blago (u/blago) - Readit News

blago commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter

xvector · 10 months ago

$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.

blago · 10 months ago

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?

blago commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter

xvector · 10 months ago

$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.

blago · 10 months ago

> ...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?

blago commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter

christophilus · 10 months ago

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.

blago · 10 months ago

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.

blago commented on AI Demos aidemos.meta.com/... · Posted by u/saikatsg

xvector · 10 months ago

What are you talking about? Insane YoY rev growth. Still on a hockey stick growth curve. Lower PE than Apple. Best FCF in the biz. Well positioned to take over VR if it becomes a thing. WhatsApp is ripe for monetization.

Talk to any staff+ eng at Meta in Ads and they will tell you there's a lot of low hanging fruit left. Sure the music will stop eventually (it always does) but there's no evidence that's soon.

People need to separate their hatred of Meta/Zuck from an objective analysis of the company. Meta has been and continues to be an amazing stock to own.

blago · 10 months ago

> 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.

blago commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter

xvector · 10 months ago

[flagged]

blago · 10 months ago

Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?

blago commented on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes nytimes.com/2025/02/21/up... · Posted by u/belter

jimmar · 10 months ago

1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis.

2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient.

3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.

4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.

blago · 10 months ago

> Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers

Never heard this argument before - it sounds very implausible. Do you have any studies or source for that claim?

blago commented on TikTok goes dark in the US techcrunch.com/2025/01/18... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

thisisnotauser · a year ago

This is actually a really great example, I wish I had included it in my original post.

Here, in response to a very public failure of our security apparatus, the US Congress passed a draconian law allowing the US government to do the kinds of bad things that Russia and China do routinely. When the public realized this, they made it clear that there is a limit to the power of the government, and that behavior was very quickly stopped. Forever.

The idea that there is a limit to the power of the government, and that the general public can enforce that limit, is what makes America different than China and Russia. That difference is foundational to our Constitution, and I think it is a very good thing.

blago · a year ago

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.

blago commented on Cognitive load is what matters minds.md/zakirullin/cogni... · Posted by u/zdw

K0nserv · a year ago

I've been thinking about the notion of "reasoning locally" recently. Enabling local reasoning is the only way to scale software development past some number of lines or complexity. When reasoning locally, one only needs to understand a small subset, hundreds of lines, to safely make changes in programs comprising millions.

I find types helps massively with this. A function with well-constrained inputs and outputs is easy to reason about. One does not have to look at other code to do it. However, programs that leverage types effectively are sometimes construed as having high cognitive load, when it in fact they have low load. For example a type like `Option<HashSet<UserId>>` carries a lot of information(has low load): we might not have a set of user ids, but if we do they are unique.

The discourse around small functions and the clean code guidelines is fascinating. The complaint is usually, as in this post, that having to go read all the small functions adds cognitive load and makes reading the code harder. 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; it's obvious what a function called last that takes a list and returns an optional value does. If someone feels compelled to read every function either the functions are poor abstractions or the reader has trust issues, which may be warranted. Of course, all abstractions are leaky, but perhaps some initial trust in `last` is warranted.

blago · a year ago

> 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.