I'm not particularly big into fashion (I think my newest clothes are 4-5 years old), but why is the thing you want "common [expletive] sense" and someone choosing to spend their money a different way, by extension, nonsensical?
What they’re getting at is not hairsplitting. Your argument presumes that the purpose of clothing is utilitarian in nature. That it exists merely to cover our bodies efficiently.
Clothing also has an anthropological function as fashion. That might not be something that you are personally interested in, but it is factually something that provides value to society.
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing. But it’s just an opinion.
Fashion changing all the time (on the order of seasons rather than years) contributes to a lot of waste. Your claim that it "factually something that provides value to society“ is unsubstantiated. Just as unsubstantiated as "You are certainly entitled to the opinion that fast fashion is not a good thing".
All fast fashion does is waste money for consumers who buy into the craze, compared to buying quality that lasts. I have used the same two pair of jeans for over a decade at this point for example, and they are in close to mint condition (apart from the colour on the knees). Some T-shirts that I own have survived as long, many have not (it is very hard to tell the quality of the fibers up front unfortunately). In all cases, I use clothes until they are so worn through that they are past my repair skills.
So yes, some people are "invested" in fashion, but I'm saying that is akin to being "invested" in gambling or shopping for the sake of shopping. Addictions come in many forms.
> Retailers take on all the risk, put in the work to revitalize a neighbourhood, and their reward is that when lease renewal comes up in 10 years, it spikes and they're faced with a choice of being displaced or handing over an enormously increased part of their margins to the landlord which has done literally nothing.
This happens on the personal side as well, where property tax rates are artificially depressed - or more accurately, subsidized - until the property changes hands. When we bought our nearly 30 year old house that had had zero improvements, additions, or renovations since initial construction, our property tax bill increased 300% and has since "stabilized" to +10% a year.
What is truly insidious about this is that it's impossible to guess or estimate until you've already purchased the home, and by then it's too late to do anything about it except complain at the courthouse, which might get you a year's abatement if you're lucky.
If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase.
> If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear this varies by jurisdiction. In CA, which has large property tax jumps on sales thanks to Prop 13, it seems like you can know the annual property taxes in advance. The sale price is the taxable valuation* and you can find what the local tax rate is (or you can infer it pretty closely from another recently sold home's public municipal taxes paid).
So solves one problem, but is still problematic :)
*I assume this is the general case, anyways; maybe there's details I'm forgetting about separate tax rates on the land and the improvements; the split of the overall proper value between those two categories was mystifying when I bought...
The hand-wavy explanation is that in the late 70's when this initiative passed (Prop 13), home values were rising rapidly due to an influx of people moving to the state and higher inflation rates of the times. Many people that owned homes, including those that had purchased their homes and retired, were getting priced out of their homes on the property tax rates. There are other rationales or rationalizations depending on where you come down on it. But Prop 13 was intended to slow property tax growth while you owned the property, with assessment reset to full market value at sale time.
It's not in California, there are several states that do this. California is not actually the worst because at least my understanding with California is that there is a public formula you can run based on lot size, sale price, and/or assessment value to figure out your tax liability. So basically you can figure out what your taxes will be like for any offer you make.
> *SECTION 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed One percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties.*
In my experience South Carolina also does this, while it is county by county, their estimates of property value lag heavily but are readjusted after a sale.
I’ve experienced a 2-300% increase in my property taxes on the second year of home ownership as they adjust to meet the sales price.
This doesn't sound like it's the same thing as what happens in California.
> second year of home ownership as they adjust to meet the sales price.
This sounds like the reassessment is triggered when a nearby sale or comparable happens. In California, the triggering event is the sale of the property itself only. So, for the entire time you own the property in California, the Prop 13 rules limit the allowed assessment to increase only up to 2% annually, assuming that the increase is supported by market price increases. Again, this isn't exactly precise legal reading, but is enough for the gist. There are limits to things like total taxation relative to market value and certain ways local governments can (in practice) tax property in excess of the limits. But the idea is to prevent an owner seeing sudden increases of 300% anytime after the initial sale.
Now when you sell your property, the new owner will face the fully assessed market value of the property for property taxes. So the new buyer could face 100's of percent taxation differences compared to what you're paying.
No, this doesn't describe California. From the comment: "has since "stabilized" to +10% a year.". The whole reason people complain about prop 13 is that it wouldn't allow it to be increasing +10% a year. In fact, the OP is actually kinda non-sensical given that they are complaining both about property taxes not increasing quickly enough and about them increasing too quickly.
Hah. People absolutely took them seriously and still do. They are pitched as if they're serious important art about issues. People discussed it like it was King Lear.
I mean, one actor took their role so seriously they locked themselves up in hotel room for a month in isolation to prepare for their role as Joker. Many people in film took it seriously.
Just because a piece is fictional or imaginative doesn't mean it can't be taken seriously
The second point is hard to quantify. If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job. But if I am choosing not to look because I won't take a job, I am technically unemployed by the strict definition of the word but I don't count for what most people care about when thinking about the unemployment rate.
Underemployment is already reported and is distinctly different so I don't think it's fair to say that not counting someone at Burger King who has a Master's degree as unemployed is a "flaw."
>If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job.
The current definition makes sense because it's linked to an overt action that can be objectively determined. "Not looking for a job but theoretically would like a job" gets into all sorts of issues like "I want a job as a king if it landed on my lap...".
A huuuuuge part of why companies, especially public companies, especially those in regulated industries like healthcare and finance are willing to pay eye-watering sums of money for a SaaS app that you could get an MVP up in a few weeks time from a competent team with no AI is that they need a phone number to call when something shits the bed at 2 AM on a Wednesday. They need support SLAs without the payroll and headache associated with it. They need someone to sue if things truly go tits up.
Moving SaaS apps in house is a great way for a VP to get a fat bonus or a director to get a promotion but I have to imagine it keeps the CIO/CTO up at night unless they're fully asleep at the switch.
Yep! We sometimes have a choice between the gold-standard and commonly updated open source solution to X and a two-bit hacked together proprietary solution that has 24/7 support at high cost...and we choose the one with support, because that's what our audits basically require. Because then we can say "yes, it's still within the support contract, we have an escalation point".
"Government propaganda to help one of the richest companies in the history of the world sell 0.000000001% more phones this quarter" is quite frankly just idiotic.
You only said half the sentence anyway. The full sentence is: "If the government wants to get in they're going to get in, unless they want to utilize the courts in any way, in which case they have to do things the right way."
If this reporter was a terrorist in Yemen they would have just hacked her phone and/or blown up her apartment. Or even if they simply wanted to knock off her source they probably could have hacked it or gotten the information in some other illicit fashion. But that's not what is happening here.
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