571–580 of 691 posts
> Our European visitors are important to us. > This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Well they aren't wrong. They protect important visitors.
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uhhh... they are accountable to every one of their clients, every time those clients make a purchase. For almost all billionaires, that's a far larger constituency and a much more frequent and efficient selection process compared to elections every x years by the 30% of the population who bother to vote. As soon as they stop performing, the money stops rolling in.
> uhhh... they are accountable to every one of their clients, every time those clients make a purchase. Nearly nobody gives a damn about the behaviour, eccentric, insane, evil, or otherwise, of the primary shareholders of a corporation that is involved, directly or indirectly, in producing products that they consume. I may think that the Sackler family are murderous scumbags, but if I need medication made by Purdue,…
No, but they have to produce a product that someone is willing to consume at a price they are willing to pay for it. Meanwhile, politicians fail to reduce homelessness with a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars per homeless person.
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>budding Literally Dell Computers is from Austin.
Has Dell done anything innovative since the 90s? It repackaged computer hardware in a cheap package filled to the brim with bloatware.
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Austin already has plenty of homeless people, and the #s are quite comparable to san jose for example - they are just more visible in the bay area due to lax rules for them (plus weather).
> homeless people [...] are just more visible in the bay area due to lax rules for them I'm not normally someone who picks on phrasing, but this one is a little orwellian. The implication is that, while homelessness is endemic basically everywhere, the proper "rules" for them to obey are that they are not to be seen . And enforcement regimes that allow them to exist in public are "lax"? Yikes.
This would be shocking if the Bay Area didn't have an abundance of shelter for them and very-well-funded homeless service programs, but it does. The resources are all there, but many don't want to use them, they just want to be outside and be left alone, and the cities don't do anything about it.
The official reason is because of housing: "To be clear we will be continuing to expand our activities in California," Musk said. "Our intention is to increase output from Fremont and Giga Nevada by 50%. If you go to our Fremont factory it's jammed." But, he added, "It's tough for people to afford houses, and people have to come in from far away....There's a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area." https://ww…
Of course he is blaming housing prices when the real reasons are the lower taxes and pro-business environment in Texas.
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No it isn't. CA will still try to tax those shares if and when he decides to liquidate them. However, Musk does not ever need to liquidate any shares. If he never wants to pay any tax, all he has to do is buy a hedge against the shares (thereby locking in a particular price) and take out loans against the now hedged asset. And like magic, he's got all the cash he could ever need and zero capital gains.
Can I do this with my vesting stocks? I get tax deducted stocks, always!
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I disagree with that article (which repeats the ITEP WhoPays report). It incorrectly assumes that the incidence of the property tax is on the renters that occupy a house rather than the landowner. If you think that property taxes are more regressive in Texas than California you would predict that poor people pay more for rent in Texas than California, when the truth is the reverse. And if you think that property taxe…
Rents in CA (bay area in particular) are a function of demand more than landlords' cost. When rents in CA go up by 40%, I guarantee you that's not because a landlord's taxes went up by 40%, but because demand has shot up and landlords can extract more profit from their renters. The big pandemic rent cuts in SF give a glimpse of what reasonable rents could look like here, if supply met demand (though even the lowest p…
Exactly. In other words, especially where supply is constrained, the property tax is incident on the landowner rather than the tenant.
> my take on that is that's more caused by NIMBYism and an unwillingness to build enough housing to meet demand
Yes, the difference in land use is bigger than the difference in tax rates. However, when property taxes are higher, there is more incentive for cities and households to allow more housing. And even if you believe that property taxes are regressive, it should give you pause to realize that it is more than made up for by California’s bad land use restrictions.
> Property tax is absolutely not a progressive tax, by definition: everyone pays the same rate based on the value of their home, not based on their income or means.
No, that’s just who writes the check. You had it right the first time. The tax incidence is who bears the burden of the tax. Since property taxes are capitalized into the price and the supply is not very elastic, an increase in projected tax payments (due to an increasing rate or increasing property value) are largely borne by the landowner (in the form of a lower sales price or a sales price that grows more slowly) rather than the young worker who buys/rents it.
Good. This will both alleviate pressure on the Bay Area as well as accelerating the political shift to the left in Texas. It's a win all around. I actually think that living in the Bay Area as a tech employee is increasingly unjustifiable from an ethical point-of-view. It was once the case where that was necessary for many career paths but that's increasingly not the case and the pandemic has hastened that shift. Why…
I'm pretty sure Tesla was one of the lowest paying tech companies in the Bay Area.
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There are many millions of people in the country that don't share your politics. Some of them are even engineers with families.
I don't know which people like sitting in traffic. Wide roads is a sign of sitting in traffic. Family wise though, moving to Texas is bad for half the members of your family. Half the people in your family, aren't going to agree with the Texas government's views, whether you want to force them to or not.
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Google maps says downtown Austin to Giga Texas is 17 miles, 24 minutes. I don't know what traffic is like in Austin but I imagine it's not nearly as bad as the bay area. I think a 25-30 min commute is pretty reasonable and most people would happily take that for much cheaper housing. The big difference is that in Austin you have the option to commute a bit for much cheaper housing. But in the bay area you could be co…
Traffic in Austin is insane. Legit insane. Definitely comparable to the Bay Area if not worse. And there is absolutely no transit alternative comparable to BART. There is a morning and evening train, but it's really only effective if you live and work exactly on the stops.
Source: while working as a transport planning consultant, I had a private client in Austin. He flew our team around the city in a helicopter, saying "see all this traffic? It's insane!". I'd just flown in from New Delhi. By the standards I was accustomed to, I didn't see any traffic at all.
Certainly Austin does have a need for much better public transit -- and if being upset about traffic is a catalyst for making that investment, then that's great! -- but in that respect it's no different to most other major metropolitan centers in the US.