I’ll anonymize your account tomorrow unless @moderators tell me otherwise and I’ll delete the anonymized account in a few days unless someone objects in which case the mods can sort it out
By default, accounts with over 15 posts can’t be deleted, but there’s a setting where I can set that number as high as I want and then delete any account
I would say don’t go but if that’s what you want then I wish you well and hope you come back sometime.
Bryce has started three threads but I can change their OP so they don’t get deleted with his account
Bryce, I will always be rooting for you!
1 Like
@Bryce No idea how we pushed you away, but I still wish ya all the best
1 Like
A condo collapsed in Surfside (Miami beach) last night. This is horrific:
https://mobile.twitter.com/MiamiBeachPD/status/1407965307952566272
Yikes, that doesn’t look good. Found a news report; at least one confirmed dead but likely more as they search through the rubble. Some survivors, apparently, which is good news.
The Champlain Towers South Condos is located at 8777 Collins Avenue. The development was built in 1981 in the southeast corner of Surfside, on the beach, and has more than 130 units. It had a few two-bedroom units currently on the market, with asking prices of $600,000 to $700,000, an internet search showed.
Burkett said there had been recent roof work done on the building but it was unknown if that had anything to do with the collapse.
Will be interesting to see what effect this has on asking prices.
1 Like
130 units with only a few on the market, and only 1 dead? That would be a miracle.
Yeah, this is going to be real bad. I would be surprised if there aren’t hundreds dead/injured. The one thing that might keep the numbers down is that many of the residents might be seasonal and this is the down season for south Florida.
Propublica with another report on the ultra wealthy and this time on RothIRAs
In 1999, single taxpayers were only allowed to contribute to a Roth if they made less than $110,000. Like many startups, PayPal offered its top executives low initial salaries and large stock grants. Thiel’s income that year was $73,263, the IRS records show.
Thiel also had an advantage over most Americans with IRAs, who typically use them to purchase publicly traded stocks, bonds, mutual funds and certificates of deposit. Since Thiel used his Roth to buy shares of a private company, the value wasn’t set on a public stock exchange.
While SEC filings describing that time don’t mention Thiel’s Roth, they show that he bought his first slice of the company in January 1999. Thiel paid $0.001 per share — yes, just a tenth of a penny — for 1.7 million shares. At that price, he was able to buy a large stake for just $1,700.
In 1999, $2,000 was the maximum amount you could put into a Roth in a year.
The dot-com boom was in full swing. “We’re definitely on to something big,” Thiel told employees in late 1999, predicting that PayPal would become “the Microsoft of payments,” according to “The PayPal Wars,” a book by a former employee recounting those heady early years.
But when it came time for Pensco, the custodian of Thiel’s Roth, to report the value of the account to the IRS at the close of 1999, none of the investor enthusiasm was apparent. Pensco told the IRS that Thiel’s Roth was worth just $1,664 at the end of 1999, tax records show.
In an interview, Anderson said Pensco relied on the companies whose shares were in a Roth to say what they were worth. He didn’t know how PayPal came up with its market value, but he said Thiel’s purchase of those shares was “very legitimate.”
After 1999, Thiel would never again contribute money to his Roth, tax records show.
He didn’t need to. In just a year’s time, the value of his Roth jumped from $1,664 to $3.8 million — a 227,490% increase.
Then in 2002, eBay purchased PayPal. That same year, Thiel sold the shares, still inside his Roth, his financial assistant later told New Zealand officials. The tax-free proceeds poured into his account. By the end of 2002, Thiel’s Roth was worth $28.5 million, tax records show.
If he had held his shares outside of the Roth in a normal investment account, Thiel would have owed the IRS 20% of his gains and owed another 9% to California tax authorities. Because the shares were in a Roth, he had no tax bill when he sold them, saving him millions.
As Thiel’s Roth and fortune ballooned, he scolded Americans for their financial imprudence. In a 2006 Forbes column, headlined “Warning: Save, Save, Save,” Thiel lamented the low household savings in the U.S. and called for most Americans to live within their means.
“Forgo the new kitchen and sundeck,” he wrote. “Shoot to put away 15% of the paycheck.” His closing advice: “Living modestly and saving well is better than dying broke.”
In an interview on the website Big Think, Thiel said the U.S. tax system has “fairness problems” in which “you have super rich people paying a lower rate than people in the middle or upper middle class.”
The answer wasn’t taxing the rich more, he said, but “taxing the middle class and the upper middle class a lot less” and cutting their dependence on expensive programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
By then, Thiel had purchased a Ferrari and had bought and sold a penthouse in the San Francisco Four Seasons.
That January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mitt Romney, the former private equity executive running for the GOP nomination, had listed on a financial disclosure form that he had amassed an IRA worth between $20 million and $102 million. The story ran on the front page and launched waves of coverage in other publications. Romney had a traditional IRA, not a Roth. But how, people wondered, could the account have grown so large, given that the government imposed strict limits on how much money could be put into one of the tax-deferred accounts?
Citing former company insiders and documents, the Journal reported that during Romney’s time as CEO at investment giant Bain Capital, executives there had effectively bypassed the contribution limits by putting extremely low-valued shares from private equity deals into their IRAs, then watching them balloon.
2 Likes
Jesus, just saw an interview with the mayor who said the building pancaked so it’s unlikely there are many voids where there could be survivors. He also said the building owner or manager or someone like that said “occupancy was not low.”
Holy shit, I just saw video of the collapse and more of the building came down that I realized. Seems like there have to be some serious engineering flaws here.
This shit is absolutely enraging. There is basically 100% hatred of this crap, it blows my mind the Democrats get dragged into arguing about absolute bullshit made up issues instead of screaming from the mountaintops about taxing these assholes.
Fuuuuuuck
Grasping for some sort of hope: there aren’t that many units with lights on, so hopefully there weren’t that many people home.
Yeah that’s the same video I saw on the stream of the Miami NBC station.
Are those bright spots people’s TVs? That happened so fast, I can’t imagine there will be many survivors.
Wasn’t it 2am? Lights off might not mean much. 