Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons
cpcwiki.eu
cpcwiki.eu
Tarrif averted, thousands sold!
The differences could be huge
> Footwear with open toes or open heels; footwear of the slip-on type, that is held to the foot without the use of laces or buckles or other fasteners, the foregoing except footwear of subheading 6402.99.33 and except footwear having a foxing or a foxing-like band wholly or almost wholly of rubber or plastics applied or molded at the sole and overlapping the upper:
>> Having outer soles with textile materials having the greatest surface area in contact with the ground, but not taken into account under the terms of additional U.S. note 5 to this chapter 12.5%
>> Other 37.5%
> Sandals and similar footwear of plastics, produced in one piece by molding. 3%
Now looks like they are in trouble for this scheme.
https://jalopnik.com/ford-faces-potential-1-3-billion-fine-f...
(And why it's called Chicken Tax is another fascinating story...)
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/epis...
Although I suppose van buyers are slightly more likely to know someone with a welding torch and some steel sheets than the average person, so perhaps they missed a trick...
Why SHOULD a cargo van have higher import taxes than a passenger van, other than to serve the needs of some random private company?
Even moreso, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ford lobbied FOR those laws before changing its mind in where to produce a particular sku
Have you read a tariff schedule? They're full of this stuff, which seem to be protections or favors for specific industries. Anti-dumping protections seem similar.
That's from the 'further reading' link on Wikipedia.
Running for reelection and aware of the influence the U.A.W. had in Congress and in the minds of voters, President Johnson looked for a way to persuade Reuther’s union not to strike and to support his “Great Society” civil rights agenda. Johnson succeeded on both counts by agreeing to include light trucks in the Chicken Tax.
While U.S. tariffs on other Chicken Tax items have since been rescinded, lobbying efforts by the U.A.W. have kept the tariff on light trucks and utility vans alive. As a result, American-made trucks still dominate sales in the U.S., and some very desirable trucks, like the high-end Australian-made Volkswagen Amorak, are not sold in the United States.
If there was a war American industry would shut down overnight.
The EU has banned poultry meat from the US on psytosanitary grounds for more than two decades.
For some context: it is about washing chicken meat with chlorine dioxide to kill bacteria, especially salmonella, at the slaughterhouse. It may seem ridicoulous that europeans prefer salmonella to chlorine on their chickens, but european food health and safety argues that the practice is needed in the USA due to the very unsanitary, and therefor cheaper, chicken meat production, whereas europa requires high standards during production instead of washing the end product in chlorine, and is therefore more costly. Some argue this cost difference is the major driver of the ban, and it is not an actual health and safety issue.
Its incredible to me that there's an entire political identity that borderline denies any of this happens, and instead the government itself is somehow naturally corrupt but business and the lobbying and capital owning class are all angels and saints. Everyday conservatism buys into this fallacy fairly well and this dishonesty seems to be the core of libertarianism.
Explaining this concept to some people feels like how I would imagine explaining water to fish must be. We're just so surrounded by it and it defines so much of our culture, that you can fail to see if you choose. You can just call everything government corruption from cradle to grave without asking about the source and motivation of that corruption. You can swim your whole life and never wonder why you're wet.
It's the same game that SaaS companies play. Everything is free until you want SSO, then it's $30,000 a year. If you need SSO, you can afford it.
Personally, I hate this in both cases. I think we could save everyone a lot of time if every vendor you did business with just grabbed you by the ankles and flipped you upside down and took whatever money fell out of your pocket. Why tiptoe around what they really want...
I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business.
Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then...
why go through the hassle of voting and deal with uncertainty whether you voted a right person, when you can just buy with cash whatever law/regulation you need
I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes. That would be politically quite unpopular, but there is a certain logic to it and it would also make taxes easier to administer and more difficult to avoid. And it doesn't need to be as pro-rich as it sounds - you could just replace corporation taxes with other taxes targeting wealthy individuals, such as a wealth tax or higher income taxes.
Without a wealth tax that would just make tax evasion even easier for the ultrawealthy in the usual manner of borrowing against the equity of the stock they own.
So while a business doesn't pay sales on the fuel they need to deliver their goods to me, it gets paid in the end because the cost of the fuel is included in the price I pay and the sales tax is levied on the whole purchase price.
(It is a little more complicated than that. Don't sue me.)
[0]: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/06/03/ford-transit-connect-imp...
That way everyone gets what they want, and they've technically sold it with the seats still installed.
You have to report behavior X, and if you deliberately don't do behavior X to avoid reporting it, that's a crime too!
Let's see you put that on the blockchain...
Edit: ...when successful.
Judging by how hard it is for programmers to write bug-free instructions for literal computers, I'm not sure your expectation of flawless legislation is something realistic for mere mortals.
More laws = more ways people/organisations are burdened with things they need to know (and will be punished for whether or not they know). Having canonical interpretations of laws that aren't written in the laws just makes that even more fraught with peril.
The poster I originally responded to thinks we ought to be further right along this spectrum. I think we're either in a good place or if anything we ought to move a little further left. I don't think either extreme is desirable, and the left extreme is where we get those consequences you want to ascribe to me.
The justice system is already quite intolerant of such hacks. In the Ford case, they didn't even interpret the law differently. Instead, they determined—with evidence— that Ford was actually importing cargo vans and not passenger vans.
In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities.
Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting the laws to cover these new situations and variables with absolute certainty and unambiguity. And unlike software, you can't just push a commit to prod to fix the problems as they pop up. It's a really long process, because democracy.
It's not happening, no more than you'd be able to handle a piece of software that took some infinite and random number and variety of inputs and did something useful with them.
We should, as you say, write "quality" laws to the best of our ability but there will always been a sizable human element to the interpretation of law.
Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.
Yet almost everyone fails.
You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?
I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.
Your code will fail sometimes. You’ll fix it.
In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways that we accomplish this, but it will never be (and really shouldn’t be) fast and easy.
Sometimes I just want to ignore HN entirely because of embarrassing comments like this. “Code works this way, so everything should work this way!”
I never said the law worked exactly like code. I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.
Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law
Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)
Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.
This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say".
Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust all matter.
Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.
Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.
Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.
And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!
And thank you for providing some excellent example of why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust are important.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-gorsuch-and-the-case-of-...
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/gorsuch-transam-t...
Judges are there to make the boundaries clear for the greyzone on what's not written down
The world is too complex to get perfect laws written. You're always going to miss weird edge cases in both directions
Ate they following things specifically as the law said they're supposed to, or hacking some edge case that isn't explicitly called out?
Ford should only have issued a guide to independent dealers and repair centers on how to do a conversion between cargo and passenger (and made sure both were possible) but only import the passenger version into the country.
Then it's murkier, because not all dealerships would offer it and the customer isn't buying it from Ford, he's getting an independent dealer to install additional things (or remove) from the vehicle.
CBP is one of the worst infringers upon personal rights, I wouldn't defend them.
Well, no, they are dictating what taxes you owe based on intent, and using consistent patterns of behavior as evidence of ongoing intent.
This isn't Ford changing their mind about the purpose of the vehicle after importing them.
The problem I have here is how easy it is to avoid the tax. CBP shouldn't have any jurisdiction over car modifications and repairs; that responsibility falls to different agencies.
If import tax on a cpu is x, and motherboard is y, should you have to pay computer import tax z if you build and sell PCs? After all, what imported cpus and motherboards aren't destined to be assembled computers?
It is a more normal way around these sorts of tariffs to import a vehicle as a kit of parts (CKD / "Complete knocked down"), and perform some level of final assembly in the end country. The sort of rules you talk about apply then, you pay the car parts import rate on the kit, not the (presumably higher) rate for a complete car[1].
[1] Or otherwise avoid whatever other protectionist measures mean you can't just import a fully built car.
Either it meets the definition of the lower taxed category or it doesn't, at time of import.
Any other way of interpreting it gets into intent and degrees modification, or worse, applying import taxes after the fact for domestic modifications.
Reverse the scenario: is an imported pc taxed at z need to be taxed at x and y if the only purpose was to get the parts and sell the cpus and graphics cards a la carte? If x and y were cheaper than z, do you think the govt would refund the difference?
The indefensible part is tying a large difference in import tariffs to how many seats are installed. Absurd outcomes such as this one highlight systematic flaws in the rules. If the basis for the tariffs were logically sound you wouldn't be able to work around them without addressing the reason the tariffs were imposed in the first place.
The phrase you’re looking for is ‘criminal conspiracy’
I mean, that's the whole point of the import tariff law, so if the CBP has jurisdiction to enforce tariff law, surely how the item is used (or at least how the item is intended to be used or how the item can reasonably be expected to be used) is the primary factor to consider.
Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.
I'm not somebody who really loves rules and regulations and I'll be the first person to say that America's "war on drugs" has been an utter disaster in multiple ways.
But, generally speaking, flooding a country with cocaine is not what most of us would call beneficial to society.
If you don't think that we should have a society and/or laws, cool, that's another discussion. But if you accept the premise that we should have laws, controlling the flow of industrial quantities of coca leaves seems like the good kind of law.
I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them? I think we would find that orders of magnitude more work and orders of magnitude less effective. There would be a large cost to society, and nobody wins except Coca-Cola, really.
Yes? Basically?
(1988)
"Workers at the Stepan Co. plant, the nation’s only legal importer of cocaine, must undergo strict background checks, and agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency frequently visit, said plant manager John O’Brien.
DEA spokesman Milton Smilek in Newark said there haven’t been any security problems at the plant just west of New York City. He said it processes hundreds of tons of cocaine each year."
This is where Coca-Cola is said to get its flavoring from.
And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.
In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!
At worst, you can imagine selling a full nuclear bomb to Al kaeda, then being surprised pikachu when they use it to blow up IAD
Ford would have been fine if they had kept the seats in the car until they were sold and left it up to the customer to remove the seats. (This would not have affected the customer, tax-wise, since the import duty is paid by Ford, and by the time the customer has removed the seats, they have already paid the sales tax on the vehicle.)
The Subaru case probably violates the intent as well but maybe that would be a lot harder to prove. But the Ford case they clearly conspired to violate the intent. Which, if "intent" really is the important thing, I suppose should have lead to criminal charges too.
I suppose intent probably matters a bit more when it's the little guy on the receiving end of it.
I'm beyond tired of massive corporations sending jobs to other countries, pretending to care about their own country and lying about being made locally, and dodging taxes. Ford hit all three here.
All these cheats will never be accepted for working individuals. Corporations get a different flavor of justice. Even then they push it to the limits and dinner times find a burocrat in the pertinent agency willing to push forward a rightful punishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...
The irony is that in the X-Men universe, the X-Men fight for a unification of mutants and humans.
Are they truly speciated or can they interbreed producing fertile offspring?
"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" doesn't really address this as Superman is not a member of genus homo.
The human body accumulates on the order of 10 quadrillion uncorrected mutations per day, supposedly:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC47258/
(I'm assuming 30 trillion cells and that ~2.7% of mutations go uncorrected based on the rat figures mentioned)
https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2021/09/15/feds-accuse-...
Courts can interpret laws if the interpretation is the problem. If there is just a stupid loophole, then either the law itself makes no sense (as seems to apply to this Jones Act) or it needs to be reworded to align with its intent.
This reminds me of all the california electricity deregulation games where Enron et al moved power out of state and back, or had plants go down strategically for maintenance in order to gain the system. The correct solution is not to say "play nice, you know what we meant". It's to have a consistent and enforceable set of rules that dont admit gaming.
Tax is one of the few areas of law where activities can be declared illegal and subject to punitive sanction after the fact. For example, the fictive loss tax shelter scheme that was popular 15 years ago. Fictive losses were technically legal at the time the scheme began (in the sense that they were legal within the letter of the law but violated the intent of the law), and weren't explicitly stated to be illegal until years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkens_%26_Gilchrist).
We should never encourage ignoring certain laws or it undermines the whole system. It’s why I don’t support states legalizing weed under the federal government’s nose/while they turn a blind eye. Sure, we like it for weed, but what happens when a super conservative state does something less popular like, say, functionally bans gay marriage and goes, “well you aren’t enforcing drug laws, why should they get a pass but not us?”
I’m sure there are better examples but hopefully I’m getting my point across. Exceptions = weakening of the established structure. I don’t know about you, but I like that “the law is king” in the US. Mostly because we can change them.
That happened in North Carolina (albeit before weed legalization had gained momentum):
Or like abortion. The new abortion rules in conservative states are betting they can sway the federal gov if a lawsuit arises, but its based on the assumption they'll get to ignore the gov.
Yes, indeed. It completely defeats the purpose of the law, which is why the suggestion is akin to your A solution (that it should be invalidated/removed).
The law doesn't encode "purpose" or "spirit", the law only exists as written. When applying the law, and tax law especially, it's counterproductive to speculate as to "spirit" or "purpose", and best to focus just on what the law actually is, because that's the only part that really counts as "democratic". Intentions and ideals weren't voted on, the actual literal text of the law was.
There's no such thing as the "spirit of the law", just like there's no such thing as the "spirit of the code".
If you leave a buffer overflow it will get exploited no matter what. Same thing with the law.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@45.1583297,-67.1396882,3a,75y,3...
> And if it's true to say, "a Jaffa Cake is a cake" (or "a Jaffa Cake is a biscuit") then that also tells us something about the world, i.e. about the properties of a Jaffa Cake, as well as about the meaning of the word "cake".
And of course it's even more fun because I have to mentally substitute "cookie" every time I read "biscuit".
When I was young, I dipped my biscuits in Milo.
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20210609082852/https://www.nytim...
Pity, as I kinda like the Jimny even if it makes no sense at all for me to own one.
Anyway here’s a popular video of a 660cc Jimny towing a large truck that’s stuck in snow during the great Tokyo Blizzard of 2014.
Someone figured out it was cheaper then to import unprocessed meat from Spain to Norway, turn the truck around as soon as they were customs cleared and drive the 3000 km or so back to Spain for curing.
Once cured they'd re-import the processed meat, which now has a different tariff due to being "Norwegian" ham processed abroad, while still being proper Spanish dry-cured ham.
So a ~6000 km (3700 miles) detour to save on import taxes, yay...
The name comes from the E6 route[2] the trucks drive through Sweden and into Norway.
Infamous refers to something that is "well known for being bad!". A classic example would be a (well known) pirate! If the tax you are talking about is bad (I'm pretty sure it is) and well known (also, yes), then "Infamous" is a fine word to use
Notorious is a similar word - well known for something bad
Famous works if it isn't bad, but it usnusually used for people, and I would imagine "the highest threshold" of well-known stuff - so expect people to argue with you: "I haven't heard of X, so it must not be famous!"
Renowned and prominent are fine alternatives to "famous"
My personal favorite is Preeminent- which carries the notion of "#1 best". "My king is the Preeminent leader" - there is NO OTHER leader that can be king
Again, welcome to English, enjoy your stay!
Translated: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/norge/ellevill-skinkereise...
He said the drivers who haven't done it before gets quite confused when ordered back to Spain just as they've crossed the border, without unloading.
There are carbon taxes being implemented and on the whole i think they are good. But combined with the current spike in energy prices, they are hammering some people.
My understanding is that Napoleon's Continental System caused a shortage of cocoa in continental Europe, so chocolatiers had to substitute in hazelnuts. This became Gianduja[0], which later were modified to become Nutella.
Ahh, those Norwegians and their customs evasions. https://youtu.be/oP1Oq3JLNbc (do note that I'm ascribing this to Norwegians completely in jest - tone is difficult to get across in text)
... Which recently had an update. https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/asc-gets-green-li...
Then you sell the uncured hams you needed for the stamps to a pet-food factory or for German “salami” or whatever.
a) You bring two sets of high quality hams from Spain, one cured and the other raw
b) You cross the border in and out with the raw hams, and tell the customs clerk "I'll come back the processed product"
c) You cross the border again with the cured hams "that was quick, eh?"
d) You dispose of the raw hams selling them at a high discount on a roadside stand
I guess you can do it even more efficiently changing slightly the first two steps:
a) You bring a thousand cured hams and a single raw ham
b) You cross the border in and out a thousand times with the (only) raw ham you have
That improves the economics of the scheme, but makes it look even more fishy.
b) Yes
c) Yes but if the hams are fungible, which the other commenter explained they are not, then doing this at volume would make the timing irrelevant.
d) Yes, or just pre-sell them to someplace that doesn't care about quality. Just has to be inside the EU since these are the hams that (you say) have not yet been to Norway!
Crossing the border a thousand times, carrying a ham each way each time, would probably be less efficient, unless you get tax breaks for your hourly employees, in which case you could also have a thousand employees on standby and do it relay-style.
While it's true that this would never work, and if you tried it'd be extremely fishy, I do in fact know a place you can buy pork sausage that tastes of fish.
Sometimes the absurd is possible!
And I guess they aren’t fungible because they get tested for health reasons and protein content.
In the EU, tracking is needed. If people get ill from eating ham, it’s important to exactly know where the meat came from (factory, farm, sometimes even the specific pig. Conversely, if animals get ill, it’s important to know where their milk went. https://ec.europa.eu/food/animals/traces_en)
However, you have reminded me that indeed this would probably not work because of all the tracking required to prevent the Mad Swine Pox and so on.
.. then one day in 1999 ministry of education announced a huge contracts for school computerization program, and specifically requested "no VAT" prices (22%) from all bidders. The only way to achieve this was exporting/re-importing Polish build computers, something Ministry itself not only suggested, but was publicly proud of securing.
Year later local prosecutor accused Optimus of evading $2m VAT, froze all assets (~$100mil company in 2000) and arranged SWAT to arrest CEO, leading to inability to pay wages/service debt. 3 years and multiple appeals later investigation was closed without so much as "sorry". This wasnt even the only company destroyed same way. Another one was JTT, mayor PC hardware distributor https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/JTT_Computer?...
In 2011 CD Project reverse merger with corpse of Optimus SA to get on the stock exchange. https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/CD_Projekt?_x...
11 years later (2014) CD Project managed to "win" ~$300K settlement for court mistake https://crn-pl.translate.goog/aktualnosci/cd-projekt-dostal-...
Same year mayor shareholder of defunct JTT received ~$10mil settlement, which was immediately overturned. It only took them another 7 years to finally get ~$1mil just last year https://www-pb-pl.translate.goog/mci-otrzyma-5-mln-zl-odszko... for the destruction of a company worth ~$20mil in 2000.
The framed cover used to be a reminder that, in general, the state and the Polish equivalent of the IRS is not, and never will be, your friend. Sure, I've had some friendly and helpful chats with multiple people working for our IRS but I've never forgotten Optimus.
In a slightly less illogical EU you could just go to the appropriate EU committe, and get an exception where you send the ham on a "virtual trip". Just proove that you payed the cost of shipment. The ham benefits, the environment benefits, everybody wins.
I would even go further and introduce a legal principle. Every law that can be circumvented by a ridiculous trick is either void, or the loophole has to be closed.
California did something like this with window tint violations. It's illegal to have your windows tinted darker than some amount. In the old days, if you were ticketed for this, it would be a "Fix It" ticket. You get the tint removed, have a cop sign off that the violation was corrected, and pay some nominal fine. ($25, I think)
Almost everyone who got one of these tickets would have the tint peeled off, the ticket cleared, and be back at the tint shop the next day to get it put back on. If you like your tint, then true cost of the ticket was $225 or whatever.
Now the ticket gives you an option! You can still correct the violation, have it signed off, and pay the fee, or you can pay a larger fine and not have to demonstrate that you've cured the violation. They probably figured if the driver was going to go through the expense of removing and reapplying the tint, the state might as well see that money.
Wasn't really a loophole, per se, but it was a circumvention that the state decided to eliminate buy allowing you to buy an indulgence :)
The game over here in New England is getting a statement of medical accommodation from an eye doctor asserting that bright sun is uncomfortable but you have no other limitations.
This has approximately nothing to do with the EU. Norway is not in the EU and not in the EU Customs Union.
> The European Economic Area (EEA) was established via the Agreement on the European Economic Area, an international agreement which enables the extension of the European Union's single market to member states of the European Free Trade Association. The EEA links the EU member states and three EFTA states (Iceland, Liechtenstein, and *Norway*) into an internal market governed by the same basic rules.
The EEA limits what we can do with our own customs tariff though.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/calculation-c...
Isn't that tariff still in place?
It seems like they're smarter with the enforcement, so tricks like that don't work anymore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
> The U.S. Customs Service changed vehicle classifications in 1989, automatically relegating two-door SUVs to light-truck status.[4] Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Suzuki (through a joint venture with GM), and Honda Motor Co. eventually built assembly plants in the U.S. and Canada in response to the tariff.[1]...
> Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ruled in 2013 that Transit Connects imported by Ford as passenger wagons and later converted into cargo vans should be subject to the 25% duty rate applicable to vans and not to the 2.5% rate applicable to passenger vehicles. Ford sued and finally, in 2020, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case which confirmed the position of CBP.[22]
They would import from Europe with seats, but remove the seats at the port and ship them right back.
Chrysler specifically designed the PT Cruiser to fit the NHTSA criteria for a light truck in order to bring the average fuel efficiency of the company’s light truck fleet into compliance with CAFE standards.
For instance, dumping positions at loss before new years eve might help you with your tax bill since you have losses.
And of course, setting up a company in a country where you did buy a lot of spectrum and you have huge losses, effectively creating a tax credit ( https://www.reuters.com/article/telefonica-germany/update-2-... )
For instance, I could sell my losses in a growth fund only to buy a different growth fund (not the same index though) and I get to stay in the market.
Ideally you would do this on day 364 of losses to maximize the tax incentive.
If someone followed your advice exactly and sold on day 364 vs staying in they'd lose even more, as by the time the initial investment goes back up (after day 365) you'd be in long-term capital gains territory, which is a lower tax rate.
That's why I said it only works in the short term - eventually the gov't is gonna get it's money.
Most people wouldn’t care, but if you’re in a high tax bracket and you can sell one to buy another and keep your risk profile roughly the same, you’ll do it.
People prefer to pay long term gains and take short term losses. The benefits work in your favor and against the govt. The tax code reflects that, and has for a long time.
1. Harvesting your capital losses allows you to offset other gains which may be taxable at an earlier date. $1000 today is worth substantially more than $1000 in 10 years time. 'Tax deferred is tax avoided.'
2. You can offset up to $3000 of losses a year against regular income which is taxed at a higher rate.
For me at least while it seems worthwhile to switch index funds to harvest losses when the market falls substantially the upsides aren't enough to justify the lock in of using something like Betterment's automatic tax loss harvesting features of their platform by having you invest in many individual stocks managed by their roboadvisor rather than an index fund.
there are ETFs created for the sole purpose of circumventing this, by providing exposure to the same asset or market forces
the wash sale regulation has amendment aimed at preventing this by prohibiting trades of "substantially similar securities", but I don't think it passes muster or has any teeth. you report all the trades to the IRS its up to them to figure out if your UltraShares 3x Inverse Pez Dispenser ETF is substantially similar to the Direxion one
But it's not exactly the case you could pull this off with, say, Tesla, unless there's some ETF that's 99% TSLA (is there?)
Don't know, doubt it but its a business opportunity. It’s why there are so many ETFs, take your 20 basis points from investors and work on something else.
More likely to find an ETF that hasn't rebalanced and has a large holding of Tesla.
I have never seen an ETF of a single security. Got an example? It would be hard for me to fathom that one could be made and remain economically viable but who knows.
ETFs however, do currently provide some loopholes with wash sales. While selling/buying AAPL within 30 days is a wash sale... selling VOO and buying IVV (both which track the S&P 500) within 30 days is currently not considered a wash sale.
You see some explanations as to why that currently is (technically those two ETFs are from different asset managers... so they have some different risks, etc). But it looks like the rule just hasn't been amended and maybe the IRS doesn't see this as prevalent enough of a case to change the tax code.
The other problem is that we probably had time for a carbon tax when the idea was first advanced decades ago. It's not clear to me that we can afford a gradual approach now when we really need to be doing things like saying you just can't buy new coal burning equipment at any price, for example.
The problem is that we wasted 3+ decades on denialism and a lot of pollution comes from things with long service lives. A high-pollution SUV will be polluting in 2040, maybe 2050; a gas or oil heater might run into 2070. At this point we need more than gradual nudges — things like requiring special permits to buy new fossil fuel-burning equipment with heavy subsidies and 0% loans for installing electric alternatives.
I don't think there's any reasonable solution that will appease those people.
I think the problem with carbon taxes is that they are a good solution to a negative sum game, but I think it turns out the actual game is positive sum and that carbon taxes are not an implementable solution.
[1] the big constraint with electric cars is batteries. Plug-in hybrid cars use electricity for short trips (ie most miles travelled) and so lead to more efficient use of the available batteries than electric cars that mostly use <20% of the battery capacity in a day leaving the rest unused.
like what, wasting our effort banning flavor-of-the-day things like plastic straws or whatever?
Columbia will add an extra pocket below the waistline on a women's shirt so it gets classified as a utility/work garment and they can price it 10% cheaper. https://www.marketplace.org/2019/05/29/theres-a-reason-your-...
Converse will line the rim/bottom of a shoe with felt so it can be classified as a slipper. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-is-why-your-c...
Canon will choose to make an insufficiently sized heatsink on its DSLR so that in video mode it has to shut down after 20 minutes so it can be classified as a camera and not a video recorder. https://www.cined.com/canon-eos-r5-heatsink-mod-improves-rec...
The camera will record indefinitely in 4K line-skipping mode, so that's not actually the reason they didn't put the heatsink on.
That reason is either incompetence or market segmentation.
Yes
Or simply because most people don't record longer videos. Or because that heat has to go somewhere and a bigger heatsink might heat some areas (or the user).
Or the current heatsink is an existing part and it was "good enough"
It's almost 100% using unique parts, too.
That's false. They slide all over the place on tile and polished floors. They're terrible. I've abandoned them for Vans. Maybe they've improved in recent years but they lost me long time ago.
I can hardly think of anything more ridiculously overpriced than some canvas, rubber, and eyelets for $60. Then they have the gall to add extra crap that wrecks the shoe to pinch a few more pennies.
One has to wonder how much this innocent-looking levy contributed to the overall global warming situation, by never having the US automakers to be incentivized to manufacture more efficient commercial fleet, and, as such, inbreeding the culture of buying the overly big pick ups and SUVs with massive engines for private use, too.
https://www.marketplace.org/2019/05/29/theres-a-reason-your-...
Example from the article:
Certain women’s garments with “pockets below the waist” get lower duty rates than those without. Because of that, a number of the women’s shirts Columbia Sportswear makes are intentionally designed with tiny pockets near the waistline, which lowers the cost of importing them. One of the company’s shorthands for “pockets below the waist” is “nurse’s pocket.”
https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/07/sony_adds_basic_to_pl...
"In 2006, the European Union created a law that added an import duty of 5-12% to any video camera. What determined whether a camera was a video camera? In short, the ability to record longer than 30 minutes. Thus, companies like Canon and Nikon decided to cap their video clip lengths, preventing their enthusiast and prosumer cameras from being considered video cameras."
https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-1985-18847 (Google translation below)
From here: https://www.zonadepruebas.com/viewtopic.php?t=1830
It's funny that they explicitly set the number of RAM KB for machines. I wonder what was the logic?
---
BY ROYAL DECREE 1215/1985, OF JULY 17, A MODIFICATION HAS BEEN INTRODUCED IN THE TARIFF DUTY ASSIGNED TO SUBHEADING 84.53.B.II OF THE CUSTOMS TARIFF, CONSISTING OF SETTING A SPECIFIC MINIMUM DUTY OF 15,000 PESETAS PER UNIT.
THE BROAD CONTENT OF THE REFERENCE SUBHEADING, IN WHICH DIFFERENT ELECTRONIC COMPUTER PRODUCTS ARE CLASSIFIED AND TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THAT THE MENTIONED SPECIFIC MINIMUM SHOULD ONLY AFFECT A CERTAIN TYPE OF AUTOMATIC MACHINES FOR THE PROCESSING OF INFORMATION, KNOWN SECTORALLY UNDER THE THE NAME OF "MICROCOMPUTERS", MAKES IT ADVISABLE TO COMPLEMENT THE CITED MODIFICATION WITH THE TIMELY CLARIFICATION LIMITING ITS SCOPE.
BY VIRTUE OF IT, AND IN USE OF THE POWER RECOGNIZED TO THE GOVERNMENT BY ARTICLE 6 SECTION 4 OF THE CURRENT TARIFF LAW, AT THE PROPOSAL OF THE MINISTER OF ECONOMY AND FINANCE, AND PRIOR APPROVAL BY THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF AUGUST 28, 1985, I HAVE :
ARTICLE 1. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE APPLICATION OF THE SPECIFIC MINIMUM RIGHT OF 15,000 PESETAS PER UNIT INTRODUCED IN SUBHEADING 84.53.B.II OF THE CUSTOMS TARIFF BY ROYAL DECREE 1215/1985, OF JULY 17, IT SHALL BE UNDERSTOOD BY TAXABLE UNIT AFFECTED BY THE CITED RIGHT THOSE AUTOMATIC MACHINES FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION THAT CONSIST OF INTEGRATED OPERATIONAL UNITS, WHICH COMPRISE IN A SINGLE ENVELOPE AT LEAST ONE CENTRAL UNIT AND ONE INPUT UNIT, WHETHER OR NOT PROVIDED WITH AN OUTPUT UNIT, AND WHICH HAVE RAM MEMORY WITH CAPACITY NOT EXCEEDING 64 KB.
ART. 2. WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO ITS EFFECTIVENESS FROM JULY 25, DATE OF PUBLICATION OF ROYAL DECREE 1215/1985, THIS ROYAL DECREE WILL ENTER INTO FORCE THE SAME DAY OF ITS PUBLICATION IN THE "OFFICIAL STATE GAZETTE".
GIVEN IN PALMA DE MALLORCA ON AUGUST 28, 1985.-JUAN CARLOS R.-THE MINISTER OF ECONOMY AND TREASURY, CARLOS SOLCHAGA CATALAN.
At least it creates a few local jobs.
As far as I can remember, the CPC472 was sold for the same price as the CPC464. It was never marketed as an actual improvement over the 464 and competition in the market was hard enough to be able to justify a higher price without a clear justification.
Then again my memory is not that good now so anyone feel free to correct me.
If a nonsensical action helps one remain in compliance with the rule, it is the rule (not the action) that is nonsensical.
Amazing how many examples exist.