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Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023

320 points · 277 comments · jakemanger

DataDive · 1789652120 · focus · HN ↗
What happens if some of those tax the unrealized gains bills pass in some country where they have obligations?
They would have to either pay the tax on gains or write off losses.
1. philipallstar · 1789652603 · focus · HN ↗
  Surely only an absolute lunatic would pass that sort of law. And by then it's too late, because it's Socialism with extra steps.
  1. sebzim4500 · 1789652770 · focus · HN ↗
    Doesn't Switzerland do this instead of capital gains? Makes sense IMO, much better to tax wealth than discourage transactions.
    briandw · 1789654336 · focus · HN ↗
    Really? How? Show me a country that taxes wealth and is prosperous. Taxing unrealized gains results in owing tax on money you don’t have and makes starting a funded company impossible.
    superxpro12 · 1789657148 · focus · HN ↗
    and on the other hand we have trillionaires who spend their wealth on fascist party propaganda and censorship
    tim333 · 1789654968 · focus · HN ↗
    Apparently not. Googling, no one seems to actually do it in spite of some politicians talking about it.
    It seems quite a bad idea from a practical point of view.
    Not so much because it's socialist but it leads to all sorts of extra paperwork for no good reason. Like say you buy some utility company share for your retirement in 20 years and it fluctuates. Do you want to be valuing it and paying tax and then claiming it back when it goes down every year for 20 years or just declare the gain at the end?
    philipallstar · 1789657387 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, it is socialist in that the government basically gets to own more of everything you own every year.
    spacebanana7 · 1789655095 · focus · HN ↗
    Taxing capital assets by taking large portions of their value destroys value by forcing liquidity events. Think forcing sales of farms, factories and domain names.
    I much prefer land value taxes (and similar taxes on non capital wealth like jewellery) and leisure taxes (ideally taxing people for every hour they don't work). Of course these are difficult to administer in practice, but British business rates and US overtime tax discounts effectively approximate this.
    bitmasher9 · 1789656410 · focus · HN ↗
    The idea of taxing people for not working an hour sounds incredibly dystopian.
    superxpro12 · 1789657088 · focus · HN ↗
    What will they think of next? tying healthcare to employment that you lose the moment you get fired to meet quarterly profits? Madness i tell you!
    overtone1000 · 1789657752 · focus · HN ↗
    I had the same reaction. It also seems easy to pull apart. What about disabled people who are unable to work?
    I think something more like "investment income should be taxed at a higher rate than income earned through labor," accomplishes similar goals but is more intuitive and less problematic.
    philipallstar · 1789659854 · focus · HN ↗
    If your goal is to reduce investment that creates jobs for labour, then you should do that.
    overtone1000 · 1789665812 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a false dichotomy. Laborers could just as easily invest in job-creating endeavors as passive income earners. All taxes cause economic drag, not _just_ business and investment income taxes. The economy includes every participant, and laborers are not an externality.
    philipallstar · 1789730520 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm sorry, I don't follow. Yes, people who are labourers could also somehow creating funding pools that are big enough to start companies, but so what? That doesn't negate the fact that they will be disincentivised to do so by a tax on investment income.
    fl4regun · 1789664473 · focus · HN ↗
    Not as dystopian as the ability to get wealthier without working and pay no taxes (and even IF you sell to realize gains, your tax liability is still lower than someone who made money through labour)
    philipallstar · 1789730132 · focus · HN ↗
    Your definition of "wealthier" is stupid, though, because it relies on a measure that doesn't actually apply to the person in question. A share's price is just "the last sale price of the same type of share", and that is multiplied by the person's shareholding to get their "wealth". However they don't have any more money by this happening - it's just a huge assumption that the share price would stay the same across all their shares if they sold right now.
    The time we actually know what money they would make, making it concrete for tax, is when they sell. And we already do this.
    fl4regun · 1789758243 · focus · HN ↗
    There's multiple advantages to making money from equities that people who make money from ordinary income simply do not have, favourable tax rates, the ability to choose when and how much to realize, the ability to loss harvest, compound interest, everything around how we tax these 2 forms of income is set up to beget inequality.
    philipallstar · 1789982485 · focus · HN ↗
    > everything around how we tax these 2 forms of income is set up to beget inequality
    No it's not. Most people don't pay capital gains because things like houses don't have capital gains applied. I.e. the rules are set up so that most people avoid capital gains tax when they gain capital. Everyone pays income tax with the same rules, and some people pay capital gains tax as well if their risks pay off. We tax the profits and let investors absorb the losses.
    axus · 1789655661 · focus · HN ↗
    If the government forced transfer of ownership %, instead of forcing a sale, it would be not as bad?
    sebzim4500 · 1789663810 · focus · HN ↗
    They could accept either I suppose
    philipallstar · 1789730169 · focus · HN ↗
    It's identical really. It's just instituting the nationalisation over time of all businesses.
    sebzim4500 · 1789742849 · focus · HN ↗
    In an ideal world, the government would sell some of whatever shares it gets at good times to pay off debt, for example when interest is high just before a tranche of government bonds expire
    philipallstar · 1789659818 · focus · HN ↗
    > Makes sense IMO, much better to tax wealth than discourage transactions.
    It's much, much worse to tax wealth.
    overtone1000 · 1789665861 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree with you in the other thread, so I want to balance that by saying that I strongly agree with you here.
  2. IAmBroom · 1789653089 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh, no, not Socialism! That's worse than attending a Macklemore concert!
    kriops · 1789654587 · focus · HN ↗
    Macklemore concerts didn't kill 100 million people at minimum.
    nwsm · 1789655650 · focus · HN ↗
    Do we have an estimate on the number of people capitalism has killed? Serious question.
    Include deaths due to poverty and lack of affordable healthcare under capitalism, overworking and dangerous working conditions, and all wars and counter-insurgency waged on alternative economic systems globally.
    thesuitonym · 1789656794 · focus · HN ↗
    No, people who die as a direct result of capitalist economics are not counted because that would be inconvenient and wouldn't fit the CIA's narrative.
    carefree-bob · 1789656857 · focus · HN ↗
    You'd need a definition of capitalism first. Since for most people, it's just the default mode of living -- e.g. the very term "capital" comes from "head", as in "head of an ox", as early cattle culture practiced capitalism, so it predates the agricultural revolution and was practiced by nomadic groups.
    A lot of the language, for example "interest" comes from cattle culture. If you think about it, a cow produces other cows, so it bears interest. You can eat the cow (consume capital) or let the cow produce a stream of milk. Ownership of cows gave you great power.
    So asking "the number of people killed by capitalism" is like asking "how many people were killed by everything that's not communism", which is pretty inane, since the point of communism is that it is an ideology, and mass killing for an ideology (that's not religion) is a part of the modern world, not the traditional world of cows and capital. The first ideological genocide was the slaughter of the Vendee peasants by the French revolutionaries, but it was merely the first of many times that urban ideologues slaughtered rural farmers.
    wing-_-nuts · 1789656577 · focus · HN ↗
    Man I always love the straw men you guys stand up to fight this. More taxes = socialism, and not nordic socialism, no, actually, communism. Therefore mass death / genocide. Ok. Sure jan.
    philipallstar · 1789658034 · focus · HN ↗
    Nordics are not socialist[0]. Socialism is central planning and control, sometimes created out of mass killings[1] [2], and often creating many deaths just from incompetent central mismanagement[2] [3] or grisly bureacratic rules[4].
    [0] <a href="https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-bernie-sanders-to-stop-calling-it-socialist" rel="nofollow">https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-...
    [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_Stalin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_...
    [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
    [3] <a href="https://historyincharts.com/chinese-death-totals-great-leap-forward/" rel="nofollow">https://historyincharts.com/chinese-death-totals-great-leap-...
    [4] <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34667551" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34667551
    ValueTheory · 1789659995 · focus · HN ↗
    What does taxing unrealized gains have to do with "central planning and control"?
    wing-_-nuts · 1789660706 · focus · HN ↗
    Nothing, hence my point about it being a straw man :^)
    philipallstar · 1789685085 · focus · HN ↗
    If you tax unrealised gains, say Elon Musk's SpaceX shares, all that means in practice is the government takes a certain percentage ownership stake in SpaceX every year until he has nothing left to tax, or he sells it to someone else and pays tax on that sum (but who would buy anything if it's going to be taxed away?)
    wing-_-nuts · 1789695924 · focus · HN ↗
    What a nonsensical argument. Yes, that's why we're all living in government owned housing, because if you tax something, it inevitably gets taken away, and nobody wants to buy houses, cause the government is just gonna take it away...what?
    philipallstar · 1789738195 · focus · HN ↗
    If your wealth is 100% ownership of Tesla, say, and the government imposes a 5% wealth tax, you have to sell 5% each year of your ownership stake (because the lie of all this is it isn't wealth being taxed, it's ownership) and give it to the government. Until you don't own it any more.
    And if you think "well, it doesn't have to go to the government", who else will take it? Who would buy something that they would have to sell 5% of each year? The government, being the only thing that wouldn't be affected by a wealth tax, would become the de facto buyer.
    IAmBroom · 1790079215 · focus · HN ↗
    An awful lot of links, none of which define "socialism". Your point remains: "I think socialism is the same as communism."
    tancop · 1789657938 · focus · HN ↗
    Communism is not socialism. What Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung did was wrong because they did basically the exact opposite of a socialist policy, centralizing power out of workers hands and taking all surplus value into the central government instead of distributing it.
    They all turned into paranoid dictators who did everything they could to stay in power, except for Mao who got lied to by other party leaders and regretted it in his final years. None of them represent what socialism really is. Tankies who worship them are a small minority.
    philipallstar · 1789685177 · focus · HN ↗
    You've got spot the pattern though, right?
    Someone says they're going to make everything equal and they just need enough power to do it. Trouble is, that requires all the power, and a) the halfwits who end up in power are nowhere near as good as the people doing the work and taking the risks at deciding what to do and how to do it and b) the people who want all the power can just say that and the credulous believe them.
  3. wing-_-nuts · 1789656411 · focus · HN ↗
    Why not? We tax property every year on it's assessed value. I think it's pretty clear that the wealthy will need to pay more taxes throughout the world to deal with an aging population.
    I'm a little tired of billionaires 'buy, borrow, dying' to get around the paltry taxes they're currently subject to. We need a harder tax to dodge.
    carefree-bob · 1789656520 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would taxing the wealthy be relevant to an aging population? Do you think that we tax stuff? We just tax money to buy stuff. If a nation produces less stuff, then spending more will just cause prices to go up, but will not result in the production of more stuff to go around.
    wing-_-nuts · 1789657435 · focus · HN ↗
    Because our current social safety nets all work by assuming the next generation pays for the care of the current elderly. Those elderly do need 'stuff' they need doctors and nurses and nursing homes. Thus taxes will have to go up, and if it has to, it may as well be progressive.
    philipallstar · 1789730456 · focus · HN ↗
    We already have giant amounts of tax everywhere, all the time. What makes you think we have no money for this?
    wing-_-nuts · 1789753954 · focus · HN ↗
    No, actually, we have explicit taxes for SS and Medicare, and we've known they were not bringing in enough revenue to fund those programs since the 80s.
    The trust funds are almost dry, so we're either going to have to raise those taxes to fund those programs, or cut a critical safety net to the American public. I know where my vote is going.
    philipallstar · 1789983154 · focus · HN ↗
    Or cut something else. The assumption that all government money is spent perfectly on essentials is a huge issue that afflicts tens of millions of voters.
  4. superxpro12 · 1789657030 · focus · HN ↗
    The fascism we CURRENTLY HAVE is far more preferable

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