bzbarsky

I think there's an interesting argument to be had here about the point at which "self-determination" becomes "colonialism". A group that is sufficiently geographically diffuse does not have a right to self-determination (ipso facto, because it's not the majority anywhere). Your position seems to be that an attempt by such a group to concentrate geographically somewhere in order to exercise the right to self-determination is fundamentally illegitimate because any such attempt is "colonialism".

Is that an accurate representation of your views? If not, what is?

> It has nothing to do with anti-semitism.

Anti-semitism has nothing to do with the movement to create a homeland for the Jewish people (which then tried to garner the support of various governments, which is where the Balfour Declaration comes in)? It has everything to do with it.

Were there various colonialism-related issues involved too, of course. But pretending like that's the entire story is quite disingenuous.

Anti-semitism, including of the extremely violent variety, did not start with WWII. The Balfour Declaration was a response to Jews wanting to get the hell out of a Europe that hated them and liked to go kill them every so often.

How many developers do you think a browser engine needs? How much do they cost?

But also, the answer to your question is at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201... and https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019-fo... (the 2020 numbers are not up yet because the audit starts when the tax return is filed and lasts for several months, so isn't completed yet).

Just for comparison, last I checked Chrome's marketing budget was estimated to be in the ballpark of Mozilla's total budget.

Disclaimer: used to work for Mozilla.

That is a good question. I don't know offhand; it had not come up in the cases I was dealing with.

In the US tax handling of employee discounts at least on physical goods is as follows: if the discount brings the price paid below cost, then the below-cost subsidy is treated as income received by the employee.

Concrete example: Company sells widgets for $12, of which $2 is profit. Then as long as the employee price is at least $10 there are no tax implications for the employees. If it were $9 they would owe tax on $1 per widget bought, etc.

That said, some companies will pay the relevant taxes for you, or at least try to by guessing at your marginal rate...

"Tent site" usually means "place for a single tent". If grandparent has the usual usage, it's $60k/tenant, unless people are sharing tents.

Thank you; I had missed that. As the sibling comment from shkkmo points out, not all prosecuted cases that result in a "not guilty" involve acquittal at trial. But I will grant that it's hard to talk about numbers here without very carefully defining what exactly we will be counting...

The post said "all the experts are saying may actually be true". The "may" (not "is"!) there is pretty key in making the meaning a lot closer to your (B) than anything like your (A)... Did that comment get edited after yours? Because it seems like you are arguing against a strawman, not what was actually said.

I would love a citation on where you are getting "above 99%" for the US.

What I managed to find easily just now in https://www.justice.gov/usao/reading_room/reports/asr2012/12... page 9 has: "Of the 87,709 defendants terminated during Fiscal Year 2012, 80,963, or 93 percent, either pled guilty or were found guilty."

So quite high, but not anything like over 99%.

This is federal cases, though, so maybe state cases have higher enough volume and conviction rates to make the overall number over 99%? Again, I would love to see hard data.

_Is_ that case egregious by American standards?

The 3 years might be (though I'm not convinced for some jurisdictions), but the overall shape of the case is, I think, depressingly common in the US...

Martha Stewart went to prison for lying to federal investigators and obstruction of justice, not for insider trading. The "insider trading" (not actually a crime; the actual criminal thing in such cases tends to be "securities fraud") charges were variously dropped or dismissed by the court, depending on the charge.

So she was actually innocent (in the legal system sense, at least) of the crime she was initially accused of, but guilty of obstructing the investigation.

Similar to the Ghosn story, actually: he's guilty of jumping bail and whatnot no matter what's going on with the substantive issue of embezzlement.

The bar for creating a wicg draft is _very_ low. Things in that space are not "specs" that are "approved" in any way.

> The poor person is likely to starve to death.

This is actually _extremely_ unlikely in the US or Western Europe. Social safety nets do in fact exist, and while they have all sorts of problems they do generally prevent starvation to death. Now eating things that get you to ill health, that is much more believable.

I suggest talking to some people who actually lived through the pre-perestroika era in the USSR.

Yes, there was generally clothing in stores. Whether there was clothing in your size (no matter what size you were; pretty much all normal sizes tended to be hard to find in practice) was a big gamble on any given day.

When you say "apartments were small"; I just want to make sure we understand that we're talking about things like a family of 4 living in a 16 sq meter room plus shared access to a small kitchen (this is personal experience here).

And note that if we're talking about smaller towns or villages the situation was different yet again: more living space, but running water might be a real problem. Heck, consistent hot water was a problem even in reasonably large cities.

The 80s brought their own set of problems, but it was not all rosy before that, by a long stretch. Saying "it was all there" elides the fact that what was there was quite poor quality, especially compared to what was available even just across the border in Romania, much less Western Europe or the US.

For a start, salary and cost to employer are not the same thing.

A $100k salary in the US also means the employer is paying $7650 in payroll taxes, typically some amount of money for health insurance ($0-$30k depending on the employer), maybe paying for office space, etc, etc.

A €40k salary in France means the employer is paying (if I read https://www.activpayroll.com/global-insights/france at "Social Security in France" correctly) somewhere around €21k in payroll taxes, plus whatever other benefits/administrative/etc expenses they have. I assumed the "family allowance contribution" of 3-5% is paid by employee, not employer, but I'm not sure.

That's assuming that €40k is the gross wage and not the "wage after employee side of payroll taxes". I don't know what the French custom is here in terms of what the salary numbers mean.

Anyway, the employer cost of just that €40k salary plus the obvious payroll taxes is $73k or so (with the payroll taxes and current exchange rate). Obviously still smaller than the $108k for US salary plus payroll, but not as much smaller as it seems at first glance.

Also note that in the US it's normal to work longer hours for more weeks for that money than it is in France for the French salary, though the effect is actually not too great if the US job is mostly 40 hrs/week, 2-3 weeks vacation, etc.

For Wolfram Alpha, I just tried the integral from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_integration#Example_2_... and it times out. The by-hand solution is pretty straightforward, if you know contour integration.

If a least one browser had used a different backend, the API behavior would have had to actually be defined instead of just saying "behaves like SQLite". And that defined behavior would have to be implementable on top of both SQLite an the other backend.

All doable, but quite a lot of work. Once you start looking at the details, every single database has its own SQL dialect and they're not all that compatible except for the simplest queries.

It's not clear to me that an ocean-going fishing boat would be cheaper than college tuition. Is it? Would love to see some data. https://horizonship.com/ship-category/commercial-fishing-ves... has prices a good bit about even 4-year tuition for all the things that list actual prices.

It seems to me that you're speaking a bit past heipei's question, which is about the actual consequences, as opposed to the intended ones, of policies.

If you have a 90-100% estate tax, then the intended consequence might be "redistribute the money via the government" but the actual consequence is much more likely to be "most of the money is spent on luxury consumption, because why not?".

At lower levels of estate taxation intended and actual consequences might align better, of course. This is pretty specifically a question about calls for near-100% estate taxation, not a question about why there's an estate tax in general.

The US used to have a lot more "luxury taxes" on things like yachts. They got repealed "because they were hurting jobs in the industry" (e.g. the yacht industry). Leading Democrats at the time led the repeal push...

What would be ideal, in some ways, is a progressive consumption tax, with the hard parts being defining consumption (e.g. is cancer research consumption?) and actually measuring it....

That is a thing you can do in the US. It is not a thing you have to do, by any means.

Not all shares can be sold. Especially at all times (blackout periods, etc.)

The problem with the oft-cited options example is that tax is levied on gain of an asset that in fact cannot be legally sold at the time the tax is levied and is often enough worthless (or worth a lot less than at tax time) by the time it _can_ be legally sold.

Asset-based taxation on liquid assets with deep markets and clear prices is indeed probably fine in various ways. But if you tax other sorts of assets there are various problems, and if you only tax the easily-taxable ones people will turn to the other ones to avoid taxation...

> Why not pay your income tax when you know - you get your income

Yeah, I have no idea why gambiting is not doing that.

The rules in the US is that your estimated tax payments have to cover the smaller of 90% of your current-year ongoing (quarterly) tax liability or 90% (sometimes 110% for high incomes, an there are other special rules for farmers/fishermen) of the previous-year tax liability.

So yes, you can make them based on last year's income as as safe harbor if you have no clue what's going on with your income this year for some reason. Or you can just make them based on this year's income as you go.

At least for the US, any spy or saboteur who wants to enter can do so on a student visa, I am sure. Just have to pony up for tuition at any of a number of schools who are desperately looking for students who will pay.

What's the effective tax burden on a self-employed single person making $300k in, say, Massachusetts (5% income tax; not exactly the highest in the US)?

Based on 2020 US tax brackets, standard deduction, including the both sides of FICA (capped at the social security cap for the social security part) and the medicare extra tax they are paying, I am ending up at ~37-38% effective (not marginal; marginal is 43.8%) tax or so. This individual would in my mind be excused for claiming that they pay "40% in income taxes" and is not making "millions" (though obviously is not suffering financially).

At 1km/s^2 after one second you would be 0.5 km away. (Average speed over that second is half the final speed, or just memorize s = 0.5at^2, whichever is preferred.)

If you want to run a specific wpt, you just load the URL. See https://wpt.live/ (which is linked to from the wpt.fyi bits).

But yes, if you want to run the full test suite and get overall results there's more work to do.

There are many people (both in the US and in the world in general) who could quite honestly say the same thing about the homeless in San Francisco... This does not make their situation particularly wonderful, in either case.

> One (or a couple of) cities don't represent the whole country, naturally.

Very true. Neither does San Francisco, of course.

> But are these in the same quantity/concentration and causing as much trouble and being as aggressive as the ones in SF?

Absolutely not. My point was that San Francisco's problem is not obviously that it's in a "third-world country".