ObjectivityIncarnate

That is one horrendous logo, lol

Not quite. 🤓 Humans and monkeys are both primates.

Is reading the abstract at the very beginning really that much of a burden?

are there even any counterexamples?

Actually, there are a large number of billionaires whose primary assets are literally property.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2023/10/04/the-richest-real-estate-billionaires-in-america-2023/

I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people’s homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.

But the real question is, do you think they should be? 'Cause I’m with you if you say no. Unrealized gains should not be taxed at all, it makes no sense.

He does take an income ($100k, very modest compared to others even in the same company: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-warren-buffett-only-gets-174730982.html ).

And why shouldn’t he continue to own things that are becoming more valuable over time, exactly?

• Property taxes are not levied federally, but on the state level
• Buffett pays property tax too

Not sure what point you were trying to make here, lol. There is no type of unrealized gain that “normal people” are taxed on (federally or otherwise), but Buffett isn’t.

My “true tax rate” is a low single digit number too, if you measure it the same way, and I make ~$50k a year.

It’s extremely disingenuous to talk about taxes paid as a percentage of income, and as a percentage of total wealth/net worth, in the same breath, as if they are anywhere near the same thing.

It’s also extremely disingenuous to say someone is ‘avoiding tax’ by not paying tax on their unrealized gains in net worth. He doesn’t OWE any tax on that. NOBODY in the US does.

This is like calling someone a draft dodger, who was never drafted, lol.

deriving income from loans

lol

Yeah no except billionaires do exactly the thing you just said, that you already explained anyone can do, proving your point

ok

Billionaires do nothing different than anyone who takes out a HELOC on a house that appreciates in value at a rate higher than the LOC.

No one “ruined” anything or “played games”, you’re just ignorant of what’s actually being done. If your collateral happens to be something that appreciates in value faster than your loan balance does, you can do the exact same thing.

Small business loans are also all basically predicated on the exact same premise: “loan me this upfront money I need, and I can use it to make enough money to pay you back and then some”. The only difference is that I’m that case, the ‘thing that becomes more valuable’ is being created, it’s not something that exists already that’s growing in value.

loans collateralized on capital assets are treated as income under this model

As soon as someone unironically suggests that loans should be considered income, under any circumstances, you can safely stop listening to their economics takes, lol.

republikkklown

Grow up, please, lol.

The only way to fight this is to raise the minimum wage to something that is livable for the average worker.

Then what do you do when only the Amazons and Walmarts of the world with the deepest pockets can afford that, and small business basically ceases to exist, as a result? People talk a lot about ‘if you can’t pay a livable wage you don’t deserve to be in business’, but the same people also complain about monopolies and lack of choice at the same time. How do you propose this be reconciled?

Also, no one’s ever going to be able to begin to enforce a “living wage”, even if they wanted to, until that wage is given a concrete definition–at the very least, a formula with variables to account for cost of living differences across the country. Until then, all this clamoring for a “living wage” is completely pointless.

Labor is the source of all profit. How would the company make money if no one did anything?

Charge the customer more for the finished product than what it cost to produce it. Obviously.

The simple fact is that if employees were a source of profit, businesses would all try to hire as many people as they possibly could, because not doing so would literally be leaving money on the table for no reason. But obviously that is not what goes on. When a business is in trouble financially, what’s more common, a hiring freeze, or a hiring spree?

I understand it’s a joke, but it’s a poorly-formed joke that exposes its writer not understanding the thing they’re riffing on, lol.

Would be kind of like making a joke based on a stereotype of NBA players mostly being redheads, with no such stereotype existing, lol.

randomly generated words

The hypothetical monkeys don’t type words, though. They type characters at random.

This is pretty dumb, the whole point of the monkey with typewriters thing is that they’re typing random characters, not knowing the language.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only reason I know of for cis kids to use puberty blockers is as a measure against the condition precocious puberty, which basically means the body is going into puberty too soon.

If that’s correct, then this isn’t really a good argument, because using drugs to delay premature puberty until its ‘normal time’ is very different from delaying ‘normal time’ puberty to a future ‘late time’–the latter moves the body into an abnormal state, while the former movies out out of one.

Isn’t that kind of like arguing that because we’ve been using blood thinners successfully for a long time (leaving out that it’s used primarily on people who are prone to blood clots to treat that condition), that there’s definitely no harm in prescribing blood thinners to people with regular blood?

making massive profits off the work of their employees.

Labor is a cost, not a source of profit, what kind of moronic statement is this? If employees were a source of profit, the notion of downsizing would never exist–why would a company ever lay anyone off, if workers create more value than their wage?

Even the founder of Costco (only stepped down as CEO a few years ago), a company famous both for how well it treats its customers, and its workforce?