DelaneyM

Are we really doing this?

Every other club every day has straight energy. Every movie you watch, every book you read.

The point of a gay bar is a homonormative space. And since gay people are outnumbered 20:1, and heteronormativity is the cultural constant, a place where gay is the norm is incredibly valuable.

And I don’t think for one second that you think nobody complains about the presence of visibly gay people everywhere’s else.

I don’t even know why I’m responding to this rage-baiting. I hope you get downvoted into oblivion.

Some do, but not every bar has a bouncer, and even then it’s hard to blanket-ban on suspicion.

There aren’t any lesbian bars, sadly, but I would expect bachelorettes to hit them if they existed. The point seems to be “act slutty and let their guard down without risk”. (Though as a gay woman I have a whole separate rant about straight women in gay bars.)

I have some sympathy for them. The whole point of gay bars is having fun and expressing one’s sexuality without risk. But each party is having a “once in a lifetime” drunken blowout, while for the rest of the bar it’s just a Friday. Also they bring extreme straight energy.

It used to be less common, but then their behaviour was worse when gay culture was less mainstream and they treated it like going on safari. It was also galling when they invaded our space to celebrate marriage when we couldn’t marry, then turned around and voted Republican.

Anything to get the bachelorette parties out of gay bars. They’re a plague.

Edit: The bachelorettes are the plague, not the gay bars. I assume they also blight straight bars, I just don’t go to those.

An accounting professor I once had called trades like this “speed dialing the SEC from your Bloomberg”.

Even if it’s legit, this trader is going to be spending a lot of time giving depositions over the next few months.

Or possibly it’s like the hole in the ozone layer, which has also faded from public discourse, because thanks to that huge amount of press and action it’s been largely addressed.

You’re basically saying “why is this thing we’re all working so hard to prevent not happening enough to justify prevention?”.

> …COVID has killed more people in the past 4 years than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+.

Ok, so that’s wrong by an order of magnitude. AIDS has killed ~85.6 million [64.8 million–113.0 million] people, and it’s plausible that could be a huge undercount. COVID has killed ~7M people, which is also bad but nowhere near “more”.

There are also a lot of reasons these aren’t really comparable pandemics, and the responses to them are similarly difficult to compare, but I’m not going to bother with that conversation here.

[https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet], [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/]

No part of the post you’re replying to suggests it’s opening the door to reciprocal violence.

The more complete argument is that extra-judicial action is justified when there is no other way - such as when the political process cannot effect change.

If there are no just elections, the only way to remove a ruler is revolution, almost by definition. In that case, “punch the Nazis” all you like.

No part of the post you’re replying to suggests they want to pursue or support tyranny. If some right-wing kooks justify revolution with demonstrably false statements, that does not justify their actions - falsehoods are never a foundation of justice.

As a teenager I picked it up in a few weeks of halfhearted practice while visiting blind relatives. It was a struggle for a few hours until it “clicked.”

It’a not like learning a new language, just a different alphabet with mostly 1:1 substitutions. (I figure most punctuation out from context.) It’s like learning Morse code.

Vision loss runs in my family and has affected a few of my uncles and grandparents, so I’ve seen this multiple times.

Braille can absolutely be learned at any age, and is a godsend for an avid reader. My grandmother learned braille at 72 and it changed her life - she never got into audio books, and I think she also appreciated the community of her local braille library. She also had a braille reader which attached to a console and worked surprisingly well - perhaps ironically she became much more technically capable and comfortable after losing her sight. She used that to write and read email in pine (I set that up for her in the early 2000’s, I’m sure better options exist now.)

My uncles who’ve lost their sight both picked up braille early and have barely skipped a beat. I believe learning and leveraging braille while partially sighted both made it easier to adapt and mitigated the emotional impact of their loss as it progressed.

There are other advances in tactile displays happening every day now, one which I’ve been following is https://pad.dotincorp.com/.

PS. If your mother has AMD (as my family does), be aware that there’s a significant hereditary component. You should be sure to inform your doctor and consider annual ophthalmologist checkups.

This affects women more because caregiving is a responsibility which falls disproportionately on women.

Though I'm no longer working, being able to shift to remote a few years ago let me move home and care for my parents + kids at the same time. It wasn't about working less, it's about being available in case of emergency and not having to do a commute. My hours worked didn't change at all - if anything, they increased, because I didn't have to rush home from the office as a precaution.

I like to think that remote work is particularly valuable for men because it makes it possible for them to rise above systemic factors and be present and engaged in caregiving in a way which was previously artificially denied them. I like to think the biggest benefit for women isn't that they're able to work remotely to more effectively be caregivers, but that their spouses are able to work remotely so they aren't obliged to be caregivers. I wish that were how it was presented.

Our decision to have lower taxes, because we don’t need to raise more money, seems an odd thing to criticize us for.

Companies do not choose Cayman. They choose “not my home/operating country”, then as a well regulated and safe third party location many of them end up in Cayman. And you should be glad they do, because here they operate transparently and legally, and if it’s for tax benefits whatever tax loopholes exist in their home countries are closed they’ll have no choice but to richly comply. (BTW, In surveys the most frequent reason cited for being in cayman is regulatory neutrality, not tax mitigation.)

And if Obama has a problem with hundreds of companies sharing an address, I can’t wait until he finds out about Delaware. Or a post office!

By the way, Cayman has pretty substantial taxes. We operate a thriving country with no national debt and a great social safety net.

We just charge them differently. There’s an effective 22% consumption tax (with carve-outs for basics), levied on all imports and increased on luxuries. We have 7% taxes on all property transfers (for both income and to minimize house flipping). We have a ton of fees on any government interaction which aligns regulatory burdens with income.

My point is that the ability of a company to put money offshore for tax benefits is on the home/operating country, not the offshore location.

Cayman invests a lot of energy in sensible and globally integrated financial regulations. We specialize on that as a country. So when companies are moving money around globally we often feature in that. But we can’t be held responsible for what those funds transfers are used for.

We can be transparent (and we are exceptionally so), we can be responsive to global financial crimes queries (we are that as well). But what are we supposed to do about another country’s laws?

Companies are not putting money in Cayman to hide it.

Some companies put money outside of their operating or home country to minimize taxes, but Cayman has no part of that besides being “not their operating country”.

And it’s actually less often the tax treatment of funds which brings companies to Cayman, and much more often the simpler regulations. Operating globally often means a geometric growth in financial complexity. Cayman is a neutral third country, which simplifies things tremendously. Think of us like a financial cache.

Many people misunderstand the difference between legal tax mitigation and tax avoidance.

If your country allows companies or individuals to not be taxed on assets they locate overseas somehow, that’s on your country, not on us. And it has nothing to do with the money being here. All we can do is ensure that money flows are transparent and legal, which we do.

We put a lot of effort into being the world’s safest and best neutral third party location, and sometimes companies which are orchestrating tax mitigation schemes put money here while doing so. But they’re not putting money in Cayman to hide it, they’re putting money here because if you need to put money somewhere here is the easiest place to put it.

There’s tax mitigation and tax avoidance, and I feel like you’re conflating the two.

If your country allows a company to locate money somewhere else and not be taxed on it, that’s on your county, not on us. The best we can do is make sure it’s visible, which we do.

> The Cayman islands along with a few other tax havens play a nasty and selfish role in today's financial system that gives rich companies and rich people a massive advantage while hurting everyone else.

This is where you demonstrate your ignorance and bias.

Yes, there are American laws which allow US companies to minimize their global tax burden, but those are on America, not Cayman. The best we can do is ensure the money is well documented and visible, which we do.

Cayman is used not because of tax friendliness, but because if you’re going to put money somewhere which isn’t a major economy Cayman is the easiest and safest place to do so. It’s a neutral third location.

It’s easy because we comply with every global financial interop and transparency regulation. It’s safe because we have a large and strong financial services industry with British law.

And Cayman does not “generously skim” for ourselves. We have pretty minimal fees and a local economy of professionals. The primary way we benefit is services and expertise, which is how we level up our country and a contribution to the global economy.

It’s mostly Grisham’s fault from his 90’s book “The Firm”, IMO. Also, like much of the world, before global money laundering laws and regulations came into being there _was_ a lot of tax evasion happening here. But that hasn’t been the case for twenty years, we grew up.

People use Cayman because it’s a neutral and safe jurisdiction for global funds which plays nicely in the global financial system.

If you keep money in the US, and the beneficial owner of that money is in Singapore/UAE/China/etc, then profits are taxed twice.

If you operate in USA but earn money globally, then you’re subject to at least double, but sometimes a polynomial combination, of reporting and filling obligations from combinations of jurisdictions.

Cayman is clean, simple, above-board, and safe. It’s like a global money cache.

Citations needed.

You just can’t hide money in Cayman. You can put money in Cayman, when you need to put money somewhere safe and neutral, but not hide it. Nobody dodges taxes by putting money in Cayman.

There are some ways to save on some countries’ taxes by putting money here, but that’s on those countries, not on Cayman.

I’m a wealthy local with a wealth management bank account. It took me 7 weeks and I had to file literal volumes of paperwork with help from an accountant to open a bank account when I moved home.

As a Caymanian I’m doing to take exception to your non-sequitur about Cayman being a “well-known tax haven”.

Cayman is one of the most financially transparent, if not _the_ most financially transparent, location in the world. We fully comply with FATCA, CRS, and AEOI, to the extent that it takes even a native Caymanian multiple weeks to open a local bank account.

The reason most foreign investors use Caymanian intermediaries is actually just that transparency, particularly when they’re being scrutinized by foreign regulatory bodies and don’t want their money to disappear into a Delaware numbered company.

It is very, very hard to use Cayman to hide money from taxes. It is, however, a particularly easy place to keep global funds in a law abiding and transparent way. This is our whole regulatory strategy for continued national growth and prosperity.

I don’t challenge your conclusion that FDIC protection shouldn’t apply to non-regulated funds. Just don’t trash Cayman. If your country allows tax shenanigans that’s on your government and has nothing to do with us. Cayman will not aid or abet any tax evasion, and does not deserve the snide aside.

The biggest frustration I have with Bluesky is the velvet rope and its consequences on community building.

I've been on the wait list since Feb 22, but for whatever reason I don't have access. That's just sour grapes, I know, but it also means that others who don't run in the right circles also don't have access. It means the community is intentionally exclusive and cliquey.

I don't know what it is about tech that everyone wants to become the people who abused them in high school, but it's a bad trend and we should be better. If invites aren't going to be chronological they should at least be random. Invite people who are different intentionally. Otherwise we end up with another clubhouse-esque VC circle jerk.

Oh yes, I realize it's for the street. But unless a public offering coincides with the PR there's little value in combining the two messages.

I know the reality is more complicated, but it's always jarring to read a "company X had a great! quarter, is firing 20% of employees" headline. Very dystopian.

It seems like these two facts should at least go out in different press releases on different days.

For Shopify, does anyone know whether the 20% figure includes the people leaving with the sale of SFN to Flexport?

Edit: just heard in the earnings call that the 20% headcount reduction does _not_ include the logistics teams going to Flexport.

The value people produce is an asset. After all, you don't own people, you buy their effort.

A contract can be an asset. Usually the unrealized future value of the agreement has value should you need to make a deemed disposition (or have some other valuation event). It gets very obviously complicated and fuzzy though, which is where accountants make the big bucks. It's pretty rare that a company chooses to make a contract valuable, but it often comes up in bankruptcy proceedings.

As an example of contracts having value, a few years ago I was involved in the acquisition of some media distribution assets, and one such asset was a transferable "MFN" contract with a major publisher. That was a very, very valuable asset.

For a half billion dollars or so Elon could buy substack. It's a private company in the midst of a very painful and difficult fundraising cycle, they may not have much of a choice but to sell. Twitter would get a functioning monetization engine which favours creators, and apparently a functional product team.

Heck, he could keep the substack exec team under a heavy earn-out as the new Twitter exec team and declare victory, and go back to playing with rocketry and sports cars. Just returning his attention to Tesla would probably increase his net net worth with the acquisition.

Instead he's taking the pettiest of all paths. I genuinely feel sorry for him at this point, it's got to feel awful right now. I don't understand why one of the world's richest people would willingly subject themselves to his Twitter experience. He can afford to let go his ego this one time, he has nothing to gain and nothing to prove.

I'm not sure that's even possible. You'd likely need to register a Caymanian company to open the account.

It might be possible if you're a resident of UK or a different BOT? (British Overseas Territories).

If you'd like to ask around, generally the most flexible bank is Butterfield. I'd start there.

To be honest, I don't actually drink, and I'm just defending Cayman rum as a point of national pride.

I suggest a Caribbean tasting tour.

Tax haven rules are on the US side, not the Cayman side. FATCA makes Cayman way more transparent than the US itself.

Like, what does "stop being a tax haven" even mean? "Start charging a corporate income tax you don't need"?