words? Is that really a viable solution vs a product implementation?
> Don't make it appear that your apathy regarding politics should be the status quo.
And nowhere in this discussion was I against the discussion of politics just that this immediate and visceral reaction to wanting to discuss a topic is my issue here.
If we had a meta forum as mentioned above I would love for discussions like this to be moved in that direction but we are where we are because the lack of structure.
Yes, that was one of my solutions. Only one human being has to write such a simple script, and share it for the rest of the world. The other solutions I provided require manual labour. It could also easily be implemented in the apps which use the API (f.e. I use Yarn).
> And nowhere in this discussion was I against the discussion of politics just that this immediate and visceral reaction to wanting to discuss a topic is my issue here.
Because it is offtopic, just like rants about quantum mechanics would easily be or become offtopic in a thread about Android security. We wouldn't accept that; why would be find rants about politics being on the website acceptable? The intolerance fundamentally starts when people go offtopic complaining about the substance of the topic which is disrespectful to those who do care about the topic. It does not need to be this way, if you just moved on, filtered, upvoted, read, and participated in what you find interesting. That's a way to positively reinforce instead of negatively.
> If we had a meta forum as mentioned above I would love for discussions like this to be moved in that direction but we are where we are because the lack of structure.
So the lack of that justifies graffiti in random threads until your demands are met?
Nope but it is the inevitable outcome as we see here.
I'll still stand my ground that the first reply that I replied to was a shit comment only wanting to deflect conversation. If it followed what you said here then the appropriate response is to ignore it and report.
I find that HN's community and mods are pretty good at policing flamebait content in general, inflammatory topics don't last long on the frontpage in my experience.
I'd sooner ban politics entirely from HN (as has been attempted before) than create a sub-forum for it.
I also find that political talk doesn't tend to contaminate other threads the way it does in other communities. If you want to avoid political threads it's fairly easy to do so in general. So it's really not that bad from my point of view, and I don't really like political stuff either.
What should be unified is the rules for contributing to HN.
To avoid bubbles, users should not be allowed to save their tag based selections.
edit: added some more ideas.
Look at the current frontpage for instance:
>Germany bans children's smartwatches
>TechShop shuts down all U.S. locations, declares bankruptcy
>Termination of the certificates business of StartCom
>There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It
>Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers
Which ones of these deserve to be tagged "politics"? And for those you'd tag that way, which ones are those you'd consider not part of "core" HN subjects? For instance the smartwatch ban one is objectively political, yet it's probably of interest for the crowd here since it's obviously also about tech.
Both tags and better sorts for threads and comments would be ideal. "Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?" already had several hundred comments when I first saw it, and it's now at 800. Having the only choices to view that thread be by karma or whatever latest comments appear on /newcomments makes it difficult to browse, although I do appreciate long threads being paginated. This one feature Reddit gets more right than HN.
And to counter the likely argument that adding tags would make the UI noiser, and somehow reduce the intellectual quality of comments by attracting mainstream users, lobste.rs uses tags and they don't seem to have fallen down either slippery slope.
And, HN already has pseudo-tags in the form of "Ask HN", "Show HN", and "Tell HN". Might as well just make those #ask, #show, and #tell and turn the ask and show pages (and maybe jobs) into tag feeds.
As for lobste.rs, a website I didn't know existed before your comment, looking at the frontpage I see that the "politics" tag is conspicuously absent, and instead all tags are about rather objective things like technologies being used (with maybe the exception of a lone "philosophy" tag).
I'd also point out that if I had up all the number of comments of all the stories on the front page currently I end up at a whopping 42 comments with most stories having none. I'm sure it's a very nice community but it's really too small to use as a reference.
Of course, the answer for that is for HN to bite the bullet and actually integrate a relational database, if only to improve performance and scalability.
And as far as lobste.rs goes, the culture there seems to be more restrictive due to being invite only, and having a policy of banning not only offending users, but the users who invited them, and the users who invited them, as far up the (publicly viewable) graph as deemed necessary. This inevitably leads to far more posts than comments, and less diversity of thought or critical discussion, by design. Nevertheless, using tags doesn't seem to have interfered with any of that, so it shouldn't necessarily interfere with Hacker News' culture either.
HN, however, has open membership, and any tag system employed here would need to take the heterogenous nature of the community into account. Since politics is one of the more divisive topics here, a politics tag would probably be inevitable. Lobste.rs would just not allow anyone they consider too political to join in the first place.
China has to routinely purge extraordinary numbers of people from their political system (tens of thousands), because most of their corruption occurs behind closed doors, shadow dealings, hidden bribes, and so on. Is that better or worse than instead having a strictly defined system of public lobbying? For emphasis I'll point out that the US lobbying system is extremely tightly regulated, there are very well defined laws for it, they will put you in prison if you break those laws.
Systems without US-style open lobbying are not lacking in common corruption, there has always been plenty of that in nations such as Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, South Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, etc.
The world is flooded with political corruption practically everywhere, with most of that world not utilizing a system like US lobbying. It'd be easy to say that one would rather eg AT&T not try to influence politics at all, that's wildly unrealistic as it pertains to human nature and history. So is it better to have a public system that AT&T lobbies in, such that you know where they're lobbying and for how much. And if so, is there a better version of that than the US system (and what would that be).
The people who only want to discuss, for example, Android from technical merits and completely leave out any privacy aspect are the ones who have an agenda. They're trying to silence our concerns. We should downvote their opinion as its akin to complains about moderation.
Which would be when our ancestors first began making hand tools and using fire, right?
However it has become increasingly dominant over our lives with the invention of things like the Internet, computer, car, smartphone, magnetron, and a whole plethora of inventions which I cannot even fathom.
Take for example a very obvious example: electronic voting. It has to do with technology and politics. Should we avoid discussing that? Should we avoid discussing the privacy topics of Facebook? Google? Should we avoid all the topics brought up by a series such as Black Mirror? [1]
And why is it that with non-political topics (as for as these exist) we should be allowed to vote on them, whereas as soon as politics get somehow involved it should be avoided on HN? And, since politics isn't a clear proposition, where do we draw the line?
It should be obvious that we can have a conversation about, say, the Android low memory killer's process ordering strategy without having to talk about the social implications of website cookie tracking or whatever.
Yes, mobile technology as a whole is connected to privacy. That doesn't mean that any particular detail of that technology is relevant to any particular political cause, and it doesn't give people the right to inject social issues into discussions into technical matters. You can't be intellectually honest, keep a straight face, and claim that malloc chunking is "deeply intertwined" with some pet political cause.
One reason the West has gone mad the past few years is this bizarre emphasis on the old, bad "the personal is the political" idea. No, it isn't.
Furthermore, we don't always discuss Android's low memory killer's process or malloc chunking; we also discuss iPhone's latest authentication measure FaceID or we discuss the latest inclusions of the Linux kernel. Both of which are more easily related to politics.
> One reason the West has gone mad the past few years [...]
What? Nice political comment.
Commerce, communications, privacy, speech, expression, lifestyle, journalism, entertainment & culture, knowledge, societal debate, government, money, wealth - it all increasingly flows through technology/platforms that techies, nerds, geeks (whatever term you prefer) now heavily influence or directly control.
There's no going back, it's all going to get more political rather than less as governments gets deeper into assigning regulations to the Internet.
The guidelines specifically state that this would be an "off-topic" submission. If these types of topics are wanted then the guidelines should be modified or a separate section should be created.
Can we come to terms that if stories are getting voted up, it means people want these? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it's complementary to the technical, scientific, and business side of the site.
See how that works? Don't like it? down vote it? :)
Stories which are obviously off topic or spam should be flagged, but stories you simply don't care for should just be hidden. If you flag stories because you don't like them, you're making it more difficult for everyone else to participate in that thread.
Only if you can come to terms that if comments like the parent are getting upvoted it means a large chunk of people don't want these stories?
> See how that works? Don't like it? down vote it? :)
Most users do not have the ability to downvote and so their voice is represented by up-voting the parent.
News for hackers is intrinsically political.
On a serious note, most people don't vote. Keeping out of politics is not a luxury few have, it's the choice the majority makes.
When software eats the world that means politics and software are only going to intersect even more.
- Health (bad service in the US and nutrition), body hacks
- University/education (decline / loan in the US, do I need a university degree to be a developer, Google/Amazon/Facebook favoring same top universities)
- Government surveillance and other threads to freedom
- What I like/disliked or how I moved from language A to B
- Tesla / electric cars, renewable energies
- Online scams, phishing etc
- drugs, war on drugs
- how broken are programmer interviews
- wealth distribution/inequality
Which has turned HN from stuff-that-hackers-find-interesting to something closer to viewpoints-hackers-most-agree-with
And this is true for many other things aside from politics, politics is just where it's most obvious. (I think the format/process worked early on with a smaller, more startup-oriented crowd. Those days are long gone)
And this is one of the few places where I can do that.
I agree that political threads here have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than other articles. It's just that here is better than almost anywhere else these days.
These are all very worth talking about. Not least because people are going to be talking about them whether we do or not, and the discourse benefits from people with actual technical knowledge contributing towards it.
IMO, this topic has huge intersections with modern tech. From attitudes about US tax reform in the tech community, to means of creating transparency in wealth with tech, to means of aggregating and distributing investigative journalism about such large and complex matters with tech.
Tax avoidance, not so much.
If we pay close enough attention, surely we could automate all this into a tax-avoidance-as-a-service app. Maybe turn it into smart contracts on a blockchain machine-learning cloud buzzword buzzword? And once you start making real money, you can eat your own dog food to keep more of it.
I guess I could see how some readers might let their primate fairness response generate an emotional reaction, but I think it's pretty cool how these people exploited vulnerabilities in the code--that typically go years or decades without getting patched--to improve their lives by a marginal amount at a relatively large cost to absolutely everyone else in their respective countries, in a way that strictly obeys the letter of the law while completely subverting its spirit. If that's not hacking, I don't know what is.
Why, that's no more political than attaching a RazPi and some 3D-printed plastic components to the optics and lower receiver of a sniper rifle, such that an attacker could successfully strike a moving target--as a completely hypothetical example--on the deck of a luxury yacht cruising more than a mile offshore through somewhat rough seas, somewhere between Malta and the Caymans.
And it isn't as though many of us are paid, sometimes very well, to eliminate jobs through automation, or to mine and reduce big data from the consumer population, or disrupt existing industries to the detriment of the people who built careers in them, or to create technologies that tend to increase the concentration of wealth and power in those who already have it. We're completely apolitical! We have no real need to consider the social ramifications of what we do!
~ (Poe's Law warning: satire)
Technically tax codes and laws are source code to Governmental society.
That being said, it seems a little rich to complain about the intrusion of politics into this genteel little salon we've got here.
So if you don't like it, just skip it. (Others have said that you can hide it, but you can also just scroll past it.) What does it matter to you if we discuss stuff you don't care about in thread that you don't bother to read? It's not like you can only look at articles on the first page. (Yes, I know, you have to scroll further than you otherwise would. That seems like a fairly small problem. I wonder if it deserves such a large solution...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you think it's disruptive, then please email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We read all of those, and we routinely penalize stories that are off-topic for Hacker News.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon..."
Since the rich avoiding taxes isn't some new phenomenon, this is off-topic.
The actual mechanics of how it is accomplished being published is a fairly new phenomenon, to my eyes. That makes it somewhat relevant.
Your inability to see it as anything but purely political is not an attribute we share.
Then it becomes very expensive to create a shell company to launder money through and games like paying oneself through a corporation lose their appeal.