To my knowledge, Bermuda Post is not a real journalistic organization in Bermuda (the major paper is the Royal Gazette). Instead, checking their about page reveals:
'BermudaPost is a non-profit, private and self-funded, commonly-created News and info-sharing platform that enables everybody to share valuable content such as local and global news updates.'
Besides two suspiciously barebones property listings, there are no references to Bermuda.
It'd be a really cool if there was a browser plugin that showed you the provenance of any news you read. Like first appeared here, then here then here....
I've noticed that HN has a bizarre preference for really strange news outlets and blogs over more credible and reputable outlets. Like..there will be some major news even in tech or science and HN is like "link to a major site? Naaaaah, Joenews.com!"
Major news outlets carry a small ranking penalty on HN (it's in the software), since loads of uninteresting articles from major news outlets are constantly submitted.
The URL can always be changed if there's a better source. Just email them.
This is an internet culture problem in general. People have decided they can't trust the "mainstream media", possibly for valid reasons, and then fall face-first into trusting all sorts of completely random sites. Your other comment is very correct.
I think it's mostly because editorializing titles is not allowed. So to emphasize the part you deem most important in a story, you have to find an article that uses it as the title.
I've also wondered this - but I assumed it was more because most people post on HN after seeing it elsewhere. As the more 'strange' outlets (often) favour clickbait titles they get more shares/go viral more often (because people love to share without reading the full article). So I figure there's a greater chance someone will see the stranger version on social media over the (perhaps) stuffier/dryer version with the decent reporting from a more credible and less clickbaity outlet.
As an aside, HN is usually pretty good about switching the link for something better when prompted.
I wonder whether it is more a timing issue. Mainstream sites are submitted first, but overlooked. Subsequent submissions have to use other sites and those are the ones which finally gain traction.
I think DDG's site scoring is based on how many invasive trackers and advertising it has and not if a site's information is reputable. Though someone please correct me if I'm wrong?
Be interesting if they started to also add reputable content info to their site ranking .... like utilize one of those non-profit fact checking sites and score them based on how many of their articles over a period (3 to 6 months) or long periods of time (a year) was not factual .. truth bent ... etc.
If it was done well and became popular it might cut down on clickbait and the tons of trash that is pushed out as truth but isn't.
It's good to see what the other team is doing sometimes. I've seen stuff on DR that other places didn't host but was still interesting. It's not in the same OMGWTF category as newsmax or OAN despite what some HN people will tell you.
Lately I've seen HN people linking to sites like Newswars (which is infowars rebranded, it seems) and whatnot.
> It's not in the same OMGWTF category as newsmax or OAN despite what some HN people will tell you.
Drudge has a history chock full of conspiracy theories, retractions and dirty-deletes. All of which center around attacking liberal politicians or causes to "own" or "gotcha" them.
Seriously, read the list that includes Obama birther conspiracies, Las Vegas shooting conspiracies, "immigrants setting wildfires" conspiracies (from Breitbart), and perpetuating hoaxes like "black man attacked McCain campaign staffer!": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report
These people use economies of scale AND also have a legal and physical protection against other people stealing their riches.
In the old days, the rich would have to hire their own small defense/army just to protect their riches from being stolen. And we're not even talking about the public road/education/health/communications system that allows their products to be made and delivered to customers that pay the money that becomes their profits.
From the above you can see that the these people want to "ride free" off the backs of people that pay their share back into the system.
Not sure I agree with the notion of this being treason, but it’s a pretty serious crime, considering that most wage-based workers (W-2, 1099 in the US) are absolutely lambasted with taxes (especially in certain states), and there is pretty much no way around it aside from hiring an accountant to come up with legal ways to help you reduce your tax liability. But for the most part, you’ll still have to pay a pretty ridiculous rate, especially as you earn higher levels of income (when things like AMT kick in). It burns me that I, a wage-based employee, am bearing a completely unfair proportion of the burden of the infrastructure costs of my country. My effective tax rate can be around 40%, yet the “rich” (whatever that actually means) can, in many cases, avoid taxes altogether by hiding assets and obfuscating their true net worth. So yeah, maybe it should be treason.
You can avoid this by having your lawyer do the contacting as well as fund transfers from their IOLTA.
For you as an individual you have to realize that the state doesn't know who your lawyers are. They might know you have A lawyer, they don't know all the lawyers you have. Piercing a lawyer's records is more expensive for the government to both rationalize and do and use as evidence, and just adds another layer for them to just stick with focusing on the lower hanging fruit.
This is more about avoiding scrutiny just because some other business got subpoena'd, actually report/pay your taxes though. There are other ways to shield assets and compliantly reduce taxes domestically.
Why is Switzerland so high on the list? We might have low taxes for companys, but since many years now, other countrys get all information about the customers. So if an us person open an account, they send all information about it to the us. I think this is at least since 15 .. 20 years now.
The score is a combination of the amount of wealth stored and the degree to which wealth is able to be hidden in that jurisdiction. Notice that the US is number 2 on the list. It may be a heavily scrutinized jurisdiction and thus not a great tax haven in the traditional sense, but there are still huge amounts of capital moved there. They can still be useful, especially to move funds away from your country of residence's jurisdiction.
It's all a matter of reading comprehension. People can have a passing knowledge of "something about Delaware" for the next 100 years and never consider that there are 55+ other jurisdictions under the US brand which aim to be competitive too.
All states, the district, the territories, and even reservations have incorporation laws. The reservations are very numerous and many have not even considered the possibility, just show up and ask them to pass your model incorporation law. This is the kind of opportunity that the US still has. (There are many jurisdictions that have passed good laws, but have incompetent and ill equipped executive branches. If nobody has ever shown up to form their super awesome business type, the public servants in the state might not actually know how to do it. Whereas places with validation like Wyoming and Delaware, can have turn around times of 24 hours for things they do often.)
The other way that the US is somewhat unique, in comparison to other countries, is that there is no way to incorporate a business at the national level. Only Congress can create corporations, one at a time, one law at a time, and Congress has never addressed or delegated this to change this reality. The national government derives its power from the states and has never bothered them over this. (They did recently pass some registry of business owners law though, but it's more of a feel good thing for activists than anything practical.)
The beauty of this is that the US has an easier time pointing its bullying efforts outwards, whereas all US jurisdictions escape scrutiny by the US or OECD or other multinational bodies that put "tax havens" on blacklists.
States compete for business, so this makes more and more favorable business incorporation laws pretty easy to get.
The last thing I'll say is that there are other countries similar to the structure of the US, where there are many obscure states you can actually create business entities in. Some countries have incorporation at the national and the state level, just because the separate jurisdictions passed the laws. Some countries you might not even notice are federations of smaller states. So again, its all about reading comprehension. The usefulness of this knowledge is that some countries brands might attract scrutiny now (ie. "Panama corporation"), while the state level version is completely benign to everyone because they just haven't seen the name and aren't allergic to it.
In BC we have numbered corporations, it's quite cheap to incorporate and very little info is made public.
To look up corporate records, you need to apply and get approval, pay $100 and some additional amount per record. Then it is an ancient batch CGI web app that gets you results some days later.
I've been meaning to build a corporate transparency site/non-profit. Some low price per record, but then the results are public on the site for anybody else that is interested.
US FATCA treaty to almost all countries in the world only applies to US citizens trying to open accounts in other countries. That is a one-to-many relationship.
The worldwide reality is a many-to-many relationship. Switzerland doesn't snitch on other country's citizens for two reasons:
1) Other countries don't have the resources to enforce a global tax regime. And if they tried, their diplomatic leverage was so weak that it was laughed at.
2) Other countries never even attempted to pass laws for a global tax regime, that is an almost uniquely American hubris, and even with the US's massive resources it also struggles to enforce this stretch of the jurisdiction concept.
> The worldwide reality is a many-to-many relationship. Switzerland doesn't snitch on other country's citizens for two reasons
That is wrong, see AEOI/CRS as mentioned above. Switzerland exchanges information with dozens of countries and has been doing so since 2017.
And strictly speaking, it's not about citizship, but tax residency. A Danish national living in France will have their Swiss bank account reported to France, not Denmark.
didn't know OECD had actually gotten anywhere beyond blacklists.
I've seen CRS in a variety of countries, many of those are still implemented in interesting ways, and also don't mean there is liability or tax liability for the ultimate owners.
Switzerland is a tax-heaven for the ultra wealthy. These individuals buy passports from countries with territorial or no tax at all. This way they can open bank accounts claiming to be tax residents in such countries, and avoid tax reporting to their true tax resident country. When the OECD designed the information exchange protocol they did learn about this phenomenon. It turns out that the implementation of CRS (common reporting standards) was actually different from country to country. The OECD negotiated each deal individually with all the different countries in the world. One of the very few features of AEOI (automatic exchange of information) in the CRS that Switzerland did not sign fully with the OECD, was the "enhanced" validation of the account holder citizenship. It was marked "optional" for Swiss banks to validate. [1]
Switzerland has been a tax haven for so many years now (they invented the business, we could argue), that they don't care about the small fish anymore. They are all about the UHNW (ultra high net worth) individuals and families.
Now, there is some interesting things to be noted for such individuals. Many centamillionaires and billionaires are tax residents in many countries. They own properties and businesses all across the world, which often needs you to have tax IDs in those countries, either as a natural person, as a corporation or both. It doesn't matter if the corporation, in such case, is a complicated and obfuscated entity because the bank reports the tax id of the significant owners, not regarding how many layers of corporate structures there are (except for exotic "non-incorporated" entities such as trusts, which also serve the purpose of reducing tax burdens or hiding away assets). Most tax systems across the world were designed for normal people who don't own stuff all around the world and are based upon the principle of worldwide taxation based on your "true" residence. Truth is many of these billionaires are not true only-residents of any country. They might be traveling around the world for many months each year, having multiple homes across the world. So, which should be their "true" tax resident country? Apart from the USA, which taxes Americans regardless of where they reside, most of the remaining countries of the world are pretty ambiguous about this dilemma and most importantly, they are unable to enforce taxation of the worldwide income, and in the end, in practice, people with multiple citizenships and permanent residencies just choose whichever is more convenient when making their invoices or opening their bank accounts. That's why Switzerland may score so high on the list. Almost all UHNW individuals have bank accounts in Switzerland because they open them with their most convenient passports and/or permanent residence cards, and they prefer to bank in Switzerland because they have better perks, better mobile apps, better account managers, they can get an AMEX black card guaranteed by their private banking account balance, and much more.
We all assume they're avoiding taxes but the funny thing about this is that you can treat this stuff like Roth IRAs, just pay your taxes one year and then just use the post-tax money to create entities offshore and hold assets indefinitely.
The IRS doesn't care what you do with post-tax money! There is no prohibition on doing stuff outside the country, there are no capital controls for US citizens.
The main difference is the secrecy and lack of scrutiny. Even if you have judgement proof trusts and retirement plans like Roth IRAs, people still get to know about them. And they have withdrawal restrictions.
So there is utility in disappearing some of the money that you already paid taxes on into a better jurisdiction for that purpose. The key point is already paid taxes on.
Example of utility being when you get charged with something and you get your assets frozen so you can't even pay a lawyer making it difficult to afford your rights as a US citizen. Well, now you can lol because you were still liquid. There are other ways to do it too, this is one way. It takes a pretty weird and creepy level of nationalist hubris to think your money needs to stay in the country, but I would say this brainwashing has been largely successful in creating a stigma at least. Except to people that matter.
> The IRS doesn't care what you do with post-tax money! There is no prohibition on doing stuff outside the country
No, the IRS absolutely does care what you do with your money abroad.
If you create a foreign bank account (anywhere) they literally require said foreign bank to send a report every year of your assets. And the bank always complies, because the US treasury can restrict its ability to transact in US dollars.
Also, as an American, having a foreign investment account is possibly the dumbest thing you can do. There’s extremely punitive taxes on foreign controlled investment accounts to the point it doesn’t make sense to hold any money abroad.
Your advice may have been true pre-2000s but it is no longer the case in a post-FATCA world.
Yes, foreign passive and controlled accounts can have punitive taxes on them in some circumstances
Yes, a report is sent by the bank
No, that has nothing to do with there being a problem or any liability for you. A report goes out to the IRS, so what. Was your main point to say "and therefore the IRS cares?" okay. It means nothing to them if there is no tax event.
As we move more and more towards collectivism... it was never your money... its the governments money.... they just let you use some of it for a time... if you have the right politics and you don't piss off the wrong people. The China model.
So how did these people use economies of scale AND also have a legal and physical protection against other people stealing it?
In the old days, the rich would have to hire their own small defense/army just to protect their riches from being stolen. And we're not even talking about the public road/education/health/communications system that allows their products to be made and delivered to customers that pay the money that becomes their profits.
From the above you can see that the these people want to "ride free" off the backs of people that pay their share back into the system.
So how exactly do people get educated and products make it to market etc? There's a lot of "soft" infrastructure that you're forgetting too. That was part of Biden's point. There's hard infrastructure that everybody understands, and then there's the soft infrastructure like a well-educated workforce that can quickly adapt to the new market demands.
An efficient (not wasteful, which is tough to make happen) investment in either would help the US in every way, publically and privately.
I’d expect the larger the fraud, the more likely for them to be wealthy. It likely tapers off as I don’t expect Bezos to risk jail time to save a few bucks, but I’d bet you’ll have more at the single and double digit millionaire than say the sub $100K net worth.
It's easier to hide when you only have 3 or 4 employees, can do all the books yourself and deal in cash. A bit harder (but still possible) when you have 200 employees and a CFO, more people need to be on board with the fraud.
I really believe that tax dodging and evasion are the biggest source of social inequality.
Less budget for the state or government means less redistribution and less public services, meaning the poor becomes poorer.
What's crazy is that as a european, would I talk about taxes on hacker news or reddit, I will always encounter libertarians who are arguing that taxes are bad.
Firstly inequality growth is mainly an American phenomenon, it's not really a factor in the developed world generally.
The problem is the Pickety/Zucman analysis didn't fully take into account taxes and transfers, so it overestimated 1%-er incomes and underestimated low wage earner benefits. Within the US, CHIP and Medicaid expansion have made a huge difference. After all it's hard to argue Medicaid expansion has no effect on inequality.
Another major area of anomaly is that the P/Z analysis assumed income from pass-through businesses was capital gains. It turns out, this includes a lot of doctors, lawyers, etc whose income comes form these kinds of business structures. That made it look like their income was capital gains from investments in businesses, where in fact it's really labour income. This is not a small discrepancy, there are a lot of these sorts of people and they earn a lot. Correct for these sorts of things and the inequality largely evaporates.
Anyway, it's a messy problem with a million details and there are still distortions in the economy that disproportionately benefit the wealthy and always have done.
I disagree tax evasion is such a big factor, it's a problem but a relatively constant one. I think the main problems are mostly structural distortions in the tax system that encourage passive incomes. Income from rents and inheritance are significant issues. The drastic rise in property prices across the developed world is a huge problem that disproportionately hurts low income groups.
> inequality growth is mainly an American phenomenon
Where do you get this from? It’s quite dismissive, given the large amount of study about wealth inequality increasing globally. This is definitely an issue throughout Europe too and even Asia, in my experience.
The P/Z figures estimate pre-tax income for the top 1% in the US has more than doubled. Pre-tax though, that's always been a gaping hole in their analysis. As I pointed out what really matters is post-tax and transfers.
That's one reason the Obama era health care reforms are so significant, it doesn't show up as a headline economic or wealth figure and now it's just become the new normal, but taking health care provision off the table as a critical risk for tens of millions of low income Americans was a huge game changer. More of that please.
I don't have figures for the top 1% in Europe, but for the top 10% it's gone up by a few percent (except Eastern Europe which is much higher). The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School or Economics published a report on this in 2020.
Inequality in Asia, particularly China is definitely up but then it's just gone through a massive program of industrialisation. There's little point comparing inequality in China now to what it was in the 1970s. What would you even be measuring? Similarly for Eastern Europe, their whole economic system has changed so you're not comparing like for like.
To my knowledge, Bermuda Post is not a real journalistic organization in Bermuda (the major paper is the Royal Gazette). Instead, checking their about page reveals:
'BermudaPost is a non-profit, private and self-funded, commonly-created News and info-sharing platform that enables everybody to share valuable content such as local and global news updates.'
Besides two suspiciously barebones property listings, there are no references to Bermuda.