The framed cover used to be a reminder that, in general, the state and the Polish equivalent of the IRS is not, and never will be, your friend. Sure, I've had some friendly and helpful chats with multiple people working for our IRS but I've never forgotten Optimus.

1. Harvesting your capital losses allows you to offset other gains which may be taxable at an earlier date. $1000 today is worth substantially more than $1000 in 10 years time. 'Tax deferred is tax avoided.'

2. You can offset up to $3000 of losses a year against regular income which is taxed at a higher rate.

For me at least while it seems worthwhile to switch index funds to harvest losses when the market falls substantially the upsides aren't enough to justify the lock in of using something like Betterment's automatic tax loss harvesting features of their platform by having you invest in many individual stocks managed by their roboadvisor rather than an index fund.

Most people wouldn’t care, but if you’re in a high tax bracket and you can sell one to buy another and keep your risk profile roughly the same, you’ll do it.

People prefer to pay long term gains and take short term losses. The benefits work in your favor and against the govt. The tax code reflects that, and has for a long time.

Are they truly speciated or can they interbreed producing fertile offspring?

"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" doesn't really address this as Superman is not a member of genus homo.

The human body accumulates on the order of 10 quadrillion uncorrected mutations per day, supposedly:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC47258/

(I'm assuming 30 trillion cells and that ~2.7% of mutations go uncorrected based on the rat figures mentioned)

Don't know, doubt it but its a business opportunity. It’s why there are so many ETFs, take your 20 basis points from investors and work on something else.

More likely to find an ETF that hasn't rebalanced and has a large holding of Tesla.

The problem is that we wasted 3+ decades on denialism and a lot of pollution comes from things with long service lives. A high-pollution SUV will be polluting in 2040, maybe 2050; a gas or oil heater might run into 2070. At this point we need more than gradual nudges — things like requiring special permits to buy new fossil fuel-burning equipment with heavy subsidies and 0% loans for installing electric alternatives.

I think the problem with carbon taxes is that they are a good solution to a negative sum game, but I think it turns out the actual game is positive sum and that carbon taxes are not an implementable solution.

[1] the big constraint with electric cars is batteries. Plug-in hybrid cars use electricity for short trips (ie most miles travelled) and so lead to more efficient use of the available batteries than electric cars that mostly use <20% of the battery capacity in a day leaving the rest unused.

However, you have reminded me that indeed this would probably not work because of all the tracking required to prevent the Mad Swine Pox and so on.

b) Yes

c) Yes but if the hams are fungible, which the other commenter explained they are not, then doing this at volume would make the timing irrelevant.

d) Yes, or just pre-sell them to someplace that doesn't care about quality. Just has to be inside the EU since these are the hams that (you say) have not yet been to Norway!

Crossing the border a thousand times, carrying a ham each way each time, would probably be less efficient, unless you get tax breaks for your hourly employees, in which case you could also have a thousand employees on standby and do it relay-style.

While it's true that this would never work, and if you tried it'd be extremely fishy, I do in fact know a place you can buy pork sausage that tastes of fish.

Sometimes the absurd is possible!

The game over here in New England is getting a statement of medical accommodation from an eye doctor asserting that bright sun is uncomfortable but you have no other limitations.

> The European Economic Area (EEA) was established via the Agreement on the European Economic Area, an international agreement which enables the extension of the European Union's single market to member states of the European Free Trade Association. The EEA links the EU member states and three EFTA states (Iceland, Liechtenstein, and *Norway*) into an internal market governed by the same basic rules.

Yes, indeed. It completely defeats the purpose of the law, which is why the suggestion is akin to your A solution (that it should be invalidated/removed).

The law doesn't encode "purpose" or "spirit", the law only exists as written. When applying the law, and tax law especially, it's counterproductive to speculate as to "spirit" or "purpose", and best to focus just on what the law actually is, because that's the only part that really counts as "democratic". Intentions and ideals weren't voted on, the actual literal text of the law was.

Or like abortion. The new abortion rules in conservative states are betting they can sway the federal gov if a lawsuit arises, but its based on the assumption they'll get to ignore the gov.

That happened in North Carolina (albeit before weed legalization had gained momentum):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Amendment_1

There's no such thing as the "spirit of the law", just like there's no such thing as the "spirit of the code".

If you leave a buffer overflow it will get exploited no matter what. Same thing with the law.

Courts can interpret laws if the interpretation is the problem. If there is just a stupid loophole, then either the law itself makes no sense (as seems to apply to this Jones Act) or it needs to be reworded to align with its intent.

This reminds me of all the california electricity deregulation games where Enron et al moved power out of state and back, or had plants go down strategically for maintenance in order to gain the system. The correct solution is not to say "play nice, you know what we meant". It's to have a consistent and enforceable set of rules that dont admit gaming.

Tax is one of the few areas of law where activities can be declared illegal and subject to punitive sanction after the fact. For example, the fictive loss tax shelter scheme that was popular 15 years ago. Fictive losses were technically legal at the time the scheme began (in the sense that they were legal within the letter of the law but violated the intent of the law), and weren't explicitly stated to be illegal until years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkens_%26_Gilchrist).

That way everyone gets what they want, and they've technically sold it with the seats still installed.

CBP is one of the worst infringers upon personal rights, I wouldn't defend them.

The problem I have here is how easy it is to avoid the tax. CBP shouldn't have any jurisdiction over car modifications and repairs; that responsibility falls to different agencies.

https://apnews.com/article/af06f48660bf613e12d411a8f4dd4784

And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.

In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!

I'm not somebody who really loves rules and regulations and I'll be the first person to say that America's "war on drugs" has been an utter disaster in multiple ways.

But, generally speaking, flooding a country with cocaine is not what most of us would call beneficial to society.

If you don't think that we should have a society and/or laws, cool, that's another discussion. But if you accept the premise that we should have laws, controlling the flow of industrial quantities of coca leaves seems like the good kind of law.

I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them? I think we would find that orders of magnitude more work and orders of magnitude less effective. There would be a large cost to society, and nobody wins except Coca-Cola, really.

At worst, you can imagine selling a full nuclear bomb to Al kaeda, then being surprised pikachu when they use it to blow up IAD

So while a business doesn't pay sales on the fuel they need to deliver their goods to me, it gets paid in the end because the cost of the fuel is included in the price I pay and the sales tax is levied on the whole purchase price.

(It is a little more complicated than that. Don't sue me.)

Without a wealth tax that would just make tax evasion even easier for the ultrawealthy in the usual manner of borrowing against the equity of the stock they own.

For some context: it is about washing chicken meat with chlorine dioxide to kill bacteria, especially salmonella, at the slaughterhouse. It may seem ridicoulous that europeans prefer salmonella to chlorine on their chickens, but european food health and safety argues that the practice is needed in the USA due to the very unsanitary, and therefor cheaper, chicken meat production, whereas europa requires high standards during production instead of washing the end product in chlorine, and is therefore more costly. Some argue this cost difference is the major driver of the ban, and it is not an actual health and safety issue.

Running for reelection and aware of the influence the U.A.W. had in Congress and in the minds of voters, President Johnson looked for a way to persuade Reuther’s union not to strike and to support his “Great Society” civil rights agenda. Johnson succeeded on both counts by agreeing to include light trucks in the Chicken Tax.

While U.S. tariffs on other Chicken Tax items have since been rescinded, lobbying efforts by the U.A.W. have kept the tariff on light trucks and utility vans alive. As a result, American-made trucks still dominate sales in the U.S., and some very desirable trucks, like the high-end Australian-made Volkswagen Amorak, are not sold in the United States.

https://www.thoughtco.com/chicken-tax-4159747

The phrase you’re looking for is ‘criminal conspiracy’

In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities.

Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting the laws to cover these new situations and variables with absolute certainty and unambiguity. And unlike software, you can't just push a commit to prod to fix the problems as they pop up. It's a really long process, because democracy.

It's not happening, no more than you'd be able to handle a piece of software that took some infinite and random number and variety of inputs and did something useful with them.

We should, as you say, write "quality" laws to the best of our ability but there will always been a sizable human element to the interpretation of law.

Judging by how hard it is for programmers to write bug-free instructions for literal computers, I'm not sure your expectation of flawless legislation is something realistic for mere mortals.

This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say".

Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust all matter.

Judges are there to make the boundaries clear for the greyzone on what's not written down

The world is too complex to get perfect laws written. You're always going to miss weird edge cases in both directions

Ate they following things specifically as the law said they're supposed to, or hacking some edge case that isn't explicitly called out?

I never said the law worked exactly like code. I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.

Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)

Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.