lowkey_

Three notes after reading, the first one being glaringly disingenuous and weird:

> The Tax Justice Network’s review – co-published with Patriotic Millionaires UK and Tax Justice UK – of the Henley report finds that the number of millionaires claimed by Henley & Partners to be leaving countries in “exodus” in 2024 represented near-0% of those countries’ millionaire populations. For example, the 9500 millionaires widely reported to be leaving the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK’s 3.06 million millionaires.

#1: The data is completely arbitrary, incorrectly compared, and adds no new insights.

The tax changes, AFAIK, are specifically aimed at generating more tax revenue from the foreign millionaires who have been using the UK's non-dom tax advantages, by getting rid of that status.

The counter rhetoric was "if even a fraction of those millionaires leave, the UK will actually lose tax revenue instead."

This article does not report on any actual adjusted numbers to the 9500 millionaires reported leaving, it just says "guys we have a lot more millionaires" — vast majority of whom are not foreign / dom-status, and therefore will not be affected anyways. No new tax revenue from them by eliminating non-dom status. It's apples-to-oranges.

Basically, they're not even using the correct denominator (foreign millionaires).

#2: This was written by an organization seeking to end tax havens, which doesn't really acknowledge that, while calling out the bias of the original report by the organization that helps secure golden visas.

#3: "credited for the UK Labour government’s decision to weaken tax reforms" — it sounds like the original government decision wasn't even passed, though I'm not sure about this, it would mean that you can't say "X didn't cause Y as was predicted" when X didn't actually occur in full.

The US economy is about 1.5 times larger than the entire EU.

The US is over 2 times larger by land.

Population is about a quarter smaller. Still, Massachusetts has more people than Denmark, New York has the same as Romania, California has more people than Poland.

Our original founding documents cite "these united states", interestingly and very tellingly "these", not "the." States are their own entities, and you'd find many to have very different cultures and laws — probably the same level of variance you'd find in the EU.

In the US, for most laws, and most judges, there's actually much less power to interpret law. Part of the benefit of the common law system is to provide consistency and take that interpretation power away from judges of each case.

I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.

If my older family member was scammed by something online, and someone said "lack of knowledge is no excuse," I think they'd really be missing the mark. Or if they shouldn't reproduce because they aren't good with technology.

It's a very HN take but it's one that lacks a lot of humanity.

Not the parent commenter, but they just said that most parents don't have the technical aptitude to do so.

Implying that they don't care about their kids, or shouldn't have kids as a result, is a pretty awful thing to say.

Sorry you're experiencing a bunch of downvotes over a counterpoint from your own experience.

Even though I could predict what side HN would stand on any sort of internet freedom post, reading through all the reasonable yet greyed-out comments in this thread feels like HN's last dying breath as a place for genuine debate.

Not the above commenter, but:

> stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes. Through invasions, plagues, violence, coercion, bribery, war, and lopsided deals with the United States government, Indigenous groups and their ways of life were nearly obliterated

This clearly implies that invasions, violence, war, were brought by the US government to indigenous groups.

In reality, their "way of life" always consisted of these things.

It's a clear myth being perpetuated in the language of this article — even in words like 'stewarded' vs. 'stolen'.

If you're ambitious and individualistic (as those who create the most economic value are), there's no alternative to the United States still.

If you're from a wealthy place like Europe or Canada: The United States is still far richer, bigger market, and more risk-encouraging than your homeland. Not everybody will want to move from those places, but I've seen first-hand how many ambitious people will. The ambitious culture and opportunity can't be overstated, and the ability to create a better life in a far more efficient country that rewards your efforts.

If you're from a poor place like Latin America: Almost anywhere in the United States is still better quality-of-life, better pay, etc., plenty of reasons to move.

From my sample size, the only people discouraged by this are political agitators who take up valuable spots at our universities, and contribute ~nothing to our economy anyways. Almost every immigrant I know supports these actions.

Everything you just said but imagine revenue is $500K, and you spent $500K on salaries for the team.

You can only expense $100K of the salary costs this year, so even though you're break-even, you pay taxes on $400K in income.

Or, even worse, imagine revenue is $250K, and you spent $500K on salaries for the team.

You can only expense $100K of the salary costs this year, you're already -$250K on the year, and now you're paying taxes on $400K in income. You're destroyed.

VC-backed startups aren't designed to get profitable quickly, and I don't see that as a problem for the American taxpayer, and nobody is saying the taxpayer is giving money or helping. A business losing money should not have to pay taxes on income, as if it's not losing money.

Fair, but worth noting the founders almost certainly already have gotten fat secondaries, and now have a chance to build something much larger if they can execute.

I would define Seattle as much more friendly than it is safe — same of other similar cities like San Francisco and Portland.

Also, found an interesting source from the federal government during the Biden administration:

https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-government-made-236-billion...

Does the tens of millions in "executive coaching" and "strategic communication" contracts really not look like fraud to you, or do you not believe that they're there because it's DOGE reporting it?

I think they're moving as fast as possible right now, and it takes a while to investigate & report.

We like to use the principle of charitable interpretation on here, and to be charitable, I think it's really clear he was saying that everybody should expect to be wrong sometimes, has been wrong, and should be scrutinized thoroughly.

To label someone as an unreliable actor is different than using our own free will and minds to analyze actions and determine truth.

ThePinkNews doesn't seem like a fantastic source but I gave it a sincere effort and read through, and yes, it seems tenuously true.

None of this is okay to me, as an American, while my own citizens die in the street, homeless, of drug overdoses.

This money needs to be spent on our own country or, at the least, intelligently on our national interests.

It's all over X, including from the official DOGE account.

Here's a couple:

On the morning of 2/3/25, 20 consulting contracts, mostly focused on "strategic communication" and "executive coaching," were terminated for immediate savings of $26mm.

On 2/10/25, the Department of Education terminated 89 contracts worth $881mm. One contractor was paid $1.5mm to "observe mailing and clerical operations at a mail center."

These things take months to years, and I don't believe we'll see fraud cases when it's been less than a month since the DOGE operation has started. If it's not fraud, it's grossly negligent with taxpayer money (which is not a crime), but I would bet at least a few of those sketchy contracts were with friends and former colleagues of the government bureaucrats in question.

It will take years to understand the amount of corruption & waste in the federal government. We can agree that these numbers found each day are 'insignificant', but it adds up, and I think we need a hard reset on the size & scope of government. That's what was voted in by the people.

Can you share details on that?

USAID, as far as I can tell, is stoking anti-US sentiment in many places by importing their own cultural values, and that's a known thing State Department officials have commented on.

Additionally, to be specific on even worse activity:

A few months ago, $9M of USAID went to an organization affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The Middle East Forum recently found $164M in USAID grants to radical organizations.

Apart from that, we've since found lots of evidence of USAID funding Hamas specifically. $900K was given days before the October 7th attack.

There's even pictures of Al Shabaab terrorists inside a USAID tent.

I already addressed the distinction and that I think there's both fraud and things we don't like.

On USAID being independent from State:

I personally would like our taxpayer-funded dollars, even if some insist on sending them overseas, to at least serve our national interest.

I know we set up USAID to counteract Communist aid from the USSR, but what do you think is the ongoing rationale for its independence from State? State is stuck fielding lots of questions from angry nations over USAID activity.

No, I think you're misunderstanding.

It looks like in a week, they uncovered over $100M, maybe $200M in fraud (I'm not keeping close track), if you count million-dollar "executive coaching" contracts as fraud (I do). It's most likely telling their friend outside the government "hey, I got some extra budget — you be my 'executive coach,' and we'll split the proceeds."

They've found billions in things that we should not be spending our money on while our own people die of drug overdoses, homeless in the street. Things "we don't like" as you say.

First, this looks great and congrats on the launch!

Is it possible to use Figma designs with this?

It's really hard to get something great through just a chat interface, and I've seen a lot of these AI tools don't allow me to actually give it more to work with like Figma designs.

> There are more extant languages in many Eastern cultures

My family comes from Eastern Europe and I've traveled it (and Asia) extensively, and while I agree skin color isn't the hallmark of diversity some call it, I think the East's cultures are really similar, and the diversity of thought within those cultures much smaller.

All the division and hatred we're seeing is, a negative manifestation of, but an indication of how diverse the West is.

> An appeal to his authority might not be your strongest argument.

His article literally mentions how it should be about the content of our words, rather than appeal to authority.

I just thought it funny and relevant that this is happening on the website he created, but maybe better to cite it without mentioning who he is. Wasn't meant as an appeal to authority but fair it could be interpreted that way.

FWIW, I disagree with Graham on a lot recently politically, but I still think the heresy comparison is extremely on-point.

Love your takes on HN btw.

The West is clearly a culture, not a race. It's also the most diverse culture there is.

Considering we're on HN, it's probably worth reading HN's founder's take on "x-isms" as a substitute for truth or honest debate: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html

I've always agreed with this take but now as a B2B founder doing sales, I think it can honestly be interpreted a lot more charitably.

I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:

* How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?

* How expensive is this problem for you today?

* From there, how much money could we save you?

My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.

Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.

The past couple years, I've consistently used robotaxis whenever in SF. Definitely not a pipe dream.

I wasn’t thinking about that at all and don’t think it would -

I was mentioning how things have moved to the cloud these days, and what the implications are for innocent unrelated parties’ data, given that the cloud involves this overlap of data on one device.

You'd likely be seizing a bunch of other innocent people's data too, then, no?

As an American, I'd be really surprised if we let that happen. I looked and found it apparently happened once, in 2009 in Texas: https://www.cio.com/article/278564/data-center-when-the-fbi-...

It resulted in another company essentially being shut down, and suing for their data back. Crazy. There has to be a better way of doing that digitally (I assume there is, these days, and we won't see something like this again).

I'd never heard of Pixelmator before (congrats to them on the exit), and:

WOW their website already looks like an Apple website. The colors, the font, the logo with the same colors as Apple Photos, all the images that show a Mac window, the shade of red in the top right, the "machine learning" section that almost looks like Notes, and I scrolled down and it's all about how great Mac is.

It seemed inevitable that Apple would either acquire or copy them, with how much this already looks like an Apple product, and is exclusively made for Mac apparently.

I don’t think speculating on how you think Israel would react is helpful or productive.

Of course Israel would “cry and whine.” I agree with you.

Obviously, Palestine also “cries and whines” — they have a narrative when their military operations are hit, too, and it’s not “fair play.”

War is an ugly, awful thing. I wouldn’t expect anybody involved to treat it so rationally. Hopefully we can view things more objectively and fairly given our distance.

It's a fair target to hit then — on both sides, military operations are fair to hit. It just hasn't happened to the Mossad HQ, despite attempts.