Yes, education around these scams and their methods could be better, but there is also a reason they target the elderly and vulnerable. Unless something else terrible happens, I assume I will count in one or both of those groups eventually. I feel like when I get there, I would appreciate empathy rather than disdain, if I were ever taken advantage of.
Regardless, you do not actually need to enable developer settings to install APKs from unknown sources (at least, not on my Samsung). When you open an APK from within another app (e.g. Google Drive or WhatsApp), Android "helpfully" forwards you straight to the relevant security settings page, allowing you to immediately toggle the "Install unknown apps" permission for that specific app. It's a streamlined flow, only a couple of taps, no scrolling/searching/reading, therefore likely easy to coach a victim into performing.
So, I expect what the Android team is alluding to in the original post is to enable additional friction like you describe.
I have definitely seen this "you need to go deep in the settings to enable 3rd party installs at all" flow before, but I don't remember which device it was. (Just saying that the commenter above is not just inventing something, I was surprised when I saw it as well)
Hah, yes, this is also how S21 works. But to still refute the OP's point: (1) it is in stock settings, you do not need to enable the developer settings menu via any arcane method. (2) When you tap on an APK in e.g. Google Drive or WhatsApp, Android "helpfully" forwards you straight to this settings page, allowing you to immediately toggle the "Install unknown apps" and installation will begin (there may be another "do you want to install this app" confirmation).
The point being that there is not a whole lot of friction in this flow -- one or two taps -- likely making it easy for scammers to coach victims to perform.
I agree that activating the developer settings menu is substantially more friction, and may arouse more suspicion in a victim, but [on many/most devices] is not currently required. I guess the original article is alluding to putting this kind of friction in place.
I don't think it's that simple. GitHub themselves say [1]:
> You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.
Yes, it does note immediately below that "if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, according to the Terms of Service, other users of GitHub.com have the right to view and fork your repository". But that doesn't mean it's open source. You probably can't/shouldn't create derivative works with your forks. And you definitely wouldn't be allowed to just use this code in a commercial product, for example.
Irrelevant. You're quoting docs.github.com, which is neither authoritative (docs are written to GitHub's documentation standards, not by their legal team), nor is it always up-to-date or well informed for the non-legal matters where it ventures to comment about the state of GitHub's products/services.
> that doesn't mean it's open source
Strawman. The question is "can you fork/copy?", not "is it open source?". The answer to the former is "absolutely yes, unequivocally". Anyone saying otherwise is wrong.
> You are inventing tax loopholes that don't exist
Are you aware of "step-up in basis" [1] that is widely considered a loophole around CGT for inherited assets? Any gains on assets up to the point they are inherited will not be subject to CGT.
So now we are in the weeds about inheritance tax, but the idea is that you pay 40% on your inheritance which clears your tax obligations for that inheritance and resets all the cost basis calculations, and then after that you pay gains when you sell from the time you inherited.
That is not a tax loophole.
E.g. if someone buys stock for $10, then the share price grows to $100 and they die, so that a family member receives $100 of stock, and then the share price goes up to $110 and the inheritor sells, then in the current system, the inheritor pays:
$40 on receipt of shares at $100 (cost basis for him is zero)
$4 on sale of shares at $110 (cost basis is now 100)
for $44 in taxes paid on that stock.
RSUs also work in the same way -- you pay taxes the moment you get them, and then if you keep them, when you sell your cost basis is the price of the shares when you were given them. That is important to know if you like to hold onto your RSU shares for a while -- know that your cost basis is not zero, but whatever the price of the shares were when you paid taxes for receiving them as income.
In your opinion. However, some people clearly believe it _is_ a tax loophole, presumably including those you're discussing with upthread.
One of the talking points against inheritance tax is that it taxes the same money twice. If I'm a middle earner I pay taxes on my income, and I pay CGT when I dispose of assets to pay for my car or retirement or whatever. Taxes are then levied a second time on what's left when I die.
People above are pointing out that, in contrast, extremely wealthy people manage to avoid the income/CGT part by borrowing against their assets tax-free and repaying the loans once they die and after the assets can be stepped up. So yes, inheritance tax may still be paid, but a great deal of their day-to-day income while alive is untaxed. Inheritance tax should be _in addition to_ income/CGT rather than instead of it, and part of the perceived injustice is that the ultra-wealthy get to dodge this in ways "ordinary" people can't.
Based on that I personally would call it a loophole.
> In your opinion. However, some people clearly believe it _is_ a tax loophole
Only people who are not familiar with basic accounting or tax economics can believe this.
> One of the talking points against inheritance tax is that it taxes the same money twice. If I'm a middle earner I pay taxes on my income, and I pay CGT when I dispose of assets to pay for my car or retirement or whatever.
OK, you are mixing two different things here. One is the "double taxation"(1) on assets in the inheritance tax. First, don't worry, only a handful of families pay this tax. But ignoring that, the double taxation applies to income not spent. It is irrelevant to this discussion, in which Bezos borrows to spend. If he didn't borrow and sold assets to spend, then those sold assets still wouldn't be taxed as an inheritance tax. So that double taxation unfairness complaint is again just a confusion about what is happening and has nothing to do with whether borrowing to spend is somehow tax avoidance.
Now as to the second point: "If I'm a middle earner I pay taxes on my income, and I pay CGT when I dispose of assets to pay for my car or retirement or whatever."
No, you only pay taxes on the gains. Think back to what we were discussing before -- you get $100 of stock, then it goes up by $10 and you sell. So you have two taxable events in which income is recognized - the income of getting $100 and then the income of getting $10. When you sell for $110, your cost basis is $100, not 0, because you already paid taxes on the $100. Thus there is no double taxation for you or for Bezos(2).
No one is treated differently here. It is the exact same re-upping you were complaining Bezos being given -- that re-setting is available to everyone else for any other kind of asset they have for any reason.
So here, too, this is just complaining about things that aren't actually happening in order to get a justification for complaints about "injustice". It's a lot of very angry people applying who/whom logic rather than getting the details right about how much is paid.
Now, if you want to talk about real tax loopholes -- for example, carried interest, mortgage interest deduction, differences in tax rates on long term versus short term gains, charitable deductions - yes, by all means let's get rid of these loopholes. Bezos pays too little taxes, not because he borrows, but because the long term cap gains rate is so low. Let's not treat LTCG differently from wage income. But trying to infer the money borrowed should be taxed at the amount borrowed is just insane. Borrowed money is not income. Bezos is not doing this to evade paying taxes, he is doing it to take advantage of spreads.
(1) It's not really double taxation, because what is taxed is the income received by the inheritor, who never paid any taxes on it before.
> But ignoring that, the double taxation applies to income not spent. It is irrelevant to this discussion, in which Bezos borrows to spend.
It's not irrelevant if Bezos spends his borrowed money on real estate and generally vacuuming up other assets that are likely to appreciate in value faster than his loans. It's not like he consumes all of it (or even most? I don't know, but I doubt it. How on Earth do you consume a billion dollars?).
> Thus there is no double taxation for you or for Bezos(2).
As I already explained there is for me if I don't consume all of my taxed gains before I die, or if I use it to purchase assets that outlive me.
> Bezos is not doing this to evade paying taxes, he is doing it to take advantage of spreads.
He's clearly doing it for both reasons. At least to avoid, not evade. I accept that he's legally not required to pay tax in this situation, but the whole point is I'm saying that should probably change!
> So here, too, this is just complaining about things that aren't actually happening in order to get a justification for complaints about "injustice". It's a lot of very angry people applying who/whom logic rather than getting the details right about how much is paid.
Dismissing this as "just complaining" is really missing the wider point. That is that "buy, borrow, die" is a well documented strategy that the ultra-wealthy use to avoid paying tax and that is widely considered a tax loophole (even by those familiar with basic accounting and tax economics). Whether it's a loophole or not isn't even really the point, rather that we should change things such that people who "buy, borrow, die" actually pay something like CGT.
This doesn't seem right to me as it goes against my intuitive sense of how other factors generally scale with size/weight/volume (e.g. rocket equation), but I admit I'm definitely not an expert. However Wikipedia claims [1] that 250-300 Wh/kg is sufficient for small aircraft but something the size of an Airbus 320 would need 2 kWh/kg. A random recent paper about scaling electric aircraft [2] seems to imply that there are challenges to scaling size as well:
> All-electric designs have been demonstrated for small air vehicles. However, such prototypes have not been scaled up to more than ten passengers due to the specific energy (E*) limitations of current battery technology. [...] A significant proportion of the energy expenditure would be used to transport the mass of the batteries; this mass would not decrease during a flight as would that of conventional fuel.
Are these sources wrong, or too simplistic in their analysis, or am I misinterpreting what they're saying?
The rocket equation, or its airplane cousin the Breguet range equation talk about ratios of mass, not absolute mass. These larger airplanes (eg an A320) often fly much faster and longer distances
AirMap mobile app [1] has a very comprehensive database of no fly zones, airports/airfields, and summaries of national rules. It works well in US/Canada and lots of countries in Europe too.
I find it often misses local city or park-level rules so I'd always use it in conjunction with a local jurisdiction's app (if available), as well as checking council websites etc.
> In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Except they didn't say that, did they? What they said verbatim was "simply do not read it" which is a much more reasonable tone than how you seemingly interpreted it.
Whether it's negative or not also depends on the context which in this case is a proposed solution to literally the most negative and upset-sounding post in this chain: the one that started it. What does your ML model think of "I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard"?
"You don't have the social skills to realize people can infer tone, so here let your fellow computer tell it to you"
third person shows up to pick a fight with the computer.
Never chance y'all.
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And for the record, if someone complains about a piece of writing, and you tell them "simply not to read it"
You are being a passive aggressive joke, and you are clearly upset with their critique.
People are allowed to dislike things, and gasp even hate things, you don't need to get all max passive aggression over that.
Not everyone lives in an echo chamber of timidity where all emotions must be moderate some of you put yourselves in.
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The person I replied to had no answer to the actual point I made, so they tried to derail the conversation to "how dare you claim I'm upset!" which was a complete aside in my comment as it was in theres.
Yet now I am talking to a guy who wants to argue with an ML model so I guess well played?
Regardless, you do not actually need to enable developer settings to install APKs from unknown sources (at least, not on my Samsung). When you open an APK from within another app (e.g. Google Drive or WhatsApp), Android "helpfully" forwards you straight to the relevant security settings page, allowing you to immediately toggle the "Install unknown apps" permission for that specific app. It's a streamlined flow, only a couple of taps, no scrolling/searching/reading, therefore likely easy to coach a victim into performing.
So, I expect what the Android team is alluding to in the original post is to enable additional friction like you describe.