throwawaysea
Joined 8 years ago
Karma
3,853
Submissions
3,274
Member since
Feb 16
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Read about this judge on Wikipedia, specifically the Criticisms section
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Moraes
Comment · 3 years ago
I’m banned so I don’t know if anyone will see this, but I wanted to share more details on this capital gains tax. In Washington, income taxes are different based on income levels are unconstitutional. So you cannot have a capital gains tax that only applies to income levels above some threshold, like this one is. To get around that, Washington’s Democratic legislators started claiming that capital gains tax is an excise tax rather than an income tax, and therefore no longer subject to the constraints of the state’s constitution.
In every state and the federal level, capital gains are a form of income tax. This includes Washington state, where the department of revenue explicitly classified it as such in line with the common definition of this tax. However, the state’s Supreme Court has become highly activist over time, due to a long history of WA being a one-party blue state. And in one of the lawsuits against this unconstitutional tax, the state Supreme Court surprisingly agreed with the legislators in redefining capital gains tax as an excise tax instead of an income tax (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-suprem...).
This tax is now being collected for the first time, and it is much larger in its collections than expected. Most of the money will go to K-12 schools, which is strange because school funding in WA has more than doubled in the last 10 years with little to show for it (see https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/states-...). Also, although school funding follows the student typically - meaning reduced enrollment at a public school leads to reduced funding - the first $500m of this tax will only go to public schools.
I expect this tax will see its thresholds reduced over time. Its initial proposal was to apply to any capital gains over $25K, not $250K. It was changed to the higher limit to give it a better chance of passing and sticking. But with the state Supreme Court redefining words and setting this precedent, the legislature is free to change the tax threshold and rate in the future.
Comment · 4 years ago
Who replicates Reddit? Are there archives of all the banned subreddits?
Comment · 4 years ago
This is what happened to me. I was shadowbanned or something like it for a comment made a few days earlier. The mod did tell me but I didn’t realize it because I would have needed to look through my comment history. I had no idea until another user pointed it out to me.
Comment · 4 years ago
I’ll volunteer myself as an example, as I was recently shadow banned (or some variant of banned). My other comment in this discussion has some details. I don’t think I am particularly controversial but maybe you can share a different perspective.
Comment · 4 years ago
> At the end of the day, it's just another form of censorship.
This is how I feel right now, since there doesn’t seem to be a good way to openly debate the policies (or dark patterns like shadow bans) once you become subject to actions taken under those policies. All you can do is appeal to the moderators by email. It’s something, but a private conversation isn’t the same as a community debate. And a community debate isn’t possible once you are silenced. I’m not sure what the right solution is.
In my case, someone called me a nitwit and my response to them was deemed engaging in a flamewar even though I was mostly just clarifying my earlier comment/stance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30255599). And then upon further investigation from the moderator, I apparently didn’t have the right mix of topics I post on and was deemed to be engaging in ideological battle. It seems arbitrary to me because here are the topics I see in my recent comments: Canada protest, climate change, Neil Young, biometric identity verification, a tool to contact representatives, the Olympics, MacBook Pros, Google Slides, GoFundMe (I had many comments on this one admittedly), search engine results, Delta airline policy, compensation trends, cars, Microsoft Teams, mathematics, Roku spyware, and rent increases.
So what is a well meaning user to do if they want to just engage on the stories most meaningful to them? Is it really a bad thing to post on topics that are controversial rather than straightforward? On the other hand, I am not sure what other community is better than HN, even if I dislike censorship. So maybe they’re doing something right and I’m on the wrong side of it after all.