Umm...that's not how it works here. While they're "laws", they're not laws as you know them. They're more like...suggestions. For example, if somebody breaks into your car and steals your shit, you'd call the police right? Where you're from, they'll file a police report. But here? The police say "That'll teach you not to put valuables in your car, dingleberry."

No, they're not secret beliefs. At all. I mean, I'm a diver, so I've mentioned how cold the water is even with a 7mm wetsuit before, and how I think I'm going to finally spend the money to get a drysuit.

Sometimes you'll have a situation like this: You're riding in the car with some friends, and the driver narrowly doesn't avoid a pothole. The same pothole that has been there for years. Somebody in the car bumps his head on the roof and says "Ow...Why don't they fix that shit? Our gas prices are supposed to be insanely high to pay the taxes that pay to fix that." So another one of us says "What DO our taxes pay for here?" and the answers range from "The high speed train to nowhere" to "Hell if I know"

In my experience, everybody who isn't a politician and lives in this state has a much lower opinion of its politics than progressive idealists outside of California do. That includes actual card-carrying members of the Democratic Party residing in this state.

Case in point: rsilvergun loves the fuck out of California's politics, and he's never even set foot here.

Aside from the fact that they can't tax him because he isn't a California resident and hasn't been for years, that would require them to take ownership of it, which I don't believe the constitution allows on account of the fifth amendment. Even for property taxes, they don't get to just keep your house if you don't pay, rather it has to be sold, and from the sale proceeds they're only allowed to keep whatever money is owed.

And that's what they're doing here -- they're levying a tax in the form of cash. So even if he was a resident, they can't take his shares away, all they can do is a "fuck you, pay me" and he'd just have to find a way to come up with $200 billion in cash to pay with. And that won't be easy at all -- you're not going to find anybody with a billion in cash lying around to buy your portion with, let alone 200 billion. That leaves you in a position where any potential buyers are at an advantage. The kind of advantage where, because you need to liquidate quickly, the buyer is at a major negotiating advantage in terms of getting it at a lower price. On the public stock market, that translates to a lot of valuation disappearing into thin air, basically fucking over all the other shareholders, most of whom don't have anywhere near a billion dollars.

But it's also not just $200 billion in taxes you owe -- whatever gains you make from selling whatever it is you sell will in turn get taxed by the IRS, which means you owe even more, likely meaning you have to sell even more.

These reasons (and more) are why you're literally taxing against money that doesn't actually exist. At least with property tax, property is an illiquid asset, so its value is actually grounded in the reality of what somebody would actually pay for it if you were to sell, which is way different from highly liquid assets like stock in a publicly traded company, whose value tends to be based on emotion and is subject to wild swings from one minute to the next.

I don't expect you to comprehend any of this, but here goes:

They absolutely do, especially for loans against shares. Not only will they do that, they'll margin call your shares just because the value went too low -- whether you were making payments on time is notwithstanding. If you don't have enough to buy your shares back, they take your shares and flip them, which then turns it into a realized gain that you get taxed on. And if they're RSU/ISO shares, then you have other consequences on top of that, particularly a loss of future income. But for the fact that you can't live in your shares, it carries a higher risk than a mortgage does because all you have to be concerned with in a mortgage is paying the thing on time every month.

The advantage of taking out loans on your shares is that if you're confident your shares will increase in value, then you get to forgo selling your shares, which means potentially higher gains later than you have to pay in interest. If those shares do increase in value, eventually they get sold, so not only do you have higher earnings, but the IRS also gets more taxes out of you in the long run, the only thing is it comes much later.

I personally have operated under a similar theory but without taking out a loan, namely I underpay my taxes and just eat the 7% interest the IRS charges me, because the share price increase will greatly exceed that percentage if I had accepted the share withholding, where I lose the shares outright. And guess what else? Both me and the IRS get more out of it than we would have otherwise.

Regardless of whether you take out a loan or not, taxes get paid on any proceeds as soon as ownership is transferred.

Two reasons for this:
1) He never filed for bankruptcy
2) It wasn't his property to begin with

His businesses were all set up as corporate entities, which isn't unique to him or billionaires or your "ruling class". You can literally create an LLC for $100, which while a fortune to you, isn't to a typical wage earner. That LLC can then own properties. If the LLC is insolvent, it can file for chapter 11, which is debt restructuring, not asset liquidation. That's exactly what he did, multiple times, keeping creditors at bay until the businesses were profitable again. Individual wage earners can do basically the same thing under chapter 13, but Trump did not.

They definitely live in the same one I and everybody else does.
The fact that you don't comprehend how any of it works is why you're kind of off in your own little reality, which you share with exactly nobody.

How would the government grant them when the homestead pre-dates that government?

The only property I'm aware of that is inherently given to you by the government is intellectual property. Taxing that would be interesting, to say the least.

The premotor cortex can't control dead neurons. It can fire synaptic signals, but that's it. If the neuron is dead, there isn't a functional dendrite to receive any signaling, let alone do anything with it.

You're assuming the patient can still move their eyes. Or that their eyes aren't uncontrollably shaking (which precedes neuron death.) That's a pretty big assumption. It's also going to be a fair bit slower than what you can get from BCI. Once they reach locked-in syndrome, BCI is the only hope of communicating at all.

It's not a risk. It's literally nothing at all. You're losing your shit over money that doesn't even exist.

They're not accruing anything other than speculative value. I honestly hope this bill passes anyway. It's better to perform these experiments at the state level before somebody tries it at the federal level. This might be for the best in the long run: This state's budget is fucked enough already, and the legislature will have no choice but to figure out how to do what the rest of us already have to do.

Well let's examine it in more detail then:

Socialism is defined simply as government owned means of production. Go ahead and pull out a dictionary. Some argue "collective", "community", or some other doublespeak term, but if you look at what they intend that term to mean, it looks like a government and quacks like a government. That said:

Here you have a proposal where 50% of all revenue from sales (not profit) has to be turned over to the government in shares. The only realistic way to do that is by diluting existing shares by having the company issue new ones.

That means existing shares lose some of their value, because their slice of that pie gets reduced, while the government gets a slice. But remember, this goes on in perpetuity. Each time the tax is assessed, you repeat: Investors lose more of the company, government gets more of it.

This means: Government's ownership stake approaches 100% and private ownership approaches 0% as time approaches infinity. Sure, it never all goes to the government, but eventually private ownership becomes de-minimus, or effectively zero.

So there's two ways of looking at it: For those who understand the reality of how this is supposed to work, it's socialism. For those who don't, it's lipstick on a socialism.

Bernie also appears to contradict himself here by saying that if the valuation decreases, then the government doesn't lose anything, but actually it does: If this is supposed to be a "sovereign wealth fund", and the valuation decreases to zero, then what exactly is held by this fund? Some worthless shares?

Keep in mind too that Bernie was openly in favor of Soviet style command economy until the USSR eventually fell, then he "changed his mind", but every now and then, he makes public statements that suggests he still wants to cease the means of production, effectively pushing us in that direction, usually (but not always) with a "think of the children" argument in tow. This is simply the latest one.

Having said that, if you don't believe this is an attempt at socialism, do explain why.

My thoughts were pretty much in line with this, though even before this shortage, apple's effective price for ram still makes today's ram prices look cheap. And they don't even use particularly good components, they use sk hynix, who makes the absolute shittiest ram you can buy. And then they convince their customers that it's a premium product worth paying a premium for -- basically selling their customers a polished turd.

They no more have a trillion dollars than Elon Musk does. There's a massive difference between money and speculative valuation.

Like I said, you believe the wermacht was clean.

I don't believe that's the case. Part of the disease pathway is the motor neurons eventually die, so it doesn't seem like that would work. I believe what they're doing is watching what the brain normally does before the motor neurons ever receive anything from their dendrites, and acting based on that.

That's what you all say. Especially during the Nuremberg trials. Generally you guys fall into one of three camps:

1. Rationalize it <-- you are here
2. Lie about it
3. Confess to what they did (this is rare)

Yes, nazi land got bombed, I already know this. My forbearers were the ones bombing it. And after the conquest, my country had to occupy yours for the long haul until denazification was complete. We also spent billions over the next 40 years to keep you from being completely overrun by Stalin and his successors, which was basically another form of nazism, something you guys have either completely forgotten about or outright denounce us over. And unlike them, we never had any intention or desire of keeping your doucheland afterward.

Or they just never said anything and lost contact, like those on the other side of the rat lines who lived out the rest of their lives under a false identity. Isn't it convenient how all of you guys are either dead or victims, but never perpetrators? But believe it or not, this is by design. It began as soon as it became undeniable that the war wasn't going in your favor. It's called "the myth of the clean wehrmacht". Initially you guys were all lumped in with Hitler by everyone who wasn't you, until the west had a strategic interest in playing into the myth, because it was in our interest to use you in in the cold war against the nazis of the east. In other words, we needed to use defeated nazis to fight newly empowered nazis, and ideally cancel each other out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

To wit:

The Supreme Commander of NATO, U.S. General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, having previously stated his belief that the "Wehrmacht and the "Hitler gang" (Nazi Party) were all the same",[4] explicity reversed this position during a 1951 visit to Germany when he claimed that there was "a real difference between the German soldier and Hitler and his criminal group". From there on, the United States began to facilitate German rearmament in light of their deep concern over Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe. The British became reluctant to pursue further trials and released already-convicted criminals early.

Whatever helps you sleep at night.