Economic activity leads to boom and bust cycles. Regulation doesn't change that and may even make it worse.

Nothing, but ignorance and resentment seem to have left people thinking so. That's my take anyhow.

Well, 27.15%

They figure out how to get prices lower or close up shop.

Yeah, either way it's sufficient product differentiation for them to be able to command a premium price.

I think the better criticism would be, "Hey, did you forget the chip shortage from five years ago already?"

So, China is banning drones in the city to prevent long-range drone strikes from outside of the city? Are you sure about that logic?

Can you still buy or repair one in the city?

That's a pretty weak excuse for bigotry.

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.