> Well positioned to take over VR if it becomes a thing.
This is an incredibly generous way to admit that Meta failed their pivot to VR and they will probably never recoup the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on it.
I was curious so tried running my own numbers. TL;DR I find it’s about 34.5%-43.5% for a single person earning $100k-$300k in SF. So taxes would have to rise half again to hit that 60% claim.
According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#QL3tlUFIae, it’s an effective tax rate of 28.3% for federal/state/local income tax for someone making $100k in SF. For $300k, effective tax rate is 38.13%.
So, for each gross dollar, you have 71.7¢ net after income tax, which gets taxed 8.63% on purchases, about another 6.19¢, bringing that original dollar’s purchasing power down to about 65.5¢ for a $100k/yr earner. At $300k, this goes to 61.87¢-5.34¢=56.53¢.
Edit: I don’t think I’m calculating the sales tax burden correctly, but don’t see my error yet. Would I just subtract the 8.63¢/$? That’d make the combined tax rate 36.3%-46.76%.
$1.3M. Paying $600k in federal+state. Then sales tax is another ~10% on what's left. That brings me to earning 48c on every dollar, so not a 60% tax but a 52% tax which is still damn egregious given that I had better roads and most public services in Florida (0% income tax) than I have had here in California. I know people that have moved to other 0% states that feel similarly.
BTW, I am not "rich." I still can't afford a house in CA. My income last year was a temporary fluke due to RSU inflation. So meanwhile billionaires get away, regular W-2s like me get squeezed by both the working class and the billionaires.
Taxes are largely a waste and a scam. I have seen firsthand how government contractors overcharge absolutely scam the American people. Millions of dollars charged for a shitty Python script written in a day. Screws selling for $80 each. We do not need to pay as much as we do. Years of "small" increases have made people complacent to the point where losing half our income to some bureaucratic black hole is seen as acceptable.
There is no need for exact numbers. I'm mostly interested in your tax bracket and effective federal and state rates. It sounds like you had a good year with a one-time payment that couldn't be classified as long-term gains, virtually no expenses, and you are probably filing as a single. That's the only way those numbers can make sense. Do you think this one-time fluke puts you at odds and you are being "squeezed by the working class"? Do you think your fluke-year taxes are representative? Do we really have a country or a CA-wide problem with 60% tax? Is there anything that you, or your company, could have done to better plan for this event?
> ...52% tax which is still damn egregious given that I had better roads and most public services in Florida (0% income tax)
Hmm, I live in Southern Florida. Full time. It has the shittiest roads of any place in the US I have been and some of the highest fatality rates to go with.
Highways look like someone ran a snow plow at full speed, turning what were once scattered potholes into a continuous network of trenches making their own interstate.
This is in a state without cold weather, ice, or snow...
There are many non-0 income tax states that have vastly superior roads than FL. Does this prove anything about taxes?
I am fully onboard with how we should be tamping down on contractors overcharging. The same as I think universities are overcharging to capture government-guaranteed school loans. But neither of those makes me think the idea of taxes or school loans are bad ideas, per se. We need better accountability, but then there’s a cost to that, too…
> My income last year was a temporary fluke due to RSU inflation
In other words, you won the lottery and still have the gall to complain that it wasn’t higher. Stock equity is called monopoly money for a reason.
I filtered the current zillow results for houses in california below $700k and got nearly 22k hits, including plenty in the east bay (no idea where you actually live, i’m just sticking to the SFBA as one of the most expensive areas to live with high tech employment potential). I think what you meant to say is you can’t afford to pay cash to outright own the ideal home you want. That’s not how it works.
You go on to complain about billionaires “getting away” and sure, they should be paying more to reach a fair share in my opinion, but you are simply out of touch if you don’t think that receiving a net sum of $700k in one year isn’t a completely life changing amount of money. That’s 33 years living at the single-person poverty income level, at which about 37 million people live in the US.
I really don’t think you’re going to get much sympathy on that from anyone except that billionaire class (and their wannabes) you seem to detest, so you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, there.
Next year, the highest federal tax rate will be around 40%. The highest state income tax is 13%. I guess if you factor in sales tax, and various soft taxes, you could get pretty close, but yeah. Seems exaggerated.
Oh boy. Tax brackets are incremental. Most people in the 40% bracket will not pay anywhere near 40%. There is a theoretical possibility that someone, who's income exceeds the highest bracket MANY times will have an effective tax rate approaching 40%. But in reality people with that kind of income derive their earnings from sources that are taxed in a very different way such as long-term gains.
According to that, corporate taxes are passed through at a rate of .24. And the pass-thru decreases as there’s more competition and for cheaper goods. In other words it’s a fairly progressive tax. Tariffs are a 100% pass-thru by definition because they’re a sales tax. This hits lower income people the hardest (unless we only tariff luxury goods).
Aren’t terrifs paid by the importer? Most consumers aren’t importing goods afaik. So it seems like there are still margins that can be eaten into to avoid 100% pass through.
I'm all for the TikTok ban but listening to your last argument a reasonable opponent might notice that:
1. You assume others play dirty by default, even though we never caught them red-handed. Not necessarily unreasonable, but see 2.
2. You assume we play fair even when we are caught red-handed. You rationalize it with "it only goes to show this was the exception and look what happened after". Spoiler alert, nothing happened after, neither the courts nor public opinion shit it down.
You have to admit these two are a little inconsistent to say the least.
> Proponents of small functions argue that you don't have to read more than the signature and name of a function to understand what it does;
Although this is often the case, the style of the program can change things significantly. Here are a few, not so uncommon, examples where it starts to break down:
1. When you’re crafting algorithms, you might try to keep code blocks brief, but coming up with precise, descriptive names for each 50-line snippet can be hard. Especially if the average developer might not even fully understand the textbook chapter behind it.
2. At some point you have to build higher than "removeLastElementFromArray"-type of functions. You are not going to get very far skimming domain-specific function names if don’t have any background in that area.
More examples exist, but these two illustrate the point.
Both examples stem from not understanding the problem well enough I think. My best work is done when I first write a throwaway spaghetti solution to the problem. Only through this endeavour do I understand the problem well enough to effectively decompose the solution.
My point is that the factoring and abstractions one produce after the spaghetti intermezzo will be better than a blind stab at them; a greater understanding of the problem helps.
Agree that intermezzos - even of the spaghetti kind - help understanding.
I thought this thread was more about (non) maintainability of code consisting of many procedures for each of which names are to be found that will make their usage self-explaining.
From my experience, simple API's with complex and often long implementations can be very well suited. As long as those are low on side effects and normally DRY, as opposed to puristicly DRY.
That's always been my understanding as well. I recall some cases in the last few years where this resulted in quite a bit of the funds being recovered.
Are you saying that there will be a large number of Starships on duty for immediate launch to deploy kill vehicles over an arbitrary area in space over and around the US? I'm no expert but this sounds pretty different form what Starship is designed to do. And not cheap at all.
I think u/credit_guy means that with Starship the U.S. could put a constellation of anti-missile missiles in orbit and keep them there for the long haul. If Falcon 9 can put up 5,500 sats in a few years, Starship could greatly increase the rate at which the U.S. can build not just comms constellations but also reconnaissance ("spy") constellations, missile defense constellations, anti-sat constellations, maybe even nuke constellations, who knows.
I suspect that missile defense constellations would have to be truly gargantuan though, because of some N thousand missile defense sats most will not be able to reach the missiles being launched at any given point, thus to counter a 1,000 ICBM/SLBM threat the missile def constellation might have to have 20x -maybe even 100x- that many space-launched anti-missile missiles. That seems prohibitively expensive even if internal Starship launch costs ever come down below $5 million each.
When we moved to the US with two babies last year it was very important for us to buy non-toxic furniture. We ended up buying a sofa and chairs from Medley. Their products are made in LA out of wood and are free of formaldehyde, flame retardants, and PFAS. It's been only a year but it looks like the furniture is going to last.
This is an incredibly generous way to admit that Meta failed their pivot to VR and they will probably never recoup the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on it.