Software Executive and Investor, mostly focused on infra software enabling AI, cloud, data, security, and reliability.
Seattle, WA, USA
Joined June 2011
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Kit Merker retweeted
If you vote "Yes," it will repeal the illegal income tax.
It will not reduce funding to schools or human services because the tax doesn't go into effect until 2029. So we aren't taking anything away.
Starbucks left because of this. Microsoft has threatened to move jobs out of state. Amazon now employs nearly 15,000 fewer people in Seattle than at its peak. Seattle is second to last in the number of VC deals that closed in Q3.
Holding a small number of companies and rich people hostage, when they have options, is a foolish strategy that is already backfiring spectacularly.
The real solution to our problems is to reduce taxes on businesses and income. Why even tax people under 25 at all? Give families with children a HUGE tax credit. Make this state an incredible place to do business and have a family.
Encourage entrepreneurs to come here.
Get startups, agencies, and smart, motivated people to build here. We can increase overall state revenue if more people make stuff, employ people, and create more value for everyone here.
Not by chasing them out of the state and creating a hostile environment for business.
Remember this: governments and taxes don't make jobs. Entrepreneurs do.
When millionaires get a tax break, our hospitals and health care clinics pay the price.
Doctors know this. That’s why the Washington State Medical Association is opposing I-645.
I-645 would repeal the millionaires tax, give a tax break to the wealthiest, and defund social services and health care access in the process.
We won't stand for this.
Washington: Vote NO on I-645!
Read more about their decision here:
wsma.org/membership-memo/wsm…
Kit Merker retweeted
I'm not sure if everyone realizes that this "Millionaires Tax" will require EVERYONE to file their income with the state and you get an exemption on all income under 1 million.
It only takes one session to lower the exemption amount to $500k
It also doesn't just hit W2 high earners.
It covers married couples, out of state residents, LLC, S-Corp, and pensions.
If you think this doesn't effect you think agian.
Vote YES on I-645
Kit Merker retweeted
I have to admit, I enjoy listening to these hardcore Seattle liberals grapple with the fact that the new Washington State millionaires tax is having a serious impact not just on the local economy, but on their own livelihoods and jobs.
High-end architect:
"All my customers are leaving."
General contractor:
"They canceled the remodel. Asked if I work in Nevada."
Tech startup bro:
"Umm... where are all the investors?"
Real estate agent:
"No one moving here wants a condo."
Non-profit CEO:
"Where are all my donors going?"
Restaurant owner:
"Our best customers all moved to Las Vegas."
Personal trainer:
"I'm doing Zoom sessions until I find new clients."
Executive recruiter:
"The job is technically in Seattle. The executive is not."
Art gallery owner:
"They’re buying art for their new house in Austin."
High-end relocation company owner:
"Honestly, we're doing great."
Kit Merker retweeted
Don't be fooled by misleading ballot language. It's an income tax. Vote Yes on 645 to Repeal It.
EXCLUSIVE: New I-645 poll shows income tax repeal surging when voters skip the ballot spin seattlered.com/taxes/i-645-p…
Kit Merker retweeted
Imagine how high your property taxes would be today if Washington didn't have property tax limits.
That's what an income tax with no constitutional limits looks like. Today's rate is just the starting point.
Ballots are due November 3. Vote yes on I-645.
Kit Merker retweeted
Washington State is trending again.
It's never just one issue either.
It's people from all over the state talking about issues from daycare fraud, Ferguson wanting to deploy NG on election day, girls sports, taxes, crime...
Holy crap people.
If this is not an admission that this state is falling apart I don't know what is.
Kit Merker retweeted
Imagine your net worth is $200,000. One day an armed gang comes up to your house and demands $10,000.
“Don’t worry!” the leader says. “I’m only going to do this one time. Plus, it’s only 5% of your net worth. What’s the big deal ?”
After he leaves, you call the cops, but they aren’t interested in investigating the matter. “What’s the big deal?” they tell you. “After all, it’s only 5% of your net worth!”
As you’re preparing to flee the city for a place where you cannot be robbed, Gabriel Zucman appears on your doorstep.
“Why are you leaving?” he asks.
“Somebody just robbed me and the police aren’t going to do anything. I want to live somewhere I can’t be robbed!”
“But sir,” says Mr Zucman, “Have you considered the fact that the man told you it was a one-time tax ? Have you considered that you gain nothing by leaving since the tax is already paid ? There’s no economic reason for you to leave anymore.”
What amazes me is the attitude of so many of the centibillionaires.
A 5% tax will not make any difference to the way they live. Their spending may be extravagant, but it is still much less than their (correctly measured) income.
They know that, as gifted as some of them indeed are, they have benefited from extreme luck (and the help of the state, and, to speak like an economist, monopoly rents).
They know that their effective tax rate is low, relative to what many others pay.
They know that extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, and can lead to political unrest, backlash, or worse.
They must admit that, morally, it is hard to argue for a society in which some become obscenely wealthy, while so many are poor and see their income stagnate.
They typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.
But they are still willing to fight the tax, spending hundreds of millions in California to avoid paying the tax. Why?
They simply think what is theirs is theirs, end of story.
They believe in the slippery slope, and if they do not take a stand on this levy, the government will come back for more.
They hate the state and the notion that their money will be misused?
Or?
Kit Merker retweeted
The moral case for capitalism is that your life belongs to you. Your work, your savings and your plans don’t become somebody else’s property because they have a moving speech about how they’d use them.
Kit Merker retweeted
If WA voters don’t repeal Governor Ferguson’s unconstitutional income tax on millionaires here are some very predictable outcomes:
Capital flight
Reduced philanthropy
Increased state spending
Jobs moving to other states
Inevitable income tax on middle class
Vote YES on I-645!
Kit Merker retweeted
There was no capital gains tax, or income tax when Amazon was built here. The state changed the rules, he didn’t break them.
Bezos’ departure and ability to avoid the state’s capital gains tax prompted co-host Spike O’Neill to question Amazon’s overall benefit to Washington during “The Jake and Spike Show.”
mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion…
Kit Merker retweeted
These are the guys who are trying to drive our largest employers out of the state.
Vote YES on I-645.
Protect jobs and your income from these creeps.
Kit Merker retweeted
Capital flight has already started in Washington. OVer the last 30 years the evil tech millionaires from companies like Microsoft, Amazon and others have contrinuted billions to charities and non profits.
The unconstitutional income tax not only kills the job creator class, it destroys their incentive to support charity and non-profit organizations.
Seattle Children’s CEO warns Washington’s new income tax is a death sentence for nonprofits, saying it “creates a strong disincentive for high-impact philanthropy, ultimately hurting the communities and organizations that rely on charitable support.”
bizj.us/1qqwhj
Kit Merker retweeted
Got my ballot. Went straight to I-645.
It repeals the 9.9% tax on income over $1 million. And it bans an income tax on the rest of us.
Then read the last line the AG put on it. Repealing it "would decrease funding for public K-12 education, higher education, and human services."
Not a fact. A warning label. Written by the side that wants the tax.
It works, too. One poll asked it two ways. With that sentence, keep the tax 57%, repeal 35%. Without it, 44% to 40%.
One sentence. 22 points.
They start with millionaires. They never stop at millionaires.
Read the whole thing. Then fill in your bubble like you mean it.
What line on your ballot made you mad, Warriors?
Kit Merker retweeted
I keep hearing from the 'No' side on I-645 something like 'how are you taxed by this? You aren't a millionaire, and there is still a road to travel before it gets to you!'
Did anyone say the road doesn't lead to you? No, they just say it's a long drive.
You want the cops to get a warrant before they kick in a drug dealer's door not because you like drug dealers, but because you know that protecting his door protects yours.
We defend the unpopular in America for our own sake.
Kit Merker retweeted
Notice that the no on I-638 campaign can't find a single, current female athlete from Washington state to take their side. It's because girls don't want to compete against boys! Vote YES!
Kit Merker retweeted
Who's gonna tell vibe coders about...
1. SQL Injection
2. XSS
3. CSRF
4. CORS
5. SSRF
6. IDOR
7. Path Traversal
8. Mass Assignment
9. Clickjacking
10. Content Security Policy
11. Security Headers
12. Input Validation
13. Server-Side Authorization
14. Row-Level Security
15. Least Privilege
16. RBAC
17. Secrets Management
18. .env in .gitignore
19. API Key Rotation
20. Secret Scanning
21. Hashing vs Encryption
22. Password Salting
23. bcrypt & Argon2
24. JWT Expiry
25. Refresh Tokens
26. OAuth 2.0
27. OpenID Connect
28. Session Fixation
29. MFA
30. Brute Force Protection
31. Account Enumeration
32. Timing Attacks
33. File Upload Validation
34. Webhook Signature Verification
35. TLS Certificate Expiry
36. HSTS
37. Encryption at Rest
38. Dependency Vulnerabilities
39. Supply Chain Attacks
40. Threat Modeling
41. Indexes
42. EXPLAIN ANALYZE
43. N+1 Queries
44. Full Table Scans
45. Connection Pooling
46. Database Migrations
47. Down Migrations
48. Transactions
49. ACID
50. Isolation Levels
51. Deadlocks
52. Optimistic Locking
53. Pessimistic Locking
54. Normalization
55. Denormalization
56. Foreign Keys
57. Unique Constraints
58. Cascading Deletes
59. Soft Deletes
60. UUIDs vs Auto-Increment
61. Cursor-Based Pagination
62. Full-Text Search
63. Read Replicas
64. Replication Lag
65. Sharding
66. Partitioning
67. Hot Partitions
68. Postgres VACUUM
69. Materialized Views
70. Backups
71. Testing Your Restores
72. Point-in-Time Recovery
73. Change Data Capture
74. Outbox Pattern
75. ORM Lazy Loading
76. CAP Theorem
77. Eventual Consistency
78. Strong Consistency
79. Raft Consensus
80. Leader Election
81. Split Brain
82. Quorums
83. Clock Skew
84. Distributed Locks
85. Consistent Hashing
86. Bloom Filters
87. Two-Phase Commit
88. CQRS
89. Event Sourcing
90. Race Conditions
91. Backpressure
92. Load Shedding
93. Bulkheads
94. Jitter
95. Retry Storms
96. Cascading Failures
97. Thundering Herd
98. Cache Invalidation
99. Cache Hit Ratio
100. TTLs
101. Cache Warming
102. Write-Through vs Write-Back
103. Redis Eviction Policies
104. CDNs
105. Cache-Control Headers
106. ETags
107. Dead Letter Queues
108. Poison Messages
109. At-Least-Once Delivery
110. Exactly-Once Semantics
111. Message Ordering
112. Kafka Consumer Groups
113. Partition Keys
114. Background Jobs
115. Webhook Retries
116. DNS
117. DNS Propagation
118. HTTP Status Codes
119. HTTP Method Semantics
120. Keep-Alive
121. HTTP/2
122. WebSockets
123. Server-Sent Events
124. Long Polling
125. gRPC
126. Protocol Buffers
127. API Versioning
128. OpenAPI Specs
129. Backward Compatibility
130. Request Size Limits
131. Compression
132. Latency vs Throughput
133. Egress Fees
134. VPCs
135. Subnets
136. NAT Gateways
137. Firewalls
138. Security Groups
139. Service Mesh
140. Ingress Controllers
141. Health Checks
142. Liveness vs Readiness Probes
143. Graceful Shutdown
144. Connection Draining
145. Stateless Services
146. Failover
147. Multi-Region
148. Availability Zones
149. Single Points of Failure
150. Disaster Recovery
151. RTO & RPO
152. SLAs
153. SLOs
154. Error Budgets
155. Incident Response
156. On-Call
157. Runbooks
158. Postmortems
159. Chaos Engineering
160. Graceful Degradation
161. Autoscaling
162. Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
163. Cold Starts
164. Capacity Planning
165. Load Testing
166. Memory Leaks
167. OOM Killer
168. Structured Logging
169. Log Levels
170. Log Rotation
171. Distributed Tracing
172. OpenTelemetry
173. Correlation IDs
174. Metrics Cardinality
175. p99 Latency
176. Alert Fatigue
177. Error Tracking
178. Profiling
179. Flame Graphs
180. Infrastructure as Code
181. Terraform State
182. GitOps
183. Blue-Green Deployments
184. Canary Releases
185. Rollbacks
186. Feature Flags
187. Environment Parity
188. Staging Environments
189. 12-Factor Apps
190. Multi-Stage Builds
191. Non-Root Containers
192. Image Scanning
193. Resource Requests & Limits
194. Pod Disruption Budgets
195. Semantic Versioning
196. Lockfiles
197. Reproducible Builds
198. Branch Protection
Kit Merker retweeted
Vote yes on I645 to repeal the income tax tax
