This has happened for a while. In February of this year, the same attack vector was used in an attack to trick developers into thinking that they'd got a job offer from GitHub: https://www.xorlab.com/en/blog/phishing-on-github
This is a while back, but I designed and built an AI-art installation from scratch, where I trained a GAN network to generate abstract art. The generated images was shown on a Samsung The Frame, and below the screen was a button. If you pushed the button, a new and unique piece was generated and shown on the screen.
I think, it total, I spend around $1100, but then I also paid for fast shipping. I think you get get that number down quite a lot by being more careful in the sourcing :)
In Sweden, for most citizen the tax authority does the tax declaration for you. If you don't want to do any changes (which most people doesn't have to), you simply write a text to them [1].
To 1-up a bit, in the UK (and probably several other countries) you usually do nothing at all. The tax is deducted by your employer at time of pay and you just get annual statements that you usually do nothing with. If you are due a refund (e.g. salary went down so your projected yearly income was wrong), you usually get refunded automatically by giro or cheque (or possibly compensatory tax code changes for the next year. Not sure)
To be fair, in Sweden the taxes are also insane. I’d rather have to pay some middleman a paltry sum every year than pay 30% more tax just for the privilege of the government automatically calculating them for me.
Not saying the US shouldn’t do this automatically, I’m merely pointing out it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison.
If you include healthcare, daycare, state pensions, disability insurance, employment insurance etc as a tax (which it is in most cases with more tax) the "insane" amount isn't that insane anymore.
But this also depends almost entirely on where you live. €100k in the almost any city in Netherlands, France, or Germany is a great income that can support a family with one earner. $250k might only put you in "solidly" middle class if you have to live in SF or NYC. The difference is that the $250k salaries are 99% of the time only widely available in these extreme HCOL cities.
Healthcare for a family of 4 in some parts of the US is absolutely fucking bananas compared to most of Europe. I've seen monthly premiums of $2k+ after the employers part, not to mention the deductible!
Efficiencies from health care competition are illusory when you properly scope it to include paperwork hassles, time hassles, and pressure on provides to skimp.
There basically is no healthcare competition in the US at all regardless of any qualifiers. You often don’t even know how much a procedure will cost you. That fact alone means there is no price competition. Even if in the past there were hospital competition (assuming you’re in the position where you have the time to shop around), hospitals are merging regionally to take care of that.
The US healthcare system is incredibly expensive and ineffective. Americans often like to come up explanations for this status quo but the fact is the system is trash when compared internationally.
Absolutely true and a valid point, I’m just trying to add some nuance to the conversation. I’ve noticed the North American heavy online bubbles fetishizing Europe in that regard, and the reality is far more grim.
You added some nuance and completely lost most of other nuance.
It's completely evident that the salary differences in the EU/US are not from the convenience of the govt calculating taxes for you, and that's the point you tried to make in your origin post.
On the other hand, you'd make great advertisements for TurboTax.
> "In the light of the conflict now spreading to Denmark as well as Tesla's recent very categorical refusal to enter a labour union agreement in any country, we have come to the conclusion that we as investors at present hardly can influence the company," the pension fund said in an emailed statement. ... That is why we're now putting Tesla on our exclusion list, ..."
PensionDanmark, one of Denmark's largest pension funds, has decided to sell its holdings in Tesla over this dispute. [0]
Scandinavia (and to a lesser degree the Nordic countries) is rich, capitalist and early adopting. This not only makes them a valuable market for Tesla. It also represents a threat if they exit. That market, alone, could enable a competitor to scale their EV production through the valley of death.
That's certainly a factor, but at least in Norway the government was quick to offer various incentives for EV (less fees, free use of bus lanes and so on) making it the largest early adopter of EVs in general (and Teslas in particular for the reasons you mentioned).
I don't see that PensionDanmark files 13f filings so it is hard to confirm their holdings. None of the 128 EDGAR filings that reference them pertain to Tesla. It's possible their holdings are through an inter-broker dealer which would be strange for a national pension fund but possible.
The Swedish National Pension Fund had about 500k of TSLA shares as of their latest 13f.
You're almost always better off buying individual stocks yourself. You can optimize your return in various ways, like tax loss harvesting to offset capital gains from other sources like stock options. There are cheap robo-advisors that can do this even with small amounts.
Also, you might agree with some activist fund exclusions, like tobacco or gambling.
You're not better of buying individual stocks compared to global index funds, that almost always ends up with you underperforming while taking more risk.
I'm not a particle physicist, but as I understand it, it wouldn't be very exciting to be hit by this because even if it interacted with you, the shower of particles produced would be so energetic that they'd nearly all come right out of the other side of you and go deep into the Earth before hitting anything else. One atom gets smashed, and one molecule gets excitingly altered but that's all in a day's work for biology.
It's a bit like how the depth where the energy is deposited of radiotherapy gets deeper with increasing energy. Past a certain energy (hundreds of MeV), most of the energy ends up being delivered somewhere behind you. This particle is hundreds of billions times more energetic than that radiation.
I think there's a high chance that no atom in the human would get hit. Just thinking of the photo of the sun that was taken through whole earth. There are thousands of particles from outer space each day passing our bodies without interaction.
Much likely, nothing at all! The more energy a particle gets, the smaller the probability of interacting with anything.
And if it does interact in your head... nothing at all! At such an energy, it is so tiny that at most one electron or one nucleon (i.e. proton or neutron) will get the thrill of its life and find itself leaving precipitously your body in order to smash, a few nanoseconds later, into the planet behind you. You won't notice, and the Earth won't either.
As an example, and admittedly in a completely separated energy range: neutrons emitted by uranium have to be slowed down in order to keep the reaction going at the desired speed.
If you don't slow them down, they'll just traverse other uranium nuclei and the reaction will only proceed with its natural speed (half-life of billion of years).
That's why you need a minimum mass of uranium for a nuclear explosion: you need neutrons to traverse a certain thickness of material before it gets slow enough to excite other nuclei
I guess people are listening to vinyl for different reasons. For me, it's not about the superior music quality of running it end-to-end analog. For me it's the ritual that I really like. Putting on this clunky record, clean it and listen to the album song by song, as the artist intended it to be listened to.
I just finished my latest project here at home, setting up my vinyl player to stream to my Sonos system using a Raspberry Pi.
When looking into streaming my vinyl player to the Sonos system, I realized that the “official” way of doing this is to buy a Sonos Port, which costs >$400 where I live. So instead I spent waaayy too much time packaging a set of open-source services into a pre-built Raspberry Pi image that reads a stream from any vinyl player (RCA) and streams it to the Sonos system.
Hopefully this will simplify the setup for someone else here :)
Setup:
* It’s running on a Raspberry Pi + a USB analog to digital converter
* “pi-gen” is used to build the custom RPi image from scratch
* “Darkice” is used as a live audio streamer, reading the stream from the vinyl player
* “Icecast” is used as a streaming media server which streams the live audio from Darkice and broadcast it out in the local network.
* The Sonos speakers are then pointed to this local stream through the Sonos app.
I have a large vinyl collection but have not been excited to spend $450+ for Sonos Port (or its predecessor which name escapes me). Getting this up and going will be my next weekend project for sure.
Glad that it will come to use! If there's something unclear or something that doesn't work during the setup, feel free to create an issue and I'll try to answer any question :)
The $250 Sonos Era 100 can take 3.5mm in with a dongle, but if you already have other Sonos gear and a Pi this is definitely a more reasonable solution.
