Oh, let's not with my country. We're also the only nation in the world that requires its abroad citizens to pay the same tax rates domestic citizens pay, and only offers a credit-basis for exempting income that you paid taxes on to the country you reside in.
It's the reason nearly all US citizens who move overseas eventually give up their citizenship. My great aunt left for Poland 30 years ago, and renounced her citizenship within 3 years because she was paying taxes on everything she earned twice, one under Polish law and again under US law.
The US doesn't care about your other nationalities. If you have citizenship or permanent residency in the US you need to file taxes (though despite what the other poster is saying, you may not actually need to pay any taxes).
If the nations have a tax treaty, you are usually not double taxed on income below some threshold. Last I checked, it was around the first $100k or so worldwide income, for US taxes anyway. After that, you are taxed at some rate, but I’m not sure if it is reduced at all or how different forms of income may affect this.
I believe the threshold, which is basically a big deduction, always applies if you meet the criterion (living outside the US). Tax treaties come into effect regarding whatever income you have beyond your deductions.
Good points. I should note that my foreign income was taxed and paid in the jurisdiction in which I earned it, so if you are not liable to pay foreign taxes on foreign income, you may not get the deduction advantages of a tax treaty to offset your US tax liability on worldwide income, as the intent is to not double tax. If you weren’t taxed on that income yet, the US may hold a tax liability on any and all income not already taxed, and it may be taxed a second time if said income exceeds limits.
That’s how I understand it, anyway. I hope to be corrected if I’m inaccurate as this is not my area of expertise.
Can it also not require Apple to get a 30% cut when we buy something from within an app, like... oh, IDK, a Fortnite skin? Because I think requiring us to tack on a 30% tax or for the devs to take a 30% loss on something Apple has nothing to do with is also unacceptable.
I don't know the direct answer, but I have a deduction in my head to work with...? I'll just put it out there: I think speed is deeply impacted by high-level frameworks that parse or compile at runtime. React Native is a framework on Android, which is a framework on Java, which compiles at runtime. IDK if anything in that chain compiles down to Assembly or machine code before you open an app made in React Native. That tied with the bloat of JIC background services sitting idle eats bandwidth. Garbage collection checks operate in a loop, checking again and again if all these unused but loaded processes still exist at their addresses. And when you pile those on each other, it seems relatively easy to see how modern CPUs don't seem much faster than chipsets from 5-6 years ago.
I stopped programming around 8 years ago because I hate the current MVC model most software is created and maintained with. What got me interested recently in dipping back in was a video on branchless programming. I love the idea of unit testing at the machine code level for efficiency, and then figuring out how to trick the compiler or runtime and the chipset into making quick, predictive outputs to reduce idling on branches or making 15 steps for something doable in as little as 4.
That feels like a completely opposing direction to take given the current priorities of engineers across almost all industries, even oldtime ones like Gaming.
In less time than it takes to read those papers, a tyranny would rise in place of whatever power it succeeds, and that would be insurmountable monopoly.
Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, but that's the issue: over time, people would adapt, not imminently. And the Tech executives would have far fewer barriers to implementing controls than the people would have the means to obstruct them.
I don't doubt for a second that Jeff Bezos would announce Amazon as a leader in "keeping us united as a society," while implementing a new policy in their warehouses that requires Safety teams to lash employees with a bamboo reed each hour if they have not met their rate.
The problem with anarchy, Libertarianism, socialism, communism, and so many similar-veined structures argued for is that these arguments so deeply idealize the end goal that they almost entirely are void of planned action during the transition.
We are physiologically engineered to take the path of least effort. Whatever minimal effort ensures the most survival. The downside to technology is an exponential drop in effort necessary for survival. We need look no further than how far off Reagan was about giving rich people more money in American capitalism (it worked until it snagged on steadily increased market instability, which has since caused massive crashes in 1987, 1996, 2001, and 2008, each time in different sectors and each time due to extremely risky and obviously absurd liability risks taken by the highest brackets of networth wherein any net loss on those decisions was guaranteed to be distributed, whereas any net benefit was guaranteed to be isolated in impact.) We can see this in social justice as well: Feminist organizers are struggling a lot right now after having envisioned a world where "misogyny" was eradicated, yet numbers across the board are going up... more sexual violence, more abuse, more online bullying, more conflicts with other civil rights' movements. The emphasis on a perfect vision has led some amazing women leading the movement to be targeted with abuse from other intersectional groups.
This is just a cursory perspective, and so much more nuance and detail is necessary to get a clear picture, but it is absolutely not as simple as saying, "Anarchy wants/doesn't want to abolish ___." Anarchy is one of a number of social philosophies that by nature are self-cannibalizing, and thereby illogical.
You're forgetting the real kingpins: the (ex?) military members who have the willpower, training and actual hardware to project the ultimate force - actual violence.
Your tech execs with all their modern technology can't do anything against a well trained, well organized group of people who will imprison or kill you if you don't do what they say. Or they can work together for an even worse dystopia.
That's anarchy. A few people will work out any issues with diplomacy, while most will band under some leaders and take what they want by force.
It's the same right now, except groups who have an oligopoly on violence (i.e. governments) are few and really big - everyone does what they say and in turn live in relative peace and decent conditions.
What you would get then is not a society that had evolved into anarchy by a natural process, and therefore had institutions appropriate to such a society. (Yes, a society that is a functioning anarchy will still have institutions. But none of them will have a monopoly on violence.)
What you would get instead would be a society that had evolved with a hierarchical set of centralized governments, which was then forcibly deprived of those governments, without restructuring all of the other institutions in the society that only exist in the first place because the society had centralized governments. Obviously this will be worse than either what we have now, or what we would have if we lived in a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process. But that is irrelevant to the question of whether a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process could be better than what we have now.
I think your opinion is irrelevant and based in ignorance of Islam and the values that a predominately Islamic society holds for its citizens. These are not easy or often flippant decisions made and/or accepted by people. But part of listening means accepting where you have a right to form opinions, to have them heard, and to feel entitled to them being relevant. This is not listening. This is you asserting a colonialist's supremacy on a culture that does not agree with your ethic. This same line of thinking is what led to the British invasions of Central Asia and Africa, that Indians were barbaric and Brits would bring the education and civil discipline to their land and improve their lives. Well, what good have yours and their Napoleon complexes left?
Huh? By the same token, India and rest of the world was invaded by Muslims in order to free them of pagan practices and bring them into Islam. This includes Pakistan.
Muslims(like most of the religions) are not foreign in asserting a colonialist's supremacy on cultures that do not agree with their ethics. Muslims(like all the religions)think they alone are right and the others are wrong...(i.e pagan, unbelivers etc) and seem to be willing to forcefully impose their fairy tales/doctrine.
>> I think your opinion is irrelevant
Even you seem to be a good representation of this kind attitude
Western people are usually surprised to find out that people actually have freedoms outside of America and Europe. They just often choose to sacrifice more egregious ones for communal good than not.
The freedom to harm others(i.e women) or restrict other people's freedoms(i.e what to install on my device, what books to read etc) is not really freedom
I made it two paragraphs before I remembered the preface of Google's code of conduct was stripped of the line "Don't be evil." It's now the last line, which to me reads as doing the ethical thing is an afterthought. The much more ambiguous "Do the right thing," is in Alphabet's corporate code.
We need the ethics of AI to be an offshoot of open source. It's tough to suggest that in an environment where enough people can pressure a group to adopt objectively unethical policies, but at the very least open source communities do not have the trigger of financial risk.
Google is going to need to make money from this "Ethics as a Service" eventually. And that is an obvious, all too obvious conflict of interest for what Google envisions.
Maybe they can do this. I'm not 100% objecting to the idea. But I'd like to suggest they start with YouTube. Ads on the platform have quadrupled since November 2019. Creators are playing a lottery with monetization every other upload, and they're making as little as 1-5% compared to YouTube's ad-share program 10 years ago. Start there.
As far as the ethics of AI goes, would "don't be evil" slogan be better than "do the right thing"?
I'm sure people may interpret things differently but doing the right thing would mean Google making AI that has a positive net impact on society, while "don't be evil" could simply mean good for Google but neutral to everyone else.
I feel bad, but then I remember that Aaron Swartz (created RSS, Markdown, and co-founded Reddit) committed suicide after federal charges would have put him in prison for life for stealing public grant-funded research papers from JSTOR at MIT.
I truly do not care about library theft at this point. Steal it all. There's nothing in their possession more important than a life, especially someone like Aaron, who had done so much good with his before he had even turned 18.
It is not, at all, the same kind of thief or library.
Old books are unique pieces and having them in library make them accesible to the largest number (digitalization being the obvious next step).
Stealing them and selling them to private collectors makes them inacessible to the public.
Academic papers are accesible as pdf provided by editors, they can trivially be copied and shared without making the originals less accesible.
Pirating them makes them more accesible and does not hurt the public (at least this is my belief, editors hold a different position).
Equating libraries that provide a public service with editors that restrict access to knowledge hurts more than it helps.
I stuck with Wells Fargo after their fraudulent account debacle, and I can attest first-hand that this will happen again, affect more people, and be only relatively as frustrating compared to the last big issue. It's when I look back on before that time that I decided to break with business after changes to Wells Fargo ACH policy in 2018.
In 2018, I was laid off, lost almost everything over five months. I had one bill on autopay that I eventually ran out of funds to pay. IIRC in June 2018, WF stopped denying repeat ACH attempts if, on the first two attempts, the funds were not available and/or WF would not choose to pay it and simply overdraw the account. Every single attempt would now process. On December 3, my account was at $490 when the $600 payment attempted, then again, and again, over and over, for 9 business days. My account was closed with a -$1,800+ balance. I lost count of the number of NSF fees by day four or five. And Wells Fargo decided to pay that payment upon closure of my account. So, I went from $490 on December 3, 2018, to owing almost $2,000 in fees to Wells Fargo two weeks later.
I'll pay it off when I can, as you know, it's still my debt, but while other banks were cutting fees, WF was changing its policies to ramp them up. I ended up in an unfortunate waltz of financial doom with them. And I had a low statistical risk of running into a problem with them because I used so few of their services. Don't leave it up to luck. When you see risky behavior, grab your money and go. They're willing to keep doing crap like this because they know most people think it would never happen to their personal accounts.
A similar thing happened to my wife, from the age of like 12 she had a wells fargo savings account, her mother would deposit $50 each time her father paid child support. It was supposed to be an account that when she graduated highschool and went off to college she would have some money for random things. She and I met during Junior year of high school, and moved in to a shitty apartment near her college at 18, thinking that she had some money to help with the deposit. I paid everything first, then she was going to pay me back.
Turns out her mother had been depositing the $50 each week automatically until she was about 17, but was also randomly over the years withdrawing nearly all of it. And at the time she went in, she was -$240 on the account, and they wouldn't allow her to close it until that was paid off, and they were going to continue feeing her $20 each month for having less than the required amount. By the time we finally had the income available to close the account it had accrued around $1000 in fees.
And yet, for some stupid reason, I am still with Wells Fargo today, 15 years on...
> And yet, for some stupid reason, I am still with Wells Fargo today, 15 years on...
Why?
I hate to rub salt in your wounds, but they have demonstrated that they are unworthy of your business. Acting on this would play a small part in forcing them to either change, or else go out of business.
When I was younger I worked for a wells fargo joint venture that did credit investigations related to mortgages. To this day I'm convinced that the way they set up their QA policy was deliberately designed to enable fraud. I most definitely would not do business with them.
Can we help you get out? I've personally opened accounts with all the popular online banks like Ally, SoFi, Simple, Schwab, Marcus, etc. If you have any questions I'd be very happy to help you leave WF. At the very least you'll have no account fees, way better customer service, and a decent interest rate.
I have bank accounts at almost every major bank in the US, including online banks, but WF is still my primary account. There are just so many services that do a direct debit that make it hard to switch off of. I use privacy for a lot of things now, but the handful of things that need direct debit I just use my wells fargo account.
I am sorry this happened to you, it seems when things get rough crap just all decides to pile on.
Long ago I stopped all auto payments from my checking account. I do the old fashion thing of paying each bill every month on a schedule. I don't really send checks, it is all via bill pay and I can schedule them out in advance so I only really do this twice a month.
This cascade of comments is missing the point. It's like someone is pointing out the darker shade of clouds at the horizon and saying, "I think a storm is coming," and everyone here is just going, "Well, it could also be nightfall. I mean, the night has to roll on in at some point too."
Yes, it's just an initial check. But is it necessary? What exactly is the use case basis for Apple transmitting and logging data on every application you run on an operating system you have a consumer guarantee of zero-tampering post-sale.
So, let's work this out: How easy is it to not upgrade macOS, retain consistent performance as usual, and not lose support if the userbase remains unsatisfied with Apple's change to an exchanged good? By my understanding, as with Windows 10, Apple will eventually require you to upgrade. If you're upgrading to a system that maintains the same performance and does not introduce express limitations to the product post-sale, that's great! Go for it, live merry. However, in this case, the userbase has zero clarification on both co-owned data transmission and a remote check that appears to trigger a constraint on workflow. There's no use case basis that makes sense for doing this, because Apple has established guarantees for decades prior to this new process that claim macOS is not susceptible to malware. So, it begs the question: Was Apple violating consumer protections by making false guarantees, or is Apple violating consumer protections by limiting the function and utility of the product post-sale?
That's what people are asking right now. We don't care about the nuance of the check. We care about the basic characteristics of, and more importantly the legitimacy of any use case for this check, given promises made to consumers at a prior time of purchase.
macOS is, in fact, susceptible to malware. (A notable example hit HN just the other day [1].) I don't think Apple has ever literally claimed that it isn't susceptible, though they may have sort of hinted at it (especially at the height of the "Get a Mac" campaign). To be fair, there has not been very much macOS malware then or now, though it's questionable how much that has to do with macOS's design as opposed to factors like the size of the target userbase.
As drawfloat pointed out, Apple doesn't have to explicitly guarantee no susceptibility to malware. The FTC Act considers anything from an Elon Musk tweet about flamethrowers to a casual joke at Apple's Keynote, and weighs whether a reasonable consumer would expect the product to reflect that claim. That doesn't mean implied guarantees are as easily prosecuted. But it does mean that when Tim Cook or Steve Jobs, or another named executive, is on stage and says something along the lines of, "We don't have the same problems as Windows," and a reasonable audience member understands he's referring to malware risk on macOS vs Windows, that's enough to say Apple has made a legal guarantee to the consumer. The law is open-ended like this because promises can look like anything, from outright printing FREE SAME-DAY SHIPPING to printing in an FAQ that most orders arrive within 7 days. If it wasn't cost prohibitive, you could actually file a small claim against, say, Amazon, for a two-day Prime delivery not arriving within two days.
The broader point though, is that Apple has established the belief that macOS is not susceptible to malware. That's why people don't "need" a virus scanner running in the background.
And this belief is widespread enough that it warrants questioning the basis of a use case for this check: Why does macOS need to send my data to a remote server upon initial load of each application to verify it with Apple's whitelist (approve-list? what's the right term these days?), if the operating system's existing protection has to date fulfilled the implied guarantee by CEO, Tim Cook, and former CEO, Steve Jobs, of zero or limited, but otherwise insignificant, exposure risk to malware?
It's the reason nearly all US citizens who move overseas eventually give up their citizenship. My great aunt left for Poland 30 years ago, and renounced her citizenship within 3 years because she was paying taxes on everything she earned twice, one under Polish law and again under US law.