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>If you lost your job, before the ACA, you could not get health insurance outside of working for someone and having group insurance at any cost.

This is a flat out lie. You absolutely could buy health insurance without being at a company.


Not if you had a pre-existing condition - the entire point of this thread.


That was my thought. This is 100% a state actor.


There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.


Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we remember a time when tech was just a job.

In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.

It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people were even working at multiple companies at the same time.

The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks" in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype.

The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software development work it's going to be exponentially harder to remain employed in tech in the coming years.

So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment every year.


>In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.

I remember it was even earlier than that, in the 90s when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.

You're right about 6 month bootcamps leading to jobs in 2021 though! A true gold rush.


Yup. Amazon doubled their workforce through the pandemic. I think a lot of tech companies are still cutting fat from those days.


Jakob Nielsen has been banging the drum that we're going all end up with custom interfaces that will be tailored to what our current task is at that time. How this will work is TBD, but if I recall correctly, he's basically agreeing with your take around agents as an interface.


I still don't understand this idea. A different interface every time would be the highest cognitive load imaginable.


>Tens of thousands of engineers and designers rebuilding slightly different drop-downs is an inefficient world that is unarguably coming to an end.

As long as branding is important, you're going to keep getting slightly different dropdowns. In fact, you could argue that in a front end world that's dominated by AI written code that pulls from standard libraries, branding and all its different dropdowns become more important than ever.


I'd love to read more about the coincidence with the Bretton Woods agreement.


Looks like an extra zero was added?


Government pricing :)


$30 per kill approval


In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.


100%

All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.


A touch screen by itself doesn't noticably increase the weight of the screen. It's only when you put everything else up there that it becomes heavier.


I have a Yoga, I use the stylus more than I type.

Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.


Which case is that?


Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-111


>"He wasn't just pretending to move to Florida."

Do people often pretend that they're going to move? Seems like a weird thing to say.


Yes.. Florida is fine, and the weather is even nice 3-6 months/year depending on your basis of comparison.

But if you are unfathomably rich, it's missing a lot of the culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do of a big blue city like NYC/Bay Area/whatever. It's also culturally a place who already made their money elsewhere go to flaunt it. It's a very different vibe than places people work and grow wealth.

So a lot of the uber rich already have 5 homes, one of which is Florida, and they spend exactly enough days there, creating exactly enough of a paper trail to show Florida is their primary residence.

In practice it may just be adjustments around the edges to where they already spend time. Most only do this if they are childless, the kids are out of the house, or they are extremely divorced.. since it's disruptive to kids being in school.


> it's missing a lot of the culture culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do…

My guess is you haven’t spent much time in Miami or Florida. It’s most definitely not just theme parks and beaches.


I've spent plenty of time in Miami & Palm Beach

Sure there's stuff, but its like 1/10th the stuff

Friends who moved down ended up keeping their NYC doctors after being very unhappy with treatment, etc


There are two pretend types:

- they move their official residence and happen to stay most of the time at the "totally just rented" place in the same state anyway

- or keep telling everyone how they're going to move, but don't actually do.

Because let's be honest - if there wasn't a big reason to live where they do, and it wasn't a pain to work from another state, they wouldn't be there to begin with. They're paying the higher taxes because they benefit(ed) in some way.

They also benefit from being famous and threatening to leave.


> Do people often pretend that they're going to move?

It isn't unheard of.

Adam Carolla has been threatening to move out of California for like at least a decade at this point.


its a luxury of the ultra-rich.

they threaten to move to push legislation which way they want.


A number of my friends who belong in these very high upper brackets have suggested to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that if I am reelected they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. I shall miss them very much but if they go they will soon come back. For a year or two of paying taxes in almost any other country in the world will make them yearn once more for the good old taxes of the U.S.A.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Address at Worcester, Massachusetts

October 21, 1936

It's always a bluff like a kid throwing a temper tantrum going to "hold their breath".


They threaten to do this every single time there is an election in NYC. And studies have shown that they are lying. To try and manipulate people. The rich are actually far less likely to move.

[1] https://fiscalpolicy.org/migration


Every election you have celebrities and wealthy individuals threaten to leave the country, etc. Nearly none of them follow-through, and of the ones that do, many ultimately move back.

Page left California specifically because of the so-called "Billionaire Tax", and is taking with him his family (which will inherit his vast riches), his philanthropy, his non-profits, many jobs, taxes and more. The effect will be generations of lost benefits to California.


Yeah; there's absolutely no way he could possibly support philanthropic efforts in one state from another. Nope; everyone now loses out because of it!

There is absolutely 0 reason that someone worth $270 billion needs to worry about the 5% tax. The 5% tax will reduce his estimated worth by $13.5B bringing him to a paltry $256.5B.

To put $256.5B in perspective: over two /lifetimes/, he would need to spend around $4.5MM a day to exhaust that number, assuming it did not grow exponentially over that same time.


1. The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.

2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.

3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.

4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.


It’s supposedly a one-time tax; but, you’re right; who knows what they’ll do.

But his net worth has effectively more than doubled in 1y. I think he’ll be just fine.


> The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.

How annual income should return more than that if he can do anything at all.


> 1. The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.

If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.

> 2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.

This is just a slippery slope fallacy.

> 3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.

Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.

> 4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.

With this argument you can defend never paying taxes to CA then, do you think it would be better as a complete anarco-capitalist state? It makes me sad that USA's public governance is so bad that this argument is always used to defend rich people not paying taxes; the political system is so absolutely broken that people prefer to allow ultrawealthy folks to keep hoarding even in the face of very real issues fracturing society stemming from that instead of thinking about how that money could fix many public issues.


> If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.

Its his voter shares, he wont get them back. Larry and Sergei currently control 51% of Google votes, if they sell any more they lose control of Google so they can't afford to sell.


I highly doubt that Larry Page has $270B only invested in one egg (Google), even if a large part of his wealth comes from that.


> Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.

If it’s blackmailing, it’s blackmailing that is legal and extremely common. Similar events have occurred in multiple jurisdictions around the world whenever wealth taxes are attempted. The only way to prevent this in a country like the US that doesn’t allow retroactive taxation is to institute an exit tax, but this is also not legal at the state level in the US. Oh, and you also likely need capital controls, another no-no inside the US.

Capital flight is so historically common that there’s a common phrase to describe it. I have no idea why CA thought they were any different.


According to later replies on X it's based on voting control percentage for dual class shares, so it's 40% tax, not 5%. So more than $100 billion.


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