Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
> Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.
Exactly. Saving is not a thing for an economy. The future economy needs to actually create all those goods and services for which you saved up. If the future economy doesn’t have enough labor because of demographics then some major price adjustments need to happen in favor of the future workers.
It's fundamentally different in any society with strong private property rights. A private pension is a set of investments, i.e. something that ultimately is owned by you. How much those investments pay off, if at all, is unknown, but if they do pay off then it's yours.
A state pension would be illegal for anyone except the state to run, because it'd be classed as a Ponzi scheme. Those are recognized as being unstable, hence why you're not allowed to run one. There is no investment into owned assets that pay out, just the appearance of it.
> […] allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
As someone who frequents personal finance sub-reddits, this does not work. The number of people who would save for their long-term needs is generally small.
And for some folks it is a 'personality problem' in that they are short-sited, in numerous cases it's a matter of not having any available funds. Forced savings are an absolute necessity.
Further it is also necessary for the funds to be away from people's hands so they don't fiddle with the money.
Canada went through this debate in the 1990s when it reformed its government pension system, and between fees and behaviour issues, the general consensus was that have a pool of money separate from private retirement accounts (RRSPs in Canada) was absolutely essential. A history of the reforms:
If what you say is even remotely true, wealth would have never been passed from generation to generation and people would have never invested in stuff useful for the future.
What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them.
But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.
Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.
The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom.
The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.
It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...
That's how it works in Sweden though: part of your pension is your own private investments, they aren't taxed as normal investments since you can only withdraw after reaching retirement age, the other part of it is a state pension. Even with this scheme we still got our retirement age risen.
So it seems it doesn't matter if it's public or private, the benefits of improved productivity is not trickling down to workers, a lot more is produced, generating a lot more wealth, and even with private funds we still get shafted because the capital class wants more and more of the pie.
But how much do workers pay towards pensions? In Austria, 20% of personel costs go directly towards pensions, and almost 30% of the entire state budget also goes to pensions on top of that, which is insane.
While I agree with the post author on the "if I pay the subscription then there should be no ads" part, there is a bit that comes fairly often in such posts which I find rather funny: "sell my data to your advertisers"
Sorry, that's not how 90% of digital advertising works. The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen based on some specific profiling.
But these ads companies don't receive a file called "Manuel Moreale personal data and shopping history"
> The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen
True, but the result is the same. I would have nothing against _some_ static ads (like in newspapers) even if I'm paying to read articles, but they should be served directly by the website, not by an external ad aggregator. Just check with how many companies data is shared on the cookie banner details: on the newspaper I'm paying for, it's "us and our 105 partners". So I feel totally justified to run an adblocker here. It's not ok that other companies should know which articles I'm reading, for how long, or things like that, so they can better target me with ads, especially that it's not limited to the website of the newspaper. In addition, you often get very annoying ads, with fast animations that are very distracting if you are reading text nearby.
It isn't. Targeted ads are much more valuable, to the point that fully random ads have almost no value at all. Btw. you can tell. If you regularly delete cookies you get much fewer ads. They like to say that if you don't allow/keep cookies, you get the same amount of ads, just less relevant. But that just isn't the case.
If browsers had the functionality to only preserve cookies that are needed to stay logged in across sessions, that would be quite powerful. That is all the cookies I need.
Could that be homogenization caused by the rise of social media in the ~2010 timeframe? Where individuality is being eliminated by the stifling conformity of being constantly visible and everyone knowing your stuff? Things which used to be private and personal. And people are playing it safe by conforming to avoid being rejected by their peers. Thus creating a hive-mind which has spread to every aspect of life, including design and aesthetics?
Unfortunately in some countries it's a choice between the old mafia and the new mafia. You're getting screwed in some way regardless of what you choose.
Typically exactly that. New finance has no fees and might steal your money once and suddenly, while regular banks steal it continuously hoping you won't notice.
The average 10 €/month in "account management fees" aka being able to have the privilege to lend them money adds up over the years. Online banking costs extra, because of course it does, SMS alerts cost extra because of course they do. Want a Mastercard/Visa system compatible card to actually do anything with your money? That'll be 50 €/year. Earning interest on your money? Haha, here's your 2 cents a month, don't spend them all in one place. I'm pretty sure I get more interest on the little I keep on Wise than all of my regular bank accounts combined.
Nickle and diming people to death just because they can and they know you have nowhere else to go.
Speaking from my own perspective of running general tech job boards [1], I would say that too narrow job boards have a really short lifespan.
This is because, you need a good supply of fresh offers to keep the audience. So if you end up to niche, you quickly become a job-ad-graveryard. Unless you scrap other big job sites automatically and somehow manage to filter and classify the jobs based on your niche.
Agreed. It's like single issue political parties. They make a point and then will disappear once people realise that a strong feeling about just one issue is actually a very small statement overall.
I guess I'd like to see this job board refocus to be a curated set of jobs, that are chosen by a group of technical experts and those who are trusted to vouch for good company cultures. It may be that no cryptocurrency jobs get through that filter! That may even be an unwritten rule. But the fact that it's not the tagline of the whole site would hopefully make it more impactful in the long run.
It's quite ironic that the recent centralization and cloudarisation of the Internet (& electronic devices).
When everything was local and private, the attacker could only access a specific device or network, even if the security was often very weak. Now a single attack on a centralized entity has such a big payoff, that it makes if viable to allocate much bigger resources by attackers.
Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.