siberianbear

The $100k you're referring to is the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion [1]. If you're an American working abroad, you don't need to pay income tax on your first $107,600. The exclusion does not apply to self-employment tax or investment income.

That's not even the real problem, though. The problem is that banks don't want to deal with the FATCA compliance issues and just refuse to deal with Americans, period. I've experienced this firsthand as an American expat and it is a colossal pain in the ass.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...

And it's not just you, either. I'm lucky to be alive after the crazy shit I did as a teenager.

^ Yeah, this.

I socked away and invested everything I could during my career in Silicon Valley. I retired just a few months after my fortieth birthday.

Why most of my colleagues didn't do the same and instead 'leveled up' their lifestyle to match their income is beyond my capacity to understand.

The parent comment is a bit flip and sarcastic, but he's not wrong. $550k isn't even a speed bump for Twitter. SV tech companies aren't going to take EU regulatory bodies seriously unless they pass out meaningful fines.

Hopefully, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission intends this to be a "shot across the bow" hinting at more severe fines if Twitter continues to do this kind of thing. Otherwise, Twitter is unlikely to change their behavior.

I think this is about the fourth time I've seen this story on HN.

Not knowing anything about philosophy, I started reading Nietzsche. I really couldn't even understand what he was talking about. After beating my head against it for some time, I reached out to an acquaintance who was a philosophy instructor at a university and told him about my experience.

"Try reading Hume," he advised me.

So, I read Hume, and I enjoyed it.

Last summer, I was visiting Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time. I've always had a fascination with cemeteries: how the stones were carved, how old the people were, how long they lived, how long did their widows outlive them, etc. In this particular cemetery in Edinburgh, I came across the tomb of David Hume. It was completely unexpected: I was vaguely aware he was Scottish, but I didn't expect to find his tomb. I took a picture and excitedly sent to all my friends. "Hey, I found the tomb of David Hume!"

I guess my comment is a bit tangential to the article. Like the article author, I found Hume interesting and accessible. I still don't understand Nietzsche.

If you're married or have children AND they come with you to AZ, that's obviously no problem. In that case, it works in your favor: it's just more data that you're a bona fide AZ resident. I was pointing out that if your children stay in CA while you go to NV, it works against you.

And AZ isn't NV. The FTB pays special attention to NV in particular because it has no income tax. Someone who moves to AZ isn't so obviously trying to skirt CA state income tax.

My case was a little special because I sold a lot of stock right after leaving CA, which makes it a little suspicious to the FTB.

You're absolutely right: it's a massive transfer of wealth from the young, productive class to older people and to commercial landlords. But it can't be changed: it's the "third rail" of California tax policy.

(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice)

I left California for Nevada many years ago, and I subsequently sold stock I accumulated while in California without paying state income tax.

It is legal and you can do it, but there are a lot of legal hurdles. They're pretty well documented around page 5 of FTB 1031 [1].

In my case, I quit my W2 job in California, entered into a contract to lease a home in NV, got rid of all leased or owned real estate in CA, sold or re-titled all motor vehicles from CA, registered to vote in NV, surrendered my CA driver license for a new NV license, re-titled all my financial accounts at my new address, got a NV phone number, etc.

This was all easy because I was single without children. If my situation was more complicated, like I had a spouse or ex-spouse with children enrolled in CA schools, or decided to retain owned real estate in CA, the situation can quickly fall into a gray zone.

If you have a W2 job in CA while claiming you're in NV, it's very hard to escape the CA FTB.

CA is very aggressive about chasing down its former residents. It's important to check all the boxes to get them from chasing you.

After I left, I filed non-resident CA returns for three years basically saying, "I had income but I am not a resident and it was not from a CA source, therefore I owe no CA tax." This is important because it starts the statute of limitations running. If you don't file, the statute of limitations doesn't start.

And while I'm writing all this: what in the world is up with a 13.3% state tax bracket? Screw California.

[1] https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2019/2019-1031-publication.pdf

Obligatory apropos xkcd...

https://xkcd.com/323/

I have used Threema and I like it, but the barrier is that it is not a free app. I've only been able to get fellow nerds to install it.

I like the idea that it indicates the level of safety you have with another person quite clearly. The highest level is when you physically scan one another's QR codes when you meet in person so you know nobody is inserting themselves into your key exchange.

Amen!

Posting a link to Coinbase's peremptory rebuttal seems apropos.

https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...

One of the things most amazing about the world is that the activity of human beings spans such a wide range of behavior: we do things that are so stupid that an alien might think we are not even sentient, and then we're capable of doing stuff in science and engineering that is absolutely brilliant.

Something about this doesn't make much sense to me. "Fauci said he's being 'practical' when he says, 'I think if we can get 75 to 80% of the population vaccinated, I think that would be a really good accomplishment.'"

If 75% of the population is vaccinated and the effectiveness is 90%, that ought to drop R0 below one pretty quick.

There seems to be a lot of "mental fatigue" with all these virus measures. Eventually, people are just going to stop complying. At some point, hitting people over the head with regulations is just going to be ineffective. It's already hitting that point even without any vaccinations at all.

It reminds me of the famous quote by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I was able to get around the paywall by using "reader mode" in Firefox.

Yeah, I had that same thought. A length of 4 or something seems unlikely to happen because a miner would almost have to be doing something nefarious to build on top of an already stale chain. A length of 2 could be some kind of concurrency/synchronization issue caused by one miner not having seen another miner's block in time to start mining on the "correct" chain.

I'm not a lawyer. But I think this is pretty much what happened when Peter Thiel funded lawsuits against Gawker until one of them bankrupted them.

https://www.thewrap.com/silicon-valley-billionaire-peter-thi...

There is an excellent (and free) book on this topic by the late computer scientist Peter Hintjens. [1] This book should be required reading for every adult. These toxic people are out there and understanding how they operate is the way to defend yourself.

[1] http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths

You're probably being downvoted for such a flip response. But you're not wrong, so here's my upvote.

It's obvious that if you're an island that is far from the rest of the world by a few hours by plane that it's easier to isolate. And that's doubly true for New Zealand.

Oz better hope that that a good vaccine emerges: otherwise they're not going to like "round one" of Covid, much less "round two" which many countries are going through now. Ozzies have no immunity unlike the rest of the world.

This topic has been beat to death more than a beat-to-death horse.

At 100K a year, there is a huge shortage of engineers.

At 500K a year, there is not.

I think the grandparent comment made the right call. It could have worked out well. Or perhaps the university would have taken disciplinary action against him for "hacking" the university computer system.

No good deed goes without punishment.

Now I'm curious. How do Colombians close a taxi door?

I can't speak to caffeine, I'm still trying to kill that demon myself.

However, cutting out alcohol has increased my health and energy significantly. In your twenties you can drink every day, wake up at 8:00 and have a normal day. In your forties, that catches up with you.

"Burning" may not be the right word. Denaturing (i.e., the proteins losing their quaternary structure) may be what increases bio-availability

I also don't understand the parent's comment. An LLC can make a tax election with the IRS to be taxed as an S-Corp.

In addition, it's not even a valid argument if the cost was entirely in cash.

One would be making the argument, "the cost is essentially free because although we spent $40B, we acquired a company worth $40B". Obviously, that's not any more correct than the case of paying in stock.

Not the OP, but RoW probably means Rest of World.

Fidelity outsources their debit card servicing. A Fidelity rep told me that the cap is set per customer, and the withdrawal limit is set depending on the account balance and history with that customer. They told me that I could request a higher withdrawal limit if I wished to do so, and they may or may not approve it.