How would that work? Mid six-figures is $500,000. Assuming a real growth rate of 4% (it could be higher, but I think this is reasonable given how low real interest rates have been lately), and assuming 45 years of growth, that gives you $2.9 million.
Each generation, you'll pay capital gains tax, which in Canada (I don't know how it works in the US) would be about 25%. In the US and many other countries, you also have inheritance tax. That's equivalent to about 1% a year. Is there a way to avoid this with a trust?
Then you have to pay half in income tax, which leaves you with 1.5% to live off of each year. That's just $44,000 year to be split between you and your siblings, spouse, and children.
but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
I don't see why it's a problem.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
Why do East Asian restaurants have such massive menus?
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Not if your neighbourhood is a grid.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
Your simple faith in this religion of the free market is touching, I have to say. There's an argument that the instances in the original post are indeed over-regulation for the sake of it, but to put it all on the free market is optimistic in the extreme.
If it were faith, I wouldn't be asking for reasons why it might not work. I don't think you're quite going this far, but there's this really common and very annoying thing that a lot of people do where, if you express any kind of belief that markets ever work, you're accused of being a free market fundamentalist. It's a subject on which people struggle to see nuance and seem to default to gesturing vaguely at market failures which they've heard exist but can never explain why any given case is one.
Every insurance company has its own licensing body? Multiple licensing bodies? Or in effect a monopoly? Any common standard, or LicenzRUz gives you one if you can turn the ignition on, nothing more required (and the insurance companies that take this licence then charge you out the nose for coverage) while Rules Rule Inc. ask for your family medical history three generations back?
Competition and choice would be great, but we can't do worse than the current monopoly.
Law cases even more lucrative for lawyers as the survivors of person killed in crash by "minimum requirements only" licence holder fight it out with the insurers, and judges have to rule on whether the driver was adequately licenced or not?
Why would it matter whether the driver was licensed? The compensation would be based on the harm caused and who was at fault. Why would this be any more difficult than it is already?
This is where we get things like "Jet's Law" in the first place, and the subsequent over-reach.
How so?
Adjusting the free market grave by grave may be one way of doing it, but I think most people would prefer a less final method than "Okay, fifty thousand extra deaths due to lax licence rules, pressure on insurers to put pressure on third party bodies to tighten up their requirements".
I'm not following this at all. What do you mean by "final"? Why would there be an increase in deaths? Why would there be any kind of grave-by-grave adjustment of the free market?
Whatever way you do it, the government is going to get dragged in by cases such as led to Jet's Law. After all, the 'free market' allowed the epileptic driver to operate a vehicle, and it was the consequences of that which involved the government:
Why would the government get dragged in?
I don't think there's anything at all wrong with what she did. If they really needed the bike, they could have paid for it, including paying her to give up the bike she rightfully rented. They were deliberately circumventing the intention of the free period limit - why is there any free period at all by the way? - so I don't see why they should feel entitled to the bikes. They're trying to do something the system is clearly designed to not allow them to do.
I don't think we need to play sympathy games to figure out who deserves the bike more based on pregnancy status, sex, age, race, tiredness, or who got there first. We have a system for allocating the bikes and she followed that system to get the bike over someone who was trying to exploit the system to get something for free. We also have an even older and better established system for getting something that legally belongs to someone else. It's called trade. You can pay for something with money.
I agree that the narrative that they ganged up on her to take a bike that was already in her possession is false, but she is still completely in the right.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Why aren't car manufacturers raising their prices? Prices for used cars have doubled and there is a shortage of new cars because prices are too low, causing ridiculously long waiting periods. Dealerships are reportedly trying to raise prices but manufacturers don't want them to. Why do the manufacturers care and why don't they just raise prices themselves and increase their profits?
Glassnoser
7d ago
Don't all countries with legal systems based on the English common law have freedom of speech?
Glassnoser
27d ago
That is still really vague. I am talking about people who want to restrict immigration based on race. What would that actually mean? Once they can answer that, we can talk about whether that actually makes sense, whether it could work, how it would be done, and whether there are better ways of achieving those goals. White nationalists don't seem to want to do any of those things. But they are decisions they would eventually have to make.
I'm going on a 3.5 hour drive tomorrow to get to the centre of the path of totality for the solar eclipse. I have the solar glasses. I have solar binoculars and regular binoculars. I know about shadow bands and am thinking of bringing something to make them easier to see. Is there anything else I should do to take full advantage of it that I'm probably not thinking of? How hard are shadow bands to see? I saw videos of people using white sheets to see them. I'll probably be on a beach if that matters.
UPDATE: I saw the shadow bands in the snow. They were very faint at first but very clear right before the eclipse. Overall, an amazing experience and totally worth the trip. It's hard to describe the impression it made. A few minutes before the eclipse, it got noticeably darker, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Then, very quickly, it's as dark as night with a full moon, and you can suddenly see this back orb where sun was a moment ago, ringed with bright light and extraordinary white whisps of still smoke coming out of it. I am not a religious person, but angelic is best descriptor that comes to mind.
A couple I know is doing IVF. They have the embryos already but they aren't implanted. I suggested they select the one to implant using genetic testing which a few companies offer at wildly varying costs. Does it really work? Are there downsides? If it can do what's advertised, it would seem to be worth the cost, which is several thousand dollars at most.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Why does that mean it's bad for it to be indulged?
Most Canadians sound similar to most Americans, but there are Newfoundlanders who sound like they're from Ireland.
Can you really not recognize a strong New York accent or southern US accent? These are very distinct.
My impression is that there is a larger average difference between the French spoken in Canada and the French spoken France than there is between the English spoken in North America and the English spoken in England.
Mapping accents to class in North America is easy. The higher class you are, the closer your accent is to a general North American accent that you hear in movies and on TV. The lower class you are, the closer it is to the strongest version of your regional accent.
The number of walkable destinations does not increase with the square of the distance. It increases linearly until you're halfway to the maximum distance and then it decreases linearly.
Imagine a grid of grocery stores each half a mile apart. For each grocery store, there is a half mile by half mile square area that is closer to it than to any other grocery store. Each corner of this area is a quarter mile in each direction from the grocery store.
Now we can divide this area into four squares and use the average distance from the grocery store to a point within one of the squares as the average distance from the grocery store to a point within the larger area, because it's symmetrical.
Now, split the square into two triangles, with one triangle containing the grocery store and the other containing the point farthest from the grocery store. The square is symmetrical with respect to the diagonal line dividing the two triangles, so we know that the distance from the grocery store to any point on that diagonal line is equal to the average distance from the grocery store to any point within the square.
Since you can only travel in a direction that is parallel or perpendicular to the lines connecting the points of the grid, the distance to any point on this line is a quarter mile. So the average distance from a grocery store to any point closer to that grocery store than any other is a quarter mile.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Grabby aliens are likely not very Godlike and would not want to give us the same Godlike power. They just want our resources. They're probably just going to come and kill us.
Glassnoser
21d ago
This is not correct. Where are you getting your information?
Glassnoser
1mo ago
It seems that most of the work that real estate agents do is finding clients. How does that work? If I want to sell my house, it's not hard to find a real estate agent. I can contact one in two minutes. For real estate agents to be spending so much effort finding clients, there has to be a large pool of people who want to sell their houses but for some reason don't have real estate agents yet. How can that be? What are real estate agents actually doing?
Glassnoser
3mo ago
How can Texas physically prevent the border patrol from entering Texas? Texas doesn't have border control between it and other states, and wouldn't part of the border patrol already be in Texas anyway?
This is politically impossible. Canadians have a very strong national identity which is based at its core - and on little else - on not being American. Remember, it's the only country in the world that was actually founded in direct opposition to the principles on which the US was founded. The entire point of Canada, for its entire history, has been to not be part of the United States. Furthermore, the Canadian population has been heavily selected over 250 years for people who don't want to be Americans. So despite the cultural similarities, most Canadians very much don't want to be part of the United States.
Most Canadians don't appreciate how much richer the US is, and those who do, mostly think it's only the very richest who are better off. They falsely believe that the average person is richer in Canada.
There are also constitutional issues. Quebec's language laws would violate the first amendment, and nothing is more important to French speaking Quebeckers than protecting their language. They would far sooner become independent than give up control over what language speak in order to join the US.
Our gun control laws would violate the second amendment, and most Canadians have no interest in giving up their safety in order to have that right. There are lots of Canadians who like to hunt and are upset and some of the recent changes to the gun laws, but there is nothing like the broad support that the second amendment has among American conservatives. The gun situation in the US is seen by most Canadians as crazy. and it would be top of mind in any discussion about joining the US.
Canada's talented engineers (who also conveniently speak English) can easily move to the US and find jobs, instead of trying to kickstart some mini Canadian engineering industry that competes with Silicon Valley
Most Canadians wouldn't see this as a good thing and would prefer to keep them here where they can support our local industry.
American Oil companies can help develop Canada's massive oil deposits and other natural resources, which cost a lot to develop and would benefit from economics of scale
Is there something preventing them from doing this now? The environmentalist movement is very strong in Canada, and outside Alberta, most people don't actually want the oil industry to be further developed.
Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US, instead of being this one persecuted minority in Canada with a chip on its shoulder
Quebec isn't persecuted in any way and has much more autonomy than it would as part of the United States, in particular, regarding laws on language usage and immigration. It would also face more pressure to assimilate into anglophone culture. Canada has a lot of federal laws enforcing bilingualism in the rest of the country. These wouldn't exist if it were part of the US, and Quebec's exposure to anglophone culture would increase. Quebec also receives large subsidies from the richer parts of the country as part of Canada's equalization payment system, which the US doesn't have.
It would also lose its ability to separate. US states don't have the right to secede, whereas in Canada, it is not clear, but they likely can if there is enough support among the province's residents. Quebec separatism may be dormant, but francophone Quebeckers do not really see themselves as Canadian and it's quite possible Quebec will try to separate again in the future if it's relationship with the rest of Canada worsens. It would not want to give up that option.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
So being a recent graduate is a bad time to date?
Glassnoser
5mo ago
I really don't get why the link alone isn't enough to start the discussion.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
What does it mean for land to be stolen in this context? We don't have any agreed upon system for deciding what country owns any given land in Israel or Palestine.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
I've never heard of a job that doesn't ask for a resumé. Even minimum wage jobs ask for resumés.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
Specifically, Chinese restaurants in Canada.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
I've read elsewhere that the FDIC will make sure they have access to their deposits by Monday. But failing that, I don't understand why a company couldn't open a bank account at another bank on Monday and take out a loan.
Why is it inherently bad?
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