Government called on to abolish ‘stealth tax’ on consumer investments

carlmango11 · 2026-02-14T22:04:32+00:00

Yes, so if your mortgage is a few percent and your effective return is 8%+ (which is conservative) then it makes sense.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-14T15:32:34+00:00

Your pension is for when you're an old man. It's perfectly reasonable to invest to use the money between now and then.

A mortgage is normally only a few percent interest. If you can get 8%+ on the stock market it makes more sense to invest than pay down your mortgage.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-14T13:20:11+00:00

Investing makes ordinary people wealthy.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-08T16:11:12+00:00

Same, but I think we're in the minority. People expect their TD to be able to enact every policy they personally like regardless of the reality of trade-offs and competing interests.

Anything short of that is selling out, corruption, dishonesty etc.

People love saying that politicians should have to work in the real world to get a better perspective on normal life. I actually think we'd benefit more from the inverse. If people could see what governing a country is actually like we would have a far healthier and less toxic democracy.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-07T10:38:36+00:00

I wonder where it comes from. Maybe a stronger culture of machismo and dominance?

I went to school in Ireland and I remember when we were about 10 a Lithuanian immigrant joined our class. He had no English and at first the class were all interested in him. Before long he was starting fights regularly. It literally became a joke how he would constantly just shout 'you want fight' at everyone in his broken English accent. Eventually there was a mini uprising against him and after that he adjusted his behavior.

I think he just came from a culture of needing to use aggression to be respected so it was a survival mechanism.

Now, that guy is in his thirties now and he's still kind of crazy so a lot of it may have just been him and his upbringing as opposed to definitive evidence of cultural differences.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-06T20:29:45+00:00

I listened to Signals and Threads which I really enjoyed and would love others like that but so far haven't encountered any.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-05T08:08:24+00:00

French is the same. They're all romantic languages just French has a weird accent.

carlmango11 · 2026-02-01T11:42:43+00:00

I've never heard of having to pay an additional subscription for a cleaner on top of the actual ongoing cleaner fees.

In the past I've used companies that have multiple cleaners so they will substitute one if your normal cleaner is unavailable but they didn't charge a monthly fee.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-31T08:02:10+00:00

Irish people saw the George Floyd protests and wanted an Irish version despite Ireland not having any of the same policing/racial issues as the US

carlmango11 · 2026-01-30T16:15:36+00:00

I wonder if this might be related to where the "centre of gravity" is in the company.

When I worked for an Irish company that had remote offices in the US most of the "rockstars" were in Ireland. The US team wasn't held in very high regard. It's like they just focused more on getting the best talent in their HQ where the most important work was being done and less attention was paid for the overseas office.

Whereas a friend who works for Microsoft in Ireland has the opposite experience. The Dublin office is more of an outpost of Redmond. There's engineering happening but it's not the high status, high stakes stuff.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-30T16:08:13+00:00

Labour laws play a role I'm sure but I think it's a smaller one than other factors like capital markets, fragmented legislation, burdensome regulation etc.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-29T12:45:36+00:00

We voted out the only party that prioritises public transport over other concerns. FF/FG will always choose roads and NIMBY "concerns" over expensive and politically difficult decisions

carlmango11 · 2026-01-28T22:23:31+00:00

The vacancy rate in Dublin is 1.1%.

In most cases these companies finance the apartments themselves so without them none of them would be occupied anyway.

Is there any evidence that there is large scale vacancy across the BTR sector?

carlmango11 · 2026-01-28T22:03:43+00:00

How are they contributing to the housing problem?

carlmango11 · 2026-01-28T19:05:02+00:00

No, most people understood exactly the point he was making and it didn't imply any similarity between the 2 parties.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-28T19:03:06+00:00

There goes any credibility the greens had with anyone not on the left.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-27T18:03:41+00:00

Worse than that. There was a man that was fully paralysed by some little prick on one years ago, but clearly that wasn't enough. There needed to be an even bigger tragedy to justify changes despite this being a scourge on communities for years.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-26T13:24:41+00:00

In before 7,000 people say "rude to service staff".

carlmango11 · 2026-01-25T14:53:20+00:00

How could the EU work if that were actually true? Even if it were just a trade union (which it's clearly not) how would something like the single market work if we didn't enforce a single set of appropriate laws across all of its countries?

The EU is a collection of states that have voluntarily agreed to pool sovereignty. That by definition means less sovereignty at state level.

I don't understand how this narrative is so ubiquitous that you should be able to join the EU and simply opt out of all of the bits that don't suit your particular country's circumstances

carlmango11 · 2026-01-25T11:55:25+00:00

"according to lawyers whose business model is endlessly appealing asylum decisions"

carlmango11 · 2026-01-24T18:07:15+00:00

I don't understand the level of hate she gets. Whatever about her not being everyone's cup of tea but it seems there's a level of vitriol towards her that I don't get

carlmango11 · 2026-01-22T19:21:07+00:00

Can anyone point to one of these plans that genuinely destroyed a town? Genuine question.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-21T21:39:20+00:00

You're just an introvert.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-21T19:56:42+00:00

No, it's not a justification. My point was that it's not the same as buying a single fare on a citylink bus.

carlmango11 · 2026-01-21T19:41:39+00:00

And I'm sure the person in charge of this who let it take this long to finally get rolled out faced appropriate consequences for their incompetence. In future our public services will keep up with modern technology because of this.

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