International users that have Advanced Protection enabled would in theory be safe from all of the 3-letter agencies (like safe from those agencies getting the data from Apple...not safe generally).
Realistically we are talking about FISA here, so in theory if the FBI gets a FISA court order to gather "All of the Apple account data" for a non-us person, Apple would either hand over the encrypted data OR just omit that....
Based on the stance Apple is taking here, its reasonable to assume they would do the same in the US (disable the feature if USG asked for a backdoor or attempted to compel them to decrypt)
It's worth pointing out that just because the FBI didn't have the access they wanted, it doesn't mean that other agencies don't, or that the FBI couldn't get the data they wanted by other means (which was exactly what they ended up doing in that specific case). It just means that they wanted Apple to make it easier for them to get the data.
It's good that Apple refused them, but I wouldn't count that as evidence that the data is secure from the US government.
It's also worth noting that the US courts have long held that computer code is speech.
Apple's legal argument that the government's demand that they insert a backdoor into iOS was tantamount to compelled speech (in violation of the first amendment) was going over a little too well in court.
The Feds will often find an excuse to drop cases that would set a precedent they want to avoid.
Would your answer be the same if this encrypted data was stored in China instead of US?
I don't think messages should ever leave the device, if you want to migrate to a different device this could be covered by that user flow directly. Maybe you want to sync media like photos or videos shared on a group chat and I'm fine with that compromise but I see more risks than benefits on backing up messages on the cloud, no matter if it's encrypted or not.
I think the average human will disagree with you. They want to preserve their data and aren't technically competent and organized enough to maintain their own backups with locally hosted hardware. Even the technically literate encourage _offsite_ backups of your data.
Know your threat model and what actions your trying to defend against.
Typical humans need trusted vendors that put in actual effort to make themselves blind to your personal data.
Yes, a large percentage of of the consulting / services business that you would know the name of are organized like this. For services / consulting it makes a lot of sense.
I mean he has a point. Things are incredibly complex now adays, I don't think most people have time to "understand the system."
I would be much more interested in rules that don't start with that... Like "Rules for debugging when you don't have the capacity to fully understand every part of the system."
Bisecting is a great example here. If you are Bisecting, by definition you don't fully understand the system (or you would know which change caused the problem!)
Not really, the more textures you can put into memory the faster they can do their thing.
PC gamers would say that a modern mid-range card (1440p card) should really have 16GB of vram. So a 5060 or even a 5070 with less than that amount is kind of silly.
FYI, this POSIWID concept has been heavily thought about, researched, reasoned, etc. within the cybernetics (or whatever you want to call it) community.
I am not going to do it justice, but the bottom line is that systems get complex very very fast (n! factorial complexity). Cyberniticians (or Stafford Beer at least) reason that we should just treat these systems as black boxes (and examine their inputs / outputs) as any attempt to explain or rationalize the inner working of the system itself (as you are trying to do) will never go well (again because of the complexity).
The Reddit /accounts were talking about this earlier this week and I think most of them had a pretty reasonable take.
1. If one uses an asset as collateral for a loan (be it stock or whatever else), for tax purposes treat that asset as sold, then immediately repurchased at the same price.
2. From there all of the usual tax laws can apply.
So in theory this should get at the core of the actual problem, while avoiding at lot of the messiness of taxing un-realized gains.
It's not perfect, but I think it helps align incentives well. Whoever is lending the money probably wants to know the value of the collateral. Lender and borrower are now both incentivized to come up with the real value at the time of the loan.
So small business can't take out loans unless they can realize and be taxed on the full valuation of their company immediately? As much as I can appreciate the goal, this is absurd.
This is not about businesses taking out businesses loans. It’s about the owners of businesses using their shares as collateral for loans.
Most small business owners probably can’t even do this, because banks won’t accept their shares as collateral. So in a sense you could say this would even the playing field between big and small business.
Because income tax started as only targeting people making $3,000 a year, which was the top ~40% of earners in 1913. Once the door to a new government power is unlocked, it never closes it only gets more open.
> Once the door to a new government power is unlocked, it never closes it only gets more open.
I don't think "slippery slope" is a reasonable defense here, especially with the situation you're using as an example. The top 40% of earners is a lot of people, and pretty close to the number of people that pay positive income taxes today (50% of earners pay 97% of taxes). The slope you're using as an example doesn't look very slippery, especially given that 100+ years of the US changing completely has happened in the meantime.
Slippery slope arguments are absolutely legitimate when (a) dealing with policy proposals in relation to difference from a perceived "normal" situation, (b) discussing issues in which factions that wish to push the status quo toward an extreme endpoint manifestly exist and exert influence, and/or (c) there's a demonstrable history of incremental expansion of similar policies' scope and effects in evidence.
The unsaid half of the example, which I assumed was understood for people on HN, was that income tax was initially presented as a small tax on the very well off which now impacts almost every earning American.
Judging by the timeline, it seemed like initial low rates had more to do with it being a new system, and less to do with some kind if "we will only do this to the rich" promise.
Also, they tried implementing income taxes previously, had it struck down by supreme court, then all the states got together to pass an amendment to allow income taxes. So, it was a pretty strongly supported change.
Honestly, I can get on board with "government tends to only grow in scope" point of view, I just don't think income taxes illustrate that point at all.
That’s playing all sorts of games with the numbers, from 1917 the $2K threshold (50k in 2024) was at 2% tax rate with the top rate being 15% at $2m pa of 1917 dollars so ~$50m pa today.
1) Effective taxes aren't much different today. A married couple with no kids will pay < 5% on 50k. FICA is what makes it higher, so not exactly apples to apples.
2) You're choosing 1917, pre changes, to paint an inaccurate picture. Top rate went from 15% to 67% that year, and 77% the year after. Almost double today's top rate.
What happened was, we introduced a revenue system, and have changed it over time, often dramatically, as the country's needs have changed, both raising and lowering rates. We haven't gone down some crazy spiral of ever increasing tax rates. If anything, the tax situation for the rich has gotten better over time, not worse.
I choose 1917 because it's both old - the point of this exercise - and right after a lowering of the band $3K to $2K and increased taxes in response to WWI. WWI was quite a dramatic event.
I'm not sure what you're arguing - that it changed dramatically or that it has not changed dramatically. If you're arguing it has changed dramatically then I guess we are in agreement.
You should also note that 1917 was prior to the introduction of sales taxes (1921) and social security taxes (1937). Looking at only federal income tax paints an rather incomplete picture when looking at total tax burdens.
"A married couple with no kids will pay < 5% on 50k" I assume they're dual filing for the 50K so 25K on average? The lower %16 percent of the population. A weird number to pick.
> I'm not sure what you're arguing - that it changed dramatically or that it has not changed dramatically.
Im arguing that the original comment, that income taxes weren't originally intended to be what they are today, or it was some kind of bate and switch, or slow bleeding, that led us to today. That was my read of thread parent anyway.
> You should also note that 1917 was prior to the introduction of sales taxes (1921) and social security taxes (1937). Looking at only federal income tax paints an rather incomplete picture when looking at total tax burdens.
We aren't arguing about total tax burden, we are arguing that a new kind of tax will/won't necessarily be abused and changed post introduction. Those three tax vectors prove that they won't be if anything, as they haven't changed much since introduction either.
>A married couple with no kids will pay < 5% on 50k" I assume they're dual filing for the 50K so 25K on average? The lower %16 percent of the population.
1) Most households were single income in 1917.
2) 50k was inflation adjusted equivalent to numbers that I was responding to. I didn't pick it at random, I chose it to show things hadn't changed much.
I don't think "everyone" is talking about small businesses. Only people with an axe to grind against the legislation, who trot out "Small Business" to play the sympathetic victim.
Yes. It's very common to collateralize a loan with the total assets of the company, and often with personal guarantee on top of this for small LLCs without significant assets or credit history.
I do not see in the article where it says the loan has to be used for personal expenses. In fact from what I can tell it just says unrealized gains will be taxed regardless of whether a loan is taken out or not. The loan example is just used as a justification.
In response to "If one uses an asset as collateral for a loan" you wrote "So small business can't take out loans unless they can realize and be taxed on the full valuation of their company".
The comment was about using assets as collateral for loans. Your response was about something else - or maybe it was not about anything, I'm not sure.
A company can also get asset-backed loans using as collateral something the company owns - or it can get a completely different kind of loan where there is no specific asset used as guarantee.
Maybe it’s just a marketing problem then and it should be called asset collateral tax rather than unrealized gain tax, which on the face of it sounds kind of stupid.
How does this interact with something trivial like remortgaging a house?
Say I bought a house for 100k, cash. Now it's worth 200k. I want to take another 50k mortgage on it. Do I realize cap gains on 25% of my house, i.e. an increase of value on 25k to 50k, and then I'm liable for cap gains on 25k? At 20% say, that's 5k tax. Unpleasant for sure, but doesn't seem out of proportion.
Yeah, I agree with this take. I think making an issue of unrealized gains isn't the real story here. Using unrealized gains/assets as collateral is the way the ultra-wealthy avoid large swaths of income tax.
I see two reasonable paths forward for taxing using assets as collateral:
1. Treat it as a sale and repurchase (as you described) and transform capital gains into a progressive system
2. Treat the sale as earning income for purposes of using the traditional income tax brackets.
Either way, you don't get into a weird speculative tax gray area. Rather it's when the ultra wealthy want cash-on-hand that they incur some kind of income tax penalty. Maybe even put in a reasonable exemption ($25-100k/year) that doesn't trigger tax so that middle class households aren't hamstrung by this.
>...Using unrealized gains/assets as collateral is the way the ultra-wealthy avoid large swaths of income tax.
There are many web sites that claim this, but are there any actual reliable stats on how many lifetime loans are being given out? It is common to make short terms based on using stocks, etc as collateral. But how common is it to have a lender be ok with either deferring interest for decades until the person dies or continually giving new loans out to cover the interest (on paper at least)? Doing a quick search, I have not found one stat on how many lifetime loans like this are actually being done. There is a treasury department page claiming that about 160 billion dollars in unrealized gains are not being taxed, but that isn't talking about stock being used as collateral, that is talking about simply the value of assets increasing - that is entirely different. (If unrealized nominal gains should be taxed, should decreases in the value of assets lead to a tax refund?)
According to this:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-sell-5-billion-185...
Bezos has sold around $13.4 billion in stock in 2024. If he could easily avoid millions (maybe billions) of dollars of capital gains tax by this one simple technique, why wouldn't he have?
One of the reasons I think politics is ok with income tax being where it is, is that the wealthy can currently avoid most of it. The wealthy can bring their money to bear to influence politics again to both broaden the scope so that the tax is more universally disliked and to create another carve out for themselves. Or at the very least situate themselves to benefit from government largess so that new taxes funding new spending is a net benefit for them.
My main concern is that it puts the government in a position to greatly benefit from inflation, even more so than it does now, and inflation will be the hidden tax that hurts the poor.
I would say it's not that "young workers aren't interested in being machinists" it's more of "Society has not incentivized young workers enough to want to become machinists."
It's probably a combination of things (high schools telling every student they need to go to college, wages too low to attract new talent, other things?), but there is a low chance in my mind that 16-25 year olds are not interested in working with their hands.
The DIY / Hobbyist community has never been larger or more available. High school robotics is bigger than ever, 3D-printing and related things are very popular....
At the same time high schools have cut a lot of this stuff out of their curriculum. I mean, no more woodshop, no more metal work. And it's not like these kids can go home and work on their car. Cars these days are too complex for that.
The whole period of time forcing the idea that everyone must go to college has come home to roost. At the same time trade schools were panned while also filled with scam schools. Some people just do not need/want the full rounded education nor the expense of it all.
The worthless college degrees are the "gee, math is hard" ones.
At Caltech, you could get a soft degree, but you still had to pass 3 years of math, 2 years of physics, and 1 year of chemistry. There weren't any "weeder" versions of them, either.
P.S. I could work the quantum mechanics problems, but was uncomfortable because I didn't understand QM. Years later I learned that nobody understands QM, they just know the math works :-)
