Ouch. Oof! Please don't post to HN like you did in this thread. Most of your comments are great but we just can't have this kind of thing here—we're trying against the odds to have HN hover a little above internet median and this kind of thing just sinks us. It isn't only the damage the specific posts cause—it's what it invites from others. I recently wrote a longer explanation of why we moderate this way, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956

There are other HN users with fire-breathing powers and formidable writing skills whom we eventually persuaded not to post in the enemy-incinerating style here. The argument boils down to trying to have a site that remains at least moderately interesting. There exist communities in which members kick the shit out of each other (or let's be nice, out of opposing arguments) and are higher-quality for it. I like to compare this to rugby teams who beat each other up and then go out drinking together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

HN can't work this way because it's much too big and incohesive—the average quality of contribution is much lower, and there are no relational ties to mitigate the downside. If people start posting in that style here, a copycat stampede will result, only without any insight or wit. We'll end up with mass battles on scorched earth, which is interesting to none of the users that we actually want to have here. Trying to stave off that fate for as long as possible is actually the founding idea behind HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

> The rest of it: I'll let you have the fact that the VAT in California is called "sales tax"

No, the sales tax is called sales tax. VAT and sales tax are structurally different.

> it's the highest in the US, FWIIW.

That's true if you talk exclusively of the state-only rate, which makes no sense to use as the basis of comparison; for statewide average combined state and local sales tax rate (the average rate people actually pay for sales tax in the State), California is #9, behind liberal utopias like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, among others. (Not only is California not the highest for average combined state and local sales tax, it's nowhere close to the highest for peak combined state and local sales tax, that is, the maximum people actually have to pay; the source I have doesn't rank this way, but from inspection it looks like Illinois with a statewide 6.25% and a peak local additional of 10.00% is the top there.)

https://taxfoundation.org/2020-sales-taxes/