Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
any good alternative?
Comment · 3 years ago
in short, this is just squeezing the proverbial balloon...it moves the issue to a different area...over time, taxes have been high jacked and twisted into being used as incentives for influencing behaviors...the problem with that is that you need different behaviors at different times in development and there's an assumption that all parties will behave/think/execute in the same way given the same incentives...while more densely populated areas are more efficient and effective economically for some towns and municipalities, it's not necessarily the best use case for all scenario and all cases...at the end of the day, the goal for most municipalities is to cover the cost of goods and services (schools, infrastructure, fire & safety, parks & recreation, etc.)...if that's the goal, then we can quantify how much it costs per person/family/household to support these goods and services and that should serve as the baseline for the "tax"...your level of good and services should not depend on the market value of your land/property/house...in a recession or downturn with depressed property values, you still need the same level of goods and services if not more...
Comment · 3 years ago
Stated another way. National and State lotteries are the largest ongoing wealth transfer from the lower-income bracket in the US. The lotteries are overwhelming played by the lower-income and that money is used to fund a large number of things in state governments.
Comment · 3 years ago
There may be more parallels to SBF and Jon Corzine than to Bernie Madoff. SBF and Corzine ran companies that were regulated by the CFTC which requires segmentation of client funds from corporate funds. Both SBF and Corzine failed to provide the appropriate systems and safeguards to prevent the intermingling of client and corporate funds. Only time and evidence will tell if SBF knowingly and intentionally siphoned client funds for nefarious intent. The situation can get more murky if usage/terms of services policies existed for the alt-coins that were used. In Madoffs' case, there was a point that no investments were being made and new money was being used to pay/boost returns of existing clients which doesn't seem to be the case with FTX.
Comment · 4 years ago
Enough is enough. No more running from app to app to avoid the death grip of Adobe. A call to action against Adobe's business practices of reducing competition and increasing prices. #StopAdobe and #SaveFigma
Comment · 4 years ago
In the examples that you site, the acquisitions were complementary additions. In this case, Adobe already has a competing product suite.
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
it saddens me that we have not put more thought into this topic and we constantly put our education, safety, and services on the economic roller coaster.

no matter how much your home is worth today or in ten years you and other in the community want a standard level of education, safety, and services from your local governments. this should be priced as a service based on the cost to provide it to the members of the community and not based on dynamically changing home values

property taxes should have a baseline cost to cover the essential services (schools, critical infrastructure, safety, etc.) that is the same for everyone (no exemptions) and a variable cost for the non-essential services (parks, beautification projects, etc.) (very limited exemptions) that can be based on the value of your home or land

this way the essential services are always funded and not impacted by economic downturns or property appraisal disputes/challenges and local governments don't have to play the game of increase the millage rate to make up costs for essential services

Comment · 7 years ago
This statement is often used and is misleading without the context of income of this 1% as a percentage. So, if this 1% earns 80% of all income, then 35-40% is relatively low. I'm not sure if your intent was to mislead or just reiterate stats that you saw from some where, but please give the appropriate context and data to support you claim that this is unfair.
Comment · 7 years ago
I think that your intentions are good, but approach may be off a bit. I agree that the SEC does protect investors and markets, but I do not agree that a company should be in the black before they IPO.

I think that your main concern is the public market funding VC capital returns. If so, then a more reasonable approach to prevent public market exploitation may be to require a lock up period for investors for a certain amount of time (not sure how you would determine this...) similar to how employees are often beholden to lock up periods post IPO.

Comment · 7 years ago
Not sure that I completely follow your logic in regards to the "tax" here. With any product, you have two main things: production of the product and distribution of the product. Spotify doesn't NEED to be on Apple devices (they started off on the web), but they WANT to be on Apple devices (and Android devices) because they are great distribution channels for its product.

That said, how much is distribution worth to Spotify? Imagine that Spotify was not software, but instead it was a hardware device. Would they expect Best Buy to carry it for free? Would they expect Walmart or Target not to offer a store branded competitor? I think not.

When you don't own your distribution channel, you pay for distribution one way or another.

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