Yeah, it should probably be a progressive rate but with the catch being that the rate never stops increasing!

So maybe we start very small – a 1% tax on wealth over $10 million. And that $10 million is also our magic number below which the wealth tax cannot drag you, which will be important in a second.

Then there are a few tiers above that which don’t need to be fancy. Maybe add 1% to the incremental rate per $100 million.

But then at $1 billion, the incremental rate becomes 100%. So if you end up over the limit you essentially get set back to $1 billion, which is further taxed according to our imaginary progressive rate.

I also wonder if it might be a good idea to provide a strong incentive for the individual to disburse their gains to charitable causes rather than the burden of administration always falling to the government. One interesting thing might be to introduce one or two even higher brackets that go above 100%.

Say that at $2 billion the tax on each additional dollar becomes 150%. That means that if you get lazy or just want to hoard wealth short term, you not only get knocked back down to $1 billion but lower than that.

Honestly though, we don’t need that complexity. 100% wealth tax on anything over a billion and the government does extravagant shit to honor the top payers each year and names buildings after them and whatnot.

It looks like the transfer rate of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway is back on the menu, boys!

Septic Poogaloo

In a country that has been building its infrastructure around personal automobiles for decades, we cannot make that necessary function of daily life be an automatic consent to targeted analysis.

I get that cameras pointed at intersections and highways are here to stay. That means there will be records of what happens in public places that can be analyzed for a certain person’s movements once there’s a warrant.

That’s the whole fucking point of warrants and 4th amendment protections. Just because the technical ability exists to analyze somebody’s Personally Indentifiable Information doesn’t mean you just get to do it. Just like you don’t get to listen to any phone call you want, or plant bugs and trackers on everybody you are curious. (A group of three-letter agencies enters the chat, lol)

I think they mean the corporate veil that is typically assumed, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

It provides a layer of liability protection for the personal assets of the humans behind the company when it comes to debts. But it also provides protection from criminal liability in many cases when it comes to horrible non-financial crimes.

I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.

Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.

I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.

the bubble premium

You know, I can absolutely see a future where Nvidia and the other hardware makers turn their eyes back towards consumers as they see the build-out slowing and the upgrade budgets shrinking.

What if in one year, Nvidia puts out a GPU or all in one PC AI server thing that will let you run free models that are as good or better than current frontier ones, at a reasonable speed, and they charge like $3000 or $5000 for the thing?

Well, I guess if they want to be proper capitalists/enshittifiers, they would first sell them for 10x as much to corporate IT departments who can replace their ridiculous tech giant subscriptions with local compute augmentation. On-prem is back, baby!

Then they can rip off the gamers and the home lab enthusiasts for a while.

And finally, at long last, with the economy raked over the coals and a cool trillion in the bank, Jensen will briefly feel whole inside. Surely he will.

My engagement terminal???

American here, and while somebody could righteously and pointlessly make a “not all americans” argument, you are spot on about the culture as a whole.

The rape history is valid but even that is a subset of the larger cultural issue where helping others is seen as weak and for suckers, while shameless greed and punching down are what the smart and the strong do. Look at none other than the president. He’s a rapist and a scammer, sure, but he also brags about how he doesn’t pay taxes because he’s smart and his supporters eat it up.

It seems too obvious to be deliberate.

I’mma stop you right there.

Even just the information that the media gets to share with us illustrates pretty clearly that this administration and entire political movement behind it is a mix of violent idiots and slightly more self aware mustache-twirling villains who delight in taunting and torturing their victims once they are confident they’ve won.

And it’s not just sadistic sickness, it’s also a strategy. If the evening news shows government officials knowingly doing illegal and reprehensible things on a regular basis and nothing happens to them, while also reminding us that the police state is in full effect for everybody else, they think they are sending a message to regular folks that they cannot be touched and you’d best just keep your head down and not get any funny ideas. It’s literally just the Death Star “fear will keep them in line” strategy.

But at least the retort about a tighter grip meaning more systems/groups slip through their fingers is also accurate.

Fascism is not a good long term plan because it is rooted in selfish, short term goals of the few.

It sounds nice to be one of the chosen ones!

G