Easy: ffmpeg discontinues or relicenses some ffmpeg functionality that AWS depends on for those product alines and AWS is screwed. I've seen that happen in other open source projects.
And then the argument for refusing to just pay ffmpeg developers gets even more flimsy.
The entire point here is to pay for the fixes/features you keep demanding, else the project is just going to do as it desires and ignore you.
More and more OSS projects are getting to this point as large enterprises (especially in the SaaS/PaaS spheres) continue to take advantage of those projects and treat them like unpaid workers.
Not really. Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg.
It's a dumb reason, especially when there are CVE bugs like this one, but that's how executives think.
> Their whole reason for not funding open source is it essentially funds their competitors who use the same projects. That's why they'd rather build a closed fork in-house than just hand money to ffmpeg.
So the premise here is that AWS should waste their own money maintaining an internal fork in order to try to make their competitors do the same thing? But then Google or Intel or someone just fixes it a bit later and wisely upstreams it so they can pay less than you by not maintaining an internal fork. Meanwhile you're still paying the money even though the public version has the fix because now you either need to keep maintaining your incompatible fork or pay again to switch back off of it. So what you've done is buy yourself a competitive disadvantage.
> that's how executives think.
That's how cargo cult executives think.
Just because you've seen someone else doing something doesn't mean you should do it. They might not be smarter than you.
It's the tragedy of the commons all over again.
You can see it in action everywhere people or communities should cooperate for the common good but don’t. Because many either fear being taken advantage of or quietly try to exploit the situation for their own gain.
The tragedy of the commons is actually something else. The problem there comes from one of two things.
The first is that you have a shared finite resource, the classic example being a field for grazing which can only support so many cattle. Everyone then has the incentive to graze their cattle there and over-graze the field until it's a barren cloud of dust because you might as well get what you can before it's gone. But that doesn't apply to software because it's not a finite resource. "He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
The second is that you're trying to produce an infinite resource, and then everybody wants somebody else to do it. This is the one that nominally applies to software, but only if you weren't already doing it for yourself! If you can justify the effort based only on your own usage then you don't lose anything by letting everyone else use it, and moreover you have something to gain, both because it builds goodwill and encourages reciprocity, and because most software has a network effect so you're better off if other people are using the same version you are. It also makes it so the effort you have to justify is only making some incremental improvement(s) to existing code instead of having to start from scratch or perpetually pay the ongoing maintenance costs of a private fork.
This is especially true if your company's business involves interacting with anything that even vaguely resembles a consolidated market, e.g. if your business is selling or leasing any kind of hardware. Because then you're in "Commoditize Your Complement" territory where you want the software to be a zero-margin fungible commodity instead of a consolidated market and you'd otherwise have a proprietary software company like Microsoft or Oracle extracting fees from you or competing with your hardware offering for the customer's finite total spend.
Google, AWS, Vimeo, etc can demand all they want. But they’re just another voice without any incentives that aid the project. If they find having an in-house ffmpeg focused on their needs to be preferable, go for it; that’s OSS.
But given its license, they’re going to have to reveal those changes anyways (since many of the most common codecs trigger the GPL over LGPL clause of the license) or rewrite a significant chunk of the library.
They COULD, but history has shown they would rather start and maintain their own fork.
It might not make sense morally, but it makes total sense from a business perspective… if they are going to pay for the development, they are going to want to maintain control.
I always like to point out that "Open Source" was a deliberate watering-down of the moralizing messaging of Free Software to try and sell businesses on the benefits of developing software in the open.
> We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape.
I like FS, but it's always had kind of nebulous morality, though. It lumps in humans with companies, which cannot have morals, under the blanket term "users".
This is the same tortured logic as Citizens United and Santa Clara Co vs Southern Pacific Railroad, but applied to FS freedoms instead of corporate personhood and the 1st Amendment.
I like the FS' freedoms, but I favor economic justice more, and existing FS licenses don't support that well in the 21st c. This is why we get articles like this every month about deep-pocketed corporate free riders.
Agree in some ways. Still, discussing the nitty gritty is superfluous, the important underlying message you are making is more existential.
Open source software is critical infrastructure at this point. Maintainers should be helped out, at least by their largest users. If free riding continues, and maintainers' burden becomes too large, supply chain attacks are bound to happen.
> Agree in some ways. Still, discussing the nitty gritty is superfluous, the important underlying message you are making is more existential.
It's an important conversation to have.
I remember a particular developer...I'll be honest, I remember his name, but I remember him being a pretty controversial figure here, so I'll pretend not to know them to avoid reflexive downvotes...but this developer made a particular argument that I always felt was compelling.
> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.
The developer meant this in the context of preferring the GPL as a license, but the problem with the GPL is that it still treats all comers equally. It's very possible for a corporation to fork a GPL project and simply crush the original project by throwing warm bodies at their projects.
Such a project no longer represents the interests of the free software community as a whole, but its maintainers specifically. I also think that this can apply to projects that are alternatives to popular GPL projects, except for the license being permissive.
We need to revisit the four freedoms, because I no longer think they are fit for purpose.
There should be a "if you use this product in a for-profit environment, and you have a yearly revenue of $500,000,000,000+ ... you can afford to pay X * 100,000/yr" license.
That's the Llama license and yeah, a lot of people prefer this approach, but many don't consider it open source. I don't either.
In fact, we are probably just really lucky that some early programmers were kooky believers in the free software philosophy. Thank God for them. So much of what I do owes to the resulting ecosystem that was built back then.
I reckon this is an impedance mismatch between "Open Source Advocacy" and Open Source as a programming hobby/lifestyle/itch-to-scratch that drives people to write and release code as Open Source (of whatever flavour they choose, even if FSS and/or OSF don't consider that license to qualify as "Open Source").
I think Stallmann's ideological "allowing users to run, modify, and share the software without restrictions" stance is good, but I think for me at least that should apply to "users" as human persons, and doesn't necessarily apply to "corporate personhood" and other non-human "users". I don't see a good way to make that distinction work in practice, but I think it's something that if going to become more and more problematic as time goes on, and LLM slop contributions and bug reports somehow feed into this too.
I was watching MongoDB and Redis Labs experiments with non-OSF approved licences clearly targeted at AWS "abusing" those projects, but sadly neither of those cases seemed to work out in the long term. Also sadly, I do not have any suggestions of how to help...
A fork is more expensive to maintain than funding/contributing to the original project. You have to duplicate all future work yourselves, third party code starts expecting their version instead of your version, etc.
Funding ffmpeg also essentially funds their competitors, but a closed fork in-house doesn't. Submitting bugs costs less than both, hence why they still use ffmpeg in the first place.
Yes, definitely. I was just saying that if the license ever did change, they would move to an in-house library. In fact, they would probably release the library for consumer use as an AWS product.
something more dangerous would be "amazon is already breaking the license, but the maintainers for now havent put in the work to stop the infringement"
Relicensing isn't necessary. If you violate the GPL with respect to a work you automatically lose your license to that work.
It's enough if one or two main contributors assert their copyrights. Their contributions are so tangled with everything else after years of development that it can't meaningfully be separated away.
I don’t know about ffmpeg, but plenty of OSS projects have outlined rules for who/when a project-wide/administrative decision can be made. It’s usually outlined in a CONTRIB or similar file.
A human at Google investigates all of the bugs fuzzers and AI find manually and manually writes bug reports for upstream with more analysis. They are certainly paid to do that. They are also paid to develop tooling to find bugs.
I'm not sure what you think you mean when you say "running AIs indiscriminately". It's quite expensive to run AI this way, so it needs to be done with very careful consideration.
Well they’d have to write their own driver anyway for one. If they were going to take an existing design and write a new driver, ZFS would be the better choice by far. Much longer and broader operational history and much better documentation.
And you might not get sued by Oracle! RedoxOS seems to use the MIT license while OpenZFS is under the CDDL. Given Oracles litigious nature they'd have to make sure none of their code looked like OpenZFS code, even better make sure any of the developers had ever even looked at the ZFS code.
Its much better to hope that OpenZFS decides to create a RedoxOS implementation themselves then to try and make a clean room ZFS implementation.
Fair enough, though you can’t really understand how BTRFS works without reading the GPLed Linux source while ZFS has some separate disk format documentation. Don’t know that anyone would sue you though.
Its not unreasonable to look at the source code to understand the disk format to then create an independent driver. So long as you are not directly copying code (or in this case, paraphrasing C to Rust.)
More importantly though, Linux or the Linux Foundation are unlikely to file a lawsuit without clear evidence of infringement, whereas Oracle by their nature will have filed lawsuits and a dozen motions if they catch even a whiff of possible infringement.
I wouldn't touch Oracle IP with a 50' fibreglass pole while wearing rubber boots.
Its certainly not as bad as some licences but there are still some gotchas to the CDDL. The 2 big ones here (AFAICT) is it's not compatible with MIT, and any reimplementation of CDDL code would not have the patent protections of the original.
Also, and again, the validity of a lawsuit isn't going to stop Oracle from filing it.
License is the obvious blocker, aside from all the technical issues[0]. Btrfs is GPL, RedoxOS is MIT, ZFS is CDDL. You can integrate CDDL into an MIT project without problems[1], but due to the viral nature of the GPL, integrating btrfs would have impacts on the rest of the project.
What I'm wondering is what about HAMMER2? It's under a copyfree license and it is developed for a microkernel operating system (DragonflyBSD). Seems like a natural fit.
[0] btrfs holds the distinction of being the only filesystem that has lost all of my data, and it managed to do it twice! Corrupt my drive once, shame on you. Corrupt my drive twice, can't corrupt my drive again.
[1] further explanation: The CDDL is basically "the GPL but it only applies to the files under the CDDL, rather than the whole project". So the code for ZFS would remain under the CDDL and it would have all the restrictions that come with that, but the rest of the code base can remain under MIT. This is why FreeBSD can have ZFS fully integrated whereas on Linux ZFS is an out-of-tree module.
> Corrupt my drive twice, can't corrupt my drive again.
Exact same drive? You might want to check that drive isn't silently corrupting data.
I still blame btrfs, something very similar happened to me.
I had a WD Green drive with a known flaw were it would just silently zero data on writes in some random situations. EXT4 worked fine on this drives for years (the filesystem was fine, my files had random zeroed sections). But btrfs just couldn't handle this situation and immediately got itself into an unrecoverable state, scrub and fsck just couldn't fix the issue.
In one way, I was better off. At least I now knew that drive had been silently corrupting data for years. But it destroyed my confidence in btrfs forever. Btrfs didn't actually lose any additional data for me, it was in RAID and the data was all still there, so it should have been able to recover itself.
But it simply couldn't. I had to manually use a hex editor to piece a few files back together (and restore many others from backup).
Even worse, when I talked to people on the #btrfs IRC channel, not only was nobody was surprised the btrfs had borked itself due to bad hardware, but everyone recommend that a btrfs filesystem that had been borked could never be trusted. Instead, the only way to get a trustworthy, clean, and canonical btrfs filesystem was to delete it and start from scratch (this time without the stupid faulty drive)
Basically, btrfs appears to be not fit for purpose. The entire point of such a filesystem is that it should be able to run in adverse environments (like faulty hardware) and be tolerant to errors. It should always be possible to repair such a filesystem back to a canonical state.
> Basically, btrfs appears to be not fit for purpose. The entire point of such a filesystem is that it should be able to run in adverse environments (like faulty hardware) and be tolerant to errors. It should always be possible to repair such a filesystem back to a canonical state.
Pretty sure all file systems and their developers are unsurprised by file system corruption occurring on bad hardware.
There are also drives that report successful flush and fua, but the expected (meta)data is not yet on stable media. That results in out of order writes. There's no consequence unless there's a badly timed crash or power failure. In that case there's out of order writes and possibly dropped writes (what was left in the write cache).
File system developers have told me that their designs do not account for drives miscommunicating flush/fua succeeding when it hasn't. This is like operating under nobarrier some of the time.
Overwriting file systems' metadata have fixed locations, therefore quite a lot of assumptions can be made during repair about what should be there, inferring it from metadata in other locations.
Btrfs has no fixed locations for metadata. This leads to unique flexibility, and repair difficulty. Flexible: Being able to convert between different block group profiles (single, dup, and all the raids), and run on unequal sized drives, and conversion from any file system anybody wants to write the code for - because only the per device super blocks have fixed locations. Everything else can be written anywhere else. But the repair utility can't make many assumptions. And if the story told by the metadata that is present, isn't consistent, the repair necessarily must fail.
With Btrfs the first step is read-only rescue mount, which uses backup roots to find a valid root tree, and also the ability to ignore damaged trees. This read-only mount is often enough to extract important data that hasn't been (recently) backed up.
Since moving to Btrfs by default in Fedora almost 10 releases ago, we haven't seen more file system problems. One problem we do see more often is evidence of memory bitflips. This makes some sense because the file system metadata isn't nearly as big a target as data. And since both metadata and data are checksummed, Btrfs is more likely to detect such issues.
To be clear, I'm not expecting btrfs (or any filesystem) to avoid corrupt itself on unreliable hardware. I'm not expecting it to magically avoid unavoidable data loss.
All I want is an fsck that I can trust.
I love that btrfs will actually alert me to bad hardware. But then I expect to be able to replace the hardware and run fsck (or scrub, or whatever) and get back to the best-case healthy state with minimal fuss. And by "healthy" I don't mean ready for me to extract data from, I mean ready for me to mount and continue using.
In my case, I had zero corrupted metadata, and a second copy of all data. fsck/scrub should have been able to fix everything with zero interaction.
If files/metadata are corrupted, fsck/scrub should provide tooling for how to deal with them. Delete them? Restore them anyway? Manual intervention? IMO, failure is not a valid option.
I wrote a tool to try to attack this specific problem (subtle, random drive corruption) in the general sense https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard but it requires re-running it for any modified files, which makes it mainly only suitable for long-term archival purposes. I'm not sure why one of these filesystems doesn't just invisibly include/update some par2 or other parity data so you at least get some unexpected corruption protection/insurance (plus notification when things are starting to go awry)
I too have had data loss from BTRFS. Had a RAID-1 array where one of the drives started flaking out, sometimes it would disappear when rebooting the system. Unfortunately, before I could replace the drive, one time when booting my array had been corrupted and it was unrecoverable (or at least it was unrecoverable with my skill level). This wasn't a long time ago either, this was within the last 2-3 years. When I got the new drive and rebuilt the array, I used ZFS and it has been rock solid.
> License is the obvious blocker, aside from all the technical issues. Btrfs is GPL
WinBtrfs [1], a reimplementation of btrfs from scratch for Windows systems, is licensed under the LGPL v3. Just because the reference implementation uses one license doesn't mean that others must use it too.
Last time I looked at DragonflyBSD, it was kind of an intermediate between a traditional kernel and a microkernel. There certainly was a lot more in the kernel as compared to systems built on e.g. L4.
There certainly is a continuum. I've always wanted to build a microkernel-ish system on top of Linux that only has userspace options for block devices, file systems and tcp/ip. It would be dog-slow but theoretically work.
You mean because the CDDL files would have to be licensed under GPL, and that's not compatible with the CDDL? I assume MIT-licensed files can be relicenssd as GPL, that's why that mix is fine?
Yes, if ZFS (CDDL) was integrated into Linux (GPL) then the GPL would need to apply to the CDDL files, which causes a conflict because the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL.
This isn't a problem integrating MIT code into a GPL project, because MIT's requirements are a subset of the GPL's requirements so the combined project being under the GPL is no problem. (Going the other way by integrating GPL code into an MIT project is technically also possible, but it would covert that project to a GPL project so most MIT projects would be resistant to this.)
This isn't a problem combining MIT and CDDL because both lack the GPL's virality. They can happily coexist in the same project, leaving each other alone.
And that's why zfs inches along with a fraction of the progress it could have had for decades.
This lack of required reciprocity and virtuous sounding "leave each other alone" is no virtue at all. It doesn't harm anyone else at least, which is great, but it's also shooting itself in the foot and a waste.
It's not an issue of GPL virality because the CDDL-ed code is not derivative of GPLed code and thus out of scope for GPL.
The problem is, IIRC, that GPLv2 does not allow creating a combined work where part of it is covered by license that has stricter requirements than GPL.
This is the same reason why you can't submit GPLv3 code to Linux kernel, because GPLv3 falls under the same issue, and IIRC even on the same kind of clause (mandatory patent licensing)
> The problem is, IIRC, that GPLv2 does not allow creating a combined work where part of it is covered by license that has stricter requirements than GPL
That is part of the virality: the combined work is under the terms of the GPL and therefore cannot have additional restrictions placed on it. If the GPL wasn't viral then the GPL code and CDDL code would both be under their respective licenses and leave each other alone. The GPL decided to apply itself to the combined work which causes the problems.
China was busy training the best scientists and engineers while the USA were busy expanding their woke bullshit inside and outside of America. Thank you for nothing, progressives.
For starters, 100.000 EUR is nothing. Also, in many jurisdictions that threshold only applies to direct (eg father-son) inheritance but not eg between siblings.
I have an unmarried aunt with no kids. Most of her estate is land (that has passed through centuries in the family and is almost illiquid because the European Union has killed agriculture) and some stock (that cannot be used to pay the taxes because it's not yours until you pay the taxes). I just checked and when she dies, my mom (her only sister) will have to pay 45% of that in death tax. We may need to turn down the estate when she dies because we cannot pay the tax. And you think that's fair? Grow up.
The government already got their share during the accumulation period. They have no claim on it anymore. If people want the government to spread their wealth around to help society they can specify that in their will.
I think it's unfair, you work your entire life paying tax on every single euro you make(a lot of tax in fact!) and then when you want to leave that to your child it's taxed again? What complete nonsense. I'm very glad the country where I'm from(Poland) doesn't have that.
People could equally argue that it is unfair that some children are born with all the advantages while others have none. I don't think "fairness" is a strong argument here because it is entirely subjective. What seems fair to you looks like a huge injustice to somebody else.
My parents are upper-middle class, and I've profited from their wealth all my life. My inheritance will be taxed, and I don't find that unfair at all. I was born on second base and had an advantage over others at every stage of my life; it would be fatuous to complain about an inheritance tax.
Suppose you've inherited genes which contribute in varying degrees to brains, beauty, longevity and charm. These are arguably advantages rather more significant in life than money. If there was a choice who wouldn't choose these? So should you be taxed given how you will undoubtedly profit from it? Or is it just the guy who's dumb, ugly, always ill with something and destined for a short life who's hammered if he or she happens to make some real cash?
>is it just the guy who's dumb, ugly, always ill with something and destined for a short life who's hammered if he or she happens to make some real cash
I'm sorry, I don't think I understand the exact point you're making.
I follow the premise of your argument. You're saying genes are a birth advantage, just like money is. I absolutely agree with that. But I don't understand how this ends in "just the guy who's dumb, ugly, always ill" being "hammered if he or she happens to make some real cash."
FWIW, in many Western countries, healthy people are already functionally "taxed" (although it's often not technically a tax) more than unhealthy people because both pay similar amounts into healthcare but derive different benefits from it.
I also think that's good, just like taxing inheritance is.
Those unearned traits might make you more money, and you might also bequeath these traits to your kids. It would compound the injustice if you could furthermore bequeath all the money to your kids, while it would ameliorate the injustice if the inheritance were largely taxed away.
It's taxed above a pretty reasonable threshold. You have the option of gifting your money tax-free to your children, or to public-good organisations. Hell, you have the option to spend some of the money you made in your lifetime! You earned it, spend it! See the world! Eat the finest cheeses for breakfast, lunch and dinner! Have a masseur on retainer! The kids sound pretty entitled anyway!
Read my comment: your brother passes away without children and the Tax Agency steals 45% of his estate (and that's after the "discount" for the threshold, the actual tax rate over the threshold is higher than 45%). That's not reasonable at all.
I'm still getting 55% of the wealth my brother built for himself without putting any effort into it. It would be different if this were a spouse, but surviving spouses are not subject to these taxes.
Also, taxation isn't stealing. But if you genuinely feel that it is, you have the option of moving to a country with no functioning government. The Somali government, for example, has effectively no ability to collect taxes in most regions.
Why should one be entitled to the property of their brother? What's special about a brother that should be unavailable with leaving property to, say, one's best friend?
I don't see what this has to do with communism, and frankly I don't think you do either. And I do agree with you that taxing inheritance is unacceptable.
Parents everywhere in (almost?) every country of the world are allowed to give tax-free gifts to their children without limit. That's generally not objected to in any way, but suddenly people think it's fair when the exact same money or houses get taxed at inheritance time.
Also - at the end of the day, someone is still getting something that they "didn't earn" - why allow it at all? Tax everything at 100% on death - why give people who didn't "earn it" something?
Obviously I'm being fascicious about this now, but if the argument that it's "unfair" for people who "didn't earn it" to get something, why allow this at all?
And also, personally - I think the argument is flipped on its head. It's not about people getting the inheritance - it's about people "giving" it - I paid taxes on my money throughout my entire life, why should the state take any more just because I'm leaving it to my children?
Limiting the snowball effect of the wealthy getting wealthier generation after generation through no contribution of their own is considered a societal good. Whether it is can be debated, but Europe seems to be in a happier position regarding that than the US, at the moment. Why is it always the rugged individualists, the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps proponents who are in favour of receiving unearned money? It feels less like a considered philosophical viewpoint than naked greed.
(and, on a side note, where do you get that you can give unlimited tax-free money to your children in almost every country of the world? I checked the US, France, UK, Spain, Morocco, South Africa and Brazil, and all have limits after which tax apply. China and the Philippines don't, but neither do they have inheritance tax.)
>>Whether it is can be debated, but Europe seems to be in a happier position regarding that than the US, at the moment
I'm Polish and Poland doesn't have any inheritance tax for children, not sure what US has to do with this.
>>I checked the US, France, UK, Spain, Morocco, South Africa and Brazil
Did you really? Here a UK page about this, there is no limitation on how much you can give your children tax free, tax only applies if you die within 7 years after gifting it:
>>Limiting the snowball effect of the wealthy getting wealthier generation after generation through no contribution of their own is considered a societal good
Again, so please tell me why you don't think we should be taxing it at 100%, to maximise the societal good?
I already pay effective rate of 40% of tax on all my earnings - am I not doing enough for "societal good"?
But is the point not that the person who needs to pay this tax, if they accept the free gift of land etc, still gets to keep 55%?
There are cases that can be imagined (a child inheriting an old house in a high-COL location) where it feels unfair, but in this case it sounds like free money. Surely the government is not asking for more money than the land is worth, or something like that?
There is a name for a system where people pass on their wealth (and titles) to their progeny, by birthright.
I am sure the average 99%-er American would love to be back in medieval Europe, where kings and queens, and lords and dukes cared so much for their offspring! Wealth by birthright, that's so progressive!
Nobody claimed otherwise however making sure your loved ones are taken care of in the best possible position involves love and support otherwise why bother you are already dead.
If you don't want to pay taxes, don't be a part of society, don't use public roads, public schools, public hospitals, and public education.
If you do want to be a part of society, accept that it's a give-and-take situation, and move on. Some people give more than they take, and some people do take more than they have given, and that's alright with me.
Side rant:
It's no wonder that a show like Breaking Bad, where a teacher gets cancer and has to become a drug kingpin to finance his healthcare, has to be situated in the US. The plot simply wouldn't hold in any other civilized country.
It's no also wonder that the name Luigi is no longer only the name of Mario's brother but synonymous with something else, and again something that happened in the US.
Nobody said "no" to taxes. Fair taxes are necessary. FAIR TAXES. Not 45% taxes on something that already paid taxes several times (income, property, VAT, etc). That's robbery.
Agreed with you! A progressive tax (the more you earn, the higher % you get taxed) makes sense as a fair thing to me.
Where I am from, it's 52%, and that's a reasonable price to pay for having bike paths, greening, parks, good roads, affordable public transport, great public schools, and paid time off and maternity/paternity leave.
Once there was a strike of the public sanitation workers in my city due to their low wages. You know what happened? In 2 weeks it changed from a beautiful place to live to a cesspool. Don't know about you but I was happy to spend some of my $$ so I didn't have to fight rats, rabid dogs and mountains of garbage to take my kids from school.
As a matter of fact, once somebody reaches a certain amount of wealth, I'd be very much in favor that it should be 70%, 80%, 90% and 99%. And, of course, then you get the prize "you won capitalism, now relax".
52% is not fair but pure robbery. Not so long ago, people paid the tithe (10%) and if any lord, governor or king dared to go just a little further, they'd be killed, usually by hanging. There's many countries in the world with smaller taxes and still great services. Public money is just wasted by politicians trying to buy votes for the next election.
It's not nothing - with 1.8 children the tax-free allowance covers 60-70% of the population (outstanding mortgages and loans are not counted in the 170K figure). And why should anyone be entitled to a relative's property? How does it benefit society? Why not friends', then?
"Benefit society"??? Pal, stop with the communist propaganda and start thinking for yourself.
One thing I can assure you: the moment you get a job, a house, a family, that's the moment you'll realize you are being systematically robbed by taxes that end up eating 70% of your income. If you are not socialist when you are young, you haven't got a heart; if you are not conservative when you grow up, you haven't got a brain.
I was right-leaning when I was young and then I saw where the policies of the last three decades have taken us and I do not like it. I have earned a top-percentile salary in a rich western country and paid lots in income tax, and I would happily give more away to make sure people who make different life choices are taken care of and get more chances in life. The rich need no more money.
Also, what good is it to have a great house, an expensive car, and private tutored kids, if the outside of your house is a slum, the roads are too bad for your car, and your kids risk being kidnapped for ransom any time they go to play outside?
The rich through times always have had the delusion that their wealth will protect them and isolate them from society, with their private armies, private healthcare, private tutors and expensive villas. But if anyone looks at history, it always ends up the same way. Based on that knowledge, it's the rich that should be actively supporting equality and progress in society as if their lives depend on it.
"I just want everything to be the same it is now, except with no government that helps anyone else because I don't want to pay taxes, and I already have everything I need" is a pretty comfortable position. Until, inevitably, people run out of bread, and the guillotines come out.
I'm more than happy to pay my taxes and ensure everybody else has a good life, too. I don't want to find out first-hand how long a head survives without its body still attached to it.
There is, unfortunately, in every large and small organisation. I can't say I've noticed any particular qualitative difference between the efficiencies of government departments and corps of equivalent size when I was working for them; if anything, the government employees were always conscious of the fact they were spending taxpayers' money that was not theirs, although I can't talk of the practical results.
If these organisations were private, waste would be equivalent, but they would lose the mentality of acting in the public interest, and there would be a profit margin taken off. I'm pretty sure it would not be an improvement overall, purely from a viewpoint of efficiency.
Better some waste happening in the public sector and a still a public road being built than a crypto bro buying a lambo from a windfall they made on a rug-pull from a meme coin.
If you don't artificially curb wealth accumulation with laws, taxes and wealth limits, you will always and inevitably end up having an accumulation of wealth that allows the rich to stay rich forever, and keep the rest perpetually in poverty. I have consistently been in the highest taxable bracket in my country, and am happy to contribute even a bigger % of my wealth towards the betterment of the living conditions of my country and city.
> The gap was most pronounced in the US: less than 10% of sons with low-earning fathers made it into the richest 25% of the population, while almost 50% of those with top-earning fathers grew up to become high earners themselves
Talk about "self-made". History has shown again and again that this can only go on as long until the poor and oppressed rise up, seize the wealth, and in the process, harm their "oppressors".
>"Benefit society"??? Pal, stop with the communist propaganda and start thinking for yourself.
It's funny to me that you both think that "benefitting society" is "communist propaganda" and that others need to start thinking for themselves. Who are these communists spreading this duplicitous propaganda of considering the well-being of others and the betterment of our community? I need to find them to thank them for their service and also scold them for being bad at communism.
>One thing I can assure you: the moment you get a job, a house, a family, that's the moment you'll realize you are being systematically robbed by taxes
I have all that, and I still care for people other than myself and my family.
I'm probably older than you, pal, and I'm happy to pay taxes as long as they help make society better. This is a considered, rational, and ethical decision. Just because I'm a highly-paid engineer doesn't mean I work harder or am a more deserving human being than a nurse or a Bangladeshi immigrant working two shifts a day at a fast-food. I'm not so selfless I want to give all my good luck away, but not so selfish I don't want life to be easier for others too, don't want the kids to get a good education, don't want the sick to get treated, don't want interesting art in the streets. I love dystopias, but only in books. I also am not so deluded as to think everything is reducible to money, and that what I achieved did not depend on having a society around me that made it possible.
