The problems with inheritance tax is that they can be avoided through trust structures and insurance schemes. In theory it's a good tax, but in practice many wealthy people figured out how not to pay it.

Those schemes are also human-created though, and can be human-fixed. I've never really understood the arguments that go like: "This regulation won't work because the people it targets will avoid it through loopholes and other schemes." Well, get rid of the loopholes and schemes, then!

Granted, this requires lawmakers to explore more of the "exploit space" around their proposed regulations, but I don't think that's really asking a lot of them.

The only way to get rid of tax avoidance is to simply tax transactions, every time, for every person, on every transaction.

“Oh, that’s regressive” they will say.

Make it small per transaction. A rich person spending 100x what a normal person spends will pay 100x as much tax. A billionaire spending 10000x what a normal person spends will pay 10000x as much. And they will also be taxed if they borrow money (that’s a transaction) against assets so they don’t have to sell them.

And when someone inherits, that’s also a transaction. Money moves from one person to another. So that same tax applies.

If your wealth/income increases x1000, their spending will not increase a thousand-fold. It's not like you can eat a thousand burgers in a day. All this leads to is poorer people paying a larger proportion of their income as taxes than the richer.

> And when someone inherits, that’s also a transaction. Money moves from one person to another. So that same tax applies.

This is a big one—we continually decrease the estate tax, which is already waived until you get to 'fuck-you-money' at the federal level (around $11 M)

Land value tax?

I own a domain and have a catch all email. I routinely get emails from Microsoft and Google's official email addresses telling me that some account will be closed, or some other account notifications. I never created these accounts, and when I try to log into them or do a password reset, it does not go anywhere. It's been a minor mystery why I keep getting these emails for a while.

The Microsoft emails are coming from microsoft-noreply@microsoft.com so it's a bit different than in this article.

Supporting is a word that means many different things.

It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.

It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.

It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.

Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.

Replace “Claude code” with “programmers” and you get what we’ve had up until now. It’s all just moving quicker now.

You don’t need to teach anyone about this. The wealth tax should apply to extremely wealthy people, not everyone.

If you accumulated a fortune, there was some skill at play. There was also considerable luck and some exploitation. The wealth tax is a way of paying back for the luck and exploitation.

You will still be extremely wealthy.

Paul wants to play the fairness card. Life is not fair and those who accumulated massive fortunes won the lottery. Don’t let the massively rich conflate issues. Don’t get fooled.

Salaries are opex

I’m not an accountant and what you’re saying is probably right. However, if you hire an engineer to do R&D, build systems, and take R&D tax credits, it “feels” like capex.

EDIT: [ IGNORE THIS COMMENT -- IT IS WRONG - I had a "bad math moment" myself ]

The math seems off. How is 7.8 million vs 4 million 95% more expensive. Article makes good points but I doubt the numbers as they don’t add up.

Still agree with the conclusion though.

7.8 is higher than 4 by 3.8 3.8 is 95% of 4 The price went up by 3.8 or in other words the price went up by 95%. I'm not sure what math you're not mathing.

Absolutely right. I had a "math moment" myself. I was thinking margin instead of markup.

You’re right and that’s intentional. Japanese companies don’t optimize for efficiently but for longevity. Sometimes those things go hand in hand. Sometimes they don’t.

The article makes a good point, but it's based on a polarized view that people make good judgement and AI is incapable of making good judgement.

I've worked with people who demonstrated below-average judgement, and I've seen cases of good judgement from AI. I think if a company can identify the poor performers and part wit them, there is a decent chance that the remaining people with AI in hand can more than make up the difference.

Now given the logic that you can't be dependent on any one service to run your SaaS, how does Railway convince its customers to run their SaaS on a single service?