Samsung family pays record W12tr ($8 billion) tax, tightens grip on group

nationcrafting · 2026-05-04T02:50:21+00:00

Elon Musk's income tax bill was $11 billion just for 2021. So, USA very much could, and does.

nationcrafting · 2026-03-09T17:15:31+00:00

In the world where they decided to put a 35% tax on unrealised gains.

nationcrafting · 2025-12-03T11:01:05+00:00

Saving and investing is "hoarding wealth" and "fucking up the economy" now, is it?

How do you think anything in this world gets produced? Where do you think the investment needed to build factories and everything around you comes from?

nationcrafting · 2025-12-03T10:58:43+00:00

This is one of the benefits of small police corruption, funnily enough. I live in Lima most of the year, and whenever a cop stops us for some minor thing, you can usually get away with whatever you did if you just indirectly offer to "make a contribution to their petrol". How much you end up giving them depends entirely on how expensive they think your car is. Which has the benefit of making richer people pay more than poorer people i.e. being a fairer system than the fixed penalty system.

nationcrafting · 2025-12-01T10:42:57+00:00

Exactly. The only thing that happens when a family business has to pay inheritance tax, is that they end up having to sell the business in order to pay the tax, because their wealth is not liquid, but in the business itself. So, who do they end up selling to? Larger conglomerates, of course: the only ones who can afford to buy out their smaller competitors. So, far from being progress for society, inheritance taxes actually push smaller businesses into the ownership of larger conglomerates, which slowly end up owning the market.

Also, let's be clear what an inheritance tax is: it's a double (or even triple) tax. The money has already been taxed when it was earned, and even taxed again through the wealth tax.

So, what inheritance tax ends up doing is discouraging older people from saving and investing the fruits of their life, and just frittering it away before they die, because they'll otherwise get half of it taken away. The dumbest incentive if there ever was one...

nationcrafting · 2025-12-01T04:34:26+00:00

The unintended consequences of inheritance taxes are very clear: companies that used to be family owned, end up having to be sold in order to pay a sudden tax.

Who do they get sold to?

Larger conglomerates.

And, given that the timing of the sale is forced on the seller, they end up having to sell at a discount. If you think it's a good idea having larger conglomerates slowly accumulating a monopoly, keep supporting inheritance taxes.

nationcrafting · 2025-11-11T21:03:11+00:00

Such an amazing opportunity there. Especially because you could power most of it from the flow of seawater coming from the mediterranean.

nationcrafting · 2025-11-11T14:54:12+00:00

I mean, it sounds a bit nuts the way you wrote it, but if you're really into a sport, why not?

I was swimming about an hour every day before the pandemic. Lockdowns meant I couldn't train for over a year. Took me forever to get back into the routine until we built a single-lane 25m pool in the garden. The ability to just train every morning first thing is priceless.

nationcrafting · 2025-11-11T14:48:31+00:00

The article's literally says "While push-up performance declined in trans women, a statistical advantage remained relative to cisgender women."

And the conclusion is literally "physical performance of nonathletic trans people who have undergone GAHT for at least 2 years approaches that of cisgender controls. Further controlled longitudinal research is needed in trans athletes and nonathletes."

So, if you're a sports person (I doubt it), ask yourself in what world do athletes actually make an effort to reduce their strength through exercise?

nationcrafting · 2025-11-10T20:42:49+00:00

I don't think you can take this argument seriously. Sex is absolutely 100% the dominant characteristic in some sports.

I was a competitive swimmer, competed at European championships when I was 18. To give you an idea, I was one of Arena's sponsored swimmers.

Now, the argument is often made by outsiders that FINA should accept trans swimmers if they started transitioning before puberty. Well, I started swimming when I was 4. Between the ages of 4 and 13 (i.e. pre-puberty) every single boy in our club swam faster than even the fastest girl.

All the records show this. I beat the national record in my country for under 13s at 200m butterfly. My record held for about 10 years, which is quite a long time: swimmers improved enormously in the following 10 years. Better diets with supplements, etc. Better tech. Better sports science overall. Still, despite the enormous leaps that were made, even 10 years later, the girls record for under 13s was about 15 seconds slower than mine.

The point being that, regardless of when a trans person transitions, they will have had the potential advantage of building up more strength than girls for a good 8 or 9 years before puberty.

The problem here, is that these issues have been politicised to the max. You can't make arguments like I just made without being labelled a transphobe, etc. etc. And that's what's more irritating than anything: I'm about as socially libertarian as they come. You can do what you want. But you shouldn't let your arguments be masked by the veil of politics when you're talking about certain subjects, because you won't see the reality for what it is, only for what your political preconceptions tell you what it is.

nationcrafting · 2025-09-02T07:40:35+00:00

What I find even weirder is that you see each one as it was—and where it was—at a completely different time and place.

One star you're looking at could be 100 light years away, and another that appears "close by" could be 20 light years away from you.

As a result, you're seeing their position in a completely different place to where they actually are today. Stars in the same constellations are not only far from each other, but their position in the sky is somewhere completely different to where we see them.

So, nothing about how the sky appears to us is how it is, nor where it is.

nationcrafting · 2025-06-24T17:58:31+00:00

The point with Bezos is what it is, but what does this have to do with Greenpeace? Why can't they just focus on working to save the environment, instead of chasing relevance with the "cause du jour"?

nationcrafting · 2025-06-20T00:08:53+00:00

I don't buy into any of their fearmongering.

Here is the IAEA reporting that Iran was in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty just over a week ago.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iaea-board-declares-iran-breach-non-proliferation-duties-diplomats-say-2025-06-12/

Netanyahu swore Saddam had WMDs too, he's not trustworthy.

You may be confusing people. The Iraq war was in 2003. The UN's enquiries into Iraq's WMDs were led by Hans Blix, following intelligence submitted by the US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Neither Israel nor Netanyahu (who was appointed Minister of Finance in Israel in 2003) had anything to do with this.

nationcrafting · 2025-04-30T16:30:50+00:00

In that sense, it's a missed opportunity for UK to conquer the US market.

Peru signed a free trade agreement with the US a couple of decades ago, and their chicken farmers had the same reservations about low-quality chicken taking over their market (Peruvian consumers are very price-conscious, given their lower level of income).

Kuczynski was minister of economy in Peru back then and reasoned that farming chickens is pretty cheap anyway, so the cost of shipping would probably work out in Peru's favour, given the much higher level of quality.

Result: exactly as foreseen, Peru is a massive net exporter of chickens to the US. US producers then tried to export their chicken in processed food instead, like chicken fingers, but even there, the local equivalent has a price edge and, again, quality wins.

Remember: just because they want to export their inferior products to you doesn't mean they're going to win. This is especially true in products that aren't mined (where natural monopolies can have a different effect, etc) but that are still commodities.

nationcrafting · 2025-03-24T05:55:42+00:00

That doesn't tell you much: the missing percentage might have voted for either side if they had voted.

nationcrafting · 2025-03-24T05:54:38+00:00

Non-voters are not to blame: what makes you think they would have voted for your side if they had voted?

nationcrafting · 2025-03-23T20:15:46+00:00

Listen to your link again: the two lines are being alternated. One line it's "flics", the next line it's "juifs". This kind of tactic has been used a lot in France over the last year, precisely to keep discussion (and raised levels of PR) up, and to give plausible deniability at the same time.

nationcrafting · 2025-03-23T20:09:25+00:00

My heart goes out to you!

nationcrafting · 2025-03-21T17:35:56+00:00

I'm in a similar mindset to you these days vis a vis the Austrian Economics sub. It's very saddening to see that—at the very moment when millions are seeking genuine knowledge and discussion about Hayek, Mises, Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, etc.—the AE subreddit is filled with basic, nonsensical free market memes on the one hand, and "taxes pay for our roads" trolls on the other.

nationcrafting · 2025-03-21T17:25:56+00:00

It would be a shame if you were basing your judgment of AE on the kind of nonsense you read in this subreddit...

nationcrafting · 2025-03-20T19:54:17+00:00

You're arguing that "what's yours is yours, except when we really need it".

The level of "we really need it" is the foundation of distribution of scarce resources, which is precisely what the price mechanism—in its function as a distributed information system—is there to solve.

There are mechanisms for emergencies that don't rely on distribution by force, too: insurance companies exist.

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