I have to emphasise that this is all my personal feeling and experience: I used to think these people and their actions actually mean something, and could lead to a different future. I was uncertain of this future, but willing to try.
Seeing recent US politics makes me reconsider: if this is democracy, or at least what it could very well turn out to be, is it really something I would want in my own country? I know my answer would be no.
Honestly, nowadays, if given the choice of "one person one vote" for the head of state tomorrow, I would strongly oppose such an idea and prefer the status quo.
Given such sentiment, I really don't care about these people and their campaigns anymore.
I mean, we went after Assange and Snowden who are in a gray area. Jimmy Lai actually went to top US officials and advocated military assistance to coup the government. No nation would ever go easy on that and it's scary to see all these comments on HN are mindlessly chanting without actually more research
Hong Kongers would very much like to choose their own leadership. I understand that you're arguing from a mainland Chinese perspective, but in so doing you're ignoring the people who ought to have the most to say.
I used to have your viewpoint, but after reading Lee Kuan Yew, and after several hours of cross referencing various interviews with the pro-rioters/hk democracy, and pro-engagement/neutral hongkongers, I conclude that most of the pro-rioters like Joshua Wong/Jimmy Lai at large fail to articulate anything of value other than "I want to turn the system upside-down" , while pro-engagement/neutral people know they want upward social mobility and more government involvement in fixing the housing and employment crisis.
Good for you. But I didn't refer to any specific pro-democracy figure. I am advocating for free and open elections where everyone, pro-mainland or localist, can choose the direction of the city.
America doesn't speak for Hong Kong and many people don't want America sticking its nose deep into their business especially through someone breaking the law by acting as a pseudo-foreign agent.
The irony is that Trump getting involved in pressuring for the release of Jimmy Lai just makes him look even more like an American asset.
You claimed he urged top US officials to give military assistance to a coup. This video is just him pleading to the US public "They'll listen to you because you're as powerful as they are".
The fact that this is being introduced after the whole Epic/Apple thing clearly shows that the penalties in that case were not nearly severe enough and the standards set were not nearly stringent enough. The mere attempt to engage in policies like this should result in fines in the hundreds of billions.
The cheaper and more effective way is tk tbeeaten to jail any key decision nakers. Remove the freedoms they enjoy and abise and suddenly they start falling in line quickly.
It should be partial government ownership. That way the true 'company' the owners feel the penalty in the form of stock dilution. Plus no one wants the government on the inside and the pains that will come with that. And repeat offenders end up owned by the government.
I’d also point out in the same observation that they knew better than to try this in Europe and that their strategy of trying to hold large tech companies accountable seems to be working (with the minor caveat that it’s now official US defence policy to try and break up the European Union and US trade policy is extremely focused on the idea that nobody is ever allowed to fine a US company for breaking the law)
I am morbidly curious about how far the attempt to destroy the USA will be allowed to proceed before even the Republican party has decided that it is probably enough. So far they have exceeded my wildest (and worst) expectations.
Unfortunately I can't get myself and those I care about off this planet (no, thank you, Elon) and we all will most likely lose a lot, possibly life and limb on account of this.
I don't know what the 'plan' is anymore other than that it seems to entail destabilization and destruction of the most powerful nation on the earth into a bit player making this every two bit dictator's wet dream.
There is no way this ends well if it is not arrested.
Yes, but then we have the blanket tarriffs. Which it seems even the most diehard are coming around to say was really, really stupid. Who's genuinely making a profit off this decision?
That definitely tells me there's ego at play here more than anything else. Even money.
That's the unheard of part of this year. Even the most blatantly corrupt politicians know not to actively throw money into a furnace.
No, project 2025 is very much about centralizing federal power, securing and further entrenching Republican partisan power, and dismantling and/or restructuring federal institutions that are perceived as being particularly useful in implementing priorities the Right does not share so thar even should the attempt to enteench Republican institutional advantage not secure a permanent majority, the federal government will have been selectively institutionally crippled so that gearing up to do things Republicans would prefer not be done will take longer than it takes to bring Republicans back into power to stop it.
Its very much about centralizing power while very carefully restructuring capacities, not decentralizing power.
Are you sure about that? I feel like they want more feudalism with a king. Aka states more independent, with a king in Washington. They even say that they want to get more rules be decided by the state...
Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
No, I think the better idea is, if the Democrats get power, pack the union, remove the pardon power, and basically send everyone associated with either Trump administration to jail for life (including all House/Senate members who voted against impeachment). It might be necessary to execute some for treason. I don't see any way back to sanity without a Nuremberg-style process in which "conservatism" as we know it is gouged out of the political arena.
This is the exact attitude that got Trump back in office. Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time, with everyone feeling like if they lose the other side is going to damage them on purpose because that's literally what they're saying they want to do.
Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, passing the laws that lower the cost of living even over the opposition of the people getting paid the higher costs, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.
This is the exact attitude that got us into this mess. Republicans can talk crazy and act crazy, knowing that the other side will be forced to be the adults in the room, clean up the mess, and get rejected by the voters soon after because no one likes the strict parent.
People would like them if they did the things people actually want. People want to be able to own a home and afford healthcare.
But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do.
Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control or medical price controls that not only don't solve the problems but generally make them worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.
It would be great to do that, but we can't do that while the government has a gun pointed at its head. There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything. Thinking that this is just "hyper-partisan" is the kind of both-sides-ism that's a big contributor to the mess we're in.
> There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything.
So then:
> Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
No, because we do need the federal government to do stuff. We just need it to mostly do the opposite of everything that it's doing. We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things, by bringing a sledgehammer down on the factions that want to do those things.
> We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things
If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent.
So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.
>Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time
No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves.
Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.
That's the thing Republicans say to justify what they're currently doing.
Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st:
> The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption).
Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it.
You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that.
But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.
All such arguments about the constitution and federal power are just a waste of time. The constitution is so riddled with flaws that there's little point in attempting to save the good parts. We absolutely should throw out a large proportion of the "rules" in the constitution. The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense. It's just an arbitrary jurisdictional distraction from the substantive content of policies. Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context is like there's a basketball game where fans, coaches, and players are all kicking each other in the nuts and you're worried about calling double dribble.
> The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense.
There are many issues on which not everyone agrees what should be done. If the federal government does them, the same solution is forced on everyone even if a large plurality of people would prefer something else and those people constitute the majority of various states, so it makes more sense to let each state decide for themselves. There is nothing stopping them from all doing the same thing if there was consensus.
And when there isn't consensus, you get to see how each of the alternatives turn out when different states do different things:
But if the federal government is even allowed to do them then whichever faction has the federal majority imposes their will on everyone else and prevents that from happening.
> Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context
The post I responded to was the one that brought up "breaking the rules". My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.
> My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.
I would say the problem is people doing bad things, and the rules are disconnected from any substantive connection to what is good or bad, and from any essential connection to the idea that the people (not any apparatus of government) is the final arbiter of what should be done.
The problem with appealing to "the people" is that they don't all agree what's good or bad, and indeed will give different answers to what is substantively the same question depending on how it's framed or what mechanism is being used to measure their preferences.
You also need some rules to temper tyrannical majorities unless "51% of the vote means you get to oppress the minority" is your idea of a good time.
And a lot of these are in the nature of a Ulysses pact. When nobody wants anybody to censor them, and everybody knows that they won't always be in the majority, we can form a general consensus that we all agree not to censor the opposition when we're in the majority and in exchange they can't censor anyone when they're in the majority. For that to work you need an effective mechanism to constrain the majority or some fool is going to steer the ship into the rocks as soon as they hear the Siren song.
Then the broad consensus gets written into the constitution which in turn requires broad consensus to change. If nobody's playing dirty.
Whereas if everybody's playing dirty then pretty clearly the checks and balances aren't working and we need some better ones.
I don't disagree with most of what you said. But a tyranny of the majority is still better than a tyranny of the minority.
And yeah, pretty clearly the alleged checks and balances we have weren't the right ones. The problem is that the system we have set up enshrines the difficulty of changing those checks and balances as one of its primary features. That's why I think we're not going to get anywhere by trying to chip away at the edges of our problem within the existing constitutional framework.
Based on my read of "Amusing Ourselves to Death", length and complexity of political speeches by presidents over time, and the current administration: What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room?
I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
> What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room?
People seem to make this mistake a lot.
People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you.
That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure.
Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team.
If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams.
I think the theory is something like 'ok, the bucket will be smaller but we're the same so effectively we will grow' where 'we' is the wealthy assholes that power this movement.
The fact that a couple of million (billion?) people could die as a result of their landgrab is none of their concern. The billionaire class appears to be divorced from reality to a very dangerous degree, and there are enough useful idiots willing to hand them their support to make this a very dangerous time. I don't think we've ever been closer to potentially losing it all than we are right now.
You're looking at 'divide and conquer' on a scale that we have never seen before and there are enough dominoes falling already that I don't even know if it still can be arrested.
A disregard for other people seems to be a prerequisite to becoming that wealthy for me. Hope i'm wrong, guess the good ones don't make the news. Surely they must exist
I think if you cared even a little bit about other people, you'd realize that after say, ten million, your life is gonna be pretty damn sweet already and you'd try to help other people with your money instead of buying yachts.
To become a billionaire requires sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others and a pathological need for more.
If you don't realize it by two you never will. Really, this is completely out of proportion by now, Marie Antoinette was a pauper by the standards these people live by.
With single family homes in some part of the world costing two by themselves, I think we can give it a little bit more leeway, especially if you're planning to retire and support your kids through college.
Sure, but you could still realize it, even if you are still amassing more money. Nothing stops people from doing so at lower points than 10 million and my point was that if you don't realize it by the time 2 million rolls around you probably never will.
> I think if you cared even a little bit about other people, you'd realize that after say, ten million, your life is gonna be pretty damn sweet already and you'd try to help other people with your money instead of buying yachts.
In general their money isn't money, it's stock. The thing it buys them is being the CEO of their company instead of letting Wall St pick someone even worse.
The real problem is that companies are now so large that you'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have a controlling interest.
Even muli-billionaires often don't have a direct controlling interest. Sometimes have special shares that give them 10x votes like Larry and Sergey. Bezos, Zuck, and Musk have significant direct amounts of their companies.
The list almost always reads the same on every major corporation. Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, ect... Numbers may be slightly out of date in some cases. If the Institutionals all vote together or collectively, almost none of the wealthy have "controlling amounts". (wikipedia listings)
- NVIDIA: The Vanguard Group(8.280%), BlackRock(5.623%), Fidelity Investments(5.161%), State Street Corporation(3.711%), *Jensen Huang(3.507%)*, Geode Capital Management(2.024%), T. Rowe Price(2.013%), JPMorgan Chase(1.417%)
- Apple: Vanguard Group Inc(9.47%), Blackrock Inc.(7.76%), State Street Corporation(4.04%), JPMORGAN CHASE & CO(3.20%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.41%), FMR, LLC(2.05%)
- Microsoft: The Vanguard Group(8.9%), BlackRock(5.6%), State Street Corporation(4.0%), *Steve Ballmer(4.0%),* Fidelity Investments(2.9%), Geode Capital Management(2.1%), T. Rowe Price International(1.9%) (Ballmer is a notable exception)
- Alphabet: The Vanguard Group(7.25%), BlackRock(6.27%), State Street Corporation(3.36%), *Sergey Brin(3.0%)*, *Larry Page(3.0%)*, Fidelity Investments(2.07%), Geode Capital Management(1.76%), T. Rowe Price(1.73%) (Sergey and Larry each get 10x votes)
- Amazon: (Notable exception to this trend) *Jeff Bezos(9.04%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.96%), BlackRock(4.93%), State Street Corporation(3.5%), Fidelity Investments(3.22%), Geode Capital Management(2.03%), JP Morgan Investment Management(1.81%), Eaton Vance(1.5%), T. Rowe Price(1.48%)
- Meta: (Another exception) *Mark Zuckerberg (13.5%)*, The Vanguard Group (8.8%), BlackRock (7.66%), Fidelity Investments (6.28%), State Street Corporation (3.97%), JPMorgan Chase (2.38%), Geode Capital Management (2.27%), T. Rowe Price (1.95%)
- Broadcom: The Vanguard Group(10.03%), BlackRock(7.63%), Capital World Investors(4.53%), Capital International Investors(4.04%), State Street Corporation(3.95%), Geode Capital Management(2.12%), Insiders[Various](2.04%)
- Tesla: *Elon Musk(12.9%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.2%), BlackRock(4.5%), State Street Corporation(3.4%), Geode Capital Management(1.7%), Capital Research & Management(1.3%)
Basically, it usually reads like "if Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street agree on anything, you lose the vote." Alphabet being somewhat exception because of the 10x special votes. Everything listed has more than $1,400,000,000,000 share cost outstanding. Even $100,000,000,000 won't buy enough.
Notably, in-practice they probably usually just vote whatever one of the main founders, CEO's, ect... recommends unless there's some actual major issue. Although that's so far above my pay grade, no idea what actually goes on.
Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.
And funnier, they all own each other.
Vanguard itself is weird, like a mutual fund, and owned by its funds, then in turned owned by shareholders. However, *those* owners, are almost entire large institutional also. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, UBS Group, JPMorgan Chase, LPL Financial, Envestnet Asset Management, Ameriprise Financial, TIAA Trust, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Beacon Capital Management, Betterment, Wealthfront Advisers, and Cove Street Capital
Blackrock is pretty the same circular ownership: The Vanguard Group(9.08%), BlackRock Inc(7.02%), State Street Corporation(4.95%), Temasek Holdings Ltd(4.28%), Bank of America Corp(4.28%), Capital Research Global Investors(3.78%), Morgan Stanley(3.62%), Charles Schwab Corporation(3.14%), Capital World Investors(2.68%), Geode Capital Management(2.32%)
State Street is ... of course, the same ownership: Vanguard Group Inc(13.23%), Blackrock Inc(8.71%), JPMorgan Chase(6.06%), State Street Corporation(4.83%), FMR, LLC(4.05%), Invesco Ltd(3.00%), Harris Associates L.P(2.73%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.66%), Dodge & Cox Inc(2.43%), Morgan Stanley(1.71%)
> Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.
It's almost like there could be a book about this from a hundred years ago:
It's almost like they learned nothing over 100 years other than how to hide their behavior better.
- And, thanks for the reference on the book. Never seen it before, yet not very surprising it looks pretty much like the Gilded Age with '"robber barons" who's fortunes were made at the expense of the working class, by chicanery and betrayal of democracy.'
Precisely. These cats fancy themselves the kings of the new world order, and if nobody stops them they'll pull it off too.
But their plan appears to be quite messy and harder to execute on than they thought so all we have so far is a lot of destruction with not much to show for it. Even the White House looks like a demolition site and not a peep about it.
I believe that if any past president had so much as suggested this rather than executed on it they'd have been impeached instantly.
Another reason they could be attacking NATO allies on this front is that the UK has been acting against Bully XL dogs. They’re scared that these dog regulations will spread and so Trump must be surely considering exiting NATO over this.
The US’ current desire to break up the EU is not because of EU regulations, it’s because the US president is a convicted felon who has been a Russian mob asset promoting Putin’s talking points for decades.
He's also a by-the-dictionary-definition fascist authoritarian including the part where corporations are untouchable and above the law, so long as they pay to play with his new mafia government modeled directly on Russia.
Amen to this. There's a certain mindset that seems depressingly prevalent in tech, which I can't even call fatalism because it doesn't really even have much of a negative-emotion dimension. It's just a sort of amorality that tries to move with trends and is puzzled by even the idea that we would choose to do things because they are good or bad, because we think they will lead to better or worse futures, etc., rather than just because they'll make more money or because they're more technically satisfying, or even just because everyone else seems to be doing them.
There's a lot of bad stuff going on; even more dangerous is the idea that we can't do anything about it; but more dangerous still is the idea that there's no reason to even think in terms of what we "should" do, and that we just have to accept our current position and trajectory without question.
He's a complicated figure. He has done so much good as well. EVs in the US and reusable rockets owe a lot to him. OTOH, so does the cesspool that is X.
Bill Gates is still kickin'. There are credible independent estimates that his funding has saved tens of millions of lives that would've been lost to malaria, AIDS, and other diseases.
Effective altruism and other New Age garbage pseudo philosophy can't hold a candle to that.
And he's retired, so the money is no longer useful to him for maintaining control over the company he runs or expanding it, which is when it traditionally starts going to charities.
In my opinion, one of the things that most reveals a person's biases and worldview is which tech oligarchs they revere and which they loathe
To reveal my own bias / worldview, I loathe and detest Bill Gates in nearly every way and have done so for over three decades. I think he has had a massively negative impact on humanity, mainly by making the computer industry so shitty for 4+ decades but in other more controversial areas as well.
With Elon Musk, while perceiving a number of big faults in the man, I also acknowledge that he has helped advance some very beneficial technologies (like electric vehicles and battery storage). So I have a mixed opinion on him, while with Gates, he is almost all evil and has had a massive negative impact on the planet.
I'm conflicted on this one. Famously, Tesla's main revenue source for ages was selling green credits to other car makers. Presumably, if not for Tesla, these car makers would have had to do something else.
The way I see it, he converted his cars' greenness into other people's fumes. So not a net win after all.
The page title includes "generated with AI", but that's not included in the post title here. At least for me that totally changes how I regard the site.
The article calls out "bad" union bosses as being those who push things like two-tiered contracts, prioritizing more senior members and creating inequality within the union. But in my perception (and I don't think I'm alone in this), an equally troubling problem is that even "good" union bosses prioritize members of their own union and create inequality among the broader class of workers and citizens.
Egregious examples include union advocacy for various kinds of licensure or "fossilizing" regulations (i.e., "we must keep doing things in this way we've been doing them to preserve the jobs of the people who do them that way"). These just raise barriers for other workers, increase competition for coveted union jobs, and increase the separation between "good" (aka union) jobs and the rest.
The old-school unions a la the Wobblies were more focused on improving the lot of all workers, everywhere. Many of the labor reforms that were passed in the early 20th century (like minimum wage) followed this model: everyone gets the minimum wage, everyone gets worker safety guarantees, everyone gets the benefits of the labor policies. But nowadays I don't see so much of that from unions or labor activism in general. To a large extent I see the reverse: advocating for special minimum-wage carveouts (e.g., for hotel workers or fast-food workers); advocacy for special work-condition requirements; and yes, things like two-tier systems where benefits or pensions are differentially allocated based on characteristics internal to the union/job.
I hate fat cat capitalism and large corporations more than almost anyone I know, but many unions (especially public employee unions) have lost a lot of my trust because of these things. The sad reality seems to be that many unions, just like the corporate bosses, are just in it for themselves. Being in it for everyone in the union is better than being in it for just the union bosses, but it's still not good enough as long as they're not in it for everyone who isn't super wealthy. If unions want to attract people they need to forcefully advocate not just for better stuff right now for these few people (union members), but for a wholesale societal overhaul to upend the entire economic system that makes such small-scale negotiation necessary.
Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates? If the robots result in increased wealth inequality, a wealth tax will counteract that. If not, then it means the introduction of robots led to more broadly-based benefits.
Either way, I'm so sick and tired of people talking about the effect on GDP. GDP is a terrible way to measure anything remotely meaningful. GDP has gone up and up and things have gotten worse and worse for more and more people; GDP could go down a lot and things could still get better for many people. Without some kind of (in)equality adjustment, GDP is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
Taxing income is straightforward in that there is a stream of it going by and some of it can be diverted. Taxing wealth is difficult because you don't really know what it is.
Arguably the value of a publicly traded corporation can be known because it is being traded continually. [1] For a privately held corporation it's quite opaque. Right now, for instance, Open AI is estimated to be worth $500B and might IPO at $1T but for all we know it could be a smoking hole in the ground in two years. Should we charge them a big bill in 2025 and then have the investors asking for a refund in 2027 when the real value is revised down to negative? Owners of imagined wealth could face big bills that, in the end, they couldn't pay. [2]
There would certainly be an incentive to avoid the taxation by minimizing bubbliness which might be a good thing but administering it would be a nightmare and manipulating the system to hide wealth would become a national sport.
[1] ... but it could be wrong seen from a future viewpoint
[2] I spent a lot of time in the 2010s calling up people in financial services on the phone and talking on the phone and there was no phrase that struck more fear into them than "mark-to-market", I could hear the voices crackle and feel the flinch. A bank or other institution that is perfectly able to make all its obligations as they unfold over time could be nominally insolvent at times when the market fluctuations down but winds up OK in the end -- the kind of accounting it would take to make wealth taxation accurate might be the end of fractional reserve banking and send us back to the giant Bitcoins of the Yap islands.
I think I am fine with taking an approach to that that is just brutally tilted against large values and brutally tilted in favor of transparency. So like, you can't do anything with your ownership share in that privately-held company --- can't use it as collateral for a loan, can't present it to investors to get more funding, can't trade it, can't sell it, can't in any way derive any benefit from it --- without committing yourself to a valuation and paying a tax on the increase in the valuation since the last such assessment. Also you can have a "sound dues"-like system where committing yourself to such a valuation also gives the government the right to immediately compel you to sell them the asset at your valuation. Any inaccuracies or procedural missteps in these calculations will incur minimal penalties until the amounts in question rise above a threshold (maybe like $50 million), at which point attempts to conceal or misrepresent the value of an asset is punishable by an increasing share of the asset, scaling up eventually to total forfeiture. All in all it should be excruciatingly painful to accumulate anything approaching the large wealth holdings we have today. Most of the large privately-held companies simply should not exist with the opaque valuations they have today. Either open the books completely, or lose everything.
So why would anyone start businesses or continue doing business in such a country?
You’re literally just describing an end to private property, where a privileged government representative can take anything you have. The “government job” will become so lucrative that the position would be passed down within families, father to son. It is already known how these economic systems function, I think.
I am describing a system where the government can take anything you have over a certain amount. (Or more precisely perhaps can take a proportion of what you have that asymptotically approaches 100% as your total wealth increases.) In my conception this money would then immediately be redistributed (as direct cash payments) to people with less. Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties. The purpose is to entirely eliminate massive wealth concentration.
As for why would anyone start a business? There's no disincentive to start a business in this scheme. I'd say the current system has greater obstacles to starting a business in many cases, due to high barriers to entry and regulatory capture by large players. The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small. You can grow your business up until its value is around that taxation threshold and then just kick back. We don't want people taking big businesses and making them bigger.
I think the major problem with your described system is how you quantify wealth. For example, you start a startup, get almost no salary, but you raise a 20M investment on 100M valuation — with your proposed method of calculation, the government already wants you to pay tax on your shares of a 100M enterprise, whereas you may not see a dollar of profit for another 10—20 years (or ever, if the startup fails). It's very difficult to quantify wealth, especially taking into account that a lot of it is risk-bound and long-term.
One interesting aspect of trying to quantify wealth and tax based on that — is that it gives enormous advantage to bearers of wealth that is difficult to quantify. For example, political followers is wealth that you can't tax, but one can turn into profit very easily and in many sneaky ways. Also power in general (power to collect taxes, power to control law enforcement and army, or people with guns in general) is wealth that isn't quantifiable in monetary amounts. So in this system powerful people will be much more powerful because they will start accumulating all other forms of wealth, and very difficult to restrict — why would they use their power to restrict themselves? They would use their power to remove any restrictions at the highest priority.
So instead of the current system (people willing to invent new things and work overtime for years to bring value to millions of people for a chance of outsized returns — and sometimes earning them) you get a system where political class seizes all power, removes all checks and balances, redistributes wealth production to themselves, and unleashes violence to rule forever. It has been tried many times.
> Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties
This only works in capitalistic open societies where wealth doesn't concentrate with government employees.
> The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small
Not all businesses can be small. How can a small business construct an airplane? Organize a nation-wide or international postal delivery service? Build millions of cars with spare parts available for decades? Make food, clothing, and shelter for millions? These things require economies of scale to be affordable. And yes, government-managed big businesses have also been tried, they tend to be very unproductive, and produce expensive and low-quality items (with tendencies to significantly decline over years).
The short answer to your startup example is that the number of businesses that take a $100M investment plus 10-20 years to realize a profit should be much, much smaller than it is now. It should be near zero. The fact that we currently have venture capital being thrown at stuff like this willy-nilly is part of the problem. Businesses should become successful before they become big.
> So instead of the current system (people willing to invent new things and work overtime for years to bring value to millions of people for a chance of outsized returns — and sometimes earning them) you get a system where political class seizes all power, removes all checks and balances, redistributes wealth production to themselves, and unleashes violence to rule forever.
I have some thoughts in response to some of your other points, but I think the fundamental disagreement here is that what you describe as "the system you get" is what I call the system we have, except that the powerful class in question is a sort of hybrid political/economic oligarch class.
The other way I would think about this is that what you call "the government" I would call "the public". We need radical transparency in all government action so that any kind of shenanigans such as you describe cannot occur, and we need to reflexively insist on this transparency regardless of whether we suspect any shenanigans in a particular case.
> Not all businesses can be small. How can a small business construct an airplane?
This is the best counterargument, and indeed airplanes are the example I've come up with as well when I formulated this counterargument to myself. However, I wouldn't describe this as "requiring economies of scale". It's just a matter of some products inherently being more complex (e.g., an airplane is more complex than a wooden spoon).
I think we should view economies of scale very critically. People say that economies of scale are "necessary" to keep things "affordable" for consumers. But in practice large economies of scale tend towards monopolism that in fact makes consumers more vulnerable to gouging. Economies of scale primarily benefit the producers that have them, and only indirectly and uncertainly benefit anyone else.
That said, if the goal is wealth diffusion, companies can become bigger the more diffuse their ownership. So, say, a worker-owned aerospace company could grow larger than one controlled by a small group of shareholders.
Finally, people talk a lot about the theoretical benefits of "innovation", but in my view innovation is also something to view skeptically. Perhaps in a world where there were a lot of small startups building airplanes or better mousetraps and competing genuinely on quality and price, we could think about relaxing some of the strictures I've mentioned. But that's not the world we live in. Much of what passes for "innovation" today is simply gaming the system, hoodwinking customers, and dodging consequences for harmful actions. I believe that this is connected to the fact that so many "innovative" companies are the type you mentioned above, essentially a venture capital gamble on some kind of high-concept startup, with a desired outcome of many total flops and a few gigantic runaway "unicorn" jackpots. That isn't healthy innovation and we should not only not encourage it but should actively prevent it. We want steady, incremental, monitored innovation, not a boom and bust cycle based on who can make the best sales pitch to their favorite billionaire. It is okay to never have another Facebook, another OpenAI, etc.
We currently live under the misapprehension that a company growing from a value of $100 million to a value of $1 billion is a "productive use of capital". My contention is that in general that is not true, and that kind of growth from big to bigger is harmful. We want to disincentivize the concentration of growth and capital in already-large companies, and incentivize the diffusion of wealth in many small enterprises that never grow huge.
You can say that, but then I can say why do we care about whether something is a productive use of capital? What I care about is life being good for human beings, not "productive use of capital".
I support the concept of taxing wealth, but I've yet to find a good way to implement it. The two biggest issues are that wealth is easily moved to places where it can't be taxed, and those making the tax decisions are easily influenced by those with wealth.
Wealth moves in lots of ways. Yes, as has been pointed out, we over value stock assets. When you own a significant percentage of a company, you can't just sell that ownership at the last trading price (the stock price would quickly crash). Wealth is also moved between national borders, allowing the wealthy to shop for the lowest tax location to stash their funds. Property can't be moved, but it can be financed with debt, making it taxed at effectively 0%. And the other side of that debt may just be an overseas shell company. There will be entire industries formed around avoiding a wealth tax, funded by the wealthy.
But probably the most capital efficient way to avoid the wealth tax is to buy politicians, influence the elections, and invest in lobbyist, which the wealthy do in the US to avoid taxes. Until money is removed from politics, I'm not holding out any hope that we'll find a way to tax the wealthy.
> Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates? If the robots result in increased wealth inequality, a wealth tax will counteract that.
It has been tried. Wealth tax means rich people (who already pay most of the taxes) are leaving the country, then the state gets fewer taxes, not more.
I'm actually receptive to this argument, but there are two problems. One is that we have no mechanism for implementing international policy of this sort even in theory (i.e., there is no jurisdiction with authority over both those to be taken from and those to be given to). The other is that, absent such a mechanism, most attempts to implement such transfers will likely increase inequality, because, for instance, the elites of whatever country we want to benefit will simply appropriate all the intended transfers. In other words there is no even remotely reliable way to convert, en masse, cars in my country to bicycles in a poor country somewhere else.
This makes it unwise to attempt to do such transfers on a large scale. That said, I would support something like a tax whose revenues are specifically directed towards improving the lives of much-worse-off people elsewhere in the world in ways that are carefully chosen so as to be less vulnerable to graft. (These would likely be in-kind benefits like latrine construction, etc., rather than monetary grants.)
I don't like the current AI trends much, but I've found duck.ai the best way to experiment with AI. I've had mixed results with DDG search and the site is sometimes slow to load.
I love that duck.ai provides a more private way to use different smaller and medium (?) scale LLMs.
I don’t like the duck.ai interface much (choosing a different LLM is not easy once you’re already in a conversation), but I use it a lot more than I use the DuckDuckGo search engine (the results from the latter aren’t great).
Just like with DuckDuckGo search, where I start a search and then use the !g bang command to go to Google for better results if needed, I try duck.ai and then move to ChatGPT (without any account) when even the best models in duck.ai aren’t good enough.
For most simpler queries though — where I’m just looking to learn a bit about something as opposed to finding a solution for a specific (more complex) question or problem — duck.ai with its GPT 5 models are more than adequate (even the 4o mini is fine).
I really love duck.ai's minimalist approach to questions when I search on duckduckgo and overall enjoy it more than say chatgpt etc. as an normal consumer and even more than occasional google ai's search (I have been fully using duckduckgo for 3 years or 4 years at this point)
Its just the right amount of AI with all the other things and I can have a lot of freedom/customizability/block AI and they provide subdomains for a lot of things (I found out about noai.duckduckgo.com from here and other things too) and overall feel like its one of the best search engines.
I wish if they could create their own index tho because I do not trust microsoft so much.
I wonder why people still use google when there is duckduckgo. I suppose monopoly might be the answer but I wish if there was more awareness about duckduckgo.
There is definitely something lost by relying on the algorithms, although I have found some fun stuff using Pandora. I wonder though how much of the decline in less "railroaded" discovery is due to algorithms per se versus the second-order effects that have accompanied the rise of algorithmic listening. An obvious one is the decline of record stores. Another is the decline in radio listening. It's not just that we use the algorithm to listen, but that we use an algorithm instead of other ways of listening, which then causes those other ways to wither.
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