Please feel free to do so. Years ago, another HN user and I tried to make some headway, but our day jobs intervened. Now that we have LLMs at our disposal, you might have better luck!
My normal bank was acquired by Wells Fargo in 2008 and they also owned my mortgage.
When I went to pay off my mortgage in 2012 they required a cashier's check for the final payment of around $80.
I asked if we could do it electronically like all of the previous payments and they said no.
So I walked into my local bank asking for a cashier's check of that amount and the bank teller told me that most people would accept a personal check for that little. I said yeah but YOU don't. She looked at me funny.
So she asked who to make the cashier's check out to. I said "Wells Fargo" and she looked at me funny again and said "Wells Fargo is us, the check comes FROM Wells Fargo. Who do I put on the TO line" and I said "Wells Fargo"
She again looked at me funny and I explained that I am paying off my mortgage. Wells Fargo is where I have my bank account and my mortgage. She said "Can't we just do it electronically?" to which I said "You would think but apparently your employer can't handle that and told me to get a cashier's check and FedEx overnight to them."
Actually I believe they're just actually complying with new laws to disclose their balance sheets for these types of loans. Many other banks like JP Morgan have much higher amounts of these loans on their balance sheets, but refuse to report and are exploiting certain loopholes.
The requirement to disclose has only existed for a year I believe, but many are kicking the can or claiming that it would cause them issues.
Be careful what you wish for. It's most likely that the only replacement for a two-party system the US will get...
Will be a one-party system.
Because there is no legal pathway[1] towards solving the conditions that create the two party system, but there are many illegal offramps that will get rid of one of those parties.
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[1] There are way too many obstacles, and the bar for consensus is too high to legally have these reforms. The bar is much lower for having them illegally - all you need is a single-party trifecta - lead by the kinds of people who'd start a coup rather than relinquish power.
That's true at the federal level, but it's possible to get past the two party system at the local or state level where there's allowance for voter initiatives.
Portland's new city council setup, with four districts and three representatives each based on ranked choice voting, is a step in that direction.
While breaking the 2 party system seems unimaginable, I do feel like rank choice voting can do a lot to get us on a better path in the short/medium term.
I don’t know people are so hung up on ranked choice. Approval voting is simpler to explain, doesn’t require changing ballots and can be implemented immediately. Not to mention empirically results in more moderate candidates.
Plus the separation of powers seems too reliant on the president being a decent human being. It'll be interesting to see that play out over the next decades.
Pretty sure there's a pretty big friggin difference between [Democrats/Romney and Bush republicans] and [MAGA republicans].
The former are nearly indistinguishable between eachother. The latter are something entirely different, and have purged all the non-crazy from their party.
Why would AGI choose to be embodied? We talk about creating a superior intelligence and having it drive our cars and clean our homes. The scenario in Dan Simmons' Hyperion seems much more plausible: we invent AGI and it disappears into the cloud and largely ignores us.
It doesn't need to be permanent. If humans could escape from their embodiment temporarily they would certainly do so. Being permanently bounded to a physical interface is definitely a disadvantage.
> Instead of subjecting his gross estate to the federal estate tax, Hsieh could have set up a trust in which he has no control over, transfer his assets into it, then have a trustee continue to carry out his goals
Your estate is taxed before it goes into a normal trust. To avoid taxes with a trust you have to set it up a long time in advance and slowly shift money in. And at $1B, it's not gonna happen. Even if you use various tricks to put lower priced assets into the trust early and let them appreciate (or e.g. buy permanent life insurance with the trust assets), none of those strategies scale to O($billion)
GSTs used to be able to get around that, but not so much anymore.
A "real" way to avoid it is to put massive amounts into a charity (or occasionally a "charity"), and then have that charity hire your kids for cushy jobs. There are other ways around it too, hiding assets overseas or whatever.
But the article gives a very inaccurate description of using trusts to get around estate taxes. Which is ... weird, right? It's an estate planning attorney? I dunno.
yep, and the charity’s underlying entity can be a corporation or a trust, which does confuse the general understanding of these things as the terms are often conflated
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