In lighter news, here's how to push a tunnel underneath four railways tracks in a couple of days. Finished just in time, since my train to the airport needs those tracks soon :-)

Facebook seems to be banning accounts left and right (pun intended) over culture war issues again. Welcome to 2017! Or just use Nostr. In practice it seems that folks on the left tend to flee to BlueCry and folks on the right to Xtard. I suspect that is because culture warriors seek attention, which is a rational preference if your goal is to impact mass culture. On the bright side: it keeps this place higher signal.

I wonder how much money Google makes from people getting scammed by sponsored results. Fake visa companies, now malware, what else? Scams are always more profitable than legit businesses, so can pay more for ads. View quoted note →

Listening to Dutch senators talk about unrealized capital gains tax for a few hours, taught me a new "Dutch" phrase: Deo volente (God willing, in reference to their scheduled next meeting) It also gave me microscopic optimism that the government won't fire this particular economic footgun. Inshallah they might go for regular capital gains after all. We'll see, don't hold your breath just yet. This was an expert hearing, not a political debate. Parliament (2e kamer) voted for this law, but the senate (1e kamer) can still torpedo it. They rarely do this, but maybe there's political will from both chambers to modify the law / make a new one. The startup lobby in particular, and employer / investor lobby more generally, made it very clear they're not a fan of taxing unrealized gains. This is despite the planned exception for startups. But this exception is too complicated. If I understand their objection correctly, you can't separate startups from the broader investment climate. Unrealized capital gains chases both wealth and talent out of the country. People move around, they might start at a big company, switch to a startup, become an angel themselves, etc. An exception doesn't help when there's nobody left to do use it. Several experts pointed out that it makes no sense to introduce unrealized capital gains as a "temporary" system and then transition to normal capital gains a few years later. Pick one. There's no such thing as a temporary system; the existing one was supposed to be temporary and lasted almost 30 years. The switch would also be expensive in the short run, making it politically unattractive. And it would be super confusing for tax payers to deal with three systems in a row. The senators seemed particularly interested in a progressive rate, which would somewhat discourage the phenomenon of holding on to assets forever to prevent a taxable event. Even a 1% difference might have a dramatic effect given how obsessed Dutch people are with discounts, even when it's economically stupid. I suspect this might be the compromise we end up with. Meanwhile the biggest proponent of unrealized capital gains, economist Bas Jacobs, made a passionate plea in favor of it*, going slightly into conspiracy mode by claiming that Musk and Bezos only spoke out about it because they're afraid other countries might follow our example and actually tax them**. One thing he did acknowledge, is that the proposed 36% rate is probably the absolute maximum a government can get away with, and probably too high. * I think he makes the classic academic mistake of believing in the perfect economic system at the expense of ignoring real world constraints - such as cash flow, feelings and international taxation dynamics. ** Which ignores the fact that Dutch unrealized capital gains tax is only for privately held assets, not for wealth held in corporations - it doesn't impact actually rich people, only the upper middle class. If it was expanded to wealth in corporations, our country would be bankrupt in seconds.

Stop listening to Peter Schiff. Not legal advice. View quoted note →

If you need a reminder of why you don't want to be famous... also, someone should invite her to Nostr (although I suspect algorithms aren't the biggest problem, rather human nature is)

Amazon

Amazon