This is not just banks but (nearly) all companies who deal with payment data will not delete anything related to payment for many many years. In India this use to be 10 years. USA I think it is 5 years.
454 karma · joined April 24, 2021
I am pretty sure a lot of digging holes and filling them back up kind of work just for the sake compliance. I hope the bill does not pass or even if it passes future admins roll it back.
Check this report by John Stossel here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubIvbtzVoZM
I am not an anti-vaxxer but I think we should not silence those who question vaccines, their studies and their effectiveness. By banning vaccine criticism in public domain we essentially ensure that only FDA is responsible for calling a vaccine fake, once they approve we all have to fall in line and not be skeptical about them. This gives too much power to FDA (hence a higher possibility of corruption) and a free pass to pharma companies who might push more and more ineffective vaccines with the help of their friends in FDA and CDC.
Google is pretty good at content recommendation and I am sure if they want they can solve this problem much better by identifying diversity in the vaccine criticism and accordingly give it exposure.
> In terms of overall welfare
What is overall welfare ? If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is).
I do not think anyone is opposed to that idea. It is covered under our freedom to form association. But in many cases unions are exact opposite of this. There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf. In such cases workers are less free than before and it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders. (This is what happens in every single society where unions have collective bargaining rights.)
There is no argument that employees should have the right to form an association. The problems arise when such associations get "special privileges" that an average worker does not. Both L and R talk a lot about "equality of law" but happily shred that principle when it comes to their own voter groups.
Nearly all the evil (as you describe it) caused by unions is eventually due to the collective bargaining rights and other privileges.
In the words of Milton Friedman, unions do not protect workers. The competition protects workers. Market competition is the biggest rival to unions and hence unions will go to extreme lengths to prevent this sort of competition to keep themselves relevant. This does immense harm to workers as well as society in the long term. Folks like me who have seen extreme violence unleashed by workers unions end up despising very notion of unions for the same reason.
We can all agree that climate change increased fuel aridity in forests (which is what lots of research indicates) and yet agree with Stossel's point that bad forest management lead to those forests burning down. And this need not even be a politically charged issue as anyone who cares deeply about climate should also be upset with forests burning down.
> For years, they and environmentalists increased the risk of big fires by opposing the thinning of forests. > The town of Berry Creek, California, tried to get permits to legally clear their forest. For two years, regulators delayed approval. This year, fire destroyed the town.
Who is responsible here for the forest fire ? While many academicians will talk about "climate change", the local people will be right to see the regulatory hurdles as the biggest reason.
We can all acknowledge the fact that climate change is real, california's temperatures warmed by 3 degrees in last 50 years, that this increases probability and scope of fire AND still agree with Stossel's point that bad forest management, California's failure to create sensible policies that would have helped us manage these forests better are key contributor to the damage these fires have done in California.
We don't really need a law for this nor anyone needs to implement a button. Visa, Mastercard etc. can simply run a service where all the transactions that are marked as "recurring" will have an associated button "Revoke payment authorization" in their app. Once you revoke it all future recurring payments for that authorization will fail. It should be the responsibility of merchant to ensure they have authorization before providing service.
This can be sold as "Peace of Mind"^(TM) service and merchants who opt into this can can proudly show it off. Those merchants who do not have this, might have to show a warning to their customers that it is not a "Peace of Mind"^(TM) merchant.
Further I am pretty sure Mastercard, Visa can easily see which merchants are problematic. I am sure SiriusXM, La Fitness etc. will be on the top of their list and they can create a threshold beyond which those problematic merchants will have to pay a higher transaction fee in order to continue or opt into "Peace of Mind"^(TM) program.
The real issue here is the the regulation. All Fintech companies are super scared to try anything new as the various federal agencies will make an example out of anyone who builds something that disrupts the market. Entire history of financial regulation in this country is about protecting the interests of the existing players only and all the existing players are mostly indistinguishable from each other. Rarely someone like Robinhood tries to disrupt and you can see how much shit the media partners throw on RH. While many of these media partners tell you how dangerous RH is nearly no one explains why Fidelity, MorganStanley etc. have such shitty and outdated sites and UX.
However one of the despotic Indian PM forcibly took over all private banks and "nationalized" it and later the same party used these banks as a jobs program to employ thousands of party workers and others to win votes.
A lot of these youngsters were bored of this manual work and insisted on computerization and the workers unions could not maintain the opposition. (In Indian government owned businesses people never lose their jobs. Which means even if a machine replaces your work, you will still get paid just to show up at work. While it makes sense to oppose digitization when you are unemployed, it makes sense to support it once you are employed. A bit of catch 22. This is not true for private companies as they can not keep people on payroll they don't need.)
Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.
It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.
One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.
NFTs on other hand appears to be equivalent of selling Golden gate bridge to tourists.
Which is not same as taxing the unrealized gain. Property tax is a wealth tax and not any kind of income (or gain) tax.
So what? The loan has to be paid back one way or another. Any time person sells his can of soda to pay that loan they pay taxes on those realized gains. If they used the loan money to create new business created new profits and paid the loan without selling the can of soda that even bigger win win as they created new wealth that made everyone more rich, paid more taxes, paid the loans as well. Not to mention when the can of soda is sold in future government can stil earn more tax revenue.
It almost makes me thing people hate others for being wealth and somehow want to see them getting hurt rather than promiting a sensible low tax policy. Isn't the world better off because Bezos or Musk can borrow against their equity and create new companies rather than handing that money over to federal government ? What possible good can come out of giving more money to federal government ?
Are you mistaking property taxes for something else ? Property taxes are imposed on property value and have nothing to do with the gain or loss in the value of the property.
But if you want to apply the same parallel to stocks then I think we should call it 'wealth tax' rather than anything to do with income and do not tax the gains (realized or otherwise) but the total value. So if you buy a stock worth $100 and it is $50 next day you still pay $0.5 as taxes even though you might have lost money. I do not think that is a good idea but that would be somewhat consistent with property taxes.
It eventually boils down to what is the principle underlying that taxation. If the principle is "I need your money and I am going to take it any ways because I am the government" then any logic goes and I feel that is where the current atmosphere is.
The question we should be asking is why should we pay anything to the government. Us government by some estimates spends $24B every single day. This is just spending what took many folks years and lifetimes to earn. What value will the citizens get for every additional dollar that government gets ? My bet is we will get increased regulation, mafia styled politicians and overall misery.
On other hand every extra dollar you leave in the hands of likes of Bezos or Musk will go into fueling more innovation, industry and job. I think it is a terrible idea to tax the very fuel that increases the size of your economy.