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2 yr. ago

  • Nope, they definitely do. The specific assets and schemes differ across wealth levels and also across time as laws change, but the general principles of finding and exploiting loopholes remain the same.

    The middle class negatively gears property despite the property gaining in capital terms. The ultra wealthy negatively gears sports teams despite the team gaining in capital terms.

    The middle class deducts fancy electronics and cars as "hobbies". The ultra wealthy deducts entire luxury hotels and horse racing clubs as "hobbies".

    The middle class stuffs income into retirement accounts. The ultra wealthy stuffs assets, which are way more fungible in value, into retirement accounts.

    The Secret IRS Files Archives — ProPublica - https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

    Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes on an Epic Scale — ProPublica - https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techniques-irs-files

    More Than Half of America’s 100 Richest People Exploit Special Trusts to Avoid Estate Taxes — ProPublica - https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-americas-100-richest-people-exploit-special-trusts-to-avoid-estate-taxes

  • Sometimes the trash just takes itself out

  • A basic one is negative gearing + trusts + cheap loans.

    Negative gearing allows you to deduct/combine different income streams together to reduce your taxable income, and hence tax liability.

    Traditionally used by middle/upper middle class to deduct mortgage interest payments and reduce their taxable income.

    Rich(er) people combine this with trusts to distribute income/expenses among trust beneficiaries for something more tax advantageous. Usually this is someone like a spouse, child, or extended family member.

    Add on the fact that rich people get cheaper loans, which often makes it cheaper to finance day to day life with loans, and only draw down (ie realise capital gains) after shuffling around incomes/expenses for a year.

    Tax loopholes are basically legal ways to shift the timing and benefiary of income/expenses. There's a bunch of other ones, like

    • choice of depreciation calculation
    • purchasing things on behalf of a "trust" or "company"
    • getting paid in low tax jurisdictions
    • moving money into tax advantageous retirement accounts
  • Ignoring the morality of it, from a purely economical and financial perspective the cost of elder care for a couple is very expensive, usually averaging around the price of a home, or most of the inheritance. It's basically liquidate the house now to send them to a nursing home, or ask a family member and "pay" them later with the house.

    Hence the typical silent agreements that the sibling who looked after the parents before death gets the majority of the inheritance.

    Silent, verbal, or even legal agreements are messy though. Talk to family members with the help of a lawyer.

  • Yes.

    Spoilers for every Monster Hunter plot:

    The monsters in the wild are becoming way more aggressive/crazy, resulting in not only the ecosystem going out of whack, but also endangering human settlements.

    You start off as a rookie hunter by culling them, and as you work up the ranks you discover that the source of this imbalance is actually due to a mysterious new monster (not actually that mysterious because it's usually the cover art monster).

    You gradually gain more experience and kill the flagship monster, graduating low rank (the first half of the game), roll credits.

    But it turns out the mysterious new monster only invaded the ecosystem because it was escaping from an even bigger threat, the new Elder Dragon of the game, whose awakening is a once in a 1000 year occurrence and is causing even more mayhem in the ecosystem.

    You work up the ranks again, and slay the Elder Dragon, graduating high rank (second half of game), credits roll for second time.

    Rinse and repeat for the G rank DLC/expansion, where you also get some new areas.

    Canonically everything is done for the ecosystem. Gameplay wise there is significant dissonance as you genocide multiple species just for a 1% drop to upgrade your corpse dress.

  • They're there because the city needs to pay the private company that owns the parking spots for the space the bus lane occupies

    (Actually not sure about this specific case, but wouldn't be surprised if it was, since Chicago Parking Meters owns all the parking meters too)

    Chicago Parking Meters - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters

  • The default experience depends on what you're searching for, usually traditional search engines fall apart pretty quickly when it comes to anything related to a possible purchase, or more technical/esoteric info.

    Tbf, one of Kagi's killer features is its ability to up/down rank websites, which means you also need to spend some time customising it to your tastes. No more Pinterest, quora, medium, etc

  • Employers: use shitty recruitment platforms, ATS, and internal systems that require Chrome to even function correctly

    Also employers:

  • Not without matching rises in incomes.

    Housing is a necessity, and the economy suffers if people can't afford it. If you are poor and priced out of the city, you get less access to resources such as education and career opportunities, the key drivers of growth.

    Even if a government decides to rely on the growth brought by attracting wealthy individuals, they still need to hire a labour force, which can't exist if they don't have anywhere to live. Can't rebound to pre crisis levels of tourism if the tour guide can't afford to live in the city.

    Also, as a matter of pedantry, higher rents make the landlords wealthier. Typically with high rents we start to see more high income, yet asset poor households who are unable to save and become wealthy.

  • Inb4 Trump places tariffs on and sues the UN

  • New affordable housing policy

  • IIRC there were some polls for how helpful LLMs were by language/professions, and data science languages/workflows consistently rated LLMs very highly. Which makes sense, because the main steps of 1) data cleaning, 2) estimation and 3) presenting results all have lots of boilerplate.

    Data cleaning really just revolves around a few core functions such as filter, select, and join; joins in particular can get very complicated to keep track of for big data.

    For estimation, the more complicated models all require lots of hyperparameters, all of which need to be set up (instantiated if you use an OOP implementation like Python) and looped over some validation set. Even with dedicated high level libraries like scikit, there is still a lot of boilerplate.

    Presentation usually consists of visualisation and cleaning up results for tables. Professional visualisations require titles, axis labels, reformatted axis labels etc, which is 4-5 lines of boilerplate minimum. Tables are usually catted out to HTML or LaTeX, both of which are notorious for boilerplate. This isn't even getting into fancier frontends/dashboards, which is its own can of worms.

    The fact that these steps tend to be quite bespoke for every dataset also means that they couldn't be easily automated by existing autocomplete, e.g. formatting SYS_BP to "Systolic Blood Pressure (mmHg)" for the graphs/tables.

  • This is why drakes can't open doors

  • Inb4 conservatives change from

    "Mary was a teenager"

    to

    "The Founding Fathers were pedophiles too"

  • I respect the pedantry, but I was trying say that I was using the "Anglo" - which in casual speech is short for the casual "Anglo-Saxon", itself short for White Anglo Saxon Protestant.

    I remember I had this exact same conversation IRL, and we determined that the confusion and somewhat jargony nature of the latter two terms (especially since WASP isn't well understood outside the US) was why people in casual speech just use the ambiguous "Anglo".

    Semantics 🤷‍♂️

  • Oop, I meant Anglo, as in the the shortened version of Anglo Saxon (basically Germanic).

  • Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world

    PSA: Couches can be lonely

  • Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world

    (Rare) National Gallery Companion Guide for 3DS