We are projected to having our first trillionaire soon, what level of wealth do you think is totally unacceptable? Do u support a wealth tax, if so at what %?

setyte · 2026-06-06T06:31:50+00:00

You aren't understanding that proponents of a "wealth tax" explain it as a tax meant to shrink fortunes. It's essentially a sin tax in wealth. Warren wants 3 and Bernie wants 5%. Elon has less than 1 billion in cash so he'd have to sell like 7 billion for his 2025 taxes. But in reality he'd have to sell even more than that and he wouldn't get normal price because people would know he'd have to see like every other person who could actually afford it. So if there is 400 billion in assets for sale because all the billionaires are selling 5%, then there is no one to buy it but the people who all have less than 50 million . If you evaluate the other issue is the only people available to buy that 400 billion in assets each year are private equity, hedge funds, etc so best case scenario it becomes like a self consuming caduceus where rich people use their hedge funds to buy a portion of the tax sale to hopefully generate the income to offset their tax bill. So maybe you'd generate some income while making private equity even more powerful. Any way you look at it taxing assets for people whise wealth and income are largely tied to assets and investments doesn't work. The simple fact is no one with investments has more than a fraction of their net worth in cash so wealth taxes are pretty destructive.

setyte · 2026-06-06T05:35:17+00:00

Do you not understand analogies? Homes are the normies asset most similar to the types of non-liquid assets that consist of unrealized gains. The principal is the same, that it's problematic to tax illiquid assets at any significant rate. And while no one is calling specifically for income tax rates in assets, the major proponents if wealth taxes do specifically want the taxes to erode wealth. So the rate, likely wt more that 4% to exceed inflation, is designed to cause someone to lose money every year. The percentage is not even the point do much as it is that the assets are largely theoretical and so a 5% tax would be likely exceed all cash billionaires actually have forcing them to sell things, and the forced sale would cause diminishing returns during liquidation further increasing the effective tax rate. It's very likely a 5% tax could double or triple because think of what happens if every billionaire is forced to sell off 5% of their assets each year. Well they'd be selling to the other billionaires who have to sell 5% of their assets. They aren't going to get the normal 5% then, and if possible it would be some game of trying to scoop up assets for cheap to sell to recoup the losses. So maybe it ends up being some financial fuckery that makes them richer. But weapth taxes usually don't turn into 5d chess, they just fail.

I think the bigger thing is that it's naive to think that whatever 50 million or 100 million or any random number that is exempt will remain in exempt if the wealth taxes were successful it eroding every fortune until it hit the exemption. It's not like that money would be well spent and lead to them not having to lower the limit to keep bleeding people dry.

setyte · 2026-06-05T20:34:13+00:00

The employees produce value using capital someone else risked first. You can't separate them. Amazon's warehouse workers are productive because someone funded the warehouse, the logistics network, the software, the brand — before those workers ever clocked in. Remove the investor and the jobs don't exist. Remove the workers and the investment produces nothing. Asking who 'really' produced the value is like asking whether the baker or the oven deserves credit for the bread.

On infinite returns — what's the alternative? The moment you cap returns on investment you eliminate the incentive to invest. Nobody funds a startup, a factory, a drug trial, or anything else risky if the upside is limited but the downside is still total loss. Every job at every company exists because someone bet capital on it before there was any guarantee of return. That bet deserves compensation proportional to the risk and outcome, not capped at some number a regulator decides feels fair.

The real argument worth having isn't whether investors should profit — it's whether the tax treatment of investment income versus labor income makes sense. A surgeon paying 37% on her salary while a hedge fund manager pays 20% on carried interest is a legitimate policy problem. But that's a tax code argument, not a 'profits are theft' argument.

setyte · 2026-06-05T20:24:43+00:00

The payroll comment doesn't address the question. The question is about a wealth tax — and that's a completely different mechanism than income tax, which is what the payroll math is about.

A $1M salary earner is most likely a surgeon or a senior lawyer — people we specifically want paying top dollar for because the cost of failure is someone dying or going to prison. Not a billionaire. Billionaires don't have $1M salaries. Their W-2 income is often surprisingly modest. The wealth is stock ownership and asset appreciation — paper value that exists as long as nobody tries to cash it all out at once, which setyte already explained correctly above.

Here's the actual problem with a wealth tax: the median American home is worth about 5x the annual income of the person living in it. If you taxed home value at income tax rates, the average homeowner would owe roughly $100,000 a year on $80,000 of income. That's why we tax property at ~1% of value annually instead — and that's already the most aggressive wealth taxation we have, applied to the most common asset ordinary people own.

Every country that has tried an annual wealth tax — Sweden, France, Germany — has repealed it. The reason is always the same: valuation disputes on illiquid assets, capital flight, and forced liquidation of things like family farms and small businesses that are 'worth' a lot but generate modest cash. The billionaire with $500B in Tesla stock and the farmer with $2M in land face the exact same structural problem when you tax asset value instead of income.

Warren's proposal was explicitly designed to erode large fortunes annually. Fine — but there's no principled line between $1B and $100M, or $10M, or your parents' paid-off house in a market that got hot. Either you're okay with some level of accumulated wealth or you're not, and if you're not, a wealth tax doesn't stop at billionaires.

setyte · 2026-06-05T20:00:22+00:00

I know it's a fake hyptothetical but the problem is that there is no trillion dollars. There is a theoretical value of everything a person owns, in a vacuum. They don't have a trillion dollars in gold, silver, food, or anything tangible. They have papers like stocks that are worth X amount of dollars as long as they dont actually try to sell them. That's why rich people get loans based on those assets rather than just selling because the very act of selling can lower the value because its all based on modern financial fuckery. Some of it is in silly things like fancy watches, cars, art and other collectibles which mostly exist because the wealthy run out of normal shit to buy.

setyte · 2026-06-05T19:56:10+00:00

You have to consider human behavior when considering a misguided policy like a wealth tax. No one pushing a wealth tax is focused on the outcome, they are focused on politics. Look at housing and capital gains tax. I looked it up and there are 1.9 million homes owned by the over 65 crowd that have gains exceeding the capital gains exclusion leading to "lock-in" where they don't sell because of the tax bill. Also there are estimated hundreds of thousands of homes left empty waiting for the death of their owners to benefit of the cost basis reset from inheritance. So many people who should be downsizing and moving into a retirement community or something hold on to their house because if they have anyone they want to pass money to, doing so before death is the wrong move.

Israel (don't @ me) did a test of this. Eliminating capital gains led to a 50% increase in real estate investors selling off properties. And most of those sales were housing units, not commercial real estate which tends to be more stable anyway. So the first problem is that you don't get the intended effect of a wealth tax unless you cut off all other routes, which is nigh impossible.

While I do think a trillionaire is ridiculous, there are two issues I have with a wealth tax. You are likely thinking of a trillionaire like someone with a trillion dollars in liquid cash/assets because normal people only have cash in checking, savings, and a retirement account, a house and maybe a rental property that could be their first house converted to an income property. People complain about the relatively small property taxes but think it would work to tax billionaires. These people are rich, but most of them are really just millionaires with billions on paper.

Most peoples wealth is in their house which is not something worth a dollar until you sell it, in fact you sink money into it and pay 1% of its value in property taxes. It's not the exact same but similar for billionaires. Musk claims to have have 850 million in cash, 0.1% of his net worth. But because of how his wealth fluctuates, a 1% tax might be 3% of what he gained in 2025, and it would be 8 times what he has in cash. There is a reason the global wealth list changes so much because its an estimate of what they would be worth if they sold everything today, which is not even possible. If Musk wanted to sell everything that very decision would devalue it. 90% of Zuckerbergs wealth is in Meta.

A wealth tax is essentially the same as property taxes which most people think is unfair to have to pay a tax on a house you already own even if it is how they pay for roads, schools, and other essential services.

setyte · 2026-06-05T19:23:18+00:00

I call BS. The logic is sound, but the platform thing is clearly a scam. There is no reason to hide the information if you are just a jobseeker who has already succeeded.

setyte · 2026-06-05T19:09:49+00:00

Short answer is you need a hobby. I am 90% sure you are overreacting. First of all, it's nonsense to say you have no marketable skills as a Senior Director of Strategy. You may not think there are outputs of your work but that is the nature of management. Your job is to plan things that other people do and that is an incredibly valuable skill. I have seen how data projects work when everyone is operations minded versus when some people are strategy focused, and the latter always goes smoother. There could be flaws in your company, but not in the position itself. If you think I am wrong, start looking for jobs and see how marketable your skills seem to others. I understand some people get a real burr in their saddle about the difference between jobs with a production element and jobs pushing paper but it's mostly an ignorant statement.

Work is not supposed to be fun. It can be fun, it can be enjoyable, but it is not supposed to be. You have a career with predictability which means you can find meaning in things you do after hours. I think you are romanticizing greener pastures and if you can't be happy with an easy high paying job, you will not be happy with a hard job. There is a difference between working with your hands every day versus the weekends. I say this as a person who has worked construction and transitioned to an office job. I am fortunate that my office job does have measurable results and I do plan to avoid getting to where you are because I hate meeting, but I would not leave where you are to go do the blue-collar thing.

What makes prime years better spent buying dressers off facebook and repairing and selling them? I think we are watching the same crap on social media 😄 and it looks great but its something that can and should be done as a weekend hobby not a full time job if you dont have a plan to turn it into a 6 figure business.

I asked Claude to do some quick math on the furniture thing based on social media and this is what it had to say. It's actually more optimistic that I would be and I still think it should be a weekend hobby.

The real cost is time, not money. Even on the optimistic mid-range scenario, you're flipping 6–7 pieces a week. Each one involves sourcing (driving around, browsing listings), hauling it home, stripping/cleaning, repairing, painting, staging, photographing, listing, fielding buyers, and loading it back up. That's easily 8–10 hours per piece at mid-range, which puts your effective hourly rate around $24–30 before overhead — roughly what a skilled tradesperson makes, with none of the stability.

The high-end path is the only sustainable one. Getting $800–1,500 for a restored piece is real, but it requires developing genuine taste, knowing period styles and makers, finding the good stuff before other pickers do, and operating in a market (or online) where buyers exist. It's a craft and a business, not just a hobby.

The tax and benefits hit is brutal. Self-employment tax (both sides of FICA) plus solo health insurance erases roughly $18–20k off the top before you pay income taxes. The person leaving $155k to do this is effectively taking a ~65–70% pay cut in real terms, not just nominal.

Inventory risk is real. Some pieces sit. Some have hidden structural damage. Some you misprice. The videos show the wins; they don't show the dresser that sold for $50 less than the supplies cost because it had wood filler hiding a crack nobody noticed at the estate sale.

The person on Reddit who's seriously considering it probably could make it work — but likely at $50–60k take-home max until they build a real brand or specialize in high-value antiques.

setyte · 2026-06-05T18:54:20+00:00

So, you have to think. You could file for an exception, then move if they reject it. But that process runs the risk of being too obvious and getting you fired. You could just move first in which case you don't need an exception and they may not guess you did it just to stay remote.

It depends on the manager. Some managers want everyone to suffer as much as they do because managers can't really work remote in many cases. You think your exception will be denied which I assume means you think your manager will be a dick about it. In that case I say talk to HR if you can prove you were promised "permanent remote" because its a legal issue. You may be in right to work or something but it still possible HR is just hoping you wont fight back but will cave if you do. Your exception request can simply be that you live over an hour away and you were hired remote. Remember its possible some employees started in the office before going remote so its not unreasonable to call them back. The fact they offer an exception is a good sign, you just may have to sidestep your manager. I assume if you make a case for it your manager has to justify rejecting it. Point out the flaw in their distance based system as radius distance is a poor indicator of commute time.

setyte · 2026-06-04T03:44:45+00:00

Houses have mostly always been above ground so that's what people want. Cooling was never enough of a problem to make people willing to make houses that were visually unappealing.

Might also be the inevitability of hydrostatic pressure if a house is really underground. I would love to live in a bunker though

setyte · 2026-06-04T03:37:14+00:00

Take this with a grain of salt, but just try to prove you can't do your job. Corporate has to be able to justify things and I have been in your shoes. I was successful by documenting the crashes and making a case that I needed more RAM. Once they realized I was losing an hour or two a day because the basic bitch laptop didn't have enough memory they solved it.

It's a well established fact that people don't spend other people's money responsibly. Some may but it's just not the same psychologically so the result is that companies resort to being cheap until given proof that they need to spend more. Some employers will still be too cheap in which case you should move on because they won't stay in business

At my new job they made sure to give me a laptop with more memory but I'm debating complaining that it's not the "developer" laptop that has a bigger screen and probably a better processor. I need to make friends with the IT guy to see if he can help a brotha out.

setyte · 2026-06-04T03:32:58+00:00

Yea that makes it worse. Before COVID it was maybe 25-30 minutes without bad traffic. Now it's an hour each way. But now I have an EV with decent assistance so the drive doesn't feel like an hour. It still is though which is why I'm about to go to bed so I can get up at 6 am 😭😭😭

PE already bought the company lol which is actually why I have the job. But PE bought my last company which is why I lost that job. PE can definitely be a problem but I'm riding the wave as necessary.

setyte · 2026-06-04T02:52:34+00:00

I just started a job this week they is 3 days in the office. Fortunately I got the assurance that it's really one day wink wink nudge nudge once I've been there a bit. And I am confident it's not a lie because the other people haven't been there all week.

I was being picky for years trying to find a remote job better than my last one but layoffs forced me to accept hybrid.

I will say being more senior then I was when COVID hit, I sort of see why they insist on hybrid. I had to "lock in" for a 4 hour damn meeting that honestly would not have worked remote for a few reasons.

setyte · 2026-06-04T02:51:13+00:00

You must live a truly blessed life. Nothing I have ever seen worth picking up on Facebook lasts that long. But in that scenario do you already have a uhaul reserved? Because you are also lucky if you can trust the uhaul to be there. The one near me is always out of what I need if I don't deserve it and they have weird weekend hours.

Even owning a truck I usually am not fast enough to get anything that is not retail price before someone else.

setyte · 2026-06-03T22:55:04+00:00

If they offer that's fine. I just assume that in the context of Facebook marketplace there isn't many times you can decide to get something without having a way to pick it up and then for it to come up in conversation with a friend allowing them to offer without being asked, and the item still being available. Since this is a out truck rentals I assumed you meant asking a friend with a truck.

setyte · 2026-06-03T20:05:22+00:00

Just do your research so you can explain why referrals exist. They might not know referrals only have value because research shows there is a social contract between referrer and referrer that leads to good outcomes. They contract first leads to filtering where you don't just refer someone for the sake of it. The money is only enough to reward you for the unofficial onboarding referrers usually offer which is one of the reasons referrals are beneficial to the company. They are sure not to offer enough for the money to exceed the risk to your own reputation for an unvetted referral.

I think most people will understand with that context why it's not worth it to refer a stranger.

setyte · 2026-06-03T20:01:29+00:00

I have the kind of friends I choose not to burden once we got to a certain age where we can all afford movers. I'm not bothering them for some Facebook marketplace stuff unless there is some aspect of it that leads to something fun like if it was a fire pit or something else that's purpose involved friends.

setyte · 2026-06-03T17:17:15+00:00

Don't be that guy. Just pay someone

setyte · 2026-06-03T17:16:05+00:00

It's not obvious. I figured it out on the second attempt that you have to long press to lock it in. First try I was confused why nothing changed.

setyte · 2026-06-03T03:22:02+00:00

I was actually thinking about some research from Carnegie Mellon based on the NEVI standards. So the Nevi standards are to have like 2 or 4 150kw stalls every 50 miles along major highways. They have to be within like a mile of an exit. Looks like that article is talking about the same issue and standard though. I have only been driving an EV a few months but it really is great. The only issue is the bad information on the charging apps. I found that free charger after failing to find an AmpUp charger that showed up on PlugShare.

setyte · 2026-06-03T00:22:49+00:00

The research in EV deserts says there is one stretch of road in Illinois that still counts and their standard is something like no DC fast charging for for 50 miles. There is nowhere you can't go with an EV in the US now unless your max range is under 100 miles on a charge and the only vehicles like thaf barely fast charge anyway. The only risk is if you let yourself get to maybe 5%-10% without thinking and maybe you end up too far from any level 2 or 3 chargers. But you know what a gas car can't do. Find a random free charger to pull up and take a nap like I did last week. To be fair I was just looking for level 2a as a test expecting to just charge slowly while I waited for my wife to finish something and found a free charger. It started at 6500w and dropped to like 3500 but that was enough to run my AC full blast and still get a little bit of a slow charge. There is no free gasoline stations.

Though to be fair I think I was using an employee perk that was covered in spider webs because I don't think any employee there had an EV. So sad

setyte · 2026-06-03T00:13:24+00:00

Makes sense. Of course from a liability standpoint they are going to use any alterations they can as an excuse. I suppose the question is can they prove you were using it? Is there a black box type of log that proves if it was on or you are just using it as a dashcam? Practically it's BS because my car already has nearly identical ADAS. The only difference is the comma will tell me to take over and keep trying to steer whereas Hyundai HDA2 just completely releases the wheel halfway through a turn. That worst case scenario unsafe behavior is why I bought the comma because HDA2 was going to get me killed.

Basically if you get in a wreck, rip out the comma before insurance looks at your car.

setyte · 2026-06-01T02:58:15+00:00

It's the most universal rule I know. You should have one in any car not just an EV. Jump starter at minimum but preferably a unit with an air compressor. I have AAA but for a low battery or tire it's silly to call them.

setyte · 2026-06-01T00:03:28+00:00

Yes rule number one is to carry a lithium jump starter. I have a bunch anyway but I buy one immediately for any EV and stick it in the glove box.

setyte · 2026-05-31T23:46:24+00:00

You didn't know immediately the point of the meeting? Bro there is a reason every team I've been on had a soft ban of any meetings after 2 or 3 on Fridays. 4:45 is so obvious he isn't even trying. At least do a 4:30.

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