HN user
It's kind of dystopian that it would even get to this point, but I wonder if there would be a business model that could sell "squatter insurance" to people, requiring that they follow particular security system procedures, but pay them out if someone successfully squats in their place.
I’d hate to run out of battery or accidentally break my phone and lose access to something as basic as an identity document or my main means of transportation, at the same time as having lost access to call for help.
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Are you claiming the Fed has directly purchased US stocks? I don't think they have.
I've only ever seen reports of them buying government and mortgage debt: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/how-the-federal-reserve-affe...
You can argue the purpose of these actions was to prop up the stock market, but I don't think they've ever intervened in as direct a manner as the Bank of Japan has with buying company stocks.
Not sure, but BOJ was a net seller of stocks in 2023: https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Bank-of-Japan/BOJ-turned-net...
So, it seems like they're at least starting to offload their stock holdings.
I was very surprised when I learned that their central bank was purchasing stocks. I'd heard about it first in 2020, but apparently it had been going on before the pandemic.
It makes me wonder if the US stock market crashed hard enough if the Fed would start buying up stocks on the major indexes. Are they even legally allowed to do this? If so, what other assets can the Fed acquire? REITs? What about direct real estate purchases? I wonder if corporate real estate crashed hard enough from remote work if they'd prop it up.
I liked Gerrit when working on OpenStack several years ago. The use of patch sets seemed pretty intuitive, and it was nice that there wasn't a "force push" workflow available that would hide changes from previous reviews. I tend to use a merge rather than rebase workflow with GitHub now, but I often see developers do the opposite, which can make directly viewing code changes from previous reviews challenging.
I am surprised that this post advocates for amending commits, though. It's been a while, so I might be misremembering, but I think a tool like git review makes that unnecessary:
I wish the map were higher definition. I see a line from San Antonio (or Austin?) to El Paso, my most traveled route, but nothing in the text description about it. There are also some other lines linking the Texas Triangle which would be great!
Regardless, I hope this plan sees fruition in a reasonable timeframe. Further investments in transit within cities themselves would be welcome too, given a lot of folks may be renting a car at 1 end of a high speed rail trip, but this seems great.
To me, it seems like more of a competitive issue for OpenAI if part of their secret is the ability to synthesize good training data, or if they're purchasing training data from some proprietary source.
I wonder how they chose which countries to include in the graph. A lot of my family's Venezuelan and have 0 spice tolerance whatsoever despite growing up near the equator.
They also seem to be ranking things per recipe rather than per unit of food eaten by the population, if you read the abstract. Even if there are 9 spicy recipes and 1 bland recipe in a country, if the 1 bland recipe is eaten every day, doesn't that just show that there are more spicy varieties of dishes?
Still an interesting article regardless.
That's an interesting fact about the ketchup. What other everyday similarities like that did you notice?
Would they need to do it all at once like this? How have other countries that have officially dollarized handled the transition, if there are any major ones?
It looks like the list of countries besides US that exclusively use USD is small, none with a population over 100k, although I know several economies have de facto dollarized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_substitution#Countrie...
Maybe that Wikipedia list is out of date. I'd thought Ecuador was running on dollars.
My eyes popped at that salary for a notary in Spain given most eng positions seem to pay under 60K euro.
It looks like they need a law degree, too, so I'm sure they offer legal services other than property transactions?
On the topic of fire codes, most Spanish apartment buildings also don't have smoke alarms, as far as I can tell. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246950
I'm not against safe building, but some friends of ours were actually denied the ability to be eligible to foster a child because their home didn't have 2 points of egress in every room. The US seems particularly stringent about anything fire-related.
It looks like this will only be available in a few countries to start, but what would the implications be for censorship resistance if this were to be available in countries with significant internet censorship?
Is anyone familiar enough with the underlying technology to know if countries would be able to identify individual users or jam the signal easily?
My understanding is the main bottleneck for using Starlink for something like this today, besides the company's willingness to do so, is that the terminals are needed to use the network.
I'm really sorry your comment is getting so much pushback. I have a brother with some Medicaid benefits in Texas who can never live independently. He's mute, can't take care of his own hygiene, and can't swallow food, so needs to be fed through a stomach tube. Medicaid is constantly trying to deny him nursing benefits, and he can't ever hold more than $2K in any of his accounts or he would lose SSI.
People have this fantasy that the social safety net takes care of people that can't take care of themselves, but that's really not the case. It is extremely easy to lose benefits and hard to get them in the first place for various services, with very long waiting lists for some things.
Germany seems like a good option if you have no other EU ancestry that you could get a passport through: https://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/
They even have a specific page on that site for software engineers. It seems like as long as you get a job offer over a certain salary threshold and meet background check requirements, you can live there. I've heard a lot of jobs there operate in English, also.
Those numbers make this paper net worth increase seem so ridiculous. Did the median American really become 36% richer since just before the start of covid?
I suppose you could argue people spent less and were able to pay off a lot of debt. I suspect more that a housing correction is overdue, although it remains to be seen if this will take the form of housing staying flat while inflation nibbles away at the real value or an actual price drop.
Also not bifrost, the OpenStack orchestration project: https://docs.openstack.org/bifrost/latest/
No worries. That makes sense to me, about people moving from non-major to non-major cities.
I could see someone wanting to move for the difference in climate alone, honestly. There are a lot of people on Texas subreddits talking about moving after the recent heatwave. It was the most brutal one I've ever been in, having lived here off and on for a few decades. Having said that, it was interesting learning how adaptable the human body is after mentioning how "nice out" it felt once the high temperature started dropping below 100F consistently!
I'm not well-read on it, but I believe the taxes are due if you sell the property. It seems intended to allow people who want to live in their home forever to stay there if they have cash flow issues in retirement. In the event other assets couldn't cover the amount due, the state would get back the tax money from the heirs, if they wanted to keep the home, or sale of the house eventually.
Can you post a link to the article if you can find it?
I'm wondering if they're downsizing given median home cost in Texas is about $300k versus $750k in California, from a quick search. It's nice to have the extra money go to equity instead of taxes, I'm sure, but I'm not sure how moving to California without the bump in income would make sense from a pure cost of living perspective.
Maybe if they're coming from Austin and moving to somewhere cheaper in California they'd find apples for apples. Austin's always been a little expensive but never anything near where it's gotten the past few years.
Another few interesting facts about Texas property taxes:
- Your primary residence gets a "homestead exemption" that lowers the overall rate and also caps any tax increases to 10% a year.
- If over 65, you can defer paying property taxes indefinitely for a 5% yearly interest rate as long as you don't move. You still owe the taxes, but they'll be taken out of your estate.
I like the 10% cap as it makes costs way more predictable, while still not having the weird effects that a permanent capped tax does where people are still paying tax rates based on a home value from the 1980s.
No, and that's a fair criticism. At $68K/year I would think you'd have to consider going down to 1 car for the family if feasible, or do that for several years until car 1 is paid off.
The main point I wanted to bring up with my comment was that San Antonio is just about average nationally wealth-wise, but the original comment I was replying to made it seem like half the population was living in very dire straits.
For reference, the ALICE threshold or a family of four is about $68K in San Antonio: https://www.uwsatx.org/alice/
If you go by the federal poverty rate, the rate is 14%, which is about average for the US.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard raising a family on $68K here. I think it would be challenging, especially factoring in childcare, but the ALICE budget gives you $819/month for transportation. This seems excessive given you can get a $10k used car for about $228/month (I think). The pickings aren't amazing at that level, but I regularly drive a car that would currently be valued around $6-8k. It's safe and reliable. I haven't broken down other parts of the budget.
Statewide, the percent above ALICE threshold matches exactly that of California, at 57%, although there are slightly more in poverty (lower threshold than ALICE) in Texas: https://www.unitedforalice.org/national-overview
Is there data on what % of those are single earner households?
Out of curiosity, how would a North Korean who escaped to the West even get money to relatives still there?
Is this a product of it being cash-based or a product of the high inflation that Argentina sees? I imagine it would be quite chaotic with prices fluctuating so rapidly.
I agree with most commenters here that cash is useful and that cashless is a step in the wrong direction. I did want to point out, though, that this differs a lot from what at least some commenters on other forums are saying about the ban. All the top voted comments on Reddit about this are against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/washdc/comments/16wacjy/dcs_ban_on_...
I find the difference in opinion between the HN crowd and Reddit kind of interesting. Part of it is probably because that is a local to DC subreddit, but I also believe they're not really considering the privacy / civic resilience angle.
From my perspective, having lived through a near total power outage in Texas for a week in February 2021, having some cash, food, and drinking water on hand is just basic common sense these days. Some local grocers were letting people take groceries without paying, anecdotally, but I don't think that was everywhere or even corporate policy. You also don't want to rely on that to feed your family or pay for basic goods in an emergency. At one point, even the cell network was starting to go down in my area because the generators powering the cell towers were running out of fuel.
It's a little shocking how different the pre-9/11 mindset was. At 9:07am on CNN, the reporter speculates that perhaps there was an issue with electronic navigation equipment that would have led two planes to hit the towers.
We also blew through the record for number of days over 100 degrees in my part of Texas this year, by double digits. It's 73 days so far this year, beating the previous record of 59 days.
One thing I've noticed is how the body can somewhat adapt to this type of heat. There's air conditioning everywhere, of course, so it's not truly adapting to existing 24/7 in this climate for most.
But, it's funny how a high of anything under 100 feels really refreshing. I keep the AC at around 76 and end up turning up the temperature or putting a hoodie on if I've spent a good amount of time outdoors that day.
I wonder if Apple has a mechanism for notifying people who were affected by the exploit after they update.
Replying to this because I can't edit the comment anymore.
I overestimated the tax by a lot, I misread the chart and was adding the "Cuota" (sum of previous row taxes) from 1 row below what I should have.
They only pay 3,108.51 on the first 668,499.75. This puts the total tax at about half of my estimate, so only a ~0.35% drag on their 2M portfolio.
It's a very progressive tax, basically goes up 10X for really rich folks (>10M they take 3.5% of total wealth).
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36777125 for a breakdown of what it would look like with an example portfolio in Valencia. The tax differs by region and is highly progressive. For a 2M portfolio in Valencia it ends up cutting 0.7% off your safe withdrawal rate after exemptions if you split it between a married couple. It makes it harder to retire early, but don't forget about additional US costs like health insurance, vehicle, etc.
I think it's definitely less common in Europe, but I did want to mention that there are European FIRE communities.
See this one for Spain: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpainFIRE/ or Bogleheads Spain: https://bogleheads.es
The wealth tax also makes FIRE harder, but there are exemptions that make it more manageable.
Here is information about the wealth tax in Valencia: https://atv.gva.es/es/ipatrimoni
Let's use a married couple in Valencia with 2M euro in index funds as an example.
They get 500K allowance each to subtract from their taxable base. Subtracting the 1M total exemption for the couple, their taxable base would be 1M euro for the purposes of the wealth tax. On the remaining 1M, they'd pay 10,595.71 for the first 668,499.75, and 1.12% on the remaining 331,500.25, for an additional 3,712.80. This puts their total yearly wealth tax at 14,308.51, or about 0.7% of their total 2M portfolio.
Generally, 4% is seen as a safe withdrawal rate for a properly managed portfolio for a 30 year retirement. Subtracting 0.7%, that'd give them a 3.3% safe withdrawal rate on their 2M portfolio, which gives them after-wealth-tax money of 66K to play with. Let's say half of what you're pulling each year is taxable for capital gains. With a 20% capital gains tax, that ends up being about 60K. This is a pretty good income for Valencia.
Estimated cost of living for a family of 4 there is about 28K: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Valencia
That gives them another 32K after tax for travel, luxuries, etc. Not to mention, you also get an exemption of 300K (individual) for your primary residence. There are also some other limits on the tax like it not being able to exceed 60% of your total income.
In the US, with a withdrawal rate of 4% on the 2M and no wealth tax, you'd get 80K. After 15% capital gains on half of what you're pulling each year, 74K. Subtract $1400/month or ~$16K for good health insurance for a family of 4 and it's a basic tie, not accounting if you have to actually hit a deductible. In Spain you will just get free public healthcare if you're a citizen.
It's definitely harder to build that level of wealth because of salaries there, but I don't think it's fair to say that it's completely impossible to FIRE there.