> APCA models how human eyes actually perceive contrast, factoring in font weight, spatial frequency, and ambient light — a genuine improvement over the WCAG 2.x formula. […] The research behind it is peer-reviewed and substantive
That's what the author claims, but I have not seen any evidence that it is actually true. In a ticket where they were asked to provide peer review, they instead linked to a bunch of blog posts that in my opinion do not qualify as peer review: https://github.com/w3c/wcag3/issues/29
Also, it is not as if the WCAG 2 formula would not model how humans actually perceive contrast.
It isn't, because the ultra rich have no capital gains. They get ultra low interest rate loans against assets so they never have to sell assets and trigger capital gains. Google "Buy, Borrow, Die" if you don't understand this strategy.
They have to sell eventually to pay off the loans. And if they die, their estate has to sell the assets to pay off the loans, and then their heir will pay inheritance taxes on top of that.
Unless their spouse is still alive. In the US, assets' cost bases are reset when a spouse dies. That is the main way that rich people avoid capital gains taxes. I'd much prefer simply stopping that cost basis reset instead of implementing a wealth tax.
> I'd much prefer simply stopping that cost basis reset instead of implementing a wealth tax.
Neither of these would really work against the people you actually want it to work against.
If you don't have a basis reset then they just do a transaction that has the same effect, e.g. create a new corporation owned by the recipient and then have it repeatedly enter into slightly favorable transactions with the one owned by the donor until the new one has all the assets, or any of a hundred other things.
If you try to do a wealth tax then their assets end up in another country under whatever arrangement is necessary to give them de facto control but not formal ownership.
The best way to solve the "buy, borrow, die" thing is actually a consumption tax because then borrowing money in order to spend it doesn't avoid the tax.
I'd like to see all taxes replaced by consumption, sales, and/or value-added taxes, with an automatic rebate to offset the regressiveness. It would kind of end up being UBI with a vastly simpler tax code.
This would be an extremely regressive tax regime, effectively a flat tax rate. Worse than a flat tax rate, actually, since consumption rates do not scale linearly with income or wealth.
I think he meant that you'd have the brackets apply to types of consumption instead of income level, so no tax on food, low tax on restaurants, medium tax on high-end electronics, insane tax on planes and yachts. I mean it sounds like it would be easier to maintain/enforce such tiering system than constantly fight with people trying to not technically be wealthy. Downside of course is that some people's luxuries are other's basic needs, but I wonder if there's been serious research on the implications of such system.
Easiest thing would be to not have any tiers of consumption. The stuff people "need" to spend money on such as food and housing would be handled by an automatic rebate, effectively a UBI. No other welfare, assistance, etc. What you earn you keep, unless you spend it, then you pay tax.
Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations. Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?). Just as examples.
> Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations.
There are lots of apartments available with no credit check. They're more often of lower quality, but if your situation is such that you want to spend less on rent and have more left for something else (like paying off your debts), why is it a problem for people to be able to choose that?
It's the status quo that screws them, because the government often pays out $1000/month or more in housing assistance but it's required to go directly to the landlord, and then if you have money problems but could live with family or are willing to take in a crappy low-rent studio apartment for a while, you can't take that money and use it to fix your situation instead because if you tried to do that the government takes it away.
> Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?).
Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
You don't know what you're talking about. The corporate takeover of most rentals (apartments and homes alike) near the roadways and transit these people need to get to their jobs (let alone in areas where they wouldn't have to commute) has made those rentals inaccessible. They use little-known credit reporting companies specific to the rental industry that have basically no regulatory oversight, and which allow landlords to deny applications in an opaque way without liability. Housing voucher wait lists are years long; they're basically impossible to get on. The only housing assistance that was available to most people were pandemic-era emergency eviction grants, and those are gone.
Van life, couch surfing, living in hotels: these are the options available to them. And it's obviously not so simple as "roughing it" for a few months, as they're essentially forced to sell or abandon most of their personal property.
What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads, while millions of wealthier Americans own multiple properties where they and their family are the only residents. It's ridiculous.
>Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
> The corporate takeover of most rentals (apartments and homes alike) near the roadways and transit these people need to get to their jobs (let alone in areas where they wouldn't have to commute) has made those rentals inaccessible.
> They use little-known credit reporting companies specific to the rental industry that have basically no regulatory oversight, and which allow landlords to deny applications in an opaque way without liability.
And then you rent from someone else because in reality large corporations own only a small percentage of rental units.
> Housing voucher wait lists are years long; they're basically impossible to get on.
You're again only making the argument for getting rid of those grants people can't get anyway in favor of a UBI that everyone gets automatically.
> What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads
How are they paying more money for anything to receive $1000 in cash instead of a $1000 payment that can only go to a landlord?
> I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
What "high end electronics" would be taxed at a medium rate? Do billionaires not just use iPhones? Most high end private planes are the same models as regional jets (e.g. Embraer ERJ line), so a tax on them would still be mostly impacting normal folks' plane tickets.
The core problem remains the same: consumption does not scale with wealth. If we limit taxes go a handful of goods and services, then demand is just going to shift to something else. Consumption taxes give billionaires the option to drastically reduce their tax burden by consuming less. The lifestyle of someone with a $20 million net worth is not that much worse than someone with a $2 billion net worth.
> Most high end private planes are the same models as regional jets (e.g. Embraer ERJ line), so a tax on them would still be mostly impacting normal folks' plane tickets.
Planes are the things airlines buy, not the things economy passengers buy. If you're conceding that taxes corporations pay get passed on to consumers then what does that imply about corporate income tax?
Also, poor people don't generally buy a lot of air travel.
> Consumption taxes give billionaires the option to drastically reduce their tax burden by consuming less.
Isn't that what we want? An incentive for the money to go to creating jobs or charitable donations rather than private jets and third mansions?
> Correct, corporate tax rates are generally regressive in their effect.
Corporations can be shell companies. Whatever rate or tax you want to be applied to "the rich" has to be at least that high on corporations or "the rich" would just put their money inside a corporation and pay the lower tax. So it turns out all taxes are "regressive" at which point you might as well use the the simple, uniform, less distortionary ones (e.g. VAT) and then achieve different effective rates via transfer payments, the most efficient of which is a UBI.
> Building jets and houses creates jobs though.
That's assuming they're building houses instead of buying up the existing stock while restrictive zoning prevents more from being built. Moreover, jobs building private jets or satisfying other hedonistic consumption are less helpful than jobs building battery factories or growing food, even if they did employ the same number of people.
> A more likely outcome of a consumption tax is that wealthy people simply spend less.
The reason wealthy people don't spend most of their income is that they already buy whatever they want and then still have money left over. Bill Gates isn't going to buy an economy car instead of a luxury car over a sales tax.
This is what parrots continuously say while ignoring that the original problem was that in the existing system they not only don't pay taxes on the money they don't spend, they don't even pay taxes on the money they do spend, because they can borrow what they want to spend instead of using taxable income and then defer capital gains or keep assets in shell corporations.
Getting from that to where they at least pay the same taxes as anyone else on the money they actually spend would be a marked improvement.
We already know how to solve that one though. You now have corporations and billionaires actually paying the consumption tax along with everyone else, so you take that money and use it for a UBI, which causes the effective rates on lower income people to be much lower or even negative even though everyone is still paying a uniform marginal rate.
That scheme still wouldn't work. When that new corporation is first formed, it's near worthless. After the series of favorable deals, the value of each share in that corporation goes up. Thus it still incurs capital gains taxes.
Of course people will try to cheat taxes, but they'll try to cheat any form of tax: income, capital gains, inheritance taxes, etc. People are good to try and evade taxes regardless of the tax mechanism.
Consumption taxes are regressive: a sales tax is a flat tax that taxes a billion on their $10 latte the same as a poor person. Consumption also doesn't scale linearly with wealth: most billionaires don't consume 1000x as much as a millionaire.
> After the series of favorable deals, the value of each share in that corporation goes up. Thus it still incurs capital gains taxes.
Only if you sell the shares, which they easily resolve by not doing.
> People are good to try and evade taxes regardless of the tax mechanism.
Which is why you should use the ones that are less susceptible to it rather than the ones that are more susceptible to it. Trying to identify the country in which "profit" is earned in an international supply chain, or value non-fungible assets not undergoing transactions, are easy to game. "You pay a given percentage when you buy something" is hard to game.
> Consumption taxes are regressive: a sales tax is a flat tax that taxes a billion on their $10 latte the same as a poor person.
The existing "progressive" income tax and benefits programs do worse than that: The billionaire pays less on $10 in marginal income than a poor person, because the taxes and benefits phase outs result in absurdly high marginal rates on the poor.
> Consumption also doesn't scale linearly with wealth: most billionaires don't consume 1000x as much as a millionaire.
Only if you're looking for it in the wrong place. A billionaire isn't going to buy a billion dollars in lattes, they're going to invest in some business ventures, which in turn are going to spend the money on equipment and vehicles and utilities and so on, i.e. consumption. You don't get a return on capital by sticking it in a mattress, you get a return by spending it to build or operate something.
> The billionaire pays less on $10 in marginal income than a poor person, because the taxes and benefits phase outs result in absurdly high marginal rates on the poor.
This is just patently false. The highest marginal income tax rate is 37%.
If you've read articles claiming that billionaires pay some absurdly low tax rate, those articles are counting their capital gains as income. Which is just a flat out lie, since those gains don't actually get taxed until the gains are realized, and the value of that capital can go down.
> This is just patently false. The highest marginal income tax rate is 37%.
Account for benefits phase outs as the tax on marginal income that they are and the marginal tax rate on lower income people is often well in excess of 37%. In some cases it has been in excess of 100% because many of the phase outs overlap and also combine with ordinary taxes.
Lol nah. The assets are held by a trust. The trust, being a friendly bunch, loan you capital which it gets by liquidating assets, at a rate of 0% with “don’t worry about it” default terms. You’ll probably pay a management fee for each loan.
You croak, your heirs become the beneficiaries of the trust. Rinse, repeat.
Debt is usually rolled over if the billionaire is still rich (banks will do that for fees). The only expenses are the interest charges- which were small 3 years ago but larger now because of how interest rate increased.
Re: estate taxes - almost no ultra rich pays them, even without surviving wife. According tom Garry Cohn (former big kahuna at Goldman Sachd and former treasury something or other in the first Trump admin) only morons pay estate taxes : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/only-morons-pay-the-estate-t...
As per your linked article, they mainly either give away their money to charity, or they set up trusts. When beneficiaries receive money from the trust, it's taxed as income.
You could also just... not pay. And then lawyer-up when the IRS comes after you. (They will not come after you, because they know you've lawyered-up and aren't going to make it easy.)
IIRC this is part of how they avoid taxes in general. Penalties don't hurt enough for the ones who do eventually face them.
You missed this part in the article: “ Estate tax planning has become so effective that wealthy families can now easily pass large portions of their estates to their heirs without paying the tax”
The beneficiaries then set up their own tax avoidance schemes. With the effect only rich people with poor tax planning skills, to quote Gary Cohn again, end up pay the estate tax.
Are there any recommendations for testing accessibility for TUI applications? The article mentions speakup, but as far as I understand, you need a hardware synthesizer to use that. Is it also possible to use orca?
I am not sure it is helpful to shoehorn terminals into being a second web. The terminal's strength is its simplicity.
For example, I really dislike mouse support in TUIs. 100% of the times I used the mouse on a TUI, I wanted to copy a piece of text. If the TUI hijacks the mouse and does something different with it (e.g. vim switching into visual mode) that is just annoying.
Of course a11y is important. But it barely works on the web and we won't get perfect semantics on the terminal without a lot of work. I say the better option is to strip down the experience to the parts that work well.
I agree that accidental mouse actions in a TTY are horrible, but generally speaking if you hold shift when clicking and dragging, it will work at the terminal emulater layer instead of sending the clicks to the program in the terminal. I have been shift-clicking like this for years. More because I'm generally in tmux than anything else. If I click and drag without shift I think tmux intercepts it usually.
My experience is that often when I think "I wish my email / browser / calendar / … did X" it turns out be a limitation of the underlying protocol. So even if you build all software yourself, you still have to make compromises when you interact with the outside world.
Looks like a helpful honeypot! Any tool that will public announce support for this spec is a tool I know to avoid because it collects telemetry without explicit opt-in in the first place.
DO_NOT_TRACK support doesn't mean tracking is not an explicit opt-in.
Example: the software crashes, and there is a crash handler that asks you if you want to send a crash dump. With DO_NOT_TRACK, the crash handler is disabled entirely, no question, no dump.
If it gets some adoption, that's probably how it will work. Those who have an financial interest in using tracking (ex: ads) probably won't support such an option.
I was working on something similar a while back (https://github.com/xi/spreadsheet) but ended up not using it. I just didn't end up being the first tool that came to mind when I was reaching for a spreadsheet. Not sure why.
I will definitely try out your tool and check if it works better to me.
Two random thoughts:
- In excel I often use the dragging feature, i.e. use a formula like $A2 + B$1 and then drag it in both directions. Does your tool have something similar?
- Another nice feature are visualizations. In my tool I added a bar() function that renders a value between 0 and 1 as a bar in the cell. Not sure how flexible that is, but I did have some fun with it.
Thanks for trying it, and the spreadsheet repo is great prior art — I'll dig through it.
Drag-fill. Not yet, but the parts are mostly there. The formula layer already carries abs_col/abs_row through tokenization → AST → eval, so $A2 + B$1 parses correctly today; what's missing is the editing op that copies a formula across a range and shifts only the relative components. Opened #17 for it. The tricky part isn't the rewrite, it's the keybinding — Vim doesn't have an obvious idiom for "drag," so I'm leaning toward a visual-selection + fill-from-anchor key (Y is a candidate) or a :fill command. Open to suggestions if you have a feel for what works in a modal editor. It also needs to land on top of the bulk-undo work in #8/#9 so a fill is one undo step instead of N.
bar() / inline visualizations. Love it, opened #18. The interesting design call is whether BAR returns a CellValue::Visual { … } that the renderer dispatches on (correct under column resizes, but ripples into CSV export, copy/paste, and how SUM treats a visual cell), or whether it just returns a string of block-drawing chars at eval time (trivial to add, but width gets baked in at compute time which is wrong). The first is the right answer; the second is a tempting MVP. SPARKLINE(range) is the natural follow-up once the abstraction settles.
That's what the author claims, but I have not seen any evidence that it is actually true. In a ticket where they were asked to provide peer review, they instead linked to a bunch of blog posts that in my opinion do not qualify as peer review: https://github.com/w3c/wcag3/issues/29
Also, it is not as if the WCAG 2 formula would not model how humans actually perceive contrast.
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