That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.
You won't be able to in the future unless you are very wealthy.
Countries cannot afford the benefits and healthcare promised to retirees. So governments are getting more grabby. That pattern seems to be occurring in many countries.
Netherlands example: new capital tax 36% rate. A capital growth tax (vermogensaanwasbelasting) applies to stocks, bonds, savings, and cryptocurrencies. A separate capital gains tax applies to real estate and startup shares, taxing only upon sale.
US: see medical debts.
Articles usually talk about savings as though you can bank some funds while working, earn interest, and withdraw the savings later.
Don't deceive yourself thinking like that.
"Savings" cannot work in the future due to demographic issues (especially due to people living longer) even if you saw it work in the past.
Look at how many workers support one retiree. In New Zealand it used to be 7 workers to one retiree, and in the future it looks like 2 workers to 1 retiree.
This is a core issue for anyone below retirement age. Not only do we deceive ourselves about solutions, we are deceived by articles and history.
I have no intention of spending my childrens' inheritance selfishly extending my own life, and I'm grateful to live somewhere I still have that choice. The people of New Zealand and the Netherlands have my sympathy and I hope they one day have the same freedom of choice.
Plenty of people say that - but in my experience people often change their minds when faced with hard choices.
Fortunately in New Zealand we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Choice_Act_2019 if you've got a terminal illness. We also have Advance Directives for making your own choices about your health should your health go South.
If you follow the fairly common path of "various expensive, intermittent medical problems for a couple decades, a handful of years of very-bad medical problems, nursing home, then hospice care" in the US, and you don't have a shitload of money, you don't really have a savings of your own, you're just temporarily taking care of the medical and end-of-life-care industries' money. There's not going to be much to pass down.
This becomes more true by the year, as those costs keep rising faster than broader inflation.
This isn’t an argument against saving. It sounds like an argument for saving more. Unless the message is to live it up while you’re young, then don’t bother treating anything when you get old… just let go.
That's one of the biggest takeaways - if you're an average American with average retirement, you will die in your 70s and 80s and your children will inherit ... just before their retirement, likely.
So instead of waiting to die, give it earlier when it helps more; or give to grandchildren.
The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work.
There is a minimum age to collect old age benefits from the government. The justification for that should be obvious.
The choice between working and starving to death is not a choice. If your savings have been taken by the government, then you don't have a choice.
The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so. Then steal whatever they have left with medical bills and price hikes on necessities.
> The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so.
Actually, the justification is to prevent old people from having to work. Retirement didn't really exist until the creation of pension systems in the late 19th century, and the modern social security system was a poverty alleviation measure introduced in the 1930s. Hell, social security was initially resented by older workers because of the cover it gave employers for firing them for being too old.
Social security was sold to the populace for purposes of voting as "insurance." Lawmakers straight up admitted they purposefully wrote the law in a confusing way[] -- resulting in evasion of democratic scrutiny and the scrutiny of the constitution. Then they briefly switched to not calling it insurance just for the purpose of scrutiny of the courts.
Social Security constitutionality was ruled on just months after the 'switch in time that saved 9' associated with a threatening to pack the courts and evade the checks and balances built into our "democracy." They ruled it was covered under 'general welfare' in a way that was totally historically inaccurate.
Furthermore, FDR and congress purposefully had it packaged in an omnibus style bill to evade democratic scrutiny over the individual portions, by purposefully torpedoing other aid to needy individuals if SS didn't pass, so that lawmakers wouldn't be able to vote on democratic view of SS but rather being damned in a catch-22 where they'd be accused of not helping out the needy in other ways.
Basically the whole thing was designed to not only evade democracy but also the constitution.
[] Recollections of the New Deal, by Thomas H. Eliot, pp. 102-115 (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1991).
But the CPF isn't represented as benefits from the government. It's represented and claimed to be your own savings that you have set aside. At gamed bond rates where the government skims off the top.
> The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a minimum of 2.6%).
Social Security is effectively the same thing. Payroll taxes are collected and placed in the social security trust fund, which invests them in federal bonds.
Payroll taxes actually pay for current Social Security benefits, the trust fund was tacked on with separate government funding in order to make it a bit less of a complete Ponzi scheme.
The trust fund is funded by the overage of collected Social Security taxes compared to Social Security payouts. It is not "tacked on" and does not use "separate government funding".
Currently there are more payouts than taxes so the trust fund is being used to make up the difference.
When the trust fund is depleted (barring any changes, this happens at some point in the next decade if I'm not mistaken) then there will be a reckoning. If no action is taken by Congress the result is that payouts will be cut by the necessary percentage to match the taxes.
Yes, it does. The Obama administration explicitly appropriated general government funds to try and make up a developing shortfall in the 'fund'. There is no money being accumulated because there are more payouts than taxes - but even if that wasn't the case, these are not actual "bonds" that have been bought on any market, they're just non-market government obligations.
They could, but it’s a tradeoff. Inventory costs money and if you cut production, that means laying off workers and possibly selling productive assets, at which point it becomes more expensive to scale production back up.
Every business decision is a tradeoff. Smart government interventions in the economy add weight to that tradeoff to reflect externalities not otherwise accounted for; this is how cap-and-trade on SO2 emissions works. Hamfisted government interventions set hard and fast rules that ignore tradeoffs and lead to unintended consequences.
In evaporative cooling, the warmer particles are more prone to evaporate and escape leaving the remaining substance cooler than it was. Likewise, as individuals with more of a libertarian or founder-sympathizing mindset stopped contributing to HN as much, the overall tone of the site turned more negative against business and successful founders.[1] I don't want to speculate too much on why they started leaving--I hope it's because they all got too busy being successful founders--but once the effect started to happen and HN turned into less and less of a site for founders to discuss their startups and turned more and more into the proverbial peanut gallery, I think a feedback loop started pushing more of them away.
mftrhu is probably correct in attributing the origin of the analogy but I don't specifically remember where I got it from and I think some of the examples EY gives in that essay would be uncalled for to apply as a direct analogy to HN. HN was never a doomsday cult and I'm not even trying to say that all of the smart and reasonable people left HN, but rather that there was a specific attitude and mentality that's not well represented here anymore.
[1] This is oversimplified. Classic HN still had lots of people complaining about big tech companies, it's just that the criticism was usually voiced from the perspective of another founder rather than from the perspective of a progressive critic. For instance, I remember lots of complaints about Apple's arbitrary and capricious App Store policies, but then that directly affects the startup founder who wants to build an iPhone app.
It wasn't conscious or intentional. JMS only realized the connection halfway through writing it.
"It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)
Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others." -- Lurker's Guide
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
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