there really needs to be a configurable rules/decisions engine. I.e. i would prefer to walk everywhere, i will take public transit if it saves me more than 15 minutes total or 5 minutes per leg, evaluate this at every interchange node.
There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
I'd also be able to tell it "never suggest that I get bus routes A, B or C; they do not in practice turn up on time".
> There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
Had a good one in Amsterdam recently; rather than walk 9 minutes to the nearby central station and get a train there, it wanted me to walk 6 minutes to the central station's metro station entrance (which was a bit closer), get a metro, then join the train at another station entirely. Would have taken about twice as long.
> If you do the work but undervalue it, it's likely tax fraud.
A company can value it's services as it chooses. If the work is performed for $1 or $5000 the government doesn't get a say in that.
> you do the work but overvalue it, it's likely investor fraud.
Quite possibly. Assuming this was done with the intention of misrepresenting your revenue and gaining investment.
>The vendor may have been chosen not by merit, but by its willingness to accept an exchange of services. Saying you have $X in revenue implies you won that revenue by merit.
Vendors are chosen all the time because of their willingness to accept specific payment terms and a whole bunch of non-merit pipelines via family, via golf course deals etc.
> That's simply not true. You may get a certain amount of leeway, but it has to be reasonable.
Where have you seen this?
When I was doing consulting I could charge whatever rate I wanted. Usually around $200 but went up to $500 and down to $25 when doing a favor. Same type of work.
At the enterprise level this is even more common. Nothing has a fixed price and the same service can be sold at wildly different prices to different customers based on endless variables.
Sure, if you're charging cash. If you charge $25 and that's all you get, it's worth $25 by definition; being bad at business is allowed.
But if you're charging $25 and you're getting $25 and a favor, that work you're doing is actually worth more than $25 and the IRS expects you to declare the value of that favor as income. If you normally charge $500 but sometimes you charge $25 the IRS might look deeper to see what else you're getting in compensation.
You're highly likely to get away without declaring that favor, and there are certainly legal ways to avoid it too -- gifts, training/education, et cetera, but at it's base level it's income.
It might be legal in YOUR jurisdiction, but at least in the jurisdiction I'm in, it is not - AFAIK - legal to neither underwrite or overwrite costs on the sole purpose of avoiding tax or grooming the pig.
No, depending on your accounting method the transaction we're discussing may be disregarded, so the net economic position of the taxpayers is no different. As a result the IRS is generally indifferent...so long as you maintain that method of accounting for future similar transactions.
> A company can value it's services as it chooses. If the work is performed for $1 or $5000 the government doesn't get a say in that.
It isn’t that black and white. If you are being paid in cash, you can charge whatever you want, that is true. But if you are exchanging goods or services for other goods or services, the government is going to care how you value that transaction.
> A company can value it's services as it chooses. If the work is performed for $1 or $5000 the government doesn't get a say in that.
Whether it you think it should or not depends on your personal preferences, but in practice the government does get a say in anything that it deems to be an undue way to reduce your taxes.
Barter would be much more common if it was a legal way of avoiding taxes.
How would this reduce taxes? If I normally charge 20k for widget Z but only invoice company A 10k because they will see me widget B for 10k and we trade widgets, there is no taxable event. If company A was willing to pay the 20k instead obviously I would rather have that even if it creates 10k taxable income because profit.
Investor fraud is much more likely if neither company actually needs each other's widgets and it's just to pump revenue.
Investor fraud is usually brought as a civil case and takes a balance of evidence approach.
Since enforcement is stochastic and rare these practices are pretty common. The freedom to do ‘whatever’ is really dependent on the discretion of the government and investors. Most companies can and do fly under the radar but have to be careful not to piss off the wrong people.
Okay but then why are we singling this out as tax fraud, if the justification is just "anything can be"? Why not claim that posting on HN is tax fraud?
Barter counts as income by many tax jurisdictions, if you don’t declare the fair market value of the exchange you are in violation. Most people don’t declare this and it is rarely ever enforced.
It depends on jurisdiction, the US is unusual, most countries they’ll reassess you and it’s on you to prove them wrong.
I did have to look it up, I didn’t know that the US was different in this way. I did have the California tax authority make a mistake and take money directly out of my account and there didn’t appear to be a way to fight it. It wasn’t enough to be worth hiring a lawyer over so I let it go but it didn’t give me much faith in the governance of California, very Kafkaesque.
CA FTB does not take money out of your account unless you have explicitly authorized it to do so and it definitely does not do so automatically. It only pulls specifically authorized amounts when specifically authorized to do so unless you have a garnishment order issued by a court. (I deal with the CA FTB on a daily basis.)
You're also wrong about most other countries as well, with the exception of France.
It is possible my memory, Google, and now AI are all conspiring against me.
It was a vehicle registration issue for a car I had sold 10 years earlier, it got a parking ticket in CA and they used that as evidence I still had the car and owed registration fees. I had evidence the car was sold and had changed title many times since then before the parking ticket but they wouldn’t accept that. I didn’t go to court over this and the money disappeared from my account, I did get a phone call telling me what happened. I had not received any notice prior. As mentioned I’m sure I could have gotten a lawyer for this but legal fees would have exceeded the amount lost, perhaps in the future when I have a lawyer on retainer.
Tax is a complex issue that differs from one jurisdiction to another, and I am in no way an expert in any of them, but I do believe most tax authorities would require fair value exchanges.
Which means, "If the work is performed for $1 or $5000 the government doesn't get a say in that." --- it absolutely does, in the way of requiring the person getting a "$1 service" to calculate their tax as if they got $5000.
On a corporate level it doesn't really matter as you're only taxed on your profits/losses. If we do a service swap ultimately it's just adding a revenue item with a matching loss, and these are infact quantified.
As an individual interestingly it does matter because services received for free are considered taxable income (but businesses are not taxed on their income).
This is pure nonsense. In the US the internal revenue code doesn't allow you to just value services however you choose in what is effectively a barter arrangement.
So technically, a yacht is any leisure vessel. ie not a working boat. In the UK, a yacht is usually a sailing boat though we also increasingly have motor yachts. In the USA though, a yacht is a large motor powered vessel. So, when an American says 'nobody needs a yacht' they generally mean one of those, rather than a sailboat. Not sure what context CrimsonCape was using.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Selfishly I think my American healthcare is better than anything I ever had in the UK. I can see a doctor within 2 weeks even a specialist, I can actually get a sleep study, my doctor will actually listen to me rather than tell me I'm just getting old, go home and take an ibuprofen.
In terms of health outcomes, the UK generally has higher life expectancy and lower maternal mortality rates than the US - but that said, even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts.
The real focus and point of contention should be that the US healthcare system is exponentially more expensive per capita than any European model, but is worse for almost all health outcomes including the major litmus tests of life expectancy and infant mortality. In some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Americans average spend on inpatient and outpatient care was $8,353 per person vs $3,636 in peer countries - but this higher spending on providers is driven by higher prices rather than higher utilization of care. Pretty much all other insights in comparing the two systems can be extrapolated from that fact alone imo.
This is probably incredibly naive so apologies if so - are things like differing obesity or other health problem causing conditions accounted for when looking at overall outcomes of the system?
The higher cost makes perfect sense to me but calculating an apples
to apples comparison of health outcomes between potentially very different populations seems potentially very difficult? Again sorry it's probably a solved problem but figured I'd ask :)
The lower life expectancy in the US is almost entirely down to young people dying at a much higher rate than Europe due to car accidents, murder, and drug overdoses. It skews the averages pretty badly. If those individual risks don't apply to you then life expectancy is actually pretty decent.
There is a wide variance in the general healthiness of the population depending on where you live in the US, which does affect life expectancy. Where I live in the US my life expectancy is in the mid-80s despite the number of young people that die.
That's because mortality rates are only weakly correlated with healthcare quality. The US has much higher death rates in some young demographics, which skews the average, but those people didn't die due to lack of medical care.
You can have exceptional healthcare quality and relatively low life expectancy in the same population.
The Brown study I cited above concludes differently, and is strictly a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age.
Within that 50-85 cohort, among 73,838 adults (mean [±SD] age, 65±9.8 years), the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.
This is likely very regional. As a single data point, raising the family in the Boston area for the last 25 years I do not recall not being able to see a doctor the same day for the regular scares, from ear pains and high fever to falling and later vomiting (is this a concussion?).
A few times when we needed to see specialists, we often saw them within 24 hours; occasionally longer but I would say with a median of 48-72 hours. Even things that are clearly not urgent (for dermatologist "hey, I have forgotten about skin checks for the last 2 years, can we do the next one now", for ENT "hey, my son is getting nosebleeds during high intensity sports; can you check if there is a specific blood vessel that is causing problems"?) always happened well within two weeks. Three caveats to this happy story:
1. This is Boston area with likely the highest concentration of medical practitioners of all kinds in the US. I had good insurance with a large network, decent out-of-network coverage and for most cases not needed a pre-approval to see a specialist.
2. Everyone is generally healthy and our "specialist needs" were likely well trodden paths with many available specialists.
3. Our usage of the doctors, as the kids became generally healthy teenagers and adults, dropped significantly in the last 5-7 years. I hear post-covid the situation is changing and I may be heavily skewing to the earlier period.
At least from what I can see, COVID and the changes in attitudes towards medical professionals are driving a lot of burnout and leaving the profession; and since then economic pressures are squeezing private practices out of existence and a lot of specialists end up working for private equity now.
I think you should also balance your take by asking people who recently lost their job what they think about their healthcare. I’m sure you’re aware of that, and my point is rhetorical, but that’s the trade off here, it isn’t only about what it looks like when things go right, you should also consider what happens when things go wrong. It’s also enlightening to see what happens many times when people “did everything right” and still got shafted by the US system. See: Sicko for instance https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEQ7acb0IE
I suspect the time it takes to see a specialist in the UK depends on how urgently the issue needs to be addressed. The real advantage you have is that you can be seen by a specialist within two weeks even for non-urgent stuff. That’s not to dismiss your need though. The definition of medical urgency and comfort don’t align well.
That's ridiculous. Nobody gets healthcare equivalent to a third world country unless they just don't try. (Think, an addict or mentally ill person, which is still not a good thing, but much smaller of a carve-out than you've represented)
If you cough up for private healthcare maybe, when it comes to the NHS if it's not going to kill you immediately it's more or less 'take a spot in the waiting list and God will sort it out' these days.
That's largely due to austerity effects and not the inherent model of UK healthcare. That's what happens when political appointees and ministers bully civil servants and doctors that the best minds all leave, while the government significantly cuts funding to the NHS while forcing it to move to AWS.
I'd take issue with your price point but agree with the sentiment
I've seen victorinox fibrox knives in Michelin Star kitchens, they get the job done and are very reasonably priced ($60 for a chef's knife).
Admittedly the knives I have at home are significantly more expensive largely because the knives I have at home are on display so I want something that looks good and I actually enjoy using them.
On one level it's a little silly but then on another level people spend thousands on art/sculptures which has no useful purpose.
When I was in school (in seventies), all boys at least tried to learn how to use and take care of all sharp tools and machines with one up to wood and metal lathe. When I was in school now as a teacher, scissors were the only somewhat sharp things kids were allowed to use. Risk tolerance is so low in our society nowadays, sense of responsibility of children is nonexistent etc.
A semester of machine shop taught me an immense amount, and based on my experience with a lot of techies, 95% more about how the world (and tools) work than 95% of the population.
I never tip before receiving the service. Always hit zero. It feels a bit weird to begin with but you get used to it and i've not been treated any differently. A tip is generally not required for coffee or to-go/counter service.
> In America, at least in restaurants, employers are allowed to pay a lower minimum wage to tipped employees. So tips are an essential part of a servers compensation and should not be considered optional.
This actually varies state by state. In Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington the minimum wage does not change tipped vs non-tipped. Also in other states if the pay after tips do not meet the state minimum wage the employer is required to make up this difference.
If you actually look at the data tipped employees make significantly more vs median income in countries with tipping than without.
> If you can't afford that, then you can't afford to eat out, choose a different option.
I think this works if we're talking about a full restaurant, If we're talking about a mostly empty restaurant then even a 5% tip is money that the server would have not otherwise had, pretty certain they'd choose more money over less.
There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.