There are also some absolute morons out there. Couple of local things around me...
First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.
Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.
Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.
This is standard advice among ham radio operators. If you're putting up a tower, put it up, mount the antennas, run the feedlines, but resist the temptation to operate for a while. Or use it for receive-only.
Log your activity, or lack thereof, meticulously. Perhaps a critical part was back-ordered, or more expensive than expected, and note in the log how it still hasn't arrived so you still aren't able to operate. If complaints come in, get them to be maximally public about it, ideally in a town meeting or something, then whip out your logbook and coup-fourré. Let the wackos show themselves to be wackos, then quietly start operating some time later.
This happens a million times all over the country by YouTube and social media addicted morons. Who go on to complain about how "nothing ever gets done in this country" and they want the "good old days" back.
Except in the good old days things just got done when there was demand for them and NIMBYs were told to fuck off.
I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.
They also have a much bigger population using exclusively mobiles rather than landlines, since their infrastructure developed when the former was already available, and it's cheaper to just put up a few towers than run one landline to each subscriber.
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be a commercial entity.
If you are from the US, the only nation who doesn't frequently use a national TLD, the onus is on you to judge if a site is commercial, US-specific, global, or something else entirely.
On the contrary, it is a helpful term. Before the term, it was common to ask "are you a manager", and then you were defined oppositionally, as not-a-manager.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
In my reading it makes it easy to even spin managers as the bad ones: ICs contribute individually and directly something of worth. Managers contribute only indirectly via ICs.
It's extremely common, even in the USA, although in the USA it's more limited to running communities. In the UK, NZ, Australia, road running is common enough that anyone would know what you mean, but it's a bit less of a thing in the USA.
It's the opposite in the UK. Most landlords are individuals, own one or maybe a couple of properties.
It's awful, rogue landlords who do everything they can to not do repairs or improvements and when they do it often comes after a long time. Often as they have underestimated all the expenses they're liable for and find that the profit is not very much.
Give me a company that owns a whole block every day, they've modelled the risk better, have economies of scale, and you have more recourse against them.
IME companies are worse: professional investors highly focused on maximizing profits - driving up rent and minimizing costs - rather than a long-term investment by someone with another job, a sidelight and retirement plan.
I don't see how you have more recourse against a company with lawyers that can ignore you, and mom-and-pop. The latter are much more likely to respond to reason.
6oz of beef is only 44g of protein; a moderate gym load would require more for many adult men. Typical might be more like 75-100g. (Recommendations I’ve heard is 2g per 1 kg of muscle mass; roughly 40% of your weight at moderate fitness.)
I’m a large guy (190cm/100kg); I lose weight eating a pound of bacon for breakfast and a pound of chicken for dinner, if I’m even moderately exercising (3x cardio, 3x strength each week). Thirty minutes a day, split between strength and cardio is hardly “top athlete” and more “recommended amount”.
That’s not to say anybody is wrong, merely our experiences may be as varied as humans are — ie, we may legitimately have different needs.
Except the people hallucinating that we need to eat more meats. A couple of people requiring more caloric/protein intake doesn't make it reasonable for everyone to take in more
The advice to cut processed foods is solid and is something we have been saying for decades.
Well the point of nutrition research is to account for that kind of thing. And it's true enough that men and women have specifically different protein needs. But person-to-person variation doesn't scale up into pure randomness. The reason it's possible to make meaningful population level nutrition recommendations is precisely because of broadly shared commonalities, about what is both good and bad for us.
Due to digestion protein is also much lighter on calories then the baseline would suggest (15% less then the measured value can be typical) - dependent highly on preparation of course (I.e. the typical American steak prep of "first I'm adding half a stick of butter..." kind of ruins the benefit).
If we put a $10k tax on beards, that's $600 billion right there!
What's that, people might change their behaviour in response to it, in possibly unintended and negative ways? Nah we can just hand wave that away, who needs liquidity or investment.
So your claim is eliminating the massive overhead and personal/corporate intrusion of income tax will have no effect, benefits, or positive behavior change in response?
And on top of that a $5000 difference in a $1,000,000 transaction is do onerous that it will kill liquidity?
Yikes! Maybe run some numbers before posting?
Seriously, at any wealth level I'd trade income tax for a pennies-on-$1000 transaction tax any day.
Yes. Transaction taxes are a huge incentive for assets to stay put, which is quite inefficient. Income/consumption taxes are a burden on new production, but let you trade existing assets freely so as to direct them towards their highest and best use. That's usually a better arrangement, though of course less tax is preferable to more other things being equal.
>>Transaction taxes are a huge incentive for assets to stay put
I'm sure that is true at high rates. But we can look at several scenarios and see how sensitive people actually are to a transaction tax.
But have you ever bought or sold a house? In most states there is a Real Estate transfer tax, which is essentially the same thing as I'm proposing for all transactions. These range from zero in TX and WY up to 5%. In Massachusetts it is $4.28/$1000 of valuation or 0.428% [0], while in adjacent New Hampshire it is over 3X the rate at $1.50/$100 or 1.5% [1]. I've lived in one state or the other for several decades, bought and sold houses in both, and been adjacent to friends/family buying/selling there. Yet I have NEVER heard even a single word in any discussion about hesitating to make a transaction on either side because of the transfer tax, or any difference in rates. I've never even read of anyone expressing any such hesitation, or heard of anyone even expressing theoretical hesitation.
Stockbroker fees in the 1990s were in the $40-$100/trade or /100 shares. So with a mean price of a DJI share of ~$56, a $70 fee would be a rate of 1.25% for a round lot. But to buy 20 shares, the $70/trade would be $6.25. These fees did not slow down investing and any significant investor, but they certainly prevented day-trading of small lots, which became more prevalent after fees went to zero.
Similarly, the common practice in auctions for antiques, estate sales, or industrial goods is to charge a "buyers' premium", which is basically the income for the auctioneer, behaving exactly as a transfer tax. You win the auction at $100, and the buyers' premium is 18%, so you pay $118. These premiums were typically closer to 10-12% a few decades ago and are now in the 18-20% range. At the newer higher rates, I have heard people express hesitation when considering bidding on an item they don't much care about.
In municipalities which have both state and local sales taxes like LA total 9.5% and NYC at 8.875%, people complain a lot, but it doesn't stop them buying, but may shift buying at the borders. Similarly, in Massachusetts there is a 6.25% sales tax but zero in neighboring New Hampshire, there are a surplus of stores right on the NH side of the border people nearby will drive to NH to purchase large items but surprisingly little; a wholesale club <15min south of an identical store across the border still does very strong volume of large TVs etc, with people not willing to bother driving another 15min to save 6.25%
So, yes, people are sensitive to significant fees approaching double digits. High-frequency traders would also be sensitive to low rates, but that is because they are in a high-transaction/low margin business of shaving pennies off every transaction, so that would be an issue for them, but if HFT disappeared it would be a net positive for the markets as they are basically front-running transactions and shaving profit from real investors.
But for most transactions, as long as the rates are sub-1%, a transaction tax will make zero practical difference, which is why the base needs to be across all transactions.
You haven't actually cited any studies, just "I haven't heard anyone say anything".
We have transaction taxes in the UK, on shares (stamp duty) and on property (stamp duty land tax). They are awful. SDLT used to be lower, around 1%, but it crept up as it's an easy tax to raise politically, the top band is now at 12%.
[The government's own modelling of SDLT is incredible](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responsiveness-of...)
A 1% change in the effective tax rate results in almost a 12% change in the number of commercial transactions and a 5-7% change in the number of residential transactions.
This effect still happens at lower thresholds, it's just less dramatic, but it's still distortionary. If you tax something, you get less of it, and why do you want people to move less?
If you prefer anecdotes, these days it's very common to rent in the UK until you can buy a longer term home, rather than buying a starter home. I know very few people who _haven't_ done exactly that, you don't want to pay SDLT on somewhere you'll only live for a few years.
It raises very little, distorts the market hugely, it is a large reason that companies choose to list overseas.
Sales taxes are a (bad) form of consumption tax (VAT is better.) Consumption taxes are broadly good, the problem with transaction taxes are when you are purchasing an asset in a market.
Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer people need cars etc.
Roads are cheap. I know we spend billions on them, but they are still cheap compared to adding another floor.
I'm not arguing with your other points. Density is often worth the monetary costs, but don't try to pretend it isn't more expensive. (Indeed I would value the time density can save high, but there is no objective way to value a large part of my time)
An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.
Yes and the fact that you have people looking for a cure to their ills will always draw unscrupulous parties to their money. The entire supplements industry is sort of a prototype for this with outrageous marketing often targeting vulnerable groups. I’d argue the professional marketing of unregulated substances makes the supplements industry a lot larger than it might organically be.
PCPs don’t have the capacity to follow all medical research either. They depend on a network of institutions and regulation to do their work. How do you propose to scale that without the bureaucracy?
I'm not in favour of getting rid of the bureaucracy, some of it is necessary, but we're way past the benefit.
I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit.
At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.
All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!
Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.
I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.
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