> Let's just say "Harvard" is a third declension noun because why not.
Given Harvard maintains the tradition of Latin addresses (the Latin Salutatory), I’m sure they have an official position on what their name is in Latin. Wikipedia cites this article but not sure if it is online: Hammond, Mason (Summer 1987). "Official Terms in Latin and English for Harvard College or University". Harvard Library bulletin. Vol. XXXV, no. 3. Harvard University. pp. 294–310.
I spent a year as a student at the University of Sydney (Australia). I roughly remember how to say in Latin “University of Sydney Library”, because they stamped it on all their old library books (something like “Bibliotheca Universitatis Sidneiensis”)-I expect old books in Harvard’s library may be stamped in Latin too
Magna Carta reminds me of the "Seven parts" from Alphonse X of Castille, nearly in the same era.
Also, for its day, it was kinda open-minded and progressive, and Alphonse X was a damn nerd as he ordered to compose a book of games like chess and more tabletop games like Nine Men Morris (Libro de los juegos/The Book of Games).
Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.
Median home price in 1940 Boston area was $3,600 or 180oz gold. Today the median home price is 215oz of gold in the same area (or $670,000). In terms of gold, house prices are up 20%. In terms of dollars, 18000%.
A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
Real inflation of fiat is easy to obscure for political reasons. That’s much harder to do with the market value of gold.
> Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.
Not really. It has fluctuated a lot. You can pick starting and ending points a few years apart and come up with very different results relative to actual inflation.
> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics, which are better than using 1 commodity or 1 purchasable item as a benchmark.
> Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics
If only it was as simple: you will need to introduce weights between different items, and account to the change of those weights too. Also gold isn't just commodity, it's monetary commodity.
If you use official inflation dollars you get 1$ 1940 ~= 23$ 2025. You can see how magnitude wrong it is for housing or cars in the example above.
Here's food prices from 1940 diner: > A 25-cent platter, 5-cent hotdog, and 10-cent hamburger. Also doesn't really work with official inflation dollars either. And again works much better with gold prices.
Median household income in the 1940’s seems to be something like $2,600. Using your inflation figure that is ~$59800 in today’s dollars.
2024 there seems to be an estimated ~$75,000 median household income.
Housing and cars are also apples and oranges seeing that the average family size and sq footage for even 50’s homes is completely different than today. Today fewer people are living in significantly larger spaces than was normal back then.
This is what passes for "intellectual contributions" for Hackernews. Notice there is zero dang's preaching about the values of HN to posts like these. He reserves his warnings for things that are popular but also goes against his fascist administration. This site is chock full of outright bigotry but it's acceptable as long as you present it politely.
Outside of the humour involved, what is your precise complaint?
You do realise that, especially in the US, almost everyone is fat, yes? That there is an epidemic of this?
And that it is getting worse.
As a general rule, many people considered lean today, would be considered fat 100 years ago.
This is the joke, and also the truth. And amusingly if you visit these smaller, older houses, you will actually find narrower internal doors, stairs and halls in many of them.
Even bedrooms are smaller, and were meant for smaller beds.
Thus humorous thought then lends to the idea, is the lair's size and dimensions a contributor to size? We know environment can cause genetic expression, after all.
For houses I think I expect to get better product for same “real” dollars, like with cars or TV. But given somewhat limited supply of houses this can be wrong assumption.
As for income tbh I read it more like real income fell a lot, rather than a proof that inflated dollars reflect reality well. I.e i think if income inequality didn’t grow as much as it did 2024 median household income would have been much higher which would have increased different between inflation figure from real one further.
Yeah people like shiny rocks. Luckily we switched to a more stable system after the great depression. Although with this major tarrifs war who knows maybe Trump will decide to really collapse us economy and switch to the gold syatem
>Not really. It has fluctuated a lot. You can pick starting and ending points a few years apart and come up with very different results relative to actual inflation.
I think he's talking about really long periods of time. It's true that gold is an extremely volatile investment, whose price can seemingly quadruple or be cut in four at any time. But if you look over periods where the price of gold increased by more than 20x, this becomes a lot less important when you try to estimate things like the average rate of inflation. If you work with a ten-year moving average of the price of gold the problem is also reduced. Gold is the only metal whose sulfide is unstable under standard conditions (101.3/293.15).
In other fields, this is called a "low-pass filter".
The key word is relatively. Compared to cash or index investing gold has been far more consistent, while cash has devalued loads even after adjusting for the government indexes, and stocks have gone up loads in real terms assuming you did something passive and reinvested dividends.
The reason it's been fairly constant is that over the long term the cost is driven by the cost of mining it and costs of say getting an acre of land, digging up earth and processing it remains somewhat comparable to the cost of getting an acre of land and building a house.
Cash depreciates because voters say we need more wages and it's easier for governments to print money than make everyone richer in real terms. They can try to generate the illusion of richer in real terms by fiddling the inflation stats, say focusing on a basket of vegetables and not medical costs or beachfront property,
Stocks go up because companies make profits and reinvest.
Sure, but modern cars are in fact much, much better at this.
New cars aren't necessarily a lot better than cars built 20 years ago, but compared to anything built before EFI they are vastly more reliable. And then you could also talk about radial tires if you are comparing to the 1940s.
While you are fiddling with your carb and fixing 2 flat tires, I'm cruising along with a misfiring cylinder and a nail causing a slow leak.
> Gold is considered to have relatively consistent value over time.
Uh... Gold has doubled in the last two years. Fast forward past the trade war and it'll likely crash again. Gold is far, far more volatile than currencies. More even than securities, and frankly even most commodities are more stable.
"Groceries" likewise make extremely poor metrics for "consistent value". Also "grocery bill" sounds like you're trying to sneak in an argument about inflation, and not value (gold inflates too!).
Also, too, no it hasn't, not remotely. Don't hyperbolize, it cheapens the discourse. Food CPI is about 1-2% higher than general CPI right now. (Or maybe you moved from CDMX to San Jose or something, likewise not a statement about value).
Median home prices have risen. Home prices have gotten out of control due to limits on supply that's one of the main factors of inflation. Cars today are very different then cars back then and come with more features. The dollar is what we use for currency and the measurement of inflation is well defined (even if there can be good faith argument of which inflation works better especially when comparing long term) meanwhile gold is just shiny rocks
A car or house built in 2025 is very different object than one built in 1945.
Consistent commodities like coal, rice, or silver make better points of comparison, but each give wildly different values for inflation just as gold does. Inflation doesn’t mean anything specific on very long timescales because the underlying economy fundamentally changes.
There’s really nothing suggesting gold is a more fundamental measure of value than silver which was far more commonly traded. IMO the reason people focus on gold today is its more consistent use in video games as a currency rather than say platinum. There’s just never been enough gold to use as a common medium of exchange between individuals, but in virtual worlds that’s a non issue.
Nope land is comparable, subtract that out and you’ll see a huge difference as you literally can’t legally build a house that shitty in most areas. These things were typically ~750 SF and had terrible insulation via single pane windows etc.
Survivorship bias means most of the lowest quality housing stock either didn’t survive or was significantly upgraded, but that’s irrelevant when talking about what was being built.
In 1945, US GDP per capita was almost $1600. Using your conversion factors, that would be almost $150k today. The actual number is something like $85k. I don't think Americans are that much poorer today than they were 80 years ago.
Poe's law strikes again. Is this supposed to be a parody of goldbugs or do you seriously think Americans were that much richer in 1945? Without a wink we don't know
It's not an original so much as an official copy. The copies, dated 1300, were created 85 years after the signing of the original Magna Carta in 1215.
Although I suppose the argument is that if you re-affirm the same text several times, that each one is legitimate.
>First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore.
>He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.
But still, it would be weird to say that a copy of the Constitution produced during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and re-affirmed by the govt was "an original" even if it otherwise had pedigree.
whatever, umm, "sanctioned forgery"
but exactly how is it a "copy", as the Magna Carta was hand written, with 4 signed copys still in existance today.
the item under discussion was created 85 years after the magna carta, and presumably, everyone who was involved with the original, was dead
so this thing is just old, but has no direct connection, it's even listed as an "amended version" of the actual original document,
which means of course that some ancient controversy and disagreement, is lurking for our
perusal and picking sides
Came here to understand exactly this point. It made no sense to me that a document created in 1215 would have a copy made in 1300 that was referred to as an original.
Yeah Harvard is doing good stuff. I also love listening to Stephen Kotkin. He uses the Socratic method a lot so he just goes a bit from here to there and lets you make up your own mind. Really great historian if you ask me. Very calming to listen to too IMO.
The sad thing is, cutting down on the streamers does make an actual dent in outgo. Each platform is at least $9USD, and subscribing to them all at this point is easily $100/month. Obviously, some are higher than $9, but cutting the cord to save money tends to come out higher than the dreaded cable bill.
Reminds me of that time I found a book at my Uni library that was in the rare books collection that I could only read in the reading room and then saw there were many copies on AMZN for 50 cents + shipping.
This was a 1970s paperback by someone who attracted attention for his work on spiritual matters and sold a lot of books but didn't leave an organization behind so you can find his books at used bookstores.
Not rare at all but some people might say it has some prurient interest (talks about his sexual misadjustment) so maybe they think it has to be limited access or maybe people will steal it or something. (The same library kept Steal this book in a restricted area of the stacks but let me check it out.)
When a librarian says a book is rare, they don't mean that the information inside is scarce. Rather, they mean that there are few surviving examples of that particular printing or edition of manufacture.
For instance, you can get a first edition copy of Trilby (which was basically the 1890's Twilight Saga) for a few hundred bucks or less as long as you're not picky about the condition.
>>Harvard Law School bought its version from a London legal book dealer, Sweet & Maxwell, which had in turn purchased the manuscript in December 1945 from Sotheby’s, the auctioneers.
>>In the 1945 auction catalog it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for £42 — about a fifth of the average annual income in the United Kingdom at the time — on behalf of Forster Maynard, an Air Vice-Marshal who had served as a fighter pilot in World War I.
>>Air Vice-Marshal Maynard inherited it from the family of Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners in Britain against the slave trade from the 1780s onward.
Ah yea, security has gotten much tougher now. There are a couple open-access museums though like the Art Museum, the Near East Museum, the Scientific Instruments one in the Science Building, and a couple others.
All in all, loved the museums and history, but detested Harvard. I would have been a better fit at a more middle class college like Cal, Stanford, or MIT.
I am surprised that a Harvard student ID was required. A long time ago, in the US, all university libraries were open the public. It was a requirement to receive federal funding. Perhaps this has changed, or Harvard forgoes federal funding for certain libraries in order to keep them more restricted. (Does anyone know the full story in 2025?)
If you want to see something special, like the Magna Carta, I am sure you can send an email to the special collections supervisor. They would probably be more than happy to grant you one day entry.
The real issue often is local high schoolers and middle schoolers. Several college librarians told me that they hated to keep them out, but they were loud and not really interested in studying. They were getting away from their parents.
If you're willing to brave the American customs gulag, Stanford's free Cantor museum has very historically and artistically significant bits. No ID needed there, of all places.
you can see the Gutenberg bible at the Library of Congress in DC. There was no ordeal to enter. There was a very American sign that said no guns allowed inside, but I dont think. there was even a metal detector or ID required.
Saw some of the examples on holiday last month when we were in Salisbury. It was really neat to be that close to one of the ones sent out. Before that time, I'd never actually read the Magna Carta, which really was an interesting read.
Ezra Klein would sneer at the red tape regulations imposed by a limited monarchy because they "know better" than us plebs how to wield absolute power properly. /s
When I visited London a few years ago I went to the British Library and stumbled into their collection (and it was incredibly impressive). I had no idea they had two original Magna Cartas. If you have a chance to see the document at Harvard, you should! It's really something.
The Harvard document is a copy of Edward I's 1297 Great Charter that is still partly in force today.
There were earlier versions of the Magna Carta; originally authored by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1215, rejected, revised and eventually reissued and negotiated (largely by force) by William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke in 1217.
The magic of compound interest: buying an original Magna Carta for $27 and selling it for $21 million 80 years later is equivalent to achieving 18.5% compound interest. Roughly the same rate and duration as Warren Buffett's investing career, with a smaller starting value.
A good chunk of that is illiquid because it is capital invested in funds that may or may not be priced/valued accurately. And Harvard has $7-8B in outstanding debt.
If there’s a severe recession or crisis, it’s not clear that Harvard will sail smoothly through it without some turbulence. Though i’m not implying they would sell some these priceless assets.
Indeed. However, it might make sense to change the definition of "realized". For example, if you use invested capital as collateral for a loan, we could require that it be valued at its basis cost. If you want to use the current market value of the stocks for loan collateral, then the IRS could recognize that the loan institution "realizes" that the stocks have appreciated in value and that the holder of the stocks agrees on the valuation. Multiple parties realized that the stock has a higher value today than its basis cost and expect it to presumably hold at least roughly that value for the duration of the loan.
Using the market value as collateral is in fact one way of realizing the gains: the investor is using the loan to convert their gains on invested capital into something usable. The capital gains tax would only be triggered when the investor utilizes a price other than their basis cost for their financial instruments.
This would probably not affect very many people: 99% of people don't use their retirement stocks as collateral on loans. It would fix the "Jeff Bezos et al. never pay taxes because they just keep getting bigger and bigger loans to pay off their loans" nonsense.
I don't think anyone in D.C. is currently proposing this, but I think it's a nifty idea. Even if the tax revenue generated is modest, it would boost the average citizens confidence that the system is working and not rigged/broken. And that is probably something worth pursuing these days given how dissatisfied voters have been for the past 9 years or so.
This would also apply to farmers when they take out a loan on their land, which they are also unlikely to ever realize, probably for longer period of time then Bezos, et al. I imagine most of rural America, once they figure this out would be very unhappy.
This might be the larger problem with this, since we probably, culturally at least, want more family owned farms and less corporate monster farms. This would not help the current trend away from family owned farms.
You can make a specific exception for loans taken out against the real assets of a business to fund capital improvements of that business. Rules would be similar to when you can deduct business expenses.
My house is already taxed on its current value rather than the value I purchased it for.
There are small edge cases for "the thing I own is worth a gazillion dollars now but I never want to sell it." Those edge cases already exist with the "I grew up in this house and I am emotionally attached to it" situation. It sure seems to me like people having unrealized gains in equities is, you know, vastly more common than finding out that the weird knick-knack that reminds you of your mom is actually a valuable collectable worth millions.
That shocked me when I moved to Nassau County, NY--that home owners did not have that protection. Nassau County is allegedly one of the most expensive tax counties in the country. There is definitely a retirement migration of blue collar residents who can't afford the property tax increases on their home when they retire. And in this perverse housing market, what was even 350k 10 years ago is 750k now (I know because I was looking). Forget what retirement age homeowners paid 30+ years ago.
The difference is that land is not produced by anybody and taxing it comes with zero negative effects - it can't dampen production to raise costs, as usual with taxation, because land was produced by nobody. That differs from taxing wealth in things that are produced very differently, because that comes with side effects of discouraging production
The $21 million figure was based on a 2007 sale, which would have been closer to holding it for 59 years -- almost 26% interest compounded annually. If that rate of growth held for another 18 years, we'd be looking at $60 million today.
Yeah so if the parents are two mid-level software engineers, then what?
I’ve been pricing out elite institutions for my spawn. They ramp up pretty fast, assuming you can get
In all fairness, the “great colleges” have tons of competition. Normal colleges have excellent outcomes.
In terms of research, they earn their reputations. But that means undergraduates can be a second-thought.
Even the wealthy have no compunctions about sending their kids to Bard or Claremont McKenna.
152 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadHarvardis alumnis corpus non habent sed quidem corpus de "habeas corpus" habent.
(Let's just say "Harvard" is a third declension noun because why not.)
Given Harvard maintains the tradition of Latin addresses (the Latin Salutatory), I’m sure they have an official position on what their name is in Latin. Wikipedia cites this article but not sure if it is online: Hammond, Mason (Summer 1987). "Official Terms in Latin and English for Harvard College or University". Harvard Library bulletin. Vol. XXXV, no. 3. Harvard University. pp. 294–310.
I spent a year as a student at the University of Sydney (Australia). I roughly remember how to say in Latin “University of Sydney Library”, because they stamped it on all their old library books (something like “Bibliotheca Universitatis Sidneiensis”)-I expect old books in Harvard’s library may be stamped in Latin too
sigillum academiae harvardianae in nov ang
https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/55900/55996/55996_harvard_seal.h...
Also, for its day, it was kinda open-minded and progressive, and Alphonse X was a damn nerd as he ordered to compose a book of games like chess and more tabletop games like Nine Men Morris (Libro de los juegos/The Book of Games).
Median home price in 1940 Boston area was $3,600 or 180oz gold. Today the median home price is 215oz of gold in the same area (or $670,000). In terms of gold, house prices are up 20%. In terms of dollars, 18000%.
A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
Real inflation of fiat is easy to obscure for political reasons. That’s much harder to do with the market value of gold.
Not really. It has fluctuated a lot. You can pick starting and ending points a few years apart and come up with very different results relative to actual inflation.
> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.
Now take this idea and average it across a large number of different items and you arrive at inflation statistics, which are better than using 1 commodity or 1 purchasable item as a benchmark.
If only it was as simple: you will need to introduce weights between different items, and account to the change of those weights too. Also gold isn't just commodity, it's monetary commodity.
If you use official inflation dollars you get 1$ 1940 ~= 23$ 2025. You can see how magnitude wrong it is for housing or cars in the example above.
Here's food prices from 1940 diner: > A 25-cent platter, 5-cent hotdog, and 10-cent hamburger. Also doesn't really work with official inflation dollars either. And again works much better with gold prices.
2024 there seems to be an estimated ~$75,000 median household income.
Housing and cars are also apples and oranges seeing that the average family size and sq footage for even 50’s homes is completely different than today. Today fewer people are living in significantly larger spaces than was normal back then.
You do realise that, especially in the US, almost everyone is fat, yes? That there is an epidemic of this?
And that it is getting worse.
As a general rule, many people considered lean today, would be considered fat 100 years ago.
This is the joke, and also the truth. And amusingly if you visit these smaller, older houses, you will actually find narrower internal doors, stairs and halls in many of them.
Even bedrooms are smaller, and were meant for smaller beds.
Thus humorous thought then lends to the idea, is the lair's size and dimensions a contributor to size? We know environment can cause genetic expression, after all.
The comment is what you make of it.
You've taken offence for some reason. Why?
For houses I think I expect to get better product for same “real” dollars, like with cars or TV. But given somewhat limited supply of houses this can be wrong assumption.
As for income tbh I read it more like real income fell a lot, rather than a proof that inflated dollars reflect reality well. I.e i think if income inequality didn’t grow as much as it did 2024 median household income would have been much higher which would have increased different between inflation figure from real one further.
I think he's talking about really long periods of time. It's true that gold is an extremely volatile investment, whose price can seemingly quadruple or be cut in four at any time. But if you look over periods where the price of gold increased by more than 20x, this becomes a lot less important when you try to estimate things like the average rate of inflation. If you work with a ten-year moving average of the price of gold the problem is also reduced. Gold is the only metal whose sulfide is unstable under standard conditions (101.3/293.15).
In other fields, this is called a "low-pass filter".
The reason it's been fairly constant is that over the long term the cost is driven by the cost of mining it and costs of say getting an acre of land, digging up earth and processing it remains somewhat comparable to the cost of getting an acre of land and building a house.
Cash depreciates because voters say we need more wages and it's easier for governments to print money than make everyone richer in real terms. They can try to generate the illusion of richer in real terms by fiddling the inflation stats, say focusing on a basket of vegetables and not medical costs or beachfront property,
Stocks go up because companies make profits and reinvest.
Except that the gold price fluctuated by 50% within the last 30 years: https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html
But a new car today is vastly different from a 1940s car, so different that it's nonsensical to use it to compare purchasing power of gold.
New cars aren't necessarily a lot better than cars built 20 years ago, but compared to anything built before EFI they are vastly more reliable. And then you could also talk about radial tires if you are comparing to the 1940s.
While you are fiddling with your carb and fixing 2 flat tires, I'm cruising along with a misfiring cylinder and a nail causing a slow leak.
They have basically the same utility. What is a car?
https://www.5yearcharts.com/historical-gold-price-chart-how-...
Uh... Gold has doubled in the last two years. Fast forward past the trade war and it'll likely crash again. Gold is far, far more volatile than currencies. More even than securities, and frankly even most commodities are more stable.
Also, too, no it hasn't, not remotely. Don't hyperbolize, it cheapens the discourse. Food CPI is about 1-2% higher than general CPI right now. (Or maybe you moved from CDMX to San Jose or something, likewise not a statement about value).
A car or house built in 2025 is very different object than one built in 1945.
Consistent commodities like coal, rice, or silver make better points of comparison, but each give wildly different values for inflation just as gold does. Inflation doesn’t mean anything specific on very long timescales because the underlying economy fundamentally changes.
There’s really nothing suggesting gold is a more fundamental measure of value than silver which was far more commonly traded. IMO the reason people focus on gold today is its more consistent use in video games as a currency rather than say platinum. There’s just never been enough gold to use as a common medium of exchange between individuals, but in virtual worlds that’s a non issue.
Survivorship bias means most of the lowest quality housing stock either didn’t survive or was significantly upgraded, but that’s irrelevant when talking about what was being built.
The ban was only lifted once we adopted fiat currency, and it became not particularly useful for trade.
So if they paid in dimes/quarters/ half dollars /dollars, they were paying in silver
Depending on which city they sleep in, Bezos or Musk make all local citizens multimillionaires. Per capita. Statistically.
Although I suppose the argument is that if you re-affirm the same text several times, that each one is legitimate.
>First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore.
>He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.
But still, it would be weird to say that a copy of the Constitution produced during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and re-affirmed by the govt was "an original" even if it otherwise had pedigree.
Avacodos be damned
But it will also be out of copyright so the cost of getting a “new” copy is basically just the cost of printing.
https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Secrets-Happiness-Intimat...
Not rare at all but some people might say it has some prurient interest (talks about his sexual misadjustment) so maybe they think it has to be limited access or maybe people will steal it or something. (The same library kept Steal this book in a restricted area of the stacks but let me check it out.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby_(novel)
>>In the 1945 auction catalog it was listed as a copy and with the wrong date (1327) and was sold for £42 — about a fifth of the average annual income in the United Kingdom at the time — on behalf of Forster Maynard, an Air Vice-Marshal who had served as a fighter pilot in World War I.
>>Air Vice-Marshal Maynard inherited it from the family of Thomas and John Clarkson, who were leading campaigners in Britain against the slave trade from the 1780s onward.
Pretty convoluted path to launder stolen goods.
I especially loved walking around Widener Library and marveling at the murals and that original Guteberg Bible
All in all, loved the museums and history, but detested Harvard. I would have been a better fit at a more middle class college like Cal, Stanford, or MIT.
I found a visitor access page here: https://library.harvard.edu/visitor-access
If you want to see something special, like the Magna Carta, I am sure you can send an email to the special collections supervisor. They would probably be more than happy to grant you one day entry.
Related:
Digitising the Magna Carta: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/magna-carta-making-history-ava...
Collection of manuscript Magna Cartas and early English statutes, ca. 1300-1577: https://listview.lib.harvard.edu/lists/hollis-014294028
Magna Carta, approximately 1300. Manuscript. HLS MS 172, Harvard Law School Library: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:49364859$1i
Amen to that. Love Stanford. Cal has a ton of great stuff too.
> the American customs gulag
What does that mean? I've been to Cantor multiple times and nothing seemed out of the ordinary security wise.
Late afternoon PST/EST tends to be when Asian and European HN is sleeping.
Asian HN seems to start up around 10-11pm PST, European HN seems to peak around 3am-7am PST, and "Global" HN seems to be around 7am-10am PST.
Maybe the person you responded to was up late or early or was referring to people who might be asleep. Do they not exist if they are asleep?
Yep! HN's tone has massive shifts depending on the time of usage, and basically turns into entirely different forums.
> Do they not exist if they are asleep?
That's more of a Descartes question than a me question /s
But yea fair.
https://ask.loc.gov/preservation/faq/337286
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/handling-historic-colle...
https://info.gaylord.com/resources/for-the-glove-of-preserva...
> We're often led to believe that wearing gloves is essential when handling precious books. In fact, it poses a serious risk of damaging them.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/our-cause/history-heritage/...
now compare
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Magna_Ca...
to
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Magna_Ca...
There's a smudge. Of law
There were earlier versions of the Magna Carta; originally authored by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1215, rejected, revised and eventually reissued and negotiated (largely by force) by William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke in 1217.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magn...
Using the market value as collateral is in fact one way of realizing the gains: the investor is using the loan to convert their gains on invested capital into something usable. The capital gains tax would only be triggered when the investor utilizes a price other than their basis cost for their financial instruments.
This would probably not affect very many people: 99% of people don't use their retirement stocks as collateral on loans. It would fix the "Jeff Bezos et al. never pay taxes because they just keep getting bigger and bigger loans to pay off their loans" nonsense.
I don't think anyone in D.C. is currently proposing this, but I think it's a nifty idea. Even if the tax revenue generated is modest, it would boost the average citizens confidence that the system is working and not rigged/broken. And that is probably something worth pursuing these days given how dissatisfied voters have been for the past 9 years or so.
Actually weird of so few people make use of it.
This might be the larger problem with this, since we probably, culturally at least, want more family owned farms and less corporate monster farms. This would not help the current trend away from family owned farms.
That said, it's an interesting proposition.
You’re talking about behavior which is only taking place as a part of the tax dodge: taking out loans with stock as collateral.
Worst case scenario is the ultra-rich sell their stock bit by bit.
Or they donate it to charitable foundations they themselves manage.
There are small edge cases for "the thing I own is worth a gazillion dollars now but I never want to sell it." Those edge cases already exist with the "I grew up in this house and I am emotionally attached to it" situation. It sure seems to me like people having unrealized gains in equities is, you know, vastly more common than finding out that the weird knick-knack that reminds you of your mom is actually a valuable collectable worth millions.
That’s what California’s Prop 13 was supposed to address.
Valuable possessions have a tendency to move to areas where ownership is not taxed.
Thus only unmovable assets are taxed simply for possession.
You can see it in the UK legislation portal — the parts which are still in force
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9
Harvard: Sorry we can’t give you a discount in our outrageous tuition; yes I know how big our endowment is.
Also Harvard: Will you take $27 for this priceless artifact?
I’ve been pricing out elite institutions for my spawn. They ramp up pretty fast, assuming you can get In all fairness, the “great colleges” have tons of competition. Normal colleges have excellent outcomes.
In terms of research, they earn their reputations. But that means undergraduates can be a second-thought.
Even the wealthy have no compunctions about sending their kids to Bard or Claremont McKenna.