Brew

After dealing with the after effects of red tide fish kills, you can see a fishery recover quickly if people are responsible and reasonable. Sometimes it takes regulations to help push that along. On the topic of C&R, I’m probably close to 100% throw it back at this point. If anything, I’ll keep something to eat that night or the next or if there are issues where it doesn’t make sense to throw something back, but for the most part I’m fishing to be on the water. There are days when I’ll spend more time hanging out rather than actually throwing lures. The guides I fish with on occasion are 100% C&R also. They mainly guide for sight fishing though, so it makes sense. The older I get, the more conservationist I become in my thoughts. Take what you need and will use, not what you want. Duck hunters and fishermen seem to be the worst about it.

Not a matte black fan on much of anything, but I’m on white truck #6 or 7 so take that for what it‘s worth.

Up 4% on the day, was down 13% at one point. Had several 40%+ returns today, so I cashed some things out that had returned to positive to lower my spread and get some cash available for whatever pile of crap hits next week.

2-3 weeks ago was the time to convert to cash, now is the time to make your money. Of course, I also thought that same thing last week and earlier this week, so what do I know.

For the same reason we have 100% bonus depreciation and Section 179, reinvestment inherently creates a wider base although there is an argument it just expands the gap. The rate should be higher, but I don’t think LTCG’s should be tied to income tax rates. There should be a larger base at 0% to encourage investment by lower income brackets and a higher rate than current on higher brackets.

I plead the 5th.

A flat tax is something that sounds great in principle, but our tiered tax structure is more fair in my personal opinion. I don’t mind paying a higher percentage than those on lower income tiers, I do mind paying more than the guy sitting beside me on the same tier. The QBI deduction and the arbitrary industries it applies to is the biggest pile of shit to come out in tax law in a while. Two self employed guys making $500,000, one may get a $100k deduction as long as he doesn’t work in a few professional service industries. That’s a $35k or so swing in tax bills on the same numbers.

My wife will make sure to put my portion earned back into the economy. If she does not notice it, then it may help pay for a few extra feet on the next boat.

I don’t think you have read or comprehended much of anything I’ve typed at this point. You clearly just want to feel better about everything by thinking you’ve added a new tax on the rich. That’s fine because I made it perfectly clear that it helps me personally for them to do it, so have at it. However, there isn’t one time where I’ve said I’m against the tax per se. I just am keenly aware of the problems with a valuation based tax and what that looks like in practice because I have years in practice trying to minimize estate tax issues and dealing with IRS auditors.

A Mark? Really? You clearly fall into the third category above of the debate shit I read about on the Internet this morning while taking a dump. The mark is the guy touting the tax the rich mantra without understanding and working through the downsides of the proposal. Not looking at the downsides of proposed tax law and working through the alternatives is why we have the pile of crap we currently have. 10% variations don’t even come close without some sort of mandated calculation methodology. Take a business with one owner and then the same business with minority ownership. The sum of those individually owned valuations will not be close even though the business is worth XXX dollars. What about art, guns, jewelry, etc? Do I get to treat it like my bank financials and throw whatever I want on it? Am I going to have to have an outside valuation done every year or two? Are we just going to use a multiple of EBITDA valuation based on industry type? Is it going to be keyed to investments and not personal property like some have brought up? I can keep going if you need me to. The estate tax example is the perfect example even though you don’t follow it. It is a wealth tax. There is an entire planning industry out there built to get around it and an entire valuation industry built around avoiding it. Valuation based taxes are much more complicated than an income based scenario because valuation is arbitrary.

I laid out 3-4 valuation questions in my response to your earlier points that create massive problems with an asset based tax model. Valuation based methodologies for non liquid or publicly valued assets is an interesting concept that is going to make a lot of guys in my industry well off unless they standardize the methodology of valuing things. We have tried it with an estate tax and it’s a failure from a valuation standpoint. I can give 10 accounting/law firms an estate with property, business interests, etc and I bet the estate tax owed doesn’t match on any of the 10. That is a problem in a tax system that is taxing valuations. As far as the income tax system, the simple answer is simplify it. Kill the QBI deductions, have a real discussion on capital gains tax, take out the social agenda items, restructure the corporate tax system, get rid of 100% bonus depreciation, lower rate structures, etc. There are a multitude of things that can be done, instead we’re going to sit around and wait on Trump’s tax changes to sunset and talk about wealth/estate tax issues.

Additionally, if the IRS gives me the ability to write off 100% of my capex spending in a year, should I opt out of that to make everyone feel better about what I pay in tax or should I take advantage of how the system is built and save my tax money?

Is Trump really rich at this point or is he just so leveraged he thinks he’s rich? My point is/was you are not comparing like things. Even in the scenarios you are looking at, the problem with what they are paying lies within the income tax system itself. Why not fix the income tax system in some way rather than throwing another tax out there that will likely be easily manipulated? Better yet, let’s fix the income tax system and then add a wealth tax if everyone wants one. If you want to further complicate the system with more asinine laws that aren’t well written or with taxes that are easily avoidable, I celebrate those decisions. It helps get me one step closer to paying it or potentially not paying it based on the loopholes that end up in it.

Click bait, we don’t know what Bezos paid in tax because it’s not public. We know what Amazon paid, but that has nothing to do with what Bezos paid personally. What Amazon paid is a byproduct of the current tax system and 100% bonus depreciation. It’s allowing them to dump their free cash flow into expansion. I love a good surly tax debate. It’s always full of great misinformation, misunderstandings of the system, and the all important shit I read on the internet while I was sitting on the toilet this morning. I support a wealth tax, it may help pay for my next boat so I’m in. I would prefer it be tied to some sort of programs. However, structurally what methodology are we going to use for property valuations? How are we valuing closely held businesses? How are we handling personal property valuations annually? Are we using some sort of national methodology or is it like it is now for estates and everyone just makes the shit up as they go? Also, why $50M? Why not tie it to the estate tax exemption and anything over that be taxed annually in some way. 2% may be a little steep, but .5%-1% on a lower threshold with maybe a sliding scale up to 2%. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because this debate has pretty well been a nonstarter even though if it went to a public vote it would carry soundly. Just goes to show you who the control lies with in this country. Just for the record it would be a much simpler process to make some corrections to the income tax system to close some of the holes in it.

For $130k that thing would be at the bottom of my list just below a Heyday for half the price.

Solid two weeks worth of interviews. Drew Barrymore’s was awkward but it still had some interesting parts. Morello/Arsenio were both excellent. Howard stepped on Morello’s answers too much, but it was still worth a listen.

I’ve had solid luck at Antlers in Frisco each year we are out there. Picked up a Michters 10 year last year for a great price. They have always had something.

Here....we....go

I don’t particularly like the idea of having to jump back and forth between programs. I’ll follow whatever though. I’m a computer dumbass and discord has been pretty easy to navigate. It pops straight to new messages and then I scan through. The only difficulty is when there are multiple stock conversations going on and sometimes they get jumbled, but that happens here as well. Again, the only difference is the look.

Older ones seem much simpler. They worked like a pontoon top where you popped the front supports out and then it just folded together. I used the Velcro’s straps off wakeboard ropes to wrap around it to hold the fabric tight. I’ve always towed from my shop to the lake which is about 30-40 miles, so I’ve always put it up each trip.

I got in the habit of folding mine out after we left the dock and then back up as we came into the dock after chasing mine down one day.

Clearly with boys an X3 Max Turbo RR variety is the right answer. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a 2 seater, but just never have pulled the trigger. We’re limited on places we can use them and I don’t want to destroy the farm with it either.

You can’t go wrong from Clearwater Beach to as far south as you want to go from there. There are also two nice aquariums in the area including the one that Dolphin Tale was based out of. The north end of AMI would be my preference, but it may be further out than you want to go.

These threads are no different than discord. This is a 41 page running chat that you scroll through and read what you want to no different than discord. I will say I could do without all the non chat related stuff posted there. There is probably a way to further break down the discussions in discord that would make it even easier to follow though.

Magnetic ride control is much improved over the prior ride. I’m sure it will be a bitch to fix when it breaks, but I’m not sure my wife has seen the end of a warranty period in a long time.