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Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

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Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#181

Post by rtpg »

notch656a wrote: post #134
mc32 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty transparent that they did that to circumvent regulation. Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.

Am I the only one that sees no problem with that? Why the hell should coca-cola be responsible for what someone else does with coca leaves?

It's basically about lying. Coca-Cola says "I am going to do X so let me import this", while intending to actually do Y. Meanwhile, the gov't is like "well in principle we don't want people importing this because of Y but we'll make exceptions if it's for X"

And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.

In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#182

Post by cgriswald »

dataflow wrote: post #158
cgriswald wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my expectation. Law, like code, can and has been patched and rewritten.

Companies with literally thousands of people with billions of dollars to invest have a hard time making their products bug-free no matter how many times they patch and rewrite, and we're talking about dealing with computers here. Exactly how many years of rewrites are you willing to spend on each piece of legislation to make it bug-free? Is it even remotely realistic? or will your solution grind legislation to a halt…

My statement that judges should interpret law and not lawmakers is not equivalent to this idea that law must be flawless and bug-free. Those are ideas you've brought to the table that I've already disclaimed. I said laws should be quality laws. What qualifies as quality in law isn't "100% bug-free, literal, unambiguous, single-definition words that don't require any interpretation at all." To the extent that a law is bad (as qualified by law, not by a computer code metaphor), no I don't think judges should go about the business of guessing how it should work. It ought to be punted back to lawmakers. (Otherwise why even separated the two: Just have lawmakers act as judges or vice versa.)

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#183

Post by spicybbq »

fooey wrote: post #14
geocrasher wrote: post #5

This reminds me of the Subaru BRAT in the early '80s. There was a 25% tarrif on imported pickups. So Subaru added two plastic jump seats in the back of the BRAT, even making them face backwards. No seat belts as I recall just handles. They weren't even really intended to be used. They were just cheap plastic. But they served the purpose of making the vehicle a four-seater car instead of a pickup, with only a 2.5% tar…

A seafood company in Canada has a 100 foot section of train track, where they load trucks on and right back off, in an attempt to get around the Jones Act requirement that goods shipped between 2 points in the US must use US flagged vessels https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2021/09/15/feds-accuse-...

That's amazing. The section of track (ahem proper Canadian railroad) is quite visible on Google maps and street view has a great shot of it[0]. It is VERY short indeed.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@45.1583297,-67.1396882,3a,75y,3...

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#184

Post by olalonde »

geocrasher wrote: post #5

This reminds me of the Subaru BRAT in the early '80s. There was a 25% tarrif on imported pickups. So Subaru added two plastic jump seats in the back of the BRAT, even making them face backwards. No seat belts as I recall just handles. They weren't even really intended to be used. They were just cheap plastic. But they served the purpose of making the vehicle a four-seater car instead of a pickup, with only a 2.5% tar…

It does shed a light on how arbitrary and ridiculous tariffs can be. I can't imagine the amount of resources wasted on enforcing, complying with and avoiding tariffs. There aren't many consensus in economics but getting rid of tariffs is one and here we are in 2022.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#185

Post by bagacrap »

vmception wrote: post #118
djrogers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling stocks at a loss is only helpful in the short term, or if you don’t think those stocks are going back up. If you harvest a loss for a tax deduction on December 31, and the stock goes back up by the end of January so you’d be even, you are way behind – because the loss only comes back to you at your highest tax rate.

> and the stock goes back up by the end of January so you’d be even, you are way behind there are ETFs created for the sole purpose of circumventing this, by providing exposure to the same asset or market forces the wash sale regulation has amendment aimed at preventing this by prohibiting trades of "substantially similar securities", but I don't think it passes muster or has any teeth. you report all the trades to t…

direct indexing helps with this as well --- own thousands of individual stocks that collectively act as an index, and trade in some losers for their similar competitors every time you have to realize gains

But it's not exactly the case you could pull this off with, say, Tesla, unless there's some ETF that's 99% TSLA (is there?)

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#186

Post by brewdad »

jrockway wrote: post #87
fredoralive wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that the issue was that Ford, the importer, changed the class of vehicle between import and being sold inside the US. Presumably if you aren't the importer you can go wild (IANAL).

Yeah, so they're really just getting punished for not dotting their is and crossing their ts. They could create a subsidiary with the same board of directors as Ford that they sell the cars to, and then the subsidiary does the dirty work of repurposing the cars from passenger vehicles to cargo vehicles. They skipped paying the $100 corporate registration fee, so now they're on the hook for a billion dollar fine that…

Except that now those vehicles are used and may be more difficult to sell again. If you don't go through the trouble of retitling them, then clearly they were never really sold and the courts will see right through this scheme.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#187

Post by JohnBooty »

cgriswald wrote: post #178
JohnBooty wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your code will fail sometimes. You’ll fix it. That isn’t isn’t remotely how passing laws in a democracy works. I can push a fix to prod in minutes (or in the worst case, days) and it rarely if ever affects peoples’ lives in the way that laws do. In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways tha…

You're being unnecessarily rude. I never said the law worked exactly like code . I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.

Apologies for the tone. You're right to call that out.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#188

Post by notmercedespr »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #62
HeavenFox wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the Ford vs Chicken Tax; basically U.S. import tariff for passenger van is 2.5% and cargo van is 25%, so Ford, which manufactured their Transit van in Turkey, installed seats in factory and stripped the seats once they arrived in the U.S. Now looks like they are in trouble for this scheme. https://jalopnik.com/ford-faces-potential-1-3-billion-fine-f... (And why it's called Chicken Tax is another fascinat…

Perhaps a more relevant and legally robust example is the Mercedes Benz Sprinter, which is manufactured in Germany, but US-bound vehicles have various parts removed before shipping. A facility in NC reassembles the vehicles (the removed parts are shipped with the van) once they arrive, which reduces or eliminates the tax.

Bit off, this was done near Charleston, SC as recently as a few years ago but has since transitioned to full manufacturing.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#189

Post by mek6800d2 »

shuntress wrote: post #172
cgriswald wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer judges and lawyers interpret what the law says, not what they believe lawmakers meant to say. It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws. Such hacks expose weaknesses in the laws as written. Edit: ... when successful.

It is a judge's responsibility to literally judge whether a given application of the law is appropriate. This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say" . Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional tr…

I'm having a little trouble interpreting (pun a happy happenstance!) your comment. Judging whether an application of a law is "appropriate" basically gives judges free rein to do whatever they want, although I can't think of a better description of what judges should do. (I suppose your use of "literally" is problematic in that, as used, it simply refers to your definition of a judge's responsibillity but is easily conflated with other posters' use of "literal" in the sense of the judge not doing any "interpretation" of the law.)

Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.

Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.

Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.

And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#190

Post by gumby »

autoexec wrote: post #131
bentcorner wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the infamous Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States case where Marvel Comics argued that their X-Men toys where "nonhuman toys" and not dolls to avoid an import tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat... The irony is that in the X-Men universe, the X-Men fight for a unification of mutants and humans.

Still, technically true though I'd think. Mutants aren't human. The X-Gene makes them "Homo sapiens superior" and distinguishes them from humans who were mutated by other means (radiation, spider bites, etc). Do X-men want to erase the distinction or do they just want peaceful coexistence between the two species?

> or do they just want peaceful coexistence between the two species?

Are they truly speciated or can they interbreed producing fertile offspring?

"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" doesn't really address this as Superman is not a member of genus homo.

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