My understanding is that the difference is in the Capital Gains Tax, which doesn't apply to the day-to-day running of the business or its profitability or the salaries it pays.
Again, my understanding is that the (only) difference is when the business is sold, and the 50% discount to CGT is no longer applied and instead there is an inflation adjustment instead (what I don't understand here is how to get an initial valuation, and would it be essentially $0, so the entire amount is capital gains? which feels somewhat unfair)
So it will be a hit at the time the business is sold, not at any point during the running of the business. My (potentially naive) take is that the hard work that goes into running and growing a business is about the provision of the goods or services, but if it's about maximising "the exit", then that feels to me like not the kind of incentive that it should be. The 'running' of the business being more important than the selling of it.
The 50% CGT discount has set a bad precedent. It should have been lower, or should have scaled over time. It has deformed the expected reward structure.
Can a business agree to be sold in tranches over time? If such a thing helps minimise tax then I can see that becoming the norm. I know that selling a house is a big, singular chunk of money that generally needs to be 'managed' in order to pay the minimum amount of tax. Maybe fractional selling is going to become a thing.
Wouldn't paying yourself a higher salary (since it's your own business) and/or putting more into superannuation offset the 'retirement' hit of not getting a golden exit parachute?
ps. Australia uses a progressive tax system. If you earn very little money, you pay a very low tax rate (or many zero). If you earn a massive corporate salary, you pay the top rate.
The new 30% floor completely throws that out the window for capital gains. It means even if your total income for the year is low enough that your normal tax rate should be 16% or 0%, the government steps in and forces a flat 30% tax on the asset sale anyway.
So, contrary to what the government is saying, this new regime taxes the poorer even more.
On paper yes, but very few of the _actual poor_ were making capital gains on asset sales. Aus Govt figures claim 90% of people under 35 do not own shares outside of retirement funds(which get different tax treatment).
It closes the loop holes where wealthy people approaching retirement would spend a few years paying very little tax and living off capital gains instead at a ~20% tax rate.
My non-heavily-researched understanding is that people who make their entire, or a majority of, their annual 'earnings' from capital gains may not be all that poor.
There's a whole spectrum of examples that can be used to demonstrate fairness or lack of fairness. Can you elaborate on your example of taxing a poor person even more by forcing a flat 30% tax on capital gains? Is this person you? What does your life entail whereby you are poor whilst also living almost entirely off capital gains?
You can still get all your capital out before the 1st of July 2027, and then re-distribute into areas that have better tax incentives, like new house builds. Sounds like that might solve two problems at once.
It's not me. I actually work for a living and I receive a salary.
Many people I know with their own business plan to hopefully get out of it some day. They all make less than me but own a business of their own.
Let's say this works and those people who already have assets get taxed a bit more, when they are gone, there would then now very little incentive to work hard and start a business.
Such short term thinking will pretty much destroy the economy in the long term. You can't tax an economy to health and fairness.
So these people make very little money on their business yet think someday they'll be able to sell this business for a lot of money? Sounds like they might need a reality check; who's going to buy an unprofitable business anyways?
This isn't short term thinking. It's the opposite.
Allowing the super wealthy, whom are the actual ones that benefit from capital gains, accumulate untold wealth is clearly resulting it a multitude of societal ills (including the dismantling of democracy itself here in the US).
Looking at even a little bit of recent history will clearly show you what happens when we let the super wealthy just get more wealthy (have a look at the Gilded Age).
The propaganda around taxation causing economic slowdown is so tired...
Sorry, what asset sales are poor people making while earning no income?
Is this a common thing in Australia cause it's not here in the US.
If you're saying instead that it applies to people living off their investments, then I have no sympathy for them as they're able to live off of ownership not labor. They should pay the same or more tax than anyone else.
>It means even if your total income for the year is low enough that your normal tax rate should be 16% or 0%, the government steps in and forces a flat 30% tax on the asset sale anyway.
From the budget:
"Recipients of means-tested income support
payments, such as the Age Pension or JobSeeker,
will be exempted from the minimum tax if they
receive any payment in the financial year in which
they realise the capital gain."
The flat rate is to stop people from dropping their income artificially and claiming the reduced rate. Most people won't run foul of this. Something like 90% of the capital gains discount was taken by the top 1%.
So your argument only applies to people who earn between 20 & 45k who don't get any government benefits (which are means tested, so they cannot be cash or asset rich), and realise a capital gain from an investment (is. not their house).
While philosophically I think it wrong that someone who earns very little cannot spread a tax liability over multiple years, the way corporations can.. I cannot think of a way that a disjoint could be given for this cohort that does not also open the door to loopholes for the 1%. Plus the number of people effected will be vanishingly small, and the amount to which that small number of purple are effected will also be small.
So, largely, contrary to what you are saying, they are not..
Capital gains is from selling an assets, if you still own the business you can take as many profits from it as you want.
If you're talking about selling the business, then presumably you had years of realizing profits from the actual operation of the business. Now that you sell it, yes, you should be taxed at a higher rate. That said, there are tons of tax loopholes for that scenarios like in the US like a cash balance plan.
But let's be honest, we're talking mostly about the sale of assets like stock ownership. That's how the super wealthy accumulate even more wealth. Then combine that with "buy, borrow, die" and you're paying almost no taxes.
All most people is for the rich to pay a proportionally fair amount of tax.
I'd assume, as an Australian, who works for a HK company and has travelled for work all their life, the long term lifestyle in Australia is probably better than those countries. I love HK and Singo but I am not sure I'd want to live there. But for working, most people here would not work in an iron lung and the socialist government pretty much supports the idea that, if you don't like to work, you shouldn't have to as long as there are a few who will work. And, that number is fewer and fewer.
Never to feed the trolls ... but, how does my carpenter deserve $100 an hour when he is using an electric drill and power saw I can get at Home Deepo for $100 bucks?
Most good developers are not employed because just because they can code well.
What is over is: fizzbuzz and trivial CS algorithm regurgitation as a gate.
I use keepass and have for years and I wanted to switch from using google drive to something more self hosted so I tried sync-thing. I have been a C and C++ developer for over 40 years and I found it one of the most obtuse things I have ever tried. I'll have to get back to it. :) It's still running but somehow never syncs a single file between the desktop and the linux server. I don't think the android client can run on a modern pixel phone anyway anymore due to security constraints.
Syncthing-fork is running perfectly fine on my Pixel 9. The web interface is definitely better than the default app interface, it's a shame they even bothered with that app interface.
All you have to do is exchange "keys" with the two machines you want to sync and then it's mostly set and forget
Esp32s are amazing fun. I designed boards in the 80s and I still love tinkering with microcontrollers. The reflux control for my still currently uses a brushed motor controlled by PWM and I am upgrading it to a second hand pump with a brushless motor so I am looking at driving it. I just set up an old drone ESC and am controlling the motor with dshot and it works ok. There is a little pre built board Simple FOC that is also esp32 I just ordered for 20 bucks to give a try.
I've been a developer for 45 years and I still actually like it most days.
I recently learned of ESP32-P4 that has graphics compositing optimizations.
A couple of years ago, I used an RP2040 to build a graphics card with 2D triangle filling and other pretty nice abstractions.
Next time... It'll be the ESP32-P4. Somewhat looking forward to that project, but there are prerequisites that need to be dealt with first. Yes, I'm very grown up. It sucks. :)
I saw the comment about it being hard to use the esp32 without the IDF and was about to disagree, but after one second's thought, the author is right. Access to all their chips is via some quirky lower level api. That said, considering how different the chips are, it's actually a surprise they even manage to give you a common interface to them all. There was an OS free boot for the esp8266.
It's probably possible if you forego the wifi and there was a basic boot hello world a while back. The arm is not natively wifi so it's not really comparing apples to apples.
I wonder if their stellar academic record is due to the same shenanigans? Given that they were caught manipulating logs and deleting evidence to cover their tracks in 2025, that they did the same to their academic records is technically plausible.
In 2011, university systems like George Mason’s were significantly more vulnerable to the exact type of SQL injection and credential theft they were using in their early criminal years.
As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike. My s1k has the factory msport straight through akro muffler and a valve system that opens the larger exit, also bypassing the baffles in the 'lunchbox' underneath, at 7k. Meaning it's very quiet until it's being asked to go very fast.
Replacing the cats and lunchbox with headers gives under 1hp on a 220hp bike.
But, every meetup, multiple people are asking "when are you getting a proper exhaust system". Which is basically louder for no other reason but being loud.
Thank you. As a biker I really dislike bikes made lout just to be made loud.
No, it doesn't save lives, most serious accidents are being t-boned on the junction, the car failing to yield to the biker with priority, biker losing control over the machine, or biker being reckless.
Most of it (at least in the UK) is attributed to ineffective observation, which in case of the bikers means education (training) and better visibility (special lights, bright coloured jacket and helmet).
> As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike.
I'm amused by vehicles which are very noisy when barely doing anything.
Really, almost all cars today have more acceleration than can be used outside racing. Most SUVs and pickup trucks today have better 0-60 times than 1960s muscle cars.
In normal operation today, the power train is not working very hard. Many pickup trucks now have fake engine noise in the cabin generated by the audio system. Not just electrics; gas engine vehicles too. Ford has been doing this since 2015, and most customers do not know it.
South Park did a pretty great episode on this topic. IIRC, they had Emmanuel Lewis “officially” change the definition of a word in Websters’ Dictionary!
I’m a classic car owner, I get the same thing from some people in that scene. I have kept my car exhaust at stock specs and it’s just the right level of loud for what the car is. IMO the cars should be as loud as how powerful they are. You can’t have a 455+ ci engine and expect it to be quiet, and the smaller the exhaust the harder it is for the engine to breathe. It’s a balance that has to be done right.
I guess this explains why in Japan very few of the motorcycles are loud. It's something I was surprised by when moving here from the US. It seems like in the US most (or perhaps many more) riders are being deliberately antisocial?
A lot of the sports bikes I see around my area are operated by 18 year olds. Who at 18 in this country are being perfectly upstanding members of society? There’s always some stupidity in that phase of life. I wouldn’t put too much thought into it.
Yeah, but a lot of the loudest are grey-haired men reclined on Harleys, alternating idling and revving in the middle of residential neighborhoods at all hours of day and night.
Like prohibition and the overtaxing of cigarettes in Australia, ID fraud will just become criminalised and the government will lose all control. There are pros and cons to this.
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