Social security and Medicare are also payroll "taxes" in that they're not optional and are automatically deducted.

This is called insurance, not tax.

If the government mandates it under threat of violence, it’s called a tax.

It could also be classified as an insurance premium, but a government mandating it is the key characteristic of a tax.

But the fact that the government reduces the annuity amount by increasing retirement age and benefit purchasing power means it is not insurance either. It is wealth redistribution from the working to the non working.

Yeah, that's how insurance works: it is wealth distribution from those who have not become (yet) an insurance case to those who have not.

If you have a car, you need to pay car insurance. Is that also a tax?

The concept of insurance is independent of mandatory or not. That should be obvious, I wonder why it isn't to you. Maybe your ideology prohibits clear thinking and makes you vote Trump?

>Yeah, that's how insurance works: it is wealth distribution from those who have not become (yet) an insurance case to those who have not.

In the context of differentiating between wealth redistribution and insurance, insurance does not redistribute wealth, insurance redistributes risk since underwriting in a competitive marketplace ensures you only a premium commensurate to your risks.

For example, the government mandates only liability insurance up to $x, for which the premium for the same coverage can be vastly different depending on each person's driving history. While this can be considered a tax because the government mandates it, one can see how this is not wealth redistribution since the "tax" being paid is at least partly dependent on one's risk profile.

Contrast this with a government mandated defined benefit pension contribution equal to a percentage of one's earned income, with a known fact that one's contributions will reflect their benefit less and less as the years go on. That is far more "wealth redistribution" than "insurance".

Another example is in the US, health insurance premiums are more tax than an actuarially calculated premium based on health risk. This is because health insurers are not allowed to price health insurance based on health risks. It is explicitly a redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and sick, due to the maximum age rating factor and inability to underwrite based on pre-existing health conditions.

Something can be mandatory insurance AND a tax.

NYC unions are not your average worker. In my north of NYC town the labor rate for a union worker is 3x that of non union..and state laws mandate govt projects must pay that rate.

Yeah, that is what unions are for, protecting worker wages from the ever tightening noose of greedy capitalists that would otherwise use slave labor if they still could.

Very much dependent on age, rest and general conditioning. I went from sea level to 14K at Pikes peak in 1 day and it was quite uncomfortable. I managed, but folks who lived in Denver with lower physical fitness levels than me, did better.

Agreed, we live at ~5K and went up to Pikes Peak; my wife and I had no problems (beyond minor headache), but my son's lips were turning blue and he was feeling pretty bad.

Other amusing things from that trip: we went up there the 3rd of July, and it snowed. We charged the car in Colorado Springs before we left, got up to the peak with 36% battery remaining. My wife worried we wouldn't be able to make it back. Got back to CS with ~70% battery left.

Lol, on my trip up Pikes Peak I was blissfully unaware that altitude sickness could be a thing. So I can't recall if I felt any different. I do recall the carburetor on my motorcycle was acting a little strange, however.

$100B isn't a startup. And if there's a $100B deal, you better believe the cash is there. Case in point - Netflix/Paramount wanting to buy WB. Or the $44B that Musk had to raise to buy out Twitter shareholders.

Both your examples are purchases. Musk had to raise actual capital to buy Twitter because the people getting the money were taking it and walking away.

Funding doesn't work like that. Investors are giving you money as part of a longer-term deal where they stick around.

Take it to it's logical conclusion. Free universal choice of schools rather than being tethered to your home address.

The revenue is in the ads. If they hit a decent run rate prior to the IPO then there's a viable path to profitablity and justification for the insane capex.

More WeWork than Theranos. Theranos was a fraud.

WeWork was a legit real estate business with a SaaS multiple on valuations.

The headline is absolutely declarative. CBP can't comply. Period.

That's not what CBP said, and the article itself has the nuance that the headline doesn't

True. But just changing the prompt to include "cite me cases" expands the search to court systems and actual cases. It's pretty useful as a first pass to get a sense for the issues, precedents and laws at stake.

You know some of those "actual cases" are made up, right? Like, famously, lawyers are filing briefs with made-up citations b/c they used LLMs to draft it.

Ah ok so only lawyers get to use AI hallucinations! (Actually, CA has a bill pending that AFAIR requires lawyers to manually verify AI citations... which is a lot narrower and better than what NY is trying here.)