The outcome depends on the perspective of the person being talked about.
For the people looking to buy a home, do they really want to buy a home where property taxes can be raised without a limit? One of the benefits to home ownership is locking in housing expenses. A home becomes a lot less appealing when property taxes go unchecked.
You’re assuming all homeowners are rich. The whole point of capping property taxes increases is to not price normal people out of their homes. Home prices in California went up a lot over the past several decades. It is possible that someone is “rich” when it comes to net worth, because their home appreciated in value a lot, but that doesn’t help cash flow, which is what would be required to pay the property taxes. Because their home went up in value, should they be expected to sell the house, just to pay the taxes, and get pushed back to a rental? That sounds rather dystopian.
I’m all for rent control. If home owners can lock in rates, so should renters. We should encourage long-term stable rentals, instead of forcing people to move constantly. I would think landlords would want long-term stable renters, but my experience doesn’t align with that (except for one place).
The sales tax is high, but it’s not so far off other states that it looks egregious.
Income tax is only mentioned once in the article and it says it’s progressive, which is what the author seems to want. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take issue with there?
I rose an issue with the property taxes, because I think there is another side to the coin that is important.
>Because their home went up in value, should they be expected to sell the house, just to pay the taxes, and get pushed back to a rental?
Not that it's always necessarily ideal, but presumably they could sell the house and buy one in a cheaper community, that's sorta the natural flow of neighborhoods. People buy into a neighborhood and raise their families and then sell to new families after their kids move out and then they move on to smaller retirement sized homes.
You’re ignoring several decades of a person’s life. People don’t tend to downsize until they retire, when the kids might be out of the house by the time they’re 45. My mom has been in her home alone for 25 years, it’s 900sqft… what is she supposed to downsize to? It’s also nice to have a place to stay when I’m in town, and she enjoys that as well, in addition to having the grandkids over.
Also, downsizing in retirement is usually due to a failure to accumulate enough retirement savings during their working years. Leaving property taxes unchecked exacerbates that problem. That’s assuming they bought a big house to begin with.
Most people in my extended family never bought big homes. There is no downsizing, as the home is already very modest, like my mom’s place.
I also bought a modest home. If property taxes were to grow unchecked and I had to downsize… there isn’t anywhere to go, other than moving to the middle of nowhere, a trailer park, or a high crime area. My place is about the size of a single-wide trailer… how am I supposed to downsize without going to a studio apartment?
I’m kind of shocked people are trying to defend the idea of raising taxes at rates that outpace inflation. Why would anyone want this? People buy homes based on the current tax rate, because they can afford it. They can’t control if property values go up, yet you want them to be punished for it? Do you want this to happen to you if/when you buy a home?
A home is supposed to create some stability in a person’s life. Leaving property taxes unchecked erodes that stability, as the city could rug pull them at any moment.
Where I’m at, a lot of people are knocking down homes from the 1940s and building big new homes. I still have a 1940s home. The trend going on here is pushing up property values, and that’s not my fault. I don’t know what it costs to rebuild a home on existing property, but some homes a block away from me were going for $1m, almost 4x what I paid just a few years ago. I don’t know what prices will be like in 20 years, but it gives me some peace of mind knowing property taxes won’t run away on me. I’ve moved 24 times in my life… I need a break.
Exactly—and that’s the normal, healthy function of a housing market.
Prop 13 distorts that by making it financially irrational to ever move, which contributes directly to the lock-in and underutilization the article describes
There is no law regarding how and when (non-exec) employees can sell company stock. The SEC only restricts insider trading, and some companies voluntarily enforce blackout periods to reduce the chance of insider trading. Plenty of public companies (e.g. Microsoft) let employees trade whenever they want.
I think the effect is actually backwards: there may only be 2 windows instead of 4 but the total amount of time window per year should theoretically go up significantly. The 2 removed reports should make both of those quarters less subject to insider trading and therefore more tradeable.
In companies I've been in, insider trading windows close because there's been a certain amount of time since the last report. So less frequent reports = more time for insider to know things that aren't public yet = more time unable to trade, not less.
however the bigger issue here - is this is a ruse - there is a reason quarterly reporting brought transparency to companies - now they can easily hide nasty things.
you as an employee with stock options - yeah those are close to worthless since the price hit you can take can vary a lot.
For 6 months instead of 3. One could argue the need to show quarterly growth forces companies to do nastier things. Long term thinking is definitely needed these days when all companies are only focusing on short term gains.
Before 1970, the reporting was twice a year and in the first half of the twentieth century it was once a year.
Would that necessarily be a bad thing? I remember how that would drive short-termism on the part of regular employees. Since stock comp was a major part of many companies' salaries, people would hope for a bump in the earnings report. We complain about short-termism in the markets, but you can't say one thing and then do something else.
It would be bad in that it makes employees' stock less liquid. Stock-based compensation is a huge part of many employees' comp packages.
I think a small subset of people might adopt a short-term approach to equity ownership. I think a much larger subset would simply be selling to access the money they rightfully earned or to diversify their holdings instead of having the bulk of their stock portfolio in a single company.
What if someone froze half of your paycheck and said you can't touch it except for the two months out of the year that they say you can?
When did "healthy parenting" become a full-time cybersecurity job with no training, adversaries backed by infinite capital, teams of PhDs optimizing for addiction, and sexual predators from around the globe dialoguing with your child through any glass surface your child can get their hands on?
This is riddled with fearmongering. You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to take interest in your own child. It doesn't take a PhD to enable parental controls or tell your child "no" if they want something that is inappropriate for them.
You might as well have said that you need to be a police officer to make sure your child isn't hit by a drunk driver, kidnapped by creeps or attacked by someone on the street. Children are under the care of parents or guardians for a reason. It's not to fist fight criminals or design their own security system.
Your analogy about drunk drivers actually makes my point: we don't just tell parents "be vigilant". We have DUI laws, road design standards, and enforcement--systemic solutions, not just individual responsibility.
With tech, we've largely abdicated that, placing the entire burden on parents to defend against industrial-scale manipulation.
Expecting individual parents to successfully counter industrial-scale behavioral engineering is a systems failure, not a parenting failure.
Considering how much big tech gets for defrauding their customers, even if the EU is only applying fines in bad faith (which they aren't) it is only a drop in the bucket in comparison...
This is a toxic government regulatory framework. Treating all consumers as suspect children first and foremost not only makes the experience worse but it defeats the purpose it was created for. I shouldn't need to submit my ID every time I want to watch a rated R movie on Netflix or cable. I shouldn't need to scan and submit my face to view a wikipedia article about anatomy. This is the end goal of such suspicious treatment.
The tools currently exist to "protect" children in game. Abdicating your responsibility as a parent is not a problem for the state to solve.
It says that the parental settings (when enabled!) are just letting children do whatever they want by default:
- buying overpriced objects
- chat without any restriction online
- play without interruption for long time
I think the first one is probably the most poignant: piping children into disguised gambling addiction by default seems like a major fault. Borderline illegal, if you ask me.
It looks a lot like a phony feature "let's add a parental control, it will make people feel like we're trustworthy and bring back more revenue. And please don't disable ingame purchases by default, this is our cash cow".
I'm talking about the above comments argument that this kind of overreach is a healthy government regulatory framework. I am not talking about the argument from the person above them.
You seem to be forgetting a crucial part of this. The parent. If a parent is buying their child a gambling game then that's on them. Not on the government to force everyone to submit their IDs and face scans to play a game for adults.
Parental controls are not a phony feature at all. That's like saying accessibility options are phony features. It's an option for people who need it. Just because it isn't default in every scenario doesn't mean it's disingenuous.
No, I'm not saying the US appears to be health. I can't name any governments that are healthy. I haven't really spent the time to check all the governments of the world.
> In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
> The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
> It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say.
...
> On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.
GTFS-RT data isn't a lot of fun to work with directly, though, so I'd recommend that you use an intermediary like OneBusAway (OBA) to interpret the data and give you a nicer to use API.
I thought about this, but I've seen several times where the signs say that the train is running late, but it's actually there and leaves perfectly on time!
The schedule has been much more reliable since the electrification
Exactly my thoughts, the current pricing model incentives people to cram as much as possible into their carry-on and stretch the definition of their extra "personal item" (not sure if all airlines allow those), leading to all kinds of shenanigans especially on full flights. I think the situation would improve a lot if you were always given 1 free bag to check in and a paid option for a carry-on, especially if they can guarantee the space.
Yes I always thought that airlines wanted to encourage checked bags because people having to stow their carry-on bags dramatically slows down the time needed for boarding.
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