Doesn't it just limit property tax to 1% while saying nothing about income tax?
Is it this?
> the aggregate of all tax levies upon real and personal property by the state and all taxing districts now existing or hereafter created, shall not in any year exceed one percent of the true and fair value of such property in money
Asking an AI (I know, I know) it suggests "Courts have ruled that income is property" which to me sounds like ruling up is down. I mean everywhere that has property tax separate from income tax or only one or the other would object...
There was initiative 2111 which seems it wouldn't even be necessary if income tax was against the constitution to begin with? Also I assume this law basically nullifies initiative 2111?
Washington's constitution says: "The word 'property' as used herein shall mean and include everything, whether tangible or intangible, subject to ownership". That is extremely broad, and there is 90 years of precedent affirming income is include here as something intangible and "subject to ownership."
So if one has income tax and property tax separate (which I guess happens now) then presumably one has also codified that income is _not_ property (which I guess is the more common state of affairs )?
Seems like this would be something for a Supreme Court to try. It was ordinary laws and cases (presumably) that had established the norms of equating income with property.
> The legislature refused to add an amendment forbidding the threshold from ever being lowered
Wouldn't such a change have to be made by the same legislature with a similar majority? Or was this some sort of constitutional change that required a more qualified majority, after which the threshold can be changed more easily than this could be introduced?
The WA constitution doesn't seem to have anything to say on income tax, just a lot about property tax?
> Wouldn't such a change have to be made by the same legislature with a similar majority?
Yes. The legislature voted on the additional language and it did not pass.
> The WA constitution doesn't seem to have anything to say on income tax, just a lot about property tax?
Washington state treats income as property, and property taxes must be uniform and flat within a specific property class.
Technically, this law does run afoul of that because having an exemption makes it not uniform, and per the state constitution property tax is capped at a total aggregate levy of 1% per year.
The state will use the argument that this is not a property tax, but an excise tax on the privilege of earning high income from the state's economy. They used a similar argument for the capital gains tax, and won in the WA supreme court.
To modify the state constitution, you need 2/3 vote in both the house and the senate, and it also must be approved by a simple majority of voters in the next general election.
Since republicans are always unified against an income tax, dems only hold a 30-19 majority in the senate, and a 59-39 majority in the house, missing 3 and 7 votes respectively.
The plan for this tax is basically to have it challenged on purpose and leave it up to the state supreme court to re-interpret the constitution, and consider this an excise tax, which is the same way they were able to pass the state's capital gains tax.
Why not just charge it on the paying end (payroll tax)? It would be the same thing but charged from employers.
E.g my Employer pays about 125 to pay me 100 because of payroll tax. Then I receive 70 because the employer also pays my tax directly. My income was only 100 and the total tax was 55.
Washington already has payroll taxes and revenue(!) taxes, which have been increasing. It was causing employers to leave. The State had to limit ambitions on several of these taxes because it was causing businesses to move to other States.
For highly paid tech employees, the total tax burden across employer and employee in Washington has become one of the highest in the US. Even if the employee doesn’t see all of that, the employer definitely does. Washington already has de facto income taxes by proxy and this is on top of that.
Maybe if we had a really terse and unambiguous form of English? Whenever there is ambiguity we insert parentheses and operators to really make it clear what we mean. We can enclose different sentences in brackets to make sure that the scope of a logical condition and so on. Oh wait
This seems it should be very easy to validate. Force the AI to make minimal changes to the code under test, which makes a single (or as few as possible) test fail as a result. If it can't make a test fail at all, it should be useless.
Agreed, and that's why I think adding some example prompts and ideas to the Testing section would be helpful. A vanilla-prompted LLM, in my experience, is very unreliable at adding tests that fail when the changes are reverted.
Many times I've observed that the tests added by the model simply pass as part of the changes, but still pass even when those changes are no longer applied.
This is essentially dual to the idea behind mutation testing, and should be trivial to do with a mutation testing framework in place (track whether a given test catches mutants, or more sophisticated: whether it catches the exact same mutants as some other test).
I meant when they each work on a separate branch and merge back, you get
the similar kinds of conflicts, where a bunch of them should not even be a conflict, so weave is trying to solve it.
There's no fundamental difference, but in practice the difference is one of frequency.
E.g. I sometimes have 10+ agents kicking off changes to the same small project at the same time, and likely to all want to merge within the next 15-30 minutes. At that rate, merge conflicts happens very frequently. The agents can mostly resolve them themselves, but it wastes tokens, and time.
> in most places in public you should have zero expectation of privacy (in the US)
Shouldn't there be a discussion about what that means? What _is_ privacy? Is it completely black or white, all or nothing? Are some kinds of privacy breaches more acceptable than others?
I feel that the "you can have no expectation of privacy in public" discussion is some times used as if it's some sort of fundamental truth that must not be challenged. If people _want_ to have more privacy in public, whatever that means, then let's make it happen.
Wear a burqa if you want total privacy while in public. Or prosthetics, I guess. I've seen people wearing full-face reflective shields in public - but that was mostly as a sun-shield to protect their ever-shriveling faces. The only thing stopping you from having real privacy while in public is social norms.
Other than that I don't see a way to remain "private" while in "public" with the current laws that we have, and I kind of like the laws that we have.
These are the same laws that let us record law enforcement, which is especially useful when they abuse their power - something that happens far to often. If the laws around recording in public were altered, then we likely also lose that right, and then law enforcement becomes even more dangerous to the citizens.
This isn't about recording. Recording was always ok. I could always record you in public. You could be part of my personal video collection, or I could use the clip of you in journalism.
But if I record you and use it in a TV commercial, that's different. The recording isn't the problem, it's what's done to the recording.
Now I'd ask: is sending the video of you to a Meta server so they can recognize your face at a specific store and location and influence which ads your mom see on Facebook more like a) journalism and personal use or which is acceptable b) the case where I recorded you and used your face in the TV commercial, which isn't acceptable?
>But if I record you and use it in a TV commercial, that's different. The recording isn't the problem, it's what's done to the recording.
You're moving goalposts. Of course using video of someone in a TV commercial requires consent. I never disputed any of that.
>is sending the video of you to a Meta server so they can recognize your face at a specific store and location and influence which ads your mom see on Facebook more like a) journalism and personal use or which is acceptable b) the case where I recorded you and used your face in the TV commercial, which isn't acceptable?
It's more like A. It isn't like B at all. But I purposely refuse to let friends take photos of me, and opt-out of group photos, because I know those photos end up on Facebook, where Facebook can do whatever they want with it short of using my likeness in an ad - at least that should be how it works, but Facebook doesn't really give a fuck about anything or anyone, so YMMV. Actual advertising companies and media companies will not use a likeness without consent, and I see plenty of faces blurred out in some "reality" shows where they did not get consent from specific people.
I can take a photo of you in public, and I can do lots of things with that photo. But if I want to sell something based on your photo, then I need to ask your permission.
Do you understand now?
This has happened to me before - someone took a photo of me and used it in an ad, and someone I know saw the ad and sent it to me... so I asked the company to stop using my photo to advertise their product, and they complied. Yes, they should have asked to use the photo first, but they likely found the photo someone else took who posted on the internet and someone at the company loved it so much (it was a great, unique photo) and wanted to use it in a fun way to promote their product. No, they should not have done that, but I get why they wanted to. Maybe they thought that sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than consent? I don't know, I don't care, but it wasn't that big a deal.
Also, FWIW, I just installed a new app called "Nearby Glasses" that scans for known bluetooth signatures of these recording glasses, and alerts when someone with these glasses is recording nearby.
> But if I want to sell something based on your photo, then I need to ask your permission. Do you understand now?
I understand, and I disagree. I think if you send video to Meta who uses it to make money (and likely offer you free services in return) then that's a commercial use of the recording. Whether it's similar to a tv-ad or not can be debated, but it's definitely recording and using it commercially.
So here's my opinion very simply: People should be required to ask for permission before sending recordings to endpoints where they even have a _risk_ of being used commercially (For example, training a LLM at Apple, or be used to improve self-driving cars at Tesla or whatever) then it should be the same as for using the recording in an a ad. Full explicit consent needed from everyone recognizable in the recording with their voice or likeness.
And I think we need to redefine privacy as something that isn't black or white. In a bathroom or in my home I expect complete privacy. In the street I expect _less privacy_ but it doesn't mean I have "no expectation of privacy".
If my biometrics or a recording of my voice is sent to a different continent and then used to change which ad shows on the phone of the person next to me on the subway, then that's less privacy than I expected and wanted.
Maybe if we weigh legitimate use cases against privacy and end up deciding that the privacy is more important, then we just don't accept those use cases?
That is: we invent new awesome life-changing technology and we just... don't use it?
Like we could have navigational AR-glasses. The wearer sees arrows on the floor where to walk. And we could choose to not let anyone wear them in public even though what they do is useful, and there aren't any real privacy issues. But people around the wearer don't know that. That's the privacy concern.
Part of it is civics. You have the right to record in public. Being in a public space means you are consenting to being recorded; it's in public. It's not always moral, classy, correct, or good, but the alternative is the erosion of the principles of free press, freedom of expression, etc.
The form factor of the camera doesn't matter. We do have different constraints, but those are pretty solidly filled out in case law. I don't believe making recording glasses illegal to wear in public would withstand constitutional scrutiny. Mandating a visible notification with a conventional color, signaling things like "on" "passive" and "recording" would be constitutional and wouldn't infringe. That said, surreptitious use would likely be legal, e.g. aftermarket modification to allow recording with no lights; first amendment issues have a high bar and all sorts of secret camera precedents being legal. This is how corrupt politicians and cops and officials get caught, all the time, and it's highly unlikely to be smart glasses that gets the people and courts to flip on 1A.
> Being in a public space means you are consenting to being recorded;
I think we all know the black/white of: you can record all you want. You can not use my face in a commercial. That idea has served us well for a century. The problem is never the recording, it's what happens to the recorded material. If you just keep it for personal use, use it for journalism? That was never a problem.
I'd argue that using the recording to send to a different continent which is then processed by humans and/or computers and this then affects me or others (E.g. changes which ad the person next to me on the train sees on their phone) is now straddling a line somewhere between the black and white of "being recorded" and "being used in a commercial". That recording wasn't just this person observing or recording in a public space. It wasn't just used for "personal use" or journalism. It's something else.
I think it's this gray area that just needs to be cleared up. What if "transmitting a recording of someone to a commercial entity that potentially does commercial things with it" was classed just as "putting my face in the TV ad"?
The GDPR (and similar) also might help (where applicable).
That's something created/accepted as a reasonable state of affairs simply because no one could imagine the resources needed to record and track every person everywhere (Or, we could - but it was fiction). Being in public was considered seen by others. Perhaps an occasional photo being taken.
Perhaps the old ideas that "you have no privacy in public" or "if you can be seen then you can be recorded" and so on just need to be revised? Should we reconsider what it means to be "in public"? Perhaps people should be granted some form of privacy protection also when "in public"?
Better to worry about the Africans running around raping our European women rather than if someone is recording you for 5 seconds while walking your dog.
Did you make a wrong turn? /r/asshat is over there ->
You posted a message in "Who wants to be hired" at almost the same time as you posted this. Do you think a potential recruiter would read your comment history?
How is this an OS concern? Shouldn't age verification be a government concern to implement a system which does a privacy preserving verification? And until such a system exists, there should be no laws about online verification at all?
Because a government represents the interests of the voters or else we get rid of it. The risk is that voters care about other issues more and get policy that they don't agree with in the package. That's always a risk. But if enough voters care about a particular issue then so does government.
Is it this?
> the aggregate of all tax levies upon real and personal property by the state and all taxing districts now existing or hereafter created, shall not in any year exceed one percent of the true and fair value of such property in money
Asking an AI (I know, I know) it suggests "Courts have ruled that income is property" which to me sounds like ruling up is down. I mean everywhere that has property tax separate from income tax or only one or the other would object...
There was initiative 2111 which seems it wouldn't even be necessary if income tax was against the constitution to begin with? Also I assume this law basically nullifies initiative 2111?
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