The paying tax and 100% legal is only tested when brought to court, which seems that be chronically underfunded conveniently and I laugh loudly at the belief that 100% of all corporations are in legal compliance.
You said that the rich are entitled to the freedoms as anyone else but shrugs off that only the rich have the effective means to make use of these instruments. They are quite capable of being completely invisible to public scrutiny by holding all their assets as an individual.
They choose to take steps to leverage opaque often intentionally complicated corporate layering schemes to minimize risk, skirt (legally or not) tax, or to layer the sources of bad money.
Whatever the reason for engaging in these games, I believe they are no longer "living life like every citizen deserves privacy" (note your comment spoke of total privacy from oversight which no citizen pretty much anywhere actually has).
I'm at least happy that my home of Canada is starting to chip away the corporate veil.
Everyone who owns shares in a retirement fund benefits from the privacy afforded by these instruments. If every beneficial owner of every corporation had to be publicly registered, that'd be an enormous proportion of the regular public!
Think about what it would mean that anyone could, at any time, look up all the investing choices of anyone in the country.
It would be truly fascinating information but yes in our current level of innovation and maturity, totally bonkers.
It's totally a thing to have trades pegged to US politicians' investment choices, because they often have the knowledge not available to the public to make "better" (financially) decisions.
As per your first comment, this is generally the difference between an active and passive investor which usually works out to someone who owns about 10% of any given company. It's probably a little too high as it isn't hard to imagine a cabal of 11 wealthy tax dodgers playing games with the reporting requirements.
I believe most laws getting enacted which are addressing corporate secrecy are primarily targetting the active owners of companies and usually unnamed beneficiaries who have a benefit to the company/trust who aren't specifically owners, who can reap the benefits of the company's assets without strictly their name of the deed so to speak.
Again, most of this revolves around what is asked by government officials for auditing and less about what information is being dumped into public information.
Your home in Canada just recently demanded blind trusts all report their members personal information to the government. Far from engaging only the rich, that demand hit millions of every day citizens with shared bank accounts with their parents or kids. Those are setup for a variety of reasons, one of which is to circumvent probate tax! Yep, by everyday non-rich people!
However, note that the CRAs information collection did not make your personal bank account information public. Would you prefer that it had? I used the example of a blind trust here because "non-blind" trusts are one of the common uses of non-commercial corporate entities.
Also, I never once said "total privacy from oversight", all these corporate entities already supply financial and ownership information to the government, whose job it is to hold them to account. This is not the same and making information public so a rabid mob of people can enact vigilante justice, or whatever people like you hope comes out of it.
>Your home in Canada just recently demanded blind trusts all report their members personal information to the government. Far from engaging only the rich, that demand hit millions of every day citizens with shared bank accounts with their parents or kids. Those are setup for a variety of reasons, one of which is to circumvent probate tax! Yep, by everyday non-rich people!
How does this hurt anyone though? That is not clear at all. The thing you're upset about here is that blind trust members information is reported to the government, but with no clear statement how this hurts anyone, wealthy or not.
Chances are, the information turned over the government has anyway.
If this is a legal mechanism to circumvent probate taxes, then its not a problem. If not, well, even regular people should pay their taxes, no?
Taxes aren't an ethical or moral topic, they are a legal topic. If you can avoid a tax through some legal structure, you are within your rights to do so and you can't judge this as some sort of shady business. Taxes are mostly used to create incentives and collect money, if people are allowed a legal structure to avoid a probate tax, then that might be an incentive on purpose. Just because you did something to pay less taxes does not mean that you are some bad actor exploiting a loophole.
For example, taxes are only paid on profit, so companies are incentivized to spend their money and pay less in taxes. No one sees this as a legal loophole that needs to be fixed, it is very much intentional.
Also you are making the false dichotomy here of "regular people" as something different from "somewhat versed in financial entities people". That's weird.
they already collect enough information that if the goal was to seize wealth they could easily do so, even before this change. I don’t see how this change makes that more imminent.
If someone wants to argue you shouldn’t have to register things with the government I’m all ears but it is no way comparable to what the Nazis did.
Say a couple lives in a house. They have a son, who lives with them.
The wife passes away.
1. Should her husband pay tax on her share of the house when it passes to him? Assuming these are not wealthy people, this may force the sale of the house.
2. Should the house go through probate? Should everyone move out while that happens?
The old man wants to leave the house to his son.
3. Should the son pay tax on the house when his father passes away?
4. Should he move out while the house goes through probate?
It is because of cases like these that we have ways to avoid going through probate.
A tangent, but this is in and of itself completely nuts. One should be able to read the text of the law, as written, and understand what you are and are not permitted to do - end of story. There should be no need to look at precedents. Courts only recourse if a law is unclear should be to send it back to an elected legislature for refinement.
I'm dragging my new company's codebases from 8 to 17 from soup to nuts. It's not always just about the language update, but all the old legacy crust that accumulated since java 8 that prevented anyone else to do it. My PRs are terrible and necessary.
I started to tinker with this new API last week. I definitely think it's a lot better than needing to self compile a lot of the bindings yourself which will certainly bring more from the community into the feature than were here before.
That said, you really need to write a bunch of boiler-plate to implement useful things in java-like paradigms in the library today. Just as an example, I wrote up a sane windows _getcwd() stub and it's like 30 lines to implement correctly (properly freeing the buffer when I'm down with it)
My pet project is to see if I can write automatic stubs around calls based on published API info and sources, so that at least some of that platform binding lift isn't just for those with non-trivial knowledge of C. Well, that's the hope anyways.
I've been quite keen on the new FFI too - apologies if this is old news, but have you tried the [0] jextract stuff for some of the boilerplate gubbins?
No! Thanks for the callout! That would certainly help on my path. My main goal was to insulate calls to avoid overly complicated reference counting when integrating large native surfaces into as Java program, but certainly an important aspect is getting the function signatures to target in the first place. I threw something bad together to work sort of like this (testing using proton), but I'm more than happy to bin it for something that just-works.
Have you looked at Microsoft's Win32 API metadata package [0]? They're using it to generate C# and Rust bindings, and other people have targeted other languages.
Any service that's so pedantic about cleaning isn't a service that most customers would want to use. Airbnb is trying to have it's cake and eat it too putting the responsibility on "hosts" to be the bad guys. It's just lazy and callous to not have strict bounds of responsibilities customers are expected to engage with.
Good for you. We never used it in 10 years of nomadding. However, we did abuse it constantly by contacting hosts and then cancelling the request and paying them cash rent at a negotiated price for a month or two. Idk how well that would work anymore.
It depends on the host. If the host is a "real person" (for a lack of a better word) then it works. If they have a bunch of properties and outsourced it to an agency or something, it won't work.
Unfortunately the latter is becoming increasingly popular and harder and harder to avoid. I usually try to book places where it's a large house and they rent out the top floor or something.
That way if there are any problems, the owner is right there to help and it's easier to negotiate the cash deals.
I just had to pick up and build a UI product in java recently and picked up javafx for the first time. With Kotlin, I actually found it while using my the standard you builder to be quite intuitive and sorta dynamic enough to make development snappy. Definitely the best attempt at GUIs for java, but sad that only smaller shops are actually investing any real effort into the space. Oh and java native + javafx is a pain in the ass until I discovered Bellsoft NDK, which made building a binary from source 100% so much easier.
You can, but anything in java that needs to step down into c/c++ ends up being a major pain in the ass so it's usually implemented half baked at best. Platform ergonomics are hard and you usually find that what works great in some languages / paradigms just don't flourish in others. It'd be nice to see some good language bindings that feel right for java.
I just started to use the intellij built-in http client for my quick and dirty curl debugs and I gotta say it's pretty good for my limited needs so far.
Auto-brail screen readers exist. If someone has the means or has a gov subsidy can read text on the internet Taxis to support wheelchair users don't, or at least done exist enough to subsist off the profit motives necessary to keep the service alive.
If someone had a government subsidy then they could use the money to pay the market price necessary to make such a service viable. If the government wants that subsidy, why should they impose that cost on a particular industry instead of paying for it out of the general fund?
Those numbers only make sense if the Gini coefficient of both comparison targets are roughly equal. Since the US has a much higher coefficient, it means that way more wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few. If the US can 'force' those people to pay enough to make up for their massive over representation in wealth and net worth, I don't see you getting the wonderful gifts of socialization any time soon.
I agree that Americans don't consider it a priority for their society to close the gap between rich and poor with things like free healthcare and free college education.
However, I don't think that's because they're oppressed by the tyrannous yoke of capitalism. That wealth inequality allows quite a lot of people to enjoy luxuries; they've got 1 swimming pool for every 30 people, that's a lot of people with private swimming pools!
Many Americans feel their high GDP per capita shows their low-tax approach is good for productivity, and that those swimming pools are proof that hard work gets rewarded in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
My point is, viewed at a national level, America isn't suffering from the burdensome cost of maintaining their large and expensive military, as gessha seemed to think. They're actually one of the richest countries in the world.
You said that the rich are entitled to the freedoms as anyone else but shrugs off that only the rich have the effective means to make use of these instruments. They are quite capable of being completely invisible to public scrutiny by holding all their assets as an individual.
They choose to take steps to leverage opaque often intentionally complicated corporate layering schemes to minimize risk, skirt (legally or not) tax, or to layer the sources of bad money.
Whatever the reason for engaging in these games, I believe they are no longer "living life like every citizen deserves privacy" (note your comment spoke of total privacy from oversight which no citizen pretty much anywhere actually has).
I'm at least happy that my home of Canada is starting to chip away the corporate veil.