You are right about 30k instead of 80k, my mistake, but still a fair chunk of change.

The deferment is reasonable, but it’s insane that an investment property can be traded in without taking the tax penalty, but you can’t do that with a residence.

As a private homeowner you want to trade your $500k house to move near an adult child after your spouse dies. With the housing markets being equal, you end up owing a ton of capital gains tax but having to spend more just to try to keep even.

Or, as the tax code seems to want to encourage, the private homeowner becomes a landlord because that at least might let them keep pace with a new mortgage they have to take on.

It’s crazy that we give tax advantage to landlords and deny them to people actually using their houses.

There’s an alternative out, and one I think most people would object more to from a fairness perspective.

Selling their house means they lose out on a ton of the value, so don’t sell, rent it out and have the current tax code coddle you because the tax code heavily favors being a landlord rather than selling the house.

It’s busted that we actively encourage people to lock property up as investment because using a house you own is more expensive not using a house you own.

Problem is their house went up by a huge percentage, but so to has every housing arrangement they will need.

Maybe not a whole lot of sympathy for someone having to sort out living arrangements with ‘only’ $2.8 million or so to work with, but this can scale down to pretty ‘normal’ house prices like $500k.

Think the problem is that no one has dreamed up a political/economic system that actually reigns it in.

You can see a change by moving from one to another, but once everyone has settled into the ‘rules’ of the game, some asshats game whatever rules those are to be back on top again.

Yeah, that robotics stuff is happening still (e.g. little robot mowers using machine vision for easier guidance).

But you are right that the prospect of advanced robotics gets a fraction of the attention that chatbots get. Trillions of bets on datacenter bound LLMs that can generate images, videos, and text but a relative pittance for advancements that would translate to physical labor…

I get that there’s value, but the value proposition seems way out of whack.

Yeah, lots of over hiring happened and this is the perfect cover for responding to that without admitting you screwed up.

If anything deliberate I’d imagine it to be some protest by an employee that wanted some symbolism to back his thoughts on the administration’s treatment of the Constitution.

As dumb as this administration is, I don’t think even they would think they could meaningfully erase sections of the Constitution just by “clerical error”

Note while the amount is dramatic, the same general principle applies for a widow selling their 500k house that was 100k and being out 80k in taxes and stuck having to get living arrangements for 420k in a market where her house sold for 500k.

Particularly egregious: if a landlord sold the same sort of house they could turn around and buy a different 500k house with zero tax burden. This exemption is not available to private homeowners, only for investment properties you don’t live in. We give a tax break for using houses as purely financial instruments but penalize people actually buying for themselves.

Ironically a property speculator could dodge this tax by buying a replacement property thanks to like-kind exemptions offered to investors but not private homeowners…

Even if you use the proceeds to immediately buy another house, you still have to pay the tax, unless you are a landlord then you get a tax break, because we must protect those landlords but not private homeowners…

So you may be at a 15% or so disadvantage looking for a new place to live if you wanted to sell your property and move.

Right but the rest of the housing market has also moved on. The cost basis of that house won’t come anywhere near buying equivalent housing in the present

Let’s say you bought a decent house back in the day for 100k, and now that house can go for 500k because it’s a typical family home and all those homes are now 500k.

Let’s say your spouse dies and you could stand for a different house, maybe closer to a family member that can help take care of things. You can sell your house for 500k, but you are left with only 420k that you keep. Sure you could easily afford 100k homes if they still existed, but now homes cost as much as you sold yours for.

The real kicker is there is a like-kind exemption that would negate this, but it’s not allowed for your actual primary residence, only as an investment property. Landlords are protected from this but residential homeowners are not.

They joke, but… https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/experience/landline.jsp

A bus that boards at a gate and drives to another airport and drops off at a gate…

There was a video of someone deliberately taking these lines and included someone a bit shocked that the ‘flight’ they booked was just a bus…

Note that having one house, even occupied is already taxed pretty much universally.

In some jurisdictions, it might make sense, but in rural areas, it generally doesn’t. My parents bought a house to live in that happened to come with a second house on the land in the middle of nowhere. No one wants that second house.

The “productive empty land” could be a nightmare, lots of deforestation to ensue in areas that can ill afford it. There’s enough dead commercial properties to reclaim before we need to start going after “empty land”.

The ratio of sourced content to editorial rant is just too low. You have to really be committed to go through the article to figure out concretely what the hell they are taking about. Most of it is just reiterating how outrageous it is and how an alphabet soup of leftist organizations are either outages or should be outraged, and a vague list of the measures that are outrageous that is mostly focused on why it is outrageous rather than what the actual measures are. It eventually does concretely describe two things, the id requirement and the voting infrastructure audits, but that’s a tiny fraction of the article.

Agreed, that article was kind of a mess., and you really have to already agree with it to stay along for the ride. Even as someone who shares their general perspective, I can’t help but to get the same vibe as I do reading unhinged conservative outlets, just from a different side. The wiring style evokes a feeling more of unsubstantiated unhinged conspiracy theory than a concrete writeup.

A lot of time is spent name dropping organizations and you have to already know them to have any idea why you might want to care about them, but not saying concretely what exactly it is, just that it is hard right nonsense that every acronym they can mention is outraged over. They even name drop the UAW in a way that lets them type it in but without citing then on the actual current reality, because the UAW hasn’t really come out against Trump.

When it gets to describing the actual “plan”, it mostly still didn’t explain exactly what it is talking about. It eventually gets to concretely mentioning two precise things, the requirement to prove citizenship in way that may be disproportionately difficult for people who had a name change, and an onerous voting certification. The rest of the elements are left too vague to try to understand.

This article may help keep up the attention and energy of folks already keeping up with this stuff, but anyone vaguely on a fence won’t make it through the first paragraph without getting a bit skeptical, and almost certainly won’t make it to the meat of the article before giving up and moving on to other articles.

Hey, last time I was at a water park a woman’s top popped off at the bottom of a slide and half of us died getting trampled by the nearby horses.

I’ll agree that it’s here to stay, but not so sure it’s going to obviously improve. I have had access to various LLMs and while they are useful, they are very obviously limited and have kind of been at that level for a while now. Feel like they’ve largely gotten as “capable” as the strategy is going to get, and now the game is on to make some things friendlier for LLM consumption to get that capability more usefully available.

At least in the context of coding.

If you have a HELOC, yeah but the rate isn’t great. If you do pay off, you can always open a new HELOC.

Funny story, I had a HELOC as part of buying a house with no closing cost on it I paid the balance off but kept it open. They called me one day and asked if I would close the account. I said that I don’t think I should, because I’d suddenly owe the money for closing costs for paying off early, and they confirmed I could either sit with a zero balance for two years for free our pay a few thousand dollars for the privilege of choosing the account…

You have a citation? At least when they sell the house they definitely pay it off and then some.

Been living without mortgage or rent for over 10 years myself.