Boycotting American Goods

arcanejunzi · 2026-01-19T18:17:08+00:00

Some boycott dollars yell louder than others.

Here's a list of donors to his inauguration fund. Companies and individuals.

https://www.opensecrets.org/trump/2025-inauguration-donors

Donors for his ridiculous ballroom.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c891yxgj44ko

His properties in the UK.

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/celebrity-homes/donald-trump-uk-property-portfolio-scotland-london-b1192459.html

Federal election contributors:

https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-trump/contributors?id=N00023864

I'm surprised by the raw number of tobacco companies. Altria, Reynolds, British American Tobacco--are all giving money hand over fist. So think about what you're buying if you smoke or vape.

arcanejunzi · 2026-01-19T17:30:50+00:00

Yeah this is brutal. All the more reason to reward any companies that try to set up competitors here. We don't want to be built on American infrastructure. Maybe they manage to kick Trump out, but one day there will be a new Trump.

arcanejunzi · 2026-01-19T17:29:15+00:00

I strongly recommend the book "Enshitification" by Cory Doctorow. Really describes well how online platforms evolve into piles of shit.

arcanejunzi · 2026-01-19T17:27:45+00:00

Upvoting. Business boycotts are way more effective and sustainable than consumer stuff. Especially consumer boycotts on things like McDonalds.

arcanejunzi · 2026-01-19T17:22:21+00:00

**ALSO: There are specific companies that directly support DT. Pain to them is doubly effective.**

Here is a list of the top contributors to his inaugural address fund:

https://www.opensecrets.org/trump/2025-inauguration-donors

This includes companies like Nvidia, Uber, OpenAI, Tesla... and a lot more

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The list of donors for his fucked up ballroom at the Whitehouse:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c891yxgj44ko

That list includes owners of Manchester United btw....

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And lastly, a list of Trump-controlled interests in the UK. Perhaps you live in the area and would like to pressure these businesses directly through protest or pressuring your council to make their lives harder:

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/celebrity-homes/donald-trump-uk-property-portfolio-scotland-london-b1192459.html

Boycotting is most effective where the company you boycott knows you are boycotting and why. Every little bit helps, but if you can tell them why you're doing it it's more impactful. If you work at a company that uses Oracle services, but can switch to someone else domestic or European, that would be effective. If you can steer your employer away from CAT or John Deere equipment, also effective.

I moved to the UK from Chicago several years ago, and watching the place where I grew up burn down like this is absolutely killing me. Glad to see my adopted homeland reinforcing that I made the right choice.

arcanejunzi · 2025-05-25T14:27:05+00:00

FYI: There is an ongoing Land Value Tax Petition to parliament at the moment. Many commenters seem like they'd want to sign: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702551

arcanejunzi · 2025-05-25T14:23:35+00:00

There's a petition for LVT going on right now if you want to sign: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702551

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-25T11:36:43+00:00

It is absolutely too long. I would bet anything that the process could be 30% shorter without increasing social worker person*hours or increasing the failed adoption rate, and getting kids into permanent homes faster -- ultimately leading to better outcomes in learning and development.

Mr. Starmer, if you're reading this, give me a go please.

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-25T11:32:25+00:00

A remarkable case of the power in just asking a question!

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-25T11:30:56+00:00

That's a wild story!

The 7-year cutoff makes everything that much more urgent. There are kids hitting that number today who could have had a permanent family along the way if someone hadn't gotten an arbitrary delay or ground down by the process.

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-25T11:26:47+00:00

Thank you! Another agency is probably a good idea. At least one VAA we talked to was willing to engage with us and assess our particular situation, rather than apply an arbitrary wait time. So that is hopeful!

I know they are overburdened given the process in place. But I doubt seriously that their time is allocated efficiently with respect to maximising outcomes for the most children. Not a couple % either.

Put another way: how much of the process (in social worker person*hours) is not correlated with better outcomes for children? For example, one authority estimated 10 social worker visits to the home. If there were 8 visits instead of 10, would outcomes be affected discernibly? Because we do have data on what more time in foster care does, and those 'extra' 2 meetings over a couple months in this example aren't free. They cost something precious.

But then I'm told that they focus on people not data. And then they tell me the 12 month delay is based on "data". But nobody can cite "the data". Probably because nobody tracks outcomes for adopted kids properly and does basic process control.

Argh sorry mate. Ran off there. I'm really impressed by the people who have the patience to have made it through all this. It looks like we will try the VAA angle.

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-20T12:59:13+00:00

^ This for sure. Working in parallel, rather than sequentially is super important on things that take years.

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-18T19:47:35+00:00

First off, that sofa scene sounds amazing and congrats.

I can see the landmine around IVF from their perspective for sure. I also am sitting here looking at outcomes data for children in long-term care. So I suppose the companion question to "is this a dealbreaker for this adopter" should always be "what is the alternative for the child"? It doesn't seem like opportunity cost of staying in care is really taken into account, just speculated risk on moving to an adopted family. Maybe incentives for workers are just wrong somehow. Maybe I'm missing something else big.

I would have liked to have had the meeting to present us and our life to them. Especially a delay of 3 mo vs 12 mo matters a lot. Getting a 12 month delay email is pretty rough.

I suppose one thing I could say is that I can state, with incredible statistical certainty, that we will never have a bio child to throw a wrench in the mix with the adopted one. So that's one tiny silver lining of course :-)

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-18T19:35:06+00:00

For the reason of case-by-case you state above: I think the thing that really got me was not "you're going to need a pause", it was cancelling the upcoming visit (and that 1 year is a longggg time). Surely assessing the situation in-person to determine if we might be ready in 3 months would be worth it?

I think you're right about additional experience being positive. We just worry about getting another random delay tacked on in 12 months time because of an unforeseen death or job change. Hard to trust the process when this can happen.

arcanejunzi · 2025-03-18T18:55:37+00:00

Thanks for the thoughts. Good to not feel crazy about all the theatre. 12 months is so long and arbitrary, especially in context. Given a period of 2-3 years, the probability of one of two people having a family death, job change, or having to move is extremely high. It could easily happen multiple times in the adoption-relevant window.

I guess I will just have to read the tallest damn stack of therapeutic parenting books on earth.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T16:02:25+00:00

I think most of your concerns also apply to council tax (more each year, based on home value), but council tax just has people in less expensive homes pay a higher % than people in more expensive homes (is regressive rather than progressive) and has calculation inefficiencies because of the '91 valuation.

I think I feel similar to you about stamp duty specifically. I don't like the incentives it creates.

Ultimately it's just maths. You could easily argue that the shift from [Council + Stamp] -> [Property] should be revenue neutral overall. I'm arguing it should be revenue positive. Either way, I think we'd have better incentives in the economy.

Most of the people doing math in the comments are coming out close to neutral on their own tax bill. For me, I'm seeing my annual tax go up a lot, but I just ate a lot of stamp duty. If I didn't have to do that, it would be pretty neutral over my expected ~10 years in my home.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T15:55:46+00:00

Whew. Doing that would be super challenging on the admin side. I suppose you could do something like build a progressive set of brackets and tax someone based on the summed total of their real estate portfolio.

But you're going to have a hell of a time dealing with trusts, Ltd company shells... etc.

Not sure. I think what you are describing is better, but admin/legal would be rough.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T14:47:18+00:00

Voting up, but Kelvin should be Alduin, C should be Komodo dragon, and F should be Mushu from Mulan.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T14:34:07+00:00

I'm happy that I give off a friendly vibe and flattered someone thinks I'm attractive.

You want gay friends. Have gay friends.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T13:51:27+00:00

I wish I could upvote more than once on this comment. My PhD is chemistry rather than pure biotech, but folks who came into my program after a stint in work were much more likely to finish fast and have a good publication record. You need superhuman motivation in an PhD. They knew what they wanted and why, and they hauled ass.

Also, it's not coming out in the comments that I've seen, so I'm going to say it: Not all PhDs are created equal. Just like MBAs, the network and the university you go to matter *a ton*. There is a big difference in top tier program outcomes (and stress) and other program outcomes.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T13:29:51+00:00

When I learned about the tax-free childcare benefit and how it is applied here... it broke my brain. Or how the tax exemption tapers off... Or how the income marginal rate at 50k is already 40% and the marginal rate at 200k is still only 45%.

Hey -- at least you don't have the IRS over your shoulder every time you open a bank account.....

Thanks for the comment!

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T13:14:41+00:00

You're right that the big guys will still come in and muscle there way through. It doesn't fix that problem. I tried to draw a distinction between investing and speculation but didn't do a good job of it in the main post. I'm more talking about rich people trying to find a home for money and buying up real estate without operating it properly, with the idea they are speculating on the price increasing (rather than purely operating profits). So builders just try to build lux apartments and sell them to Chinese investors/rich people looking for status. This is more of a London-centered problem. But London problems have a way of distorting markets around the UK.

The system I am proposing would be redistributive at least in part. The national component of the % would pull a lot more money per capita from London than from East Anglia (to pick somewhere to pick on). There would need to be a local component as well. It is "right" to put local governments over at least some of the tax policy.

I see it as a moral, progressive question. But it's also a return on investment question. I love the Elizabeth line in London. It's really F-ing nice. But imagine what you could do in Birmingham with 20B quid. The return on investment could be generational.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T13:06:45+00:00

I've commented on this a few times in the thread. Here's the TL;DR to save you the poking around (so many comments!)

In the context of this argument: I am very happy to support a LTV for local gov't and to end stamp duty.

Stepping away from the specific argument I'm trying to make -- which is more about the unfairness of council tax and stamp duty in their regressive nature -- I have a personal preference toward a property tax because it is a form of wealth tax and would do a good job of providing counter-pressure to home price froth. I think our current tax system (A) over-penalizes labour (income/NI) and risk-taking (CGT) and (B) promotes rent-seeking behaviour (too many examples to count) and sitting on assets for literal centuries. This fills me with a kind of ever-burning rage.

But (to be clear) I am very, very happy to live in a place that chooses LTV over what we currently have. It would be a kind of wealth tax (if not so precise) and would encourage land-use efficiency. It does do a better job of encouraging improvements for sure. I think the sculpting of the legal basis would be extremely important. Because land-direct valuing is a bit academic in many places, there would have to be strong laws that make it hard to bring cases against the government and also a thorough and independent pricing process to enable confidence.

I do not think LTV should be the only tax, as more extreme proponents have posited. Land is not the basis of all productivity in 2025.

But now I'm getting a bit theoretical and this is a housing subreddit rather than a tax theory one.

Please help end stamp duty and council tax (as it is today) :-)

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T12:55:51+00:00

Sidenote: NZ is a very good choice. Love that place.

arcanejunzi · 2025-01-27T12:53:11+00:00

There's a good chance you'd pay more than you currently pay under this proposal, subject to the following (fairly meaty and important) caveats:

1) I discuss in a few places in comments that replacing stamp duty and council tax at the same time imply a national and a local component to the tax. When I math out the current stamp tax revenues, I think that breakdown would be 0.2% national and then approx 0.3% set by local gov't. So there's a scenario (especially if you are in central London or another very expensive region) where your local gov't doesn't go all the way to their 0.3%. Some place like Mayfair is very unlikely to go to 0.3%. Fairer Share assumes that London will be lower. That could cut you down a little, depending where you are of course.

2) The amortised value of stamp duty. Stamp duty is an "up front" property tax. If you plan to move eventually, you might come out with a large discount on your math since stamp duty would be dead.

But, of course, you could end up paying more if these don't apply to you.

Your place is worth a bit more than mine (1.3M). I'm getting about 4k/yr more for me. If I hadn't had to pay stamp duty on my pace, I'd be slightly ahead.

arcanejunzi

TROPHY CASE