In reality, they will now just create a company in Singapore or Mongolia or another such place, which will then own the second home - while itself being owned by the original owner. Problem solved significantly cheaper than this new tax. In fact, I would not be surprised if they have already done that four months ago, when the law was being discussed.
The ones who will be hit are those who do not have the legal frameworks in place to erect such structures - Joe Homeowner who inherits grandmas city house, both worth slightly above the magic 7 figures.
> they will now just create a company in Singapore or Mongolia or another such place, which will then own the second home
How will that help to avoid a tax on secondary residences? Are they somehow going to claim that these properties are the primary residence of a company? Seems nonsensical.
No. The residence becomes an 'asset', and the original owner (and now owner of your friendly Mongolian NYC-condo-operations company [MNYCCOC]) now pays rent to the very same MNYCCOC as the landlord. They could even consider the condo to be a very exclusive one-suite hotel and pay by day, and deduct hotel costs for living in said condo as 'necessary business expenses'. In the meantime, the MNYCCOC is a good citizen, and pays taxes but only after ... and deducts everything necessary for upkeep, from dripping faucets to elevator repair to housemaids ('janitorial staff'), making them essentially free.
It's accountancy that makes the world go round round round...
Isn't that a good thing? It would encourage Joe Homeowner to sell the house to someone who could use it as a primary residence rather than leaving it empty and speculating on the real estate value.
Joe Homeowner already is incentivized to sell grandma's home. Homes need upkeep. No-one keeps an old home around to rot and fall down - that tends to bee bad for the evaluation. The issue is that those who can't finance a primary residence now won't be able to finance a primary residence then.
Why is this mythical "everyman" you've concocted for empathy points not selling a property he doesn't need that happens to be worth a "magic 7 figures"?
1 million remains the hallmark of 'wealthy' (as in: not us), to the point where pop culture has started mocking the concept decades ago (See: That Austin Powers movie...)
Hardly everyone understands 'owning a house' as millionaire-level wealth. Which is why people cheer the policy on until they realize it is them who is being shaken down.
Sure, but it's only a shakedown if it's an unoccupied second home, which is hard to have sympathy for. It can easily be an occupied second home (family, renters) or a first home for those in the upper middle class paying for $1mm+ apartments in NYC. I'm not really worried about Jeff Bezos or some Hollywood actor's crash pad when they have business in nyc.
I disagree with the comment and entire existence of the person to whom you are replying, but they aren't wrong about $1m actually not being as big or watershed a number as it used to be.
A basic middle-class house in just about any part of the country that's worth living in is going to be $1m, plus or minus 200k.
> A basic middle-class house in just about any part of the country that's worth living in is going to be $1m, plus or minus 200k.
Help me understand your comment. Do you think the country is only made up of like, 3 big coastal cities? Do you think the only houses worth living in are several thousand square feet in only the coolest parts of town? I want to understand what you think the country actually looks like, here.
You quoted the part that clarifies this: "worth living in"
Subjective, obviously. My view is that I wouldn't live almost anywhere outside of one of the major coastal cities in a blue state. Certainly nowhere in "flyover country".
Even disregarding the fact that your description here still doesn't meet the $1M bar you set in the original comment, you are using the general term "worth living in" to describe places you would live, which is way more elitist than is typical of HN.
I too would only live in a small subset of the country (a different, but not opposite, subset from you). But I would never do something as petty/hostile as describe those places as "the only places worth living."
Zero sympathy. The people who live in those places routinely complain about unfairness to them, while then voting based on bigotry and ignorance, jubilating in ICE's cruelty, etc. They have done worse than simply issued harsh words, and they deserve worse in recompense.
> you are using the general term "worth living in" to describe places you would live,
In general, anyone who uses the phrase is going to mean it subjectively.
But--there is a somewhat objective measure: property prices :)
And they are all higher in blue state coastal cities than in buttfuck Trump-loving nowhere.
"that's worth living" is doing some Herculean lifting there. I'm sorry to inform you that only the wealthy can live in the places you deem "worth living". You are not using the phrase "middle-class" correctly.
I'm not coming at this from a rural perspective. I live in the greater NYC area. I have friends in NYC. They make a lot of money and live very close to Grand Central, and even they don't live in $1M properties.
I have lived in both NYC and Southern California, and I was mostly thinking about SoCal, where in general one assumes a basic middle-class house in a reasonably decent area is going to cost $1m. Do they always? Not necessarily, but even fairly modest houses like my parents house now exceed $1m in value easily.
Out of curiosity, do your friends own condos? Doesn't even a studio condo on the UES cost at least like $600k base (i.e. not counting any fees related to the sale, nor any ongoing HOA)?
> Owning a house where your equity in it is over a million is absolutely wealthy.
Only ~30% of home owners own their outright.
~60% own 40% of the house or less.
I'd argue that you can't own more than ~92% of a home, because it costs a lot to sell a house...
The "average" homeowner moves every ~7 years in the US, and this is heavily skewed to people with less equity - the people who outright own typically have stayed put 20+ years.
So "owning" a million dollar home means anything from: you put 3.5% down, and you're currently underwater cause prices went down in a lot of the US (i.e. you are literally own NEGATIVE equity)... to you actually have $1m in equity.
I "own" a $1.2m home. I really only own about $425k of it. If I had to sell it, that typically costs close to 9% - so I'd be lucky to get $300k.
The person underwater who put 3.5% down on a home could easily have -$250k if they had to sell... So the idea that everyone who "owns" a $1m house is "rich" is a bit strange...
I mean, in general, people who "own" $1m houses are not destitutely poor, but that's about as far as you can extrapolate.
I agree that owning an expensive house where you have negative equity is not wealthy (at least based on that data point itself; maybe you have a 401k or something else that makes you wealthy)
You are confusing owning a house with having paid off a mortgage. I can go get a mortgage for $1 million tomorrow, but that does not make me a millionaire. It makes me an debtor with a house I can't afford.
You can put 3.5% down for a $1m house in places where ~50% of the population lives.
At current interest rates, no, you can't qualify, but at interest rates where people bought most of these houses... Yes, the median person could afford it (in those areas).
Almost nobody casually owns a second home in New York worth $1m or more. What a dumb comment (like pretty much every comment criticizing this tax--just stupid and immoral).
Ever since the EU has started to mandate web accessibility compliance - without defining what exactly needs to be done to be compliant, the only safe, lawyer-resistant way is to put aria-labels on absolutely everything.
It sucks, and arguably has the opposite effect, but this came from the same people who thought cookie banners were a good solution to anything, so ... what did we expect?
They have defined what exactly needs to be done to be compliant, it's basically "meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA" with some additions. WCAG has already been the de facto standard for decades.
I assume you have not read Directive 2016/2102 and/or EN 301 549, because your approach is nice and so very, very, very suable.
The issue is not accessibility itself. I'm all for making things simpler. The issue is that the EU framework combines broad principles, partial technical references, vague proportionality requirements, and evolving judicial interpretation. In practice, that means the exact compliance boundary is often only defined by a judge during litigation, and with the website operator funding the clarification process through lawyer and court fees.
That is precisely the kind of legal environment that creates serial-litigation ecosystems like the ADA lawsuit industry in the US.
With systems becoming increasingly more complex, testing all potential code paths increases effort exponentially. With content being user-generated, not necessarily system-generated, you now technically need an editorial watchdog position that greenlights every change (if only to prevent Sally from Sales to post a meme in copy without a proper alt text, or worse, an infographic, without a wall of text describing the infographic in great detail).
And for the attacker, they only need to find one case of violation - while you need to be correct 100% of the time.
The only two ways to migitate such issues are
1. do not offer the service in Europe at all and actively prevent EUians from acessing any part of them - which becomes increasingly attractive (disclaimer: I am an EUian, unfortunately),
2. implement defensive overcompliance far beyond practical usability requirements, or
3. accept ongoing legal uncertainty and budget for it accordingly.
Unfortunately, "just build reasonable software and trust common sense" is not a stable legal strategy anymore.
None of that legal complexity has anything to do with putting "aria-labels on absolutely everything."
> And for the attacker, they only need to find one case of violation - while you need to be correct 100% of the time.
I don't know how European regulators work but even in the litigious U.S., this is not true, at least not in the courts. However, for small businesses, which are more likely to be targeted by the trolls, the cost of proceeding far enough to get a suit dismissed is burdensome. And in the EU, I thought individuals couldn't bring cases to a judge, they have to complain to a regulatory body that can decide whether proceeding is warranted or not.
> implement defensive overcompliance far beyond practical usability requirements
This is like complaining about having fewer grams of rat turd in your flour than legally mandated; "Oh no, we made our product too good!"
In practice, building "reasonable software" has never included making it work for people with disabilities, despite WCAG and the web standards themselves existing for decades.
> And in the EU, I thought individuals couldn't bring cases to a judge, they have to complain to a regulatory body that can decide whether proceeding is warranted or not.
EU regulations get made into member state laws, and these vary massively in who can sue through what way.
In Germany, for example, a common enforcement vector is the "Abmahnung" under unfair competition law. In theory, if a regulation imposes costs on compliant businesses, competitors should not gain an advantage by ignoring it.
The problem is that this has historically created an ecosystem of professional cease-and-desist mills. A competitor (or an organisation acting on their behalf) identifies a violation, sends a lawyer's letter, demands reimbursement of legal costs, and requests a cease-and-desist declaration with contractual penalties for future violations.
Whether the underlying issue is accessibility, consumer protection, labeling requirements, privacy notices, or something else is almost secondary. Once compliance becomes sufficiently complex, the enforcement mechanism itself becomes a business model. The cynic in me can't help but notice that our parliaments are made up disproportionately by lawyers.
That is why many businesses are worried less about accessibility itself and more about legal uncertainty around accessibility requirements. The concern is not "making websites accessible is bad."
The concern is that compliance costs are barely predictable, while litigation risk arising from ambiguous compliance boundaries is not.
I had a whole zoo of - physical - O'Reilly books back in the day. I still own a few today, but they tend to be less language-specific and more 'best practices'-oriented (Hello, 'Bad Data Handbook').
What made me stop was not LLMs, but that I started to get frustrated by every book spending what felt like 20% of its volume on 'how to properly install this' - something that was little value to me (that's the packet manager's job, and I am not screwing up my installation becaue you like that other processor flag more) - while prices rose. Final nail in the coffin was when O'Reilly decided to aggressively push their subscription model. I'm not paying money every month to get access to a library whose books can disappear at will.
Any software that breeds a consultancy culture around it is a software that has become too complex and should probably be broken up into or replaced by smaller, more manageable parts.
I'm saying that as a former ACE-certified Atlassian Consultant from a Platinum Partner. I'm much happier now.
I think that a large part of Atlassian's problem is their network of extension vendors. Every time you look at a feature request for simple things like "as a user I'd like to see a total of the worklog hours I've added to tickets this week" you get a chorus of vendors popping up to sell you their $10/month plugin that approximately covers your request.
If Atlassian actually fixed these papercuts their product would be better but they wouldn't be getting a cut of all subscriptions from the dozens of plugins people install to make it a usable tool.
I don't think people much liked the pre-search-engine era. They used lousy search engines when they became available, and when a good one started they liked it so much that they verbed its name.
I think you are painting Heidegger in an undeservedly bad light (not all Nazis were the same. There were shades of grey), and even if you consider Heidegger's thoughts as worthless by contamination (which would be a tragedy), you are adding a contact guilt to one of the most influential philosophers for having known him 10 years before he turned brown.
Arendt was a defender of Heidegger even in the post-WWII world.
But moreover, Heidegger didn't just "turn brown". He saw NAZIism as a potential realization of his philosophy. Such a belief definitely influences my view of Heidegger. Any summary of Heidegger's philosophy and it's problem naturally either involves a lot of simplification or is book length. For book length critiques, I'd recommend The Jagon Of Authenticity by Adorno. My simplification of Heidegger's weakness is that he among a number of philosophers criticizing the lacking of authenticity/awareness/true-being/etc in the modern world in isolation. Such critiques tend to fall for political movements promising the violent reconstruction of tradition - such as NAZIism but limited to that. Michelle Foucault's despicable endorsement of Ayatollah Khomeini on the eve of the overthrow of the Shah is quite similar Heidegger's turn.
This reads so much like a story in Gates' 'The Road Ahead' about IBM refusing graphical printing because some of their printers just couldn't, while at the same time this iteration makes no sense at all and is a bit weak on the details (e.g. not giving a rationale), that I wonder if someone linkedin^1 this. With respect to Raymond Chen.
[1] to linkedin: making up anecdotes in order to create engagement in a professional setting. Often in the form of 'Today I learned' or '15 things my toddler taught me about stockpile management'.
The ones who will be hit are those who do not have the legal frameworks in place to erect such structures - Joe Homeowner who inherits grandmas city house, both worth slightly above the magic 7 figures.
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