Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that which could be viewed as propaganda in the US?
Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
We have tried many different moderation models and not all of them work.
If we try the Reddit route, then we could have incredible bias in moderated communities.
What about fitting the StackOverflow model to social media?
Another route is how X provides for the Community Notes feature. Would that have worked? Is Community Notes still susceptible to the same bias?
- Covid disinformation
- Some nonsense about Hunter Biden
and they're being conflated. What does Hunter Biden's laptop have to do with preventing Covid disinformation? A disease that was estimated to kill up to 30m people worldwide.
[1] https://mailchi.mp/06871ce9876c/new-campaign-seeks-federal-f...
In the context of Covid disinformation, "political reasons" is simply not correct. We're only 2 years out but it was clear even at the time that there was a concerted effort to pretend there wasn't an active pandemic and governments were right to crack down on it.
The only thread connecting them is "disinformation" which is tenuous at best. It's not clear to me what Zuckerberg's letter refers to because the article seems to move between the topics as though they're basically the same thing.
One example is Facebook suppressing the lab-leak theory until May 2021 [0]. Another is it deemed posts claiming the vaccine may not prevent transmission misinformation, despite it not being known otherwise [1].
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-scientists-...
How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airborne spread (like the measles)?
Describing Zuck's censorship of nearly 200 million posts on Facebook alone as "moderating content" is like calling a tsunami "a bit of rain". It's irresponsible.
Calling a platform with 3 billion monthly users a "glorified bulletin board" doesn't sound very credible to me either.
I will also say, to be fair, that none of the other influential billionaires in the tech world (PayPal Mafia, Jack Dorsey, Andreesen, Horowitz, etc.) seem to have consistent principles either.
When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS but this time you have the problem of demoting non-BS content that happens to be outside of the mainstream narrative. This time you get collapse of trust to institutions.
Now that Mark is very sorry, it spreads on the social media as "We told you that the vaccine was a conspiracy". God help humanity on the next pandemic because awful lot of people wouldn't trust in anything and will roll with the conspiracy theory they are last convinced of.
Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth and very small number of BS gets community noted. Also, the war spreads to the community notes and they too sometimes are complete BS.
IMHO, these social media companies should be forced to work with open to inspection systems. I don't know, maybe everyone should be able to ssh in read-only mode into the servers and honeypot servers should result in prison times for the involved.
It is not OK for companies to be able to pick whom voice should be lauder and do that in secret. The western world should drop the censorship ideas and just focus on accountability.
The question is what limits are made.
Journalism has always been this though, story as full page headline correction as a footnote.
If the Federal Government was telling media companies, right now, that they couldn't show video of Trumps' family sexual escapades (that the Trump family took); that would be similar.
Hunter's pedicure was not russian disinformation, and the government knew that when it told media companies it couldn't be spoken of. That is election interference.
Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists.
All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies.
Etc.
The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of the day then you were dangerous to society. Fully unpacking the irony there would take a book.
Many books have been written about this kind of censorship, because suppressing conversation like this never leads anywhere good. It's an enduring and central theme of damn-near all the top dystopian fiction.
That costs money.
Speak in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you can be placed in a "free speech zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured.
Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
I suppose it's human nature to reach out for miracle cures, but the way people behaved in the pandemic still surprised me. Reaching for random drugs like hydroychloroquine or dewormers (why couldn't it have been a fun drug like cocaine?) and eschewing actual covid vaccines makes one wonder how it is possible that one shares a reality with their fellow humans. Obviously they do not.
- it is certain that governments want to control the narrative, and it is not always done in our interests
- sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation enters the room]
- Everything at CEO level is "political"
- centralization of social media and forums allowed for this behavior. It would be impossible to "control" the Internet with federated Internet
- various powers fight over the Internet (governments, China, Russia, corporations, billionaires etc.). This is why it difficult to tell what is the truth, everyone tries to shift our perception
- YouTube removed thumbs down not to protect small creators. Moderation on social media is also not to protect ordinary people, but to retain clean image, or to keep investors happy
- sometimes when social media removes post is censorship. Sometimes it is not, but both scenarios occur
- some people that complain about free speech might be influenced by foreign powers
- some people that say moderation is required want just more control over social media for their own benefit, agenda
- I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media"
The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people will just do what their told by some perceived authority no matter what.
people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's choice
Nothing you said answered my question.
So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
the reality is, they’re loud, they have easier and larger access to more people than anyone ever in history. the reality is also that they’re just mad people speak back to them.
people talking back to them is what they’re really upset about.
honestly i can’t wait for this election cycle to be over.
Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this.
Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information?
"We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position.
By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years, partly because of their acceptance of over-censorship. There's such a thing as public responsibility, and Meta has repeatedly failed. I said so here, just yesterday.
I'm 100% fine with Meta and others censoring some things: drug sales, scams (I wish they would!), and worse.
But censoring scientists trying to say true things of a devastating pandemic, or minimize the harms from terrible policy? Censoring discussion of stories that politicians find embarrassing? Censoring the word "Zionist"??!! That's indefensible.
Again, there's a basic responsibility there; whether enshrined in law or not, and whether the law is enforced or not. Allowing a platform used by nearly half all people on Earth to warp our collective understanding of issues up to and including war, plague, genocide and famine is unacceptable, whether by government "request" or not.
Do you have any examples of this happening?
> Meta’s CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms
Sounds like he wasn’t the initiator of the discussion, but I may be misreading the paragraph.
It's pretty simple, the different realities like you said. People consume and trust different streams of information (for a whole bunch of reasons). Your info stream probably told you that people were gobbling horse goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the droves, while threatening your grandmother, and you believed it because the sum total of your experience told you that was the most believable of the options.
Other peoples experiences led them to believe sources saying that there was a thing called ivermectin that sees use in agriculture but also in billions of human doses as an antiparasitic that seems to be helping against covid (and that big corporations are not to be trusted).
There are life stories behind each of these perspectives. Many people with either of these perspectives had never heard of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine before their media of choice started praising or condemning them. Then suddenly they were experts.
I never took any of it. Was that the right decision? It seems to have worked out at least. I do try to avoid the trap of thinking any of the stuff blasted out by the media corporations, at no cost to you, has any other purpose than to get you to 1) vote a certain way or 2) buy a certain product, or 3) support some forever war. The news corps aren't just generously informing you - there has to be an ROI.
As for limits, I think by now we have collected enough data from social media use to know what kinds of posts border on outright immoral and are a negative to society. Some of these have been captured and prohibited by law. It wouldn't be that hard to use the existing laws and norms as a test bed.
But again some people don't want free speech because they are afraid their feelings may be hurt in an exchange. Mostly boils down to that.
“A U.S. federal judge,” in 2023 “restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content” [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-blocks-us-officials-comm...
In this toy model, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch have zero influence over either the media or government?
Right to be heard implies a coercion to be heard. That’s the paradox of free speech.
Ten people being denied their rights is no different from hundreds of millions?
That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be for correcting cases where something is objectively false or missing critical context, and it does quite well at that. People are very good at spotting edited videos, mis-dated photos and so on, which is the bread and butter of real fact checking. Not very exciting but useful. Facebook could do worse than just reimplementing the system. It's certainly far better than letting activist run NGOs be editors.
And certain subsets of these various nodes have a greater outsized influence than their peers. For example, the intelligentsia within the people are usually far more impactful than say Joe Blow from Appalachia.
Do I really have to explain this? We cannot permit even one person denied their rights. It isn't acceptable in small quantities and then suddenly become a problem when it's 200 million.
But as I have clearly stated and has been obvious for years, you don't have a right to use privately owned web sites. The attempt to paint it as such is only a marketing ploy by those very same sites in order to paint themselves as essential to our lives. They are not. Delete your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. they are garbage.
Agreed.
> Your info stream probably told you that people were gobbling horse goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the droves, while threatening your grandmother
That's not even close to the truth. There were reliable reports of people admitted to hospital with this but nobody in their right mind thought "droves" of people were taking dangerous quantities of ivermectin or drinking bleach.
Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs.
Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
Nobody said it’s acceptable. What’s ridiculous is to claim the difference in scale “doesn’t matter.”
> you don't have a right to use privately owned web sites
Under the First Amendment, no. Under the freedom of assembly, no. Under the principles of free speech, it’s more ambiguous.
The moment you start fighting spam, you’re obliged to make censorship decisions.
ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/politics/fact-check-oklahoma-...
And that could explain why a lot of people believed ivermectin works: they had covid, they took ivermectin, they got better. They don't see the alternate universe where they didn't take it and they also got better, because that's what happens most of the time.
I'm convinced this is why so many other people think the vaccine was a miracle. We were being blasted with the idea that covid was a death sentence, so if you had a plain old mild case (like most cases were), it had to be because of some intervention (ivermectin or the shots or the phase of the moon).
I think this is true for most of the shit the medical industry tries to push on you, but I'm a kook and I know it.
When it's at the demand from the white house, it becomes a free speech issue because it's the executive branch that essentially controls what these big bulletin boards are allowed to publish. Furthermore, nothing is for free, so what perks did these big bulletin boards got in return? maybe that administration decided not to proceed with an antitrust lawsuit as long as they complied, we don't know...
So given that information, what is one to do? I took the vaccine and take the newer versions now too along with a flu shot.
I don’t think there’s any way to algorithm your way out of non-trivial fact-checking. Tech is not the solution to these kinds of fundamentally social problems.
(I should add that the best-case scenario here is an emergent and stable cabal of intellectually-rigorous editors, perhaps of varying political persuasions, similar to what happened to Wikipedia. But that’s barely different from fact-checking by some NGO.)
If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
I don't think it is. The First Amendment gives companies control of what gets posted to the sites they own. And it gives you that control for the sites you own, too.
Literally Zuckerberg is quoted as saying he didn't remove posts: "[USG] “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.".
It would be much better if the article actually posted the contents of the government email. Everything we saw from say the Twitter files in this regard is some gov employee asking if X post complied with Y Twitter policy and if-not if the post should be removed. That gov employee didn't write Y policy, it was Twitter's own policy. I suspected a similar thing happened here where Facebook has a fake news policy [1] and a gov employee was asking them if given posts were in violation of it.
[1]: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/m...
"the narrative", who's narrative? Of course it IS a free speech issue when the boss of the country club is the chief of executive branch and being part of the country club is a quid pro quo. Zuck and Dorsey's lackeys back then, they weren't censoring informations unfavorable to democrats or Biden's family for free.
Sorry for your loss.
> the fatality rate was around one percent, wasn't it?
According to one report at least, it was 1% for folks in their 60s. For younger demographics it was quite a bit less than that.
> We report IFR estimates for April 15, 2020, to January 1, 2021, the period before the introduction of vaccines and widespread evolution of variants. We found substantial heterogeneity in the IFR by age, location, and time. Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0·0023%, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·0015–0·0039) and increasing exponentially through ages 30 years (0·0573%, 0·0418–0·0870), 60 years (1·0035%, 0·7002–1·5727), and 90 years (20·3292%, 14·6888–28·9754).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> So given that information, what is one to do?
You make the best decision you can for yourself, and sounds like you did that. The frustrating part is when other people felt entitled to make that decision for you.
Snowden chose exile over torture, and so has been separated from his family for over a decade.
Many people were tortured that didn't even work as journalists; just victims of bad metadata or the wrong name.
Many countries and organizations even consider so-called "standard practice" in American jails to constitute torture. Solitary confinement, sometimes for years. Refusal of basic medical care, nutrition, sanitation. Physical abuse from guards. Unmarked graves behind the jail [5].
Nowadays even environmental lawyers can get put in jail for the crime of winning judgments against fossil fuel companies (Donziger [6]).
* - Wasn't physically tortured, but he did reveal torture and was heavily retaliated against for his trouble.
...
0 - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/01/02/chelsea-manning-torture-...
2 - https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-dd3111dc6...
3 - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/us/former-cia-officer-is-...
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_al-Hajj
5 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/families-in-disbelief-afte...
6 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-chevron-...
Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than further increase its complexity.
No, it does not. It prohibits the government from abridging the freedom of speech.
The First Amendment is a particular expression of the broader principle of freedom of speech/expression [1]. If you are in my home and you express a view I dislike, it is completely within my legal rights to ask you to stop speaking or else be asked to leave. I could not at the same time, however, say I stand for free speech.
As far as I know, no one in my country (The US) was forced to take a covid vaccine. Some were compelled financially I have no doubt, but they would seem to me like fish that just realized that they were swimming in water after not having even realized it their entire lives. No wonder they were pissed; I can't say I've ever really gotten over it myself.
This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media, I predict in the next crisis, social media will be useless adjacent for almost everything.
Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control.
Further Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
How should the founders and equity investors in a bootstrapped high growth unicorn that is neither public nor profit-making handle this proposed capital gains tax? Does this mean VC funds would need to set aside arbitrary amounts of cash to cover impossible-to-predict taxes on cap gains during, say, a 7 year window?
It could also make it harder to attract and keep talent, since the earliest stage employees often rely on equity grants as part of their compensation. Does this mean every early stage employee has to have deep enough pockets to cover cap gains tax pre-revenue? And what happens when the company implodes past the look-back for recouping tax overpayment?
It might make sense to focus on closing existing loopholes without creating new burdens and cash flow barriers that could disrupt the innovation and growth ecosystem with unintended second and third order consequences.
---
Edit to add:
It's true that a peeved Wall St donated a fraction to Biden this season relative to the past, and — surely entirely unrelatedly — partnerships and private equity were taken out of the latest incarnation, leaving in publicly traded and the $100M holdings.
If passed, this will be tinkered with, encircling ever more to offset the loopholes inevitably used.
No it doesn’t, you’re arguing using a straw man here. They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as I understand it. Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you’re exceptionally wealthy.
That's not in dispute*, and the point is people can experience paper gains without being exceptionally wealthy, or even ramen profitable.
* To be fair, the notion of "tax" being just supposed public good versus requiring transactional value ("no taxation without representation") was a founding issue for the U.S.
These days, instead of citing nebulous public good, perhaps it could be thought of as NOA and SOA fees: Nation Owners' Association fees, and State Owners' Association fees. You can look for a different neighborhood, or contribute to improve this one.
> the notion of "tax" being just supposed public good versus requiring transactional value ("no taxation without representation") was a founding issue for the U.S.
This was a representational issue, not non-transactional taxation. Property taxes existed in many colonies 100 years before the revolution.
On the contrary, many variations of proposals (they keep popping up) cover partnerships or other forms of company holders as well.
Even in the Harris plan, though not usually talked about, even for the illiquid not-tradable group there would be a new deferred tax of up to 10% on unrealized capital gains upon exit. To be fair, "exit" implies an ability to pay that.
Let's say that I suspect that democracy is a system that assumes public opinion to be directed so that it doesn't stray too much from a narrow range of possibilities. This can be done just by manipulating the Overton window.
Not usually mentioned: even for this illiquid group there would still be an additional deferred tax of up to 10% on the unrealized capital gains upon exit.
* Once passed, anything like this is unlikely to escape tinkering until it matches most other versions, that are not limited to "tradable". Look at how worried farms are, for example, another relatively cash neutral but cap gain increasing growth (ahem) business.
I treat it like anything else: I wouldn't be shocked to see evidence that incorrect things show up in places like the lancet. But I assume it's on par with the best I can get my hands on, so I use it.
I'm gonna skip the "technically not forced" debate, been through it too many times. I'll agree to disagree.
Is the fish metaphor to say that it was some people realizing how little control they have over their lives or something like that? Amen if so.
Both arguing the same points at the same time is quite the Baader–Meinhof coincidence.
And that does not give companies and individuals the ability to choose what they host on their sites?
As to the fish thing, you understood me correctly - when we are born, we are thrown into a world we did not create and have vanishingly little control over, and seemingly less as wealth and power accumulate into the hands of a few. I'm told that well-adjusted people are capable of adapting to their circumstances, and it is a mark of mental illness that one can not.
It only seems reasonable to assume the emails for FaceBook took the same form as the ones to Twitter. But he's welcome to prove me wrong.
No, it does not. The First Amendment is silent on e.g. ISPs or payment processors blocking a particular site based on its content. Until 1897, it was unestablished whether it restricted the states in any form [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago,_Burlington_%26_Quincy...
It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time
The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity.
A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written.
Random copy pasted examples:
- There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us
- And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD.
- To gas glowniggers on-sight?
- Hang yourself tranny
Correction: without SEEMING exceptionally wealthy or even ramen profitable. By, say, kneecapping your own profit. So that you don't pay as much taxes. Which is the entire problem we're trying to solve.
In practice, these people ARE wealthy. Just perhaps not on paper (depending the paper you look at). Of course when you observe their life, they are obviously filthy rich.
So we have an accounting problem. The papers don't accurately reflect the reality.
Upper middle class its where highest quality of life happens, if one is smart enough to understand how happiness and life fulfillment works, to not die full of hard regrets. You can have meaningful true friendships. Enough to afford whatever is you need or desire to do, not enough to become self-entitled spoiled lazy disconnected from reality piece of shit parent and partner type of folks. No you don't need private jet or mega yacht or 5 mil hypercar for that, that's poor man's idea of what sort of quality wealth brings you in life.
Darn, I guess we will have to shut down social media since it cannot be run ethically. A tough loss for the world..
It's not like the money is just sitting, liquid in a vault like Scrooge McDuck.
Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
Was the palestinian stuff directed by the government? I don't know, but it sure seemed to me like the israel/palestine war posts that were allowed through sounded awfully similar to what the white house/IDF was saying about it. When stuff like this comes out, regardless of whether my theory is true or not, it adds fuel to that fire in a way I don't feel is very good for democracy or social media in general, particularly when zuck/meta will gaslight their users and claim state censorship isn't happening when it very, very obviously is. What was stopping them from coming out and saying "hey we're censoring this type of content?" Their entire approach to moderation is like this, it's a completely automated black box that leaves a user with very little clue as to how they're even supposed to interact with the platform without being punished in strange and obtuse ways.
Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate, as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns and especially the potential side effects of the vaccines. Information at the time moved lightening quick, things were barely even published before being all over the media.
The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously, but it wasn't censored. I remember several high profile articles on it.
Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
So whats changed?
Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating, that's when things really started changing.
Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.
Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?
> self moderated by kicks/bans
Also smaller communities tend to be easier to keep from becoming a cesspool
EDIT: I’ve misunderstood your comment, I don’t have any alternative accounts on hacker news!
My hand-wavy proposal:
1. there needs to be something akin to a constitution where all players involved (users of social media, social media companies) can express some shared set of values. For example kids shouldn't get depressed, data should be private, widely spread information should be reasonably accurate.
2. There needs to be a few institutions with enough power and checks and balances to be able to steer the system towards these values.
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
Zuckerberg similarly denied any plans to target Durov's domestic market, yet both moved to expand their respective reaches shortly after the meeting. “We both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks,” Durov noted.”
https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/06/39223122/telegrams-pavel...
Now the moment a vulnerability is known, be it social or system, it is exploited by many actors.
The moment a new business idea appears to work, it is an overnight saturated market
The internet is now driven by hustlers and monetization all the way down
RIP AOL COMOUSERVE PRODIGY GOLDEN ERA
If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.
What the consumer wants from those services is "free speech", but with restrictions. They want "uncensored" content with the objectionable bits removed. For some people "objectionable" means spam and pornography, for others it includes certain types of political discourse or content from certain classes of person. If people really wanted uncensored content, the dark web would be far more popular.
The only way these companies can give people both uncensored "free speech" and content moderation is to build these bubbles where freedom of speech is only freedom of one type of speech.
They're stuck in a catch-22, and I can't help but feel like they actually ARE providing the service that we demand from them to the best of their abilities.
Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.
boys did. the girls left those spaces (and the internet more generally, until social media became mainstream) because all the public spaces were disgusting, and all the boys sat around posting vulgarity, laughing, and wondering why there were no girls in our online spaces.
Those spaces were/are absolutely appalling sausage fests and while I don't think they should be shut down, saying "we all mostly got by" is some kind of selection or survivorship bias. YOU didn't mind. YOU got by. Polite company DID mind, and there wasn't a space online for them. You just didn't notice.
I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is, and I regret not taking the blue pill sometimes. He’s shown just about every notable case of it happening (with proof). Though he knows how to game the system to resist being taken offline and you could say it’s part of his brand.
You could say that it wouldn’t be worth the risk for others to call it out like he does because it wouldn’t add to the content, and they could slip up.
You can disagree with his politics or personality but you probably wont find a leftist channel that covers that kind of censorship. I wish the videos were more categorized, though he doesn’t do it and uses generic video titles because apparently that makes it less likely to get censored.
That being said, as a male I was on the receiving end of the same kind of garbage back then. I had a guy who was sending my mother very creepy emails with her real information just to screw with me, and this was in 98. It affected me worse than it did her, I thought he was going to ruin my life as a kid. Another guy got my email account deleted when I was 14 because I drew a picture that made fun of his art as a joke. I knew it was him because he emailed me saying he was going to do it.
I still would rather trade this internet for that one. It’s too Orwellian now.
I don’t think it’s correct to claim a sense of victimhood over your sex. Shitty people are going to be a problem for you one way or another.
I also found many more great positive experiences back then with people online than more recently. You had downs but a lot of ups. People you meet online these days tend to be more busy, edgy, creepy, or too arrogant to grace you with acknowledgement. There’s also a noticeable degree of mental illness, which lines up with the statistical trends. Which is fine but you really never know what kind of mental illness it is until it’s too late (can be genuinely dangerous). The good people are around but mostly keep to themselves.
A huge question I have here is how unrealized gains on nonfinancial assets would be handles. How would the government determine the fair market value of a multimillion dollar mansion, for example?
More broadly, how would we justify only taxing unrealized gains on individuals? Or would this apply to corporations, banks, and financial institutions as well?
My point isn't actually any specific issue in the proposal, these are just examples of what could be a problem. Our tax code is massive and incomprehensible to almost everyone. Adding further caveats and stipulations just makes it worse. Taking an axe to much of the tax code seems like a much more reasonable approach in my book.
Kicking people off was and still is censorship and moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people off now and just police the content instead.
Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at regular income tax rates. After all, that money gets used like regular income (living expenses).
The taxed amount can then be added to the basis when the asset is sold. It would be like reverse of depreciation calculations.
Set an asset and loan value floor so it only affects people with assets $10M+.
After all, regular people pay taxes on annuities, which are similar in structure.
Disclaimer: IANA-Accountant, but I am a taxpayer who tries to legally minimize my taxes.
The answer to all this censorship is simple: break up Facebook. If we absolutely, positively can't, then make them a common carrier, regulate them like a utility, and strip out all the profit incentive to keep bad actors on the system. The funny thing is that Facebook's crimes are not merely censoring what they believe to be disinformation, but also amplifying people who break their own rules. Facebook and Twitter had world leaders policies intended to justify keeping politicians who break their rules on platform, specifically so they could amplify them, because it made the company money.
In other words, everyone angry that Twitter banned Trump in 2021 should also be angry that Twitter didn't ban him in 2017.
1) FB launched and was able to scale past MySpace by making its feed algorithmic and gracefully degrading the freshness of content to get good uptime while MySpace was unusable during peak hours of the day.
2) FB realized that the feed being algorithmic could be a good thing, and could drive engagement directly, apart from simply avoiding downtime.
3) FB realized that the algorithmic feed was the heart of its ad platform.
4) Users got an explosion of sponsored content that overwhelmed the useful human content from friends and family.
5) Zuck decided to focus on News content and vowed to make FB the place to go for news.
6) The algorithmic feed created incredible virality and rapid spread of sensational, triggering content. Donald Trump's campain in 2016 exploited this characteristic and was able to exert great control over attention simply by Donald saying outlandish and intentionally polarizing things.
7a) This tactic, combined with viral content from other fringe groups (with questionable sponsorship & eaily funded via the ad platform) was credited with Trump's victory in the 2016 election. News orgs, motivated by profits and engagement, kept publishing more and more of the sensational stories which gave Trump's approach more and more power. Those opposed to Trump unwittingly fueled his rise in their naïveté about how the algorithm was amplifying his worldview when they shared stories about how abhorrent it was.
7b) This was a stunning blow to Meta and led to the rapid creation of internal censorship teams in response to pressure from political leaders.
8) Facebook's voluntary censorship was among the first in a movement to de-platform a wide variety of political speech in the US and other nations. Family members of top US officials were high level execs and FB, and there was/is a revolving door between Meta and government, even between Meta and the CIA (Meta's internal "disinfo" team is staffed mainly by ex-CIA info ops experts and analysts).
9) All this led to the creation of new, "anti-censorship" platforms, the purchase of Twitter by Musk for political reasons, and a variety of other consequences.
10) Now Zuck finds that consumers have lost some trust in the FB brand and there is tremendous pressure to keep the ad business profitable, but most importantly that hiring thousands of content police is very expensive and has unintended consequences.
We can hope that the US Government chooses to resort to more direct attacks on free speech and gives up the approach of pressuring firms to do anti-democratic things. With most Americans happily consuming an algorithmic feed that aggressively suppresses dissent, it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall.
A perfect tax code would be impossible, a more simply one would be very doable.
We're talking about a campaign proposal here with no legislative draft so its a guessing game, but in my opinion any move similar to taxing unrealized gains will serve only to make it more complex and would not fall under the category of "good" for me.
It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.
More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
Willful misinterpretation. He's claiming that the government encouraged FB to censor in a way that violated his values of truth and free speech, not that Zuckerberg himself feels censored.
While I completely agree, he agree screwed up, the admission is well timed.
> I aim to provide accurate and reliable information based on the extensive range of texts I’ve been trained on, which include a variety of reputable sources. However, because I’m not infallible and my knowledge is based on patterns in data rather than direct verification, it’s a good idea to cross-check critical or detailed information with primary sources or expert opinions, especially for academic or highly specific topics. If you have any doubts or need detailed, current, or specialized information, consulting additional sources or experts is always a smart approach.
this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
You have made an important statement which while simple - most people don't really understand the full spectrum of implications. A substantial proportions of the people are really are ungovernable - online or otherwise, they simply stoop too low. Like they say: you cannot fix stupid.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Let them pay their taxes with stocks. Problem solved.
Click your username at the upper right:
Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")
There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.
He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his image entirely. Following in Elon's path.
People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and he is a cutthroat business guy.
Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really wants to be President.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-zuckerberg...
Gentrification of the Internet by smartphone-wielding normies who were neither prepared nor equipped to deal with the established cyberspace social norms that differed from their meatspace counterparts, as massive corporations rushed to get as many people Online as possible, as fast as possible, so as to target them with advertisements and accumulate and sell their data. Once said gentrifying normies outnumbered the "Internet natives", the "New Internet Culture" subsumed nearly all of the "Old Internet Culture", leaving us where we are today.
Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts).
(Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
This will be hand-waved away as being caused by other influences
> data should be private
Sure, it's private: we know literally everything about you down to when you use the toilet, and so do all of our data brokers and your government. But it's tied to a token, and you'd have to do a SQL join to attach that token to your name, and we put up a flyer in the break room telling people not to do that SQL join.
> widely spread information should be reasonably accurate.
There are so, so many opportunities to frame things in extremely misleading ways to drive a certain narrative and the entire social media and corporate news establishment does this. And when they get caught making stuff up, just call it a mistake and run a retraction in fine print that no one sees
Case in point: the idea that conservatives are somehow having their speech suppressed. This is patently false. Twitter has become 4chan. Any number of conservatives topics like anti-vaxxers, Brexit, anti-immigrant propaganda and so thrive on social media, including and especially Facebook.
Now you can argue that this isn't intentional. It's simply a result of these platforms responding to and promoting "engagement bait". There might be some truth to that but at a certain point, particularly if you're the CEO of Meta, you can't play dumb. You should know what your platform is promoting and what benefits you.
What you're seeing here is Zuckerberg is increasingly becoming aligned with the billionaire class and, by extension, the political right (eg [1]). This is the arc that leads to becoming Peter Thiel.
No one, and I mean no one with the possible exception of Noam Chomsky, is a free speech absolutist. Elon, for example, has banned people who have simply hurt his feelings (many times).
And while Zuck is sucking up Republicans in Congress, see how far you get on any of these platforms if you use words like "Gaza", "Israel", "Sde Temain" or "Palestine".
All of these big tech companies have been very successful in pushing the idea that it's "the algorithm" that upranks or downranks content, like there's no human involved. This is propaganda. Humans decide what's in the algorithm and they make those decisions based on what they want it to do.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mark-zuckerberg-prais...
HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.
I suppose there were warning signs, like every previous Internet technology eventually being used for advertising.
You can tell because the lizard has begun looksmaxing
However, we know from numerous leaks now that the White House has indeed pressured every major social media company to target specific citizens and censor them.
I don't know how that plays out with mansions though. Whether a mansion is worth $30M or $10M is often hard to predict with the pool of potential buyers being so low.
I am assuming you believed him because he provided some evidence to support his claims?
And once the asset is sold, that's a taxable event.
However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
It's a very difficult problem, no doubt.
Do you think Hacker News is 'social media'? If so, is it being run in a 'clean, ethical way'?
And there lies the loophole. These loans are often structured as some kind of business expense that can be paid from pre-tax income.
So, ultra rich people get to double dip here. No taxes on selling stocks for money, as there's a loan, plus no taxes on the income for paying it off.
[Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.
In that case, this is the end of public companies as we know it.
(But then, that "a lot" is there for a reason. There has been some bad behavior from the platform too.)
This statement is hysterically ahistorical. Each thing you listed had active moderation. Sysops didn't just allow anything on a board, if you posted stuff off topic or offensive (to the Sysop) it was removed with prejudice. IRC networks all had long lists of k-lines of people kicked off the network. Individual channels had their own mods with ban lists. Forums either moderated or were deluged with spam. AOL and ICQ were both highly moderated.
Just like today small networks might be uncensored free-for-alls. Even then they are/were rarely actually uncensored, it's just you might have not been censored because you aligned with the views of the owners/operators.
The only really uncensored free-for-all was Usenet and that state only existed for its first decade or so when it was limited to professionals and academics. The Eternal September turned Usenet into an unusable mess. It's corpse limps along today as a vehicle for piracy and not much else.
As for the standard pop-feminist take, I should point out that it's not so much a matter of gender or victimhood, it's a matter of how people are conditioned to respond to hostility. If your culture socializes boys[0] to respond to toxicity with more toxicity, then they will naturally push everyone else not so socialized out of the space. This creates "male spaces" that are just where the most toxic people happen to concentrate. The interests they concentrate around do not matter aside from them happening to be the color of the tile on the floor being stepped on.
[0] Or just some subset of boys
If your bank determines that assets you post for collateral are worth 100mn or more, that's a pretty good indication.
The Dem leadership has been splitting the baby for years by allowing the ever-increasing radical wing of the party to bloviate about this without ever letting meaning legislation to the floor to enact the changes this group wants, so credit where credit is due, I guess.
He says he won the last election, so he's already running for a third term.
I very strongly believe you to be wrong:
1. Unrealized gains is unworkable. Billionaires will spend tens or hundreds of millions yearly to avoid paying literally billions in taxes because the expected value is net positive. The IRS won't win chasing down money scattered across the globe. This is not a productive use of capital.
2. Taxing unrealized gains causes extreme capital flight. This is _bad_ for the US.
3. Taxing unrealized gains will lead to corporations and startups incorporating outside the US and keeping their assets outside of the US. This is _bad_ for the US.
4. Founders would very quickly loose control of the companies they started, including before they exit. That is really bad for startups and the ecosystem.
5. This is almost certainly illegal in the US at the federal level.
6. Every tax for the wealthy eventually targets the middle class.
The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay."
Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
And again, this is for publicly traded stock portfolios. Private farms won’t be broken up… yet :-)
Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the post evil but only little boring.
But yes, a tax on "unrealized gains" basically amounts to a property tax, not anything related to an income tax.
Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged] indicator are because the user that posted the comment has been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to automatic filters that threw up false positives for new accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith.
Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and assorted people redefining words and then asserting that only their new definition is the correct one.
I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if it were not dead.
After reddit's nonsense last summer I appreciate HN more than ever. If it means the moderation is a bit "too strict" then so be it. That was also the case on some of reddit's (and other sites') best communities. /r/AskHistorians immediately comes to mind.
Taxing entrepreneurs will lead to worse outcomes for entrepreneurs. That is obvious. Every tax has a cost. But we need to fund the government and it is not fair for workers to pay for everything while much wealthier investors and entrepreneurs do not.
Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the capital gains regardless if there is a loan or not.
(Edited to correct "inheritance tax" to the technically correct term, "estate tax")
If Zuck wants popularity, maybe a good way to go about that would be to de-shittify Facebook, Instagram, and so forth so that those platforms respect their users.
I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating in value over the years.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether various wealth tax ideas are good. But, I don't believe that the concept is as infeasible as some are making it out to be when it's been happening with property taxes for a very long time.
Billionaires already routinely sell billions in stock "at once" (meaning, per quarter or similar, not a $1 billion limit order on Robinhood...), so on that one, we can empirically suggest "not much of an effect on the larger economy".
Randomly chosen examples:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-liquidated-1-7-180...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/elon-m...
HN is a small community , and frankly more moderate than everywhere else (except twitter these days).
Sadly, censorship in 2024 is coming by the people, for the people.
The contemporary American software engineer resembles the professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the suburbs in the 80's and 90's.
The article says they were "pressured", it doesn't seem to to say how that pressure was applied. To me, it reads as though compliance was not mandated, just requested. Without more info, I suppose it could be taken either way.
The main difference being that a property tax only takes into account the assessed value and ignores what you paid for it. They tax the value, not just unrealized gains.
No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5).
Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
If you're a billionaire who does the "take out loans against your unrealized cap gains" trick, then you, you know... can't sell your stock. So then your stock passes to your kids -- who, due to the stepped up basis, yes, do not have to pay cap gains on that stock.
But there's a 40% estate tax.
Estate tax generally isn't very relevant even to the ordinarily-rich, because it has an extremely high deduction (about $27M for a married couple), but for a billionaire it's absolutely relevant.
Now, sure, if you paid both the cap gains and the estate tax you'd pay that much more taxes, but if you compare a normally-wealthy person (pays 15-20% cap gains and 0% estate tax) and a billionaire (pays 0% cap gains and 40% estate tax), it's obvious that the billionaire, eventually, pays a much higher tax rate.
>The report added weight to calls for a broader probe into the theory that the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from a laboratory.[6][7] However, a WHO report states "introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway".[3] Since then, the head of the WHO COVID-19 origins investigative team, Peter Ben Embarek, has stated that the Chinese authorities exerted pressure on the WHO report conclusions, and that he in fact considers an infection via a researcher's field samples to be a "likely" scenario.[8]*
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
Edit: typo
... or any media. The messenger cannot not shape the message even if he tried. If he becomes a mere conduit, someone else will shape the message. People are (trained to be) emotionally-driven and thus their biases can be shaped
Things are headed strongly in the opposite direction you're implying.
This was a concern in 2009, but now, 15 years later, people using platforms have only themselves to blame. Stop being part of the problem !
2. Where will the capital go (all the best investments are in the US), if this happens lots of great businesses will be available to buy at a discount to people with smaller than $100m stock portfolios
3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business in the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it’s $20m for the government and I rate that as a great deal to be honest.
4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control, this is only about companies post IPO.
5. IANAL are you?
6. If the rich continue to be able to accumulate wealth without paying taxes on it forever I think that is the road to serfdom personally. Taxation of the rich will make everyone better off. I pay over 50% tax in Europe, maybe if the rich were paying their share this could be reduced!
???
Is anyone who isn't a card carrying DSA member "far right"?
They take out loans and aren't taxed on it. But they have to pay taxes when they pay off the loans, and at that time they'll owe even more money meaning more stocks will have to be sold.
But wait, how are they avoiding that tax even then? Well they take out another loan. But eventually that stops. They can't take out infinite loans, so what is happening? When they die, there is some tax trickery that involves resetting the cost basis of assets, then selling them with 0 capital gains to pay off the loans. The simple fix is to only reset the values after the estate pays out, meaning that any assets sold to pay off any loans will have to pay the real tax on their value, and only afterwards is the cost basis reset when inheritors receive those assets.
That seems a much more minimally invasive change, and also seems much more in line with the intent of the existing tax code to begin with, as the cost basis should only reset for those inheriting and not for paying off existing debts.
Similarly I don't blame FB for failing to block links to the Steele dossier, even though I think it was bogus.
"The proposal would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital gains, for all taxpayers with wealth (that is, the difference obtained by subtracting liabilities from assets) greater than $100 million."
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanati...
And there are many private farms in America worth more than $100m. I have no idea what amount of that would be "unrealized capital gains", which is kinda the problem.
It's a google search away friend. I'll source one thing for you though, pick whatever you think is craziest.
> How is it that I was reading science papers and media reports on them daily at the time, covering all these things you claim were censored?
How would I know?
Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Pinterest, Spotify and Amazon, among many more, have admitted to removing content. Many of those cases were extremely high profile. Facebook removed and suppressed nearly 200 million posts [0], many of them true. Twitter censored scientists for saying true things that the Biden Admin didn't like, as documented in the Twitter Files (which were heavily smeared as a "nothingburger"). [1]
> Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate
It shouldn't have been. Aerosol scientists emphasized early on that respiratory activities like talking and breathing produce tiny droplets (aerosols) that can stay suspended in the air, potentially spreading the virus. This knowledge should have been applied sooner. Air purification in classrooms and nursing homes could have been a thing almost immediately, but even now it hasn't been seriously pursued. (Outside the top private schools anyway.)
> as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns
For all the debate, they still got rammed through pretty much everywhere. Since then, everything that many people had been saying came true, and now we have a generation of children that teachers are describing as "feral" with the most genuine concern.
Excess cancer deaths, widespread mental health crises, a huge transfer of wealth to the rich, economic hardship for many, a huge rise in domestic violence. The people who predicted this were smeared seven ways to Sunday, and you'd have to be in a strange bubble to have missed it. Perhaps the censorship worked after all?
> especially the potential side effects of the vaccines.
Again, this has been explicitly acknowledged as a topic which got heavily censored, by the companies that did the censoring no less. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc all did it, and all report being asked to remove things that "could be seen as" going against whatever position was du jour.
> Information at the time moved lightening quick, things were barely even published before being all over the media.
Some information moved a lot faster than other info... Because of acknowledged mass suppression and censorship.
There's no damn good reason that I and many others could take a glance through Daszak's paper and recognize it as bullshit immediately, but it took years to be acknowledged as such by media and academia.
It also took a long time for those Whatsapp chats where top scientists admit to being told to say that a lab-leak was "impossible", even though they suspected it was quite likely.
To this day, the conversation about funding GOF research has not had its time in the sun.
> The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously
Serious people took it seriously from day one. There was never a good reason not to, and many good reasons to demand an immediate investigation of WIV, GOF research in general, and the role of our own money funding the exact type of research that could create a coronavirus like this.
> I remember several high profile articles on it.
So do I, and I remember them being pretty easy to see for the hack jobs they were as well. The NYT had a genuinely good one after like a year and a half, long over due.
> Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
Again, you can name one specific thing that I have claimed and ask me to source it for you; I won't do everything. All of this is easily findable.
I didn't even get into some of the gnarlier stuff, like how all across the West nursing homes were seeded with sick patients resulting in a huge number of early deaths. That was a suppressed story you might have missed, even though there were bits and pieces of it written up. Again, there's been very little accountability for that since.
What's pure fantasy is that we had some sort of reasoned debate, followed best-practice protocols, and came to measured decisions.
* * *
0 - https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1170
1 - https://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-files-platform-suppressed...
I don't know what he thinks he is selling folks on, but it's mostly spam and garbage...
Joe Biden is by all accounts, center-left. However, the parent comment also describes the "HN crowd" as far-right. What probably is actually happening is that America is extremely polarized, where any side you don't agree with has the "far-[left/right]" label slapped on.
I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
As in no outright slurs, right? I've seen plenty of race realist comments, as well as "James Damore is right about women in tech".
Here it is, so others don't have to dig around for it. It appears to have been a top level comment.
"This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political expediency. He did what the government asked while denying doing it, now apologizes for it to curry favor with the rightwing world he alienated. It's like the NY Times pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative during the Iraq war and later running long articles about what bad journalism that was."
"Crank vs sincere skeptic" is fallacious, as it attacks the person and not the argument.
Conversely - why didn't you vouch for each of the dead comments, if they are so great?
What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.
If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
Biden sounds a lot like Stephen Harper (pre-barbaric-practices-hotline) and just to the right of Brian Mulroney. Joe Clark would be well to his left.
Here is dang’s explanation: >>37421874
It sounds a fair banning for me.
You pay taxes on the assessed value of your house. It doesn't matter what you paid for it, or how much equity you have in it. It's more of a use tax than a capital gains or wealth tax.
Correction: delete the "would like to"
Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're saying.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
From what I understand, the executive branch generally uses the power of persuasion to influence media. There's no legal consequences for failing to comply; but instead the media has to weigh political consequences.
To put it differently, if your social network is used to push conspiracy theories and otherwise undermine democracy, you're going to have a tough time asking for political favors.
Whatever they post now shows up as dead
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-social-media-biden-...
https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-has-vi...
You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak theory" because that term has a number of definitions that are very different.
There's the definition where COVID was the result of gain of function research that leaked from a lab through negligence. There's also a definition that it was an entirely natural virus being studied that was leaked through negligence. Then there's the definition that the virus was "leaked" with malicious intent from the virology lab in Wuhan.
While the definitions are similar they have very different implications. Because social media tends to perform nuance destroying compression of concepts down to sound bites no two individuals using the term "lab leak theory" can be assumed to be using the same definition.
You even have an assumed definition of what you mean when you say "lab leak theory". Of everyone that reads your post your definition doesn't match that of half the audience. Even then, plenty of people claimed to be banned from social media for one reason while the reality they were banned from a network for other (or a combination) of reasons. So even the general statement of people being "social media censoring lab leak theory" elides important information and nuance and derives its validity from third hand accounts.
Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
Skip the political mumbo-jumbo and go straight to page 27 to 29 of this investigation report. Internal emails show FB employees unhappy to onboard to a private takedown request portal, where Government employees would post tickets on "disinformation" that FB & other tech companies would then be obligated to police. Further, the report suggests that CISA & its proxies didn't have a legal mandate to compel FB, Twitter, and other companies to censor content, so the CISA resorted to "suggesting" they would get the FBI involved.
The entire doc has an obvious political slant, but I think it partially explains why the Stanford Internet Observatory and other proxies self-dismantled before litigation commenced.
I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.
Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
Are we not blaming the wrong people?
In his defense, the FBI told him to. Most people would have believed the FBI.
It's so funny scrolling down facebook now where every 20th black box is a post I sorta wanted to see.
It specifically states that this only applies to individuals with 80% of their wealth in tradeable assets. No founder is going to lose control because this doesn’t apply to them!
In many cases it's not the particular comment, it's the particular poster who is shadow-banned, and all of their comments are dead on arrival (to everyone but themselves, the definition of shadow banned). But people with showdead=true and enough karma can vouch for them to resurrect them if they're worthwhile.
If yes, totally immune from consequences.
If not, then was it really "pressure"? In what sense?
Same goes for commentary on Chinese people or Palestinians, though nowhere near as extreme in animosity as that towards the Russian.
A) Loans need to be paid back, with interest. The person must either be selling assets or drawing in other (taxed) income to pay back the loan. A loan could delays the taxes to a future year to let someone buy a house or yacht or whatever without the full tax burden in year 1, but they still ultimately pay all the taxes
B) If they die while still having outstanding loans, their heirs pay a 40% inheritance tax on everything above like 10 million, so there is no magic avoidance of taxes there, just a change in whether it's capital gains tax today or inheritance tax tomorrow.
I'd love to be disproven if someone can explain a real tax loophole, but as far as I can tell, the "Billionaires avoid taxes by taking out loans" thing is completely untrue.
No refunds.
Two justices are blatantly corrupt and should be removed from the court. Two more are there through GOP malfeasance, but there's nothing we can do about them at this point.
No other democracy has lifetime appointments for high court justices.
As far as packing the court, I am personally interested in any kind of reform that depoliticizes it somewhat, whether it be that the SCOTUS acts like the Appeals courts and is a rotation, or the appointed Justices choose a second tier of judges unanimously.
But process only does so much to prevent partisan political interference. At the end of the day, our amendment system and our Congress are broken. It will take something like a mild revolution or major systemic breakdowns to fix it.
Then why did you use that example at first place? Zuckerberg doing the white house's bidding in exchange for whatever perks Zuckerberg gets in return aren't a "country club". It isn't a private matter. It's absolutely a constitutional issue and a free speech issue.
It was awesome. Then it jumped the shark when people realized they could flag posts they don't like with no repercussions.
One of the best uses of HN for me is watching my brain jump to conclusions only to have them slapped down by a well thought out counter argument.
This forum isn't perfect but I haven't found a better public discussion board on the internet. Hat tip to the moderators and others making this happen. Your work is appreciated.
This is a variation of the little boy who cried wolf. If "racism!" is cried for every single little thing that needs discussion, then one day it actually is racism and nobody will be listening.
The former use technology to do things economically to workers we haven't seen since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Like preventing a driver from getting new deliveries if those 10 minutes put him over 1 hour of work. It's robber barron extreme right wing economic policy.
Yeah, the real loophole is step-up in basis with no corresponding tax event. What should really happen is that every step-up in basis should correspond to a tax event or, somewhat more speculatively, only net changes in basis should result in tax events. Incidentally, this would also give everybody access to reduced taxes due to unrealized losses (tax loss harvesting) instead of just people with accountants.
The Biden Harris government is guilty of censorship via a third party.
The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without moderation. Cf. Twitter.
But it wasn’t.
And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”.
It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election.
It was censorship at request of the government and election interference.
We don’t need the WHAT-IF it wasn’t.
Should note:
The Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that because Facebook "began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content" before the government pressure campaign began, platforms, not the Biden administration, bore responsibility for the posts being taken down.
Instead, it's always about how the immigrants should be locked up or deported. And that's always about immigrants from Mexico, never from Canada or other places.
In the context of home ownership, a loan using an asset as collateral translates to a home-equity loan or reverse mortgage. If you want to protect ordinary home-buyers, set an asset value floor of say $20M.
However, I think most share "pledging" [1] by the uber-wealthy is done using company stock as collateral, so you could restrict the tax further by having it apply only to loans taken against stock holdings over some similarly high value floor.
1. https://aaahq.org/portals/0/documents/meetings/2024/ATA/Pape...
It’s not like you could draw a straight line between this action and something you’d categorize as election interference.
One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information from the other side and amplify misinformation from their own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.
In short: Nothing of value was lost. Especially since you can toggle it on.
The old internet was a homogeneous population. Putting the "real world" online creates dimensions of abuse potential and regulatory challenges that didn't exist when a BBS had a couple hundred users who all knew at least some of the AT Hayes codes.
It's just classical trolling in a world where people no longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple: don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting like no troll ever before.
I've moderated a number of forums in my time. And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
(Also, I have zero interest in participating in unmoderated forums. Unmoderated forums are either overrun by spam, or by users who somehow manage to spend 50 hours a week flaming people. Look at any small-town online newspaper where the same 5 people bicker endlessly after every single news story. And if I don't like how a forum is moderated, I find another one.)
And that's a "far right" position? So far as I can tell, even in europe, in most jurisdictions gig workers are treated as contractors rather than employees.
But service owner cannot aggressively cut down on spams and baits because it will mess with the engagement metrics.
Why do people assume we always have to give more and more money to the government? What have they done with the $6 trillion they spend every year so far? What evidence is there that giving them more will improve anything?
Taxes are not for you to punish people you don't like. They're to fund the government enough to perform its necessary functions. That's all.
Whether or not you think any of the companies funded by YCombinator[0] are actually worth their valuation, you have to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC activity, along with the future startups chasing their money, absolutely will move to countries without such a tax.
Again, maybe you actually believe the startup scene in the US is worthless, in which case, go ahead and advocate for an unrealized gains tax Just be honest with yourself that it will entirely shut down sectors that others view as critical to the country's future dominance.
Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to your cause, and your opinion on suppression / amplification will have some weight to throw around.
People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up because the censorship gives them something they want. It's a feedback loop.
I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority.
As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high.
And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.
Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections.
There was a time in America where the notion of an income tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your home were considered far-left authoritarian and unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property, the government surveilling our communications and finances, government oversight and permission required for all activities.
Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and people's notions of what those terms mean is variable. But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.
In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal progressives "won" and became the center and the establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist today.
Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I can think of where America has stayed the same or moved right since WWII.
I think you're looking at the DEI phenomena incorrectly. It's a way for the economically comfortable class to signal virtue without having to experience any of its detractors. Check the Wikis of many DEI proponents and writers. They live in both highly segregated economic and racial neighborhoods.
They live a 1950's far right wing lifestyle at home but wax poetic about DEI for the virtue.
I thought Harris was adopting the President's 2025 budget proposal [1], which doesn't specifically state this is specific to tradable assets, but according to the downvoters I'm wrong about that. As far as I can tell it provides no comment on how "wealth" is determined.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/revenue-p...
I suppose the whole argument is moot anyway as the President doesn't pass a budget, Congress does. And this document is really about communicating priorities, not actual policy.
And if one wants to get really persnickety, Harris didn't actually say anything. Some people working for her campaign did.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/us/politics/kamala-harris...
Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement, but still off the mark.
I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
Chelsea was published on Wikileaks as well.
Daniel Hale was published on The Intercept. They faced no consequences, but they also failed to protect Hale's identity. Hale was then made into something of an example (despite many honors from people praising his bravery).
Al Jazeera (Sami al-Hajj's publisher) have been repeatedly lethally targeted lately (with US made and funded weapons) without much comment from US media.
If this became place for every uncle and aunt it would not be the same :-)
How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".
I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed at how many are not.
I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group of people that like their “alternate facts” and share their HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone that calls their lies out.
It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of those to get comment restricted.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
He isn't suing, and it's up to the rest of us to make our decisions based on how we feel about that.
Bold of you to assume those were people and not also AI
He also said that he doesn't visit Russia anymore, yet a recent FSB leak indicates that he was frequenting there. And before that he heavily marketed Telegram as ad-free forever. And before that there were quite weird populist PR tactics when professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a mess.
YMMV, but I wouldn't trust a single word from this guy.
It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/02/20/james-comers-twitter-h...
Being pressured to enforce your own terms of service by the government ain't censorship.
Zuckerberg is a coward, afraid to stand up to Jim Jordan. What a pathetic letter
Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science will get you pseudo-science.
But do folks you know post? I’m under the impression that the slop churned out for clicks are all that’s left.
Since when science can't be challenged, even when the challenge can be outrageously wrong?
They are the main reason I am still on FB. Occasional posts from friends, and I do post (three psots this mont, and that is pretty typical)
I don’t think it’s as simple as this. This will end up catching normal people (any mortgage, automotive loan, etc) but may result in tricky accounting/loan structuring to avoid having literal collateral for the billionaires you’re trying to hit.
I don’t think that taxing unrealized gains is the solution either, but I also don’t think doing nothing is the solution. This is a very tricky problem without an obvious solution (and it doesn’t help that the ultra-wealthy can fairly easily influence lawmakers).
If it's true then he was reckless in his traveling not just to France.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr (this URL seems to work on a desktop browser only; use the menu items in other situations)
Also, just to add to the above discussion, it's even worse in practice than a tax on unrealized gains because I'll have to pay the same amount of tax every year if my house stays the same value. If it were a tax on the unrealized "gains" of my house, I'd pay $0 if it stayed the same value. And if the value of my house decreases, I'll still have to pay more than $0 in property tax, whereas a capital loss would mean I would pay at most $0.
So, I think I still stand by my sentiment that property taxes are more burdensome than a tax on unrealized capital gains.
Ronald Reagan gave 3 million illegal immigrants permanent resident status.
Most of your writing is a bias filled rant, complete with misinformation (no, the consensus for science was that the lab leak was extremely unlikely, and still remains so today as far as I've seen, again, a few individual researchers thinking it likely does not make consensus).
You seem heavily invested in going against consensus and best practice, and I'm genuinely not interested in that position as I disagree with it. While things could have been better, given the circumstances the scientific community and world governments generally did a good job at protecting people.
On the topic of what should be allowed on social media, there is room for debate there, but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require you have equal standing or that people listen to you. I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any agreement.
“Hold your shares or buy more at a discount” is incredibly out of touch with the average person who will be affected by an economic depression.
"On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related content."
and historically LGBT rights were far left positions. That doesn't mean they're far left positions today. Moreover if being pro-capital (as opposed to being labor) is "far right", then is being pro-labor "far left"? Is there even a "centrist" or non "far-left/right" position?
And there are better ways to deal with our oligarchs than braids dead proposals. Start breaking up their monopolies for one.
I don't think that age is everything, but I feel like it is a significant factor.
At the very least, it is very frustrating as a younger person that the vast majority of our lawmakers are _very_ old. This has (historically, but not recently) been more of a problem with congress: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/aging-congress-boomers/
Facebook is no different. Just bigger.
Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.
1. Assumes the asset in question is publicly traded.
2. Assumes the publicly traded asset has a non trivial amount of trade volume 3. Assumes asset price is relatively stable, moving in a narrow band along a clear trend-line
4. Assumes you have defined the price from the stock information (last trade before close. Daily average, etc)
5. Assumes holder's position is small enough not to affect stock price were they to sell.
And stocks are the easiest to do this with!
Look at the Trump vs NY court case for the value of his house in FL. Unlike the valuation imposed by government fiat, the valuation was agreed to freely by the parties. The courts found it excessive (and it might be) and proposed a valuation so ridiculously low it alone gives Trump grounds to appeal that the judge is either incompetent on the matter or has a personal bias and should anyway have recused himself.
Also HN doesn't censor as much, libertarian-right posters that would've gotten downvoted to hell on reddit actually have an outlet here. Religious right has no outlet on either site
Yes, HN is better than a toxic cesspit full of ignorant teenagers. That's a low hurdle.
This seems bigger than just business, or the House Judiciary Committee. Is this about Israel and fear of what a Harris admin would do (or stop doing)? Either way, there is definitely underhanded intent in this "admission" from ole'Zuck IMO.
You think best practices were followed? ... Really?
And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking about. I do it all the time.
> but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require you have equal standing or that people listen to you
Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should depend on how much money you have?
Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
> I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any agreement.
Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it hadn't been suppressed.
Or if there'd been any serious attempt at investigation - gathering data, scientifically.
Or if we hadn't sent millions of dollars to fund research into this exact thing, and then lied about it as the pandemic raged. That data could have been very useful for policy.
There's a lot to it, and you've shown no sign that you actually understand the arguments. It's all appeals to authorities, who have consistently shown us just how captured they can be for some time now. Think of the 2008 financial crisis, or ivy-league colleges sending riot squads on peaceful protesters, or the APA 'legitimizing' and assisting torture, or the Supreme Court tolerating obvious bribery, Congressional insider trading, etc etc.
It's not my work, since I'm not the one defending putting some comments to death while leaving lots of other, equally stupid comments up.
For the proposal to work you would need an estimate good to within less a percent. Or lawsuits galore.
“Payments can be spread out over subsequent years”
The art is very valuable, financially, because people are willing to pay for it.
However, absent the market clearing the asset, its value is impossible to objectively evaluate. Even if we had an objective function to evaluate art the basis of evaluation is incorrect - the artwork is valuable as an instrument of government corruption
So m, if we can't even agree on the reason why Hunter's artwork is worthwhile, how can we even possibly evaluate it?
2. Properties are purposely, often by statute, assessed far less then they are bought for
3. There are tons of lawsuits around this, imagine the cost of every asset being scrutinized and potentially appealed!
Governments can fund themselves in numerous ways, not just taxes. Either way you'll pay.
The key issue is do we want a federal government expenditure of 20-25% of the economy? I'd say no.
Don’t know what to tell ya. If you share breitbart hot takes, expect possible takedown for disinformation.
Flat earthers are not “legitimately questioning the science”
This is called JAQing off. “Just Asking Questions”. They’re not. They’re muddying waters, often knowingly.
"Do we want the government to tax unrealized gains?"
No. I find it very scary frankly, even though I believe that the top 0.01% of the US population are parasitical and their financial and political clout should be reined in.
If slavery is allowed then it is. If it's a million or 1 it doesn't matter, it's equally allowed. If we give someone the right to freedom that means ALL get the right to freedom.
Honestly, the issue was not about their crypto at all, but about the attitude and how they reacted. It's literally as if someone says "dude, I know a thing about crypto and you might've made a mistake there" and Pavel immediately goes into offensive defense, preaching how they have the best ACM champion PhDs and shifting the burden of proof, basically a canonical Putin/Trump-style of evading an argument.
That's what makes me wary of this guy, not his product.
Can be a public good if it's spent well. The US has spent how many trillions killing innocents the last 25 years? How many trillion were spent building ridiculous layers of redundancy on our nuclear deterrent (that we then smashed)?
Public good!
We have gone 'after it' again and again, making the system more and more complex. So much that you can now out-lawyer the IRS if you have enough money. There is no 'personal' expense, everything is somehow a business need. There is no simple solution to this really. Whatever you do to hurt ten billionaires, the ten million small business owners will face the brunt of it.
>Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the capital gains regardless if there is a loan or not.
That is the point, you don't sell stocks that makes you a billionaire. Instead, you find more and more creative ways to leverage that stock for loans, for deals, for power/control, etc etc. Also see cross collaterals where the same asset is used for multiple purposes at the same time!
When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker news reader isn't.
You've described the wrong type of tax. I make $100m and 20% goes to the government is not controversial. It's my business is valued at $100m and so I pay $20m to the government regardless of how much my company is "making".
> 4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control, this is only about companies post IPO.
Got it. So no more IPOs and every public company is about to go private.
As a side-note: I think limiting the term of justices would overall strengthen the supreme court's integrity and I think the right would agree. Or, at least, the right would regularly agree but they won't now - because they stuffed the court with cronies. Once the situation is in your advantage, surprise! The narrative changes.
Complaining about Indians, complaining about women. But they don't even know that's what they're doing so you can't say "hey stop being sexist". They're surrounded by men all the time, of course it will never click in their heads.
What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-threatens-jail-for-facebo...
Or did I misread?
> but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property
Many of these originating from the right. Because the right is not, and has never been, a party of small government. They want big government, just their big government. That has meant historically enforcing slavery, then segregation, suppressing women's rights, suppressing abortion, dictating what you can do in the bedroom, and on and on and on. These are all conservative policy - and all HUGE government.
> it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously
Yes, this is called the progression of time. This is why people who are unable to change their mind over time end up falling behind and sounding crazy.
Have you ever asked an old dude about how they feel about black people? Whoa! Clearly they grew up in a different time. Some let that shit go like they should, some don't. Those that don't are destined to be left to the past.
Just a few decades ago a slight right winger might be anti-integration. Slight. A far right-winger would be lynching people in their neighborhood. So you're correct - we've moved past that.
And, in 40 years, if I personally don't change my beliefs, I will also sound crazy. To conservatives that's scary or something. To me, that's how the world works. I say either adapt or be relegated to the insane.
I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful - even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but as above, people can avoid that.
And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all the thinking for you?
Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community.
We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform.
There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
Why should you dilute your ownership share just because of some arbitrary number?
What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it quite well, and in fact did predict this.
They are labeled Luddites by those with much better financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of profit to be made.
So far seems working as intended.
What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic. I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis type document, would be a great topic.
It doesn't matter what exact punishment is applied: e.g expulsion from a country club or a fine.
I think anybody can tell this information wasn’t obtained fraudulently. It is notable though that the same press is currently sitting on hacked documents from Iran from the Trump campaign…
You are so full of yourself. HN is great proof that there is zero association between "self identifies as technical" and "intelligence"
I found this out when the 10-year-old son attempted to lecture me on how I should "do my research"--by which he meant, study the Bible.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
... What people are suggesting is to take money from some productive enterprises and put it towards other productive enterprises such as education, medicine, public infrastructure, etc. Enterprises which have more benefits beyond simply increasing the bank account of entrepreneurs and fund managers.
Well yes, because one is trying to get to a positive outcome while the other is trying to confuse and mislead you for ideological reasons.
---
The federal government has the ability to tax "income." Unrealized gains are not income as gains have not been clearly realized.
The closest legal definition for "income" comes from:
The Glenshaw Glass case
In Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955), the Supreme Court laid out what has become the modern understanding of what constitutes "gross income" to which the Sixteenth Amendment applies, declaring that income taxes could be levied on "accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion". Under this definition, any increase in wealth—whether through wages, benefits, bonuses, sale of stock or other property at a profit, bets won, lucky finds, awards of punitive damages in a lawsuit, qui tam actions—are all within the definition of income, unless the Congress makes a specific exemption, as it has for items such as life insurance proceeds received by reason of the death of the insured party, gifts, bequests, devises and inheritances, and certain scholarships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
See case law section
There is great significance and potential conversation here regardless of how accurately Zuck is laying out facts or his intentions behind this letter. We don't want that getting drowned by all-to-predictable echo chamber.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
FWIW, I'm as distrustful of him as the next person but I do think he's deliberately accurate in representation of facts and events in this letter. Including this spicy gem at the end:
> Respectfully,
> /s/ Mark Zuckerberg
https://www.yahoo.com/news/news/mark-zuckerberg-rather-under...
Now obviously things like transaction fees need to be factored in, and timing should matter - you should have the option to increase your stated value if something changes (or even to say "yes, okay, it's really worth X" and keep the item at the higher valuation).
Apologies if I'm missing the sarcasm, but Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and even LinkedIn all suppressed certain stories, keywords, etc. For Twitter and Google at least we have documents proving Biden admin requests. I think there's a whole lot more, but the point stands regardless.
> unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this
"We could make things real hard for you for four years. We were thinking about breaking you guys up actually, you're sort of a monopoly. Anyway, here is our request - we'd never force you though. The choice is yours." [Ominous stare.]
Your retreat into legality and semantics is telling.
You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.
First off, the early internet barrier wasn't "self identification", it was a minimum degree of intelligence and technical ability.
And even so, they're right to say that the payoff for manipulation has become huge. The incentives at play today are totally different than they were, and very often of the lowest common denominator or tragedy of the commons variety.
Not exclusively, no. There's nothing in the definitions of the words 'censor' or 'censorship' that imply it is an act exclusive to governments.
Effectively, something can be censorship even if the government is not involved.
When the government is involved, then it's government censorship.
So just have it kick in above $5M/year or something like that, and have it only apply to securities as assets. Not a lot of ordinary people are taking $5M+/year in loans against their stocks.
Exactly this. It is incredible bizarre how his imagine has taken such a drastic turn from being a "hacker" to a "Jiu-Jitsu bro."
So... is owning piece of a productive company "fake wealth"? Is it fake when you can leverage that valuation to have access to more credit and use that to buy real stuff (like property...)?
Pot, meet kettle.
He keeps apologizing, thinking it will gain him respect, but the general public only sees this as a grand admission of guilt (ostensibly for some crime they didn't know of until now, and still don't know any details about).
Many other CEOs get asked similar questions, and they refuse to engage in the discussion; the result is no news coverage.
There is _always_ a technical solution here. If you can't figure it out, keep thinking. There's never a reason to ban/moderate your core users for 10% rule violations. Instead, that shows a weakness of the software. More transparency helps.
I think back when the internet was new, people just weren't used to anonymity and still behaved like they were in a room with other people. Also the types of people who engaged in those early internet forums may have just been less likely to be showy edgelord trolls - these types took longer to get into the internet.
For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
> StackOverflow
> Twitter Community Notes
These are all examples of vertically integrated corporate-run centralized platforms and therefore have inherently unilateral centralized moderation with the same sets of legal requirements regarding alignment of policies and enforcement. They are all the same model, effectively.
> Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
Nobody. Hopefully.
There are moderation models which do not have these restrictions but they are inherently incompatible with these platforms.
The fediverse (ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads/etc) is one example of a different model. I personally think it's obvious this is not a complete answer, easily observed by drama-driven defederation politics.
We need to be exploring and adopting improved moderation mechanisms and tools for networks like Nostr, BlueSky, Matrix, and keep do the same for the infrastructure layer.
Couple the recent UN convention against cybercrime[0] and the EU "SecEUrity Package"[1] with the arrest of Pavel Durov and I hope some of you reading this will wake up to the shift in relevance and urgency of the topics of decentralization and more serious use of E2EE and signatures. This includes taking a critical look at the TLS layer, PKI, and the roles of companies like CloudFlare and Akamai. I'd say a thing or two about the intertwined constriction of the financial rails, deprecation of cash, and the relevance of cryptocurrency... But let's keep that at that.
[0]: >>41211976 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/effs-concerns-about-un...
[1]: https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...
Even today Wikipedia says "explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." But if you look at the actual evidence it was almost certainly a lab leak.
Seniors and church-goers? Citation needed.
> He was just trying to convince them that this election matters most.
Sure. And he said he was going to "act as a dictator from day 1" (after saying repeatedly that "America could benefit from a dictatorship" and praising what other dictators "have been able to do for their country") for what reason? He said he'd terminate the constitution. The guy who just got indicted again for his BS on and around Jan 6.
Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and there will be so much love, that people will be happy to keep voting us back in".
I don't think he'll succeed. I don't think he'll be elected. But if you think there's not a part of Trump that wants to be President For Life, and will if he thinks he can get away with it, then ... you haven't been listening to him.
The idea that everything was made up of 4 elements (or a rather a combination of those) also assumed a round earth. Early things are heaviest and sink to the bottom, water is lighter than earth, air lighter than water and fire is lighter than air (that’s why the stars, made up of fire, are at the very top)
The church never disputed the earth being round. They were pretty adamant about it being the center of the cosmos though, with the sun orbiting it.
I guess it's not impossible, we do it for property tax on real estate. There are real costs though.
Are we talking about Mar-a-Lago here?
> the valuation was agreed to freely by the parties
Which valuation is that? The one from Lawrence Moens?
> it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall.
I mean, it's not like the CCP isn't doing a superset of the same things...
I understand you're viewing it as a tax increase as the estate pays less tax on death under the current system, but sometimes you need to realise you're stuck in the overton window.
What was the last time you saw someone post porn on StackOverflow? Oh my, HOW do they do it?!
When your ToS are vague enough to apply to just about anything (as most are), it absolutely can be.
>Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and there will be so much love, that people will be happy to keep voting us back in".
No, it means exactly as Trump said it would - he wants to be a dictator, and is willing to terminate the constitution to make it so. Even then, he won't fix jack shit, because that would actually require working, which is something he cannot and will not do. He had a supermajority in congress in his first term...and did nothing besides pass tax cuts for billionaires.
I'd never in my youth imagine that the country I grew up in would elect a guy who trashes the constitution who wears lifts and orange makeup, let alone potentially doing it twice. May you live in interesting times indeed.
> Taxpayers would be treated as illiquid if tradeable assets held directly or indirectly by the taxpayer make up less than 20 percent of the taxpayer’s wealth. Taxpayers who are treated as illiquid may elect to include only unrealized gain in tradeable assets in the calculation of their minimum tax liability.
Which seems to suggest that if someone's wealth is mostly tied up in property or art or a private business, then they wouldn't be taxed on unrealized gains.
God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went against the doomer dogma.
And the worst part is the people with the “wrong think” were right. Covid didn’t have a “4% kill rate”. It almost certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe and definitely wasn’t effective. Lockdowns didn’t work and neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of their lives.
And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of “dangerous thought”, and being yelled at by society.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...
Taxing unrealized capital gains is just going to give these people more loopholes to play with.
But "tax the rich" seems to be the zeitgeist for whatever reason.
The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.
My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.
Freedom of speech and freedom from speech are two sides of the same coin, just as freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. Moderation isn't a violation of free speech, nor is it a farce. It's free speech being exercised as it was intended.
It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment. During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly.
What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate. I actually expected the opposite.
Why? Are you implying that it was okay to censor discussion of some versions and not others?
The market volatility, job volatility, international competitiveness, and impact on innovation and entrepreneurship, that this will cause will be absolutely chaotic.
Assuming it works out exactly as you believe, do you believe this will solve the US's financial issues and burdens? Everything i've read say they expect $300-$500 billion over ten years. Let's just go wild and say we get 1 Trillion a Year, currently the deficit for just 2023 is estimated at 1.5 trillion. Again wouldn't solve this issue, and that's assuming we spent 0 on any more social programs or other welfare programs.
Instead, why not focus on specific tax laws you feel are lax and more importantly hold your representatives accountable for the run-away spending? I assume based on your position you would be encourage to spend more on social programs than we currently do? It's noble.. where's the money coming from though? It's all a bit too communistic to me.
We have seen time and time again that laws passed end up impacting the middle class. Congrats, currency inflation continues to run rampant, your house value is through the roof now.... And because you don't have the capital we're going to seize it for non-payment of unrealized gains.
I have yet to see a well thought out logical response to the impacts this sort of emotional lawmaking will bring.
Can you counter the above genuinely? I truly want to understand.
Also, community norms massively included censorship. BBSes booted people who annoyed the sysops, Usenet had moderation even if it wasn’t very secure and some servers aggressively filtered the feeds they carried for reasons in addition to space consumption.
That’s nostalgia - the BBS world, Usenet, IRC, etc. absolutely had norms and people who violated them were routinely blocked. Where I grew up there were some BBSes run by e.g. evangelical Christians who aggressively restricted the FidoNet channels they carried and the files allowed to be uploaded, and later some of the business-focused ISPs sharply limited things like Usenet (which had its own moderation system). When I ran a FidoNet node, I had to agree to community standards with the boards I peered with because the operators didn’t want to deal with certain types of hassle.
What was different is federation: back in the early online era, someone who was booted off of one system would go somewhere else. The problem with services like Twitter is that they’re centralized and so when people break their terms of service don’t want to go somewhere else, so they complain about censorship when they really mean “free hosting and promotion”.
Why does this come up so much? Yes... Google, Facebook, Instagram, they're all hamstringing their experience to spite you. They benefit and you lose.
The only way to win with politics in social media is to avoid it or promote free speech
Starting with the pentagon, who hasn't ever passed a real audit. Their budget is nearly $1 trillion.
I wonder how much of that goes to kickbacks, fraud, graft, etc.
I'm not an expert on this, and I could be misunderstanding some subtlety here.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-estate-tax-fili...
Here's some funny fail videos...of girls in bikinis. Here's some sport images for the sport you are interested in, with far too revealing angles/images.
So I don't use Facebook any more, and feel much better for it.
Maybe unrealized gains tax can be formulated as "cushy gains tax" if riskiness can be quantified in a reasonable way based on an asset's age and metrics over time. Then if an asset's risk score is above X, you don't pay tax. If it drops below X, you start to pay tax.
This would probably lead to more innovation and fewer monopolies, as people are incentivized to invest in riskier companies, and companies are incentivized to self cannibalize to maintain a healthy risk score.
eg Facebook replacing people's email addresses, one wonders if it was partly a way to fight Google+ >>4151433
That's a bold claim. The tax-averse amongst us say that, but in my experience investment flows to the best ideas / best distribution / best businesses. If those people are in the US because they're citizens, the capital will flow to the US, and investors will take the hit.
It also has all the other problems with estimating the true value of an asset.
Why did Zucc stamp his name on this now, after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020, and willingly censor in favor of the 2020 Biden campaign (covid + Hunter biden).
You've got to wonder why he seems to be signaling to the Trump campaign that he is taking sides.
My guess is either hoping for kickbacks or to thwart retribution for 2020.
This is false; he donated to state and local election offices, not Biden's campaign.[0]
[0]https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-ele...
It doesn't seem like a genie you'll be able to put back into the bottle without reducing the net tax take.
Which news stream was this?
> But election officials have said there is no indication of favoritism in how the money was distributed, according to previous AP reports. The board of the Center for Tech and Civic Life also includes Pam Anderson, a Republican and former elected clerk of a suburban Denver-area county. Republican election officials have also vouched for the program’s impartiality, including Brian Mead, a Republican election director in Licking County, Ohio.
But even if it was true that urban election offices received disproportionately more funding (obviously they received more in general since more people live there), that's still not the same as "putting $450m into Biden's campaign", which is what was claimed.
Things change as we scale, for better or worse.
Also you are still wrong about most of that. The vaccine is certainly safe and effective, masks definitely help, lockdowns definitely helped the overrun hospitals. Yes there were adverse effects in some of these policies unfortunately.
It is a completely ridiculous idea. You can't value "unrealized gains" without using a third-party agency to come up with a number (typically through 409a valuation). And even if the third-party agency comes up with such a number, there is no way to have liquid cash available to pay the tax. To give you an example, say you are a Founder with a Startup that received investments from investors, through various rounds of funding, and the Startup is now valued at $1 Billion. Assume also that you sit on 5 million shares, with 51% equity post all the dilution. You will have to pay tax on $510 million. This $510 million is "unrealized gain". It is an "estimate" of what you would receive if the company was hypothetically acquired for that amount by a bigger company on that particular day of valuation. Assuming 25% tax that would be $127.5 million. Where will you come up with that money? There is no secondary market where you can use your shares to raise that money. You will probably have to take a loan from banks (if they have that sort of liquid cash available for ALL unicorn startup founders/centamillionaires/actual billionaires) and that too with exorbitant interest. Why would anyone want to go through all that hassle? The other option is for you to sell some of the shares to raise money to pay tax. But that is self-defeating because you are devaluing your net worth by the same amount.
It is the most ridiculous idea ever.
EDIT:
> are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios
How is that tax avoidance? You do realize that when they pay the exorbitant interest on the loan, they are paying tax on the interest right? That is typically higher than if they just sold the shares and paid capital gains tax directly. Because here they are paying interest + tax.
High net worth individuals take out loans by risking their shares. Those shares are marked as lein. In other words, those shares get locked with the lender (bank in this case) and in case of the Founder not being able to repay due to bankruptcy, the lender can liquidate the assets (shares) and not be required to get the best value for it in the market.
This is not tax avoidance by any means. This is Capitalism 101: putting YOUR capital to use the way you see fit and taking personal risk along the way.
> households worth more than $100 million would pay an annual minimum tax worth 25% of their combined income and unrealized capital gains.
To be clear, Norway has also had a wealth tax for years. Summarised: The wealth tax rate is 0.7%(local)+0.3%(national) and is calculated based on assets exceeding a net capital tax basis of NOK 1.7 million for single/not married taxpayers and NOK 3.4 million for married couples. (Ref: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/norway/individual/other-taxes)
And regarding "taking out loans against their own share portfolios": Yes, I agree, this is genius tax avoidance strategy. And, I am pretty sure the interest paid on that loan would be tax deductible in the US! Most large investment banks have a separate trading desk that facilitates these loans via private bankers.
> More than eight-in-ten White evangelical Protestant voters who attend religious services frequently (85%) voted for Trump in the most recent election, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/30/most-whit...
> White born-again or evangelical Christians made up 24 percent of the electorate in the 2022 elections, according to the media consortium exit poll conducted for CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. Black (11 percent) and Latino (11 percent) voters and those from a union household (18 percent) combined to constitute 40 percent of the vote.
Source: https://rollcall.com/2023/06/28/be-skeptical-of-the-wave-of-...
> When calculating wealth tax, you must include any assets that you own at the end of the year. These assets must generally be valued at what the asset is worth on the open market. However, an exception is made in the case of housing, and a lower value, known as the tax value, must be used when calculating wealth tax.
Two things stand-out to me:
(1) "assets must generally be valued at what the asset is worth on the open market". I guess there will be GAAP accounting rules about how to value less liquid assets. Tradable securities are easy to value; other things, like artwork are less easy to value. In the case of a car, an accountant could reasonably use an online used car marketplace to find a value. (The US has something called the Kelley Blue Book.)
(2) "an exception is made in the case of housing". It sounds like there is a totally different set of rules for taxing housing (land+building).
- Taxes - debt financing - seignorage
The latter two aren't taxes, but people end up paying for the expenses anyway.
Governments can also plunder other country's money. While this sounds very Roman empire, it's still a thing. Case in point freezing another country's foreign exchange reserves, refusing to return their gold, confiscating the interest on the reserves, etc
It is, at worst, "popularity makes right." Which, to be clear: there are philosophies that take significant umbrage with that (there's a reason the US government isn't a strict popular vote for every position).
But the complaint seems to boil down to "I want people to go do something else because... I know they should." Not exactly compelling. People know themselves better than strangers do.
This isn't a claim that might makes right. It's a challenge to replace theory of how people want to engage with the world with practice. I suspect (because we keep seeing the same patterns over and over) that a replacement for Facebook is going to either not catch on like Facebook did or is going to find the need for heavy-handed moderation at some point in the not-too-distant future.
The banks agreed to the valuation and under no coercion agreed to lend money with it as collateral. Trump pays off that loan and the banks are made whole.
By contrast my school board telling me my house is worth 600 k instead of 400 k scares the shit out of me. I can't agree to it and my only recourse are the courts. The school board has lawyers on staff so it costs them nothing if I sue.
There also was a story when he claimed that Telegram is developed abroad but it turned out that many of Telegram employees actually worked at the same beautiful historical office building where Vkontakte was located at that time.
Also, a fun fact, when he was a CEO of Vkontakte, one day he was throwing banknotes into the crowd from a window in that notable historical building. Maybe he was conducting an experiment with universal basic income, who knows.
This is a rather large assumption. One's assets might be invested inefficiently, as those who financed Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter have learned to their cost.
> And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking about. I do it all the time.
Snake oil comment. You feel you get to be the judge of what is valid not actual consensus of experts. Nope. No thanks.
> Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should depend on how much money you have?
That's how it is currently. I'm not sure how you change that without going to something like communism, which surly you are not suggesting.
> Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
100% yes. State secrets exist for a reason. If you mean decisions on what information people are allowed to disseminate then still yes. There are lots of classes of information that are rightly restricted. Excluding state secrets, things like child porn and other people's personal information are good examples. If you are advocating for some sort of anarchy then go find yourself your own island to ruin please.
> Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it hadn't been suppressed.
Said like every crank with a pet theory. If you want your idea to be taken seriously it's on YOU to convince people and demonstrate evidence of them. It's not others obligation to listen to your crap, let alone fund you to "research" and spread your ideas.
This is just wrong. The very low valuation was not proposed by the NY court, but by the Palm Beach County tax appraiser. This is because the property is deeded for use as a social club rather than a private residence (a condition of sale when Trump purchased it iirc, and one which affects future disposal of the property) and as a commercial entity the value is appraised as a multiple of business income.
Yet, they still pressured Facebook to suppress truth and opinion they just didn’t like.
You can chose to not defend bad actions.
Even for HN, this is an ideologues bridge too far.
Edit: not ok for govt to coerce them into it though
I know its progressive to consider sex work a perfectly good career choice but some of us still think its worth encouraging children to have some degree of modesty and keep sex a taboo topic to be explored with someone you trust.
And if you haven't noticed prostitution on instagram and twitter you just don't know the lingo, but basically city names + dates in the bio is a solicitation to DM for rates. "NYC 9/12-9/22, Miami 10/20-31", that kind of thing. Actually the one thing that impressed me about twitter is how much of a bubble this is, you don't stumble upon porn accounts in general, but once you follow a couple of accounts that promote sex work even politically (which I think people totally have the right to do, I do prefer the nordic model to whatever america is doing) you'll see hundreds of these.
Is that because the people making the loan aren't sophisticated enough to price those securities correctly in this context and so are being taken advantage of?
> a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people
To use assets without a single universal price as collateral? I think everyone does this.
This doesn't work if the shares have low-to-zero liquidity, similar to housing or land. In environments where it can take days to find a buyer, the price slippage could be more than the tax itself.
This is effectively similar to nationalization, along with the pros and cons that come with it.
You desperately need to remove yourself from communities of perpetual victimhood.
All I said was that they are not legitimately questioning the science, because they are not.
The one thing that is extremely interesting is that even the people who loudly shout for free speech do not themselves believe in it, as they constantly try to cancel all sorts of free speech and expression essentially constantly.
Very very few people believe in absolute free speech.
No, it's because using stock (and other securities) this way allows them to "convert" the stock into money without actually realizing the gains. Thus they derive benefit from the gains without actually paying capital gains tax.
I was on tik tok today. I was fed a post that used an AI audio clip of Trump calling republicans dumb and stupid.
People thought it was real. They comment and believe it. The clip has been reused hundreds of time to make new posts. It will reach millions. This is one example.
There is government meddling in social media. It’s not always ours. That’s the MORE concerning part
They're deriving secondary benefit from ownership and they're paying interest for the facility with the ultimate expectation that they pay back the loan and the stocks never actually trade hands.
This is not much different from any interest bearing account. Should it be that you have to take all your money out of savings and ensure you earn nothing from it if you intend to offer it as collateral on a loan?
His line "we should not compromise our content standard" tela me he doesn't personally use Facebook. I can't scroll down more than a few screen length before closing the app due to poor quality ads and recommended content. I rarely see posts from my own network.
This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".
The difference is taxes. Interest on a savings account used as collateral is still taxed. Gains used as collateral in a loan are not taxed.
The parent poster is suggesting this loophole be closed - that the practice either be disallowed or considered realizing the gains for tax purposes.
I’m using Facebook wrong
> It’s simply pay for use.
This is false. Toll roads are "pay for use". Capital gains tax is, objectively, not "pay for use".
> Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton
There's zero evidence that supports a strong correlation between how many assets someone has and how much value they've obtained from government services. This is just entirely fabricated.
> and owes a lot back into it
...which they've already actually paid through taxes on profits.
This bundle of falsehoods is just a thin facade around the emotional plea that "someone having more money than me is bad, and I should get some of it".
The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize the gains, even though you are unlocking capital.
Of course, in the bear market you could get a margin call and have to liquidate at unfavorable prices (and pay taxes then). But not if you are keeping a big enough buffer.
Proposing that we should continue to throw more money at infrastructure, before diagnosing and fixing the problems that are causing that inefficiency (at which point, sure, double the infra budget - as long as we're getting good value, the absolute amount can go up as far as I'm concerned), is straight-up malicious.
The only people who make the argument to keep increasing the infrastructure budget before fixing the problems are those generically interested in throwing more money and power at the government, not those actually concerned about infrastructure (who will seek to fix the problem first).
I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.
I post a lot less than I used to as well. At least in part this is because my feed is drowning in unwanted noise. Facebook's desparate attempts to wave stuff in my face 'for engagement' drive me away from posting more, so it becomes a vicious circle, driving down engagement, making people post less, round and round we go.
Maybe I'm weird, but if my friends aren't posting much, that's OK, that's what I came here to check. Instead I'm assaulted by noise, quite a lot of it either scammy or offensive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=<CommentUserID>&by=<ReplyUserID>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang>
That (presently) turns up two admonishments dating back 11 months and two years: <>>37423572 > and <>>33132910 >.
The first of those (11 months ago) is where the account was banned.
If you have specific questions on accounts, users, sites, comments, posts, etc., which you feel are improperly flagged, killed, or banned, you can always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I do this frequently, usually with suggestions (e.g., title or URL changes), sometimes with questions (earlier today a site which showed up dead, turns out it's a hard paywall, which I eventually tracked down dang's comment on, though not in an easily-searchable way).
Obviously I am over-simplifying a little, but this is a real thing. Here's a more comprehensive explanation: https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich...
<>>41375637 >
That seems like the issue here, but nobody seems to care.
You’re not being taken down for the legitimate take. You are being taken down for the other wild assertions, conspiracy theories and lies that you cook up with them.
You people will write like “some stupid n*** shot up a grocery store”
Then you get taken down and whine that “I just made a comment about news that really happened”. And then the real reason it was taken down was the n-bomb you dropped.
The posts you claim are censored are not being censored for the reasons you are claiming.
SVB would still be around today if it was possible to convince people to not panic sell
The media then gets favors if they comply. There's no law against a politician playing favorites in the media.
The media can also choose to ignore. It's not in the White House's interest to make enemies in the media.
While the Algorithm(tm) is complete garbage, you could also probably add less Totally Random Persons(tm) to your "friends" list.
If Totally Random Persons(tm) are getting added automagically, we have bigger problems.
You go to https://www.facebook.com
That's literally it. If you don't have a suite of adblockers and extensions like FB Purity installed, you'll probably see a ton of crap. If you don't see a ton of crap, I would love to know what sort of wizard spell you have cast to ward it off.
Giving money to ineffective organizations is throwing good money after bad. I'd love to see competent government that can effectively use funds, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for it these days. There needs to be deep reform and anti-corruption efforts. Good luck doing that without the status quo powers pulling out all their dirty tricks.
When you are wildly wealthy you are not risking anything, risk is merely an input to the math equation that only goes one direction. Up.
That's quite a claim.
You wrote that I’m sure doing your very best to believe it. Bless your heart.
Wow. Well, I can tell how your mind works. Go ahead and keep all that to yourself, yea?
Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.
It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
It’s been years and I’m still mildly annoyed about losing it.
I’m still waiting for the media to tell me what “I want to fold clothes with you in the bathroom at Whole Foods” meant.
> “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech," Alito wrote. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."
It seems like the court had agreement that government coercion did happen. They threw the case out because they couldn’t draw a direct correlation to harm to the specific people that brought the allegations up.
Pointing out that toll roads are "pay for use" is factually true.
Capital gains tax is, factually, not "pay for use". There's no usage that is being metered.
You also claimed "Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton" and I pointed out that there is no evidence that supports a strong correlation between how many assets someone has and how much value they've obtained from government services. This is, again, a fact - had you had any evidence against this, you could have put it here, in your reply. But no, you didn't have evidence, so you tried to (incorrectly) portray it as an "opinion".
You calling my true statements "opinions" proves that you cannot differentiate between opinions and reality. The fact that you think that pointing out that capital gains tax is not pay for use is a conjecture proves that you literally cannot tell the difference between facts and opinions.
The content that's filling the void is just filler, be it AI, clickbait, memes, etc.
Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response.
> It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading.
> And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth...
As is all of this.
> It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy.
That's literally what you're doing.
> It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
The media doesn't seem too interested in figuring out the actual impact, so I don't think any of us really know if it was balanced or not. But this doesn't strike me as the type of thing we want billionaires doing regardless.
But yeah the 10th image in the patent literally has
> Say "McDonald's" to end commercial
with a picture of a man standing up and shouting "McDonald's!" as an example.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b4/2e/a1/779dd8d...
The wealthy and powerful don't benefit from citizenship. When you have wealth you can just pay for what you need or want. It's the common person who needs the benefits and protections that come from citizenship.
You're on the right path, pointing out how counter-culture liberals won but they are in fact right-wing. They LARP as liberals/leftists.
It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like.
Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.
1. Biden was promoting - and willing to sign into law - a border bill written by a Republican; it very nearly passed as it initially had bipartisan support before being scuppered by a presidential candidate.
Besides, even for my interests, I don't want to see a bunch of random if topical chaff. It's extremely rare for the algorithm to pick up on the kind of advanced, nuanced, and obscure discussions that I want to see, simply because they are invisible to it by their very nature.
Plus for whatever reason the algorithm thinks I'm super big on some things that make absolutely no sense... for example one recurring topic seems to be posts about various corporate logos and how they are constructed, yet I have never willingly engaged with anything on FB having to do with logos or graphic design. Another favorite topic it likes to show is really bad humor, like jokes so basic and elementary that I have a hard time understanding how anyone finds them funny. Oh and the obligatory horny bait.
It's nice that you've somehow managed to cajole your feed into something you can tolerate, but your post strikes me as suffering from the same kind of myopia common amongst tech workers who have never stepped outside their bubble. We as a group need to be pushing back much harder against the algorithmic slop that seems to dominate pretty much all popular social watering holes.
I can explain it to you with a simple example:
Imagine, for instance, you're making 50k a year and have a brokerage account that has appreciated by 100k and that you're being taxed 20% on unrealized gains in year x. In year x+1, say your account falls back to where it was before. You paid 20k plus another 10k, and you will need to set aside another 10k. In essence, your income has been reduced to 10k, which could make daily life impossible for many people making 50k annually, especially those with families.
Even if losing 100% is unlikely, someone could lose control of their company. Say I own 51% of my company. Harris wants 25%. I sell my shares to cover it… if my math is right, I then own 38.25%, the year after that, 28.6%, then 21.5%, 16, 12, 9… the control is gone. I lost my company. Let’s say the company was worth $1B. At 9% ownership I’m now under the $100m net worth threshold. So I would have paid $420M in taxes. Then let’s say the stock tanks… I have been selling off shares flooding the market, the direction has been taken from me, the decisions aren’t good and I’m powerless to stop it, the company’s value drops by 85%. Had I never paid any taxes on unrealized gains, my stock would be valued at $76.5M, below the threshold of the tax. But instead, I paid the government $420M, my new position is $13.5M, and the company I founded and build from the ground up is slipping away.
This may be dramatic, but it could happen. $13.5M isn’t nothing, but it is when the government taxed you 420M.
And what happens when all this stock is sold and floods the market? Does the market crash? When the market tanks, what happens to everyone’s 401k, the middle class… they get screwed.
Someone tell me why I’m wrong, because this is there my mind goes with this stuff.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing more bootstrapped companies staying private, instead of everyone going after VCs who are looking for a big return, either through going public or an acquisition.
Do we make them give 20% of their unrealized paint to members of the public so they can make their own paintings, hoping they too will fetch $1m each?
If the IRS took control of 20% of the paint, borrowed against it to fund the state, but then the artist decided to quit does the government somehow force them to paint?
If the artist said this ahead of time and this was priced into the future value of their paintings (now worth $0 because there will be 0 paintings) does the IRS revalue their unrealized gains down to $0bn?
As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.
It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.
Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
Is the centralization of power bad?
If yes to both, then the centralization of money is bad.
You have no argument against this. The best you can do is to attempt to refute the notion that money is tantamount to power, which will be laughable. But please do try.
He is making sworn statements to the house judiciary committee.
Are you saying he is lying and the BidenHarris admin is telling the truth?
Why would he do that? And why does all the evidence of censored accounts on Facebook match up with the Twitter Files and what everyone saw happening?
>It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources
It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources. Without them, the resource wouldn't exist. And if you punish them a lot, such people will all go somewhere else, and then you'll have no businesses or jobs and everyone's standard of living will be worse. This has been demonstrated historically countless times, every single case of the government mass-appropriating the wealth of the wealth led to extreme poverty; Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia.
>Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
Negative as defined by some left-leaning social scientists. Conversely, punitive taxation has been overwhelmingly shown by economists to lead to reduced growth in people's standard of living as measured by income and GDP.
Meta just banned all accounts of the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as NYU's People’s Solidarity Coalition.
I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:
- Racist shit like: https://x.com/barrystantonGBP/status/1828414194548461801, https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/1828498157589938272,
- People got bombed to shit: https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828380272322322536
- People got shot: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828409629329760769, https://x.com/datsjackedup/status/1828372131727720509, https://x.com/Haqiqatjou/status/1828518967578706415
- People fighting each other: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828440833835573529
- People got mutated: https://x.com/_NicoleNonya/status/1828212958742081803, https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828241017096614366
- Also post about this news: https://x.com/soaringeagle555/status/1828335179141963944
And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.
I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?
At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.
Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.
Did you ever try Facebook purity (FBP) ?
If yes, did the forcing of chronological content into the feed, not work? Or did Facebook finally kill the widget?
FBP was the only thing that made FB bearable for a while, but im curious to other peoples experience with it
"Stricter private messaging settings for teens To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don't follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who "
With things like this, and now several states requiring that you must be 18 to use any social media, (because parents can't parent apparently?)
I wonder how much of a problem this really is?
I get it that smart teens will find ways to access naughty things no matter how many barriers are put in front of them..
But at some point we must look at parents and ask why 'children' would find it fine to spend lots of time staring at thirst traps.. I know kids that if someone was to put stuff like that in front of them they would push it away and tell multiple adults about it..
Of course I have also known parents that let their kids play grand theft auto at 6 years old.
So while I have tried to tell parents for years about what exists on game consoles and the internet and how they need to not only pay attention, but have open dialogue about sharing what they see and such.. it seems to me that most parents actually do not care what their kids see on the internets..
You could of argue that parents did not know what could be found online 20 years ago, but today's children had their parents grow up with unfettered access (most of them I believe) - and so they know and they don't care (again most I believe).
There are some vocal small groups screaming that there is a need to save the children, but I would assume most of them have kids with cell phones without any blocking systems installed.
That's not to say all. I do know a family that does not let any of their children watch TV, use the internet or cell phone - all their kids, 6yrs - 16 ..no TV even not at all and they would not even think about sneaking to use a cell phone behind their parents back.
Sadly as far as the world having a culture that onboards into sex work I believe has more to do with the rent is too damn high, food costs too much and people want designer / name brand things. If most women (and men) could easily earn a living wage within a few blocks of where they live, there would be much less onboarding period.
Sadly I have given up hoping that rent will be cut in half and wages will double anytime soon, if anything, I'd bet that if the wages double I think we'll see the same with the rent and food.
Let's distinguish two things here.
One is, you have ten thousand groups and they each have local moderators. If you're a gigantic tool, you get banned from 90% of groups you join and the other 10% are a trash fire. But this primarily happens on the basis of temperament rather than ideology. Most groups don't ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint, they ban you for being a jerk or a spammer, and the ones that do ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint are the ones that become a radicalized trash fire with a reputation for abusive moderation and decline in popularity. Also, you don't have to care much about them because there are plenty of other groups that don't ban you for engaging in civil debate, most people are members of many independent groups, and there are consequently plenty of well-trafficked places for civil debate to take place.
The other is, the platform itself does the moderation and there is nowhere to go to escape their errors without losing the massive network effect of the consolidated platform. The platform at large becomes a radicalized trash fire but the network effect keeps people from abandoning it, so the platform not only loses the incentive to stop that from happening, it becomes a target for capture by authoritarians who want to censor their opponents.
One of these things is not like the other.
This just how effective the censorship was; the actual peer-reviewed science shows that lockdowns did not in fact save lives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut...
Try it out. I'm pretty happy with it; managing the feed doesn't feel like trying to hold back the tides anymore.
You’re still going to end up making a higher valuation on the stock market than you would trying other means to avoid this tax.
I used to use it like a daily "here's what I'm up to today" blog, because my friends and family would see that and it was a cool way of sharing my life with them.
The, somewhere around 2014-ish, it was suddenly unsafe to post normal stuff without getting criticised. I had a whole series of arguments with folks about things that I or they had posted. I stopped posting as much, and started checking all my posts first, and deleting old ones.
Then in 2017 I got a stalker who messaged all my friends and family with shit about me. I had to make my friends list private and unfriend a bunch of people (no great loss). It felt even more unsafe.
Now I post travel pics and that's it. I miss the old safe space.
> Plaintiffs may have succeeded if they were instead seeking damages for past harms. But in her opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that partly because the Biden administration seemingly stopped influencing platforms' content policies in 2022, none of the plaintiffs could show evidence of a "substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable" to any government official. Thus, they did not seem to face "a real and immediate threat of repeated injury," Barrett wrote.
All of the incumbents were established with network effects long before then, they are very sticky and unaccountable. Not Ma Bell level of natural monopoly but the network effects are pretty strong.
Look at Twitter under Musk, your standard beltway liberal type still uses it even though they hate him.
Created, or taken the fruits of others’ labor? Obviously, no Amazon-sized company is the work of a single person. Was the pharaoh, sitting in luxury, more responsible for the creation of the pyramid as the architect or the common slave building it?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/all-the-texts-fox-ne...
We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying.
Also, the US government spends more money than it accrues every year, so there isn't any consolidation of money happening in the government (nor will there be if taxes go up).
All companies eventually go to zero and some of them do it without a lot of notice. How many people in the year 2000 expected Kodak to be bankrupt in a dozen years?
But that isn't even the main problem.
Suppose you own 51% of your company, i.e. a controlling interest. The company is doing very well under your leadership -- value doubles. But then you have to pay tax on the unrealized gain. The shares are your main asset so the only way to pay is to sell them. Now you no longer have a majority of the shares and control of the company moves to the soulless Wall St vampire squid which only cares how much money they can extract from your customers by any means necessary.
But it gets worse, and this time the "worse" includes for the government. You're forcing people to sell their shares in order to pay the tax, but selling shares, at scale? That lowers the stock price. Which lowers the amount of the capital gain. Which lowers the government's revenue. And the value of everybody's pension fund and 401(k).
Then it gets even worse for the government. Normally the way the stock market works is that it will go up by a little over 10% a year but then once in a while it will fall by 50% as the economy enters a recession. Right now what happens is that investors buy the stock, it goes up little by little, and when the recession hits they give back some of their gains but are still ahead of where they were when they bought the stock ten or twenty years ago. When the recession hits most of them still have an unrealized gain, so anyone who sells shares is still reporting a gain and paying taxes. Which the government desperately needs at that very moment to deal with the recession, because their other revenues will be down too. If the government taxes unrealized gains then government revenue from capital gains goes to zero when a recession hits, because basically nobody has a capital gain that year and the tax revenue from all past capital gains has already been spent. If you do this, the next time there is a recession the government is screwed.
> Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free.
Which is exactly what the government does with unrealized capital gains. If they demand the money right now, it forces the shares to be sold, and since we're talking about something that happens at national scale, on net they'll be sold to someone outside the jurisdiction who doesn't pay US taxes. So the government gets the money now but they lose the future tax on the capital gain from the money that would have stayed invested in the stock market.
In other words, they get $100 now but that $100 in tax would have otherwise stayed invested and each year it would increase by 12%. Meanwhile the government is paying less than 4% on multi-year bonds. So tax revenue that would be collected by allowing the money to continue to be invested is by itself nearly as much as the government would pay to borrow it instead, before you account for the effects on capital gains of depressing stock prices by forcing sales.
Doing this could very realistically lower government revenue.
You see a problem and you refuse to fix it, and instead look for a root cause that should be addressed instead, that will then fix the problem itself.
The problem with that kind of thinking is that that’s not how the real world works. The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. But people with RCS try to solve it through jobs, training, education, etc. All those things are nice but they won’t fix the problem, which is that people are homeless.
Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
Concerns without evidence are nothing. Is there any evidence at all this occurred? Why aren't Republicans attacking Musk donating 10's of millions of dollars to directly help Trump?
I mean, we know why they aren't attacking him. Because they're complete hypocrites.
By the end of ten years you have barely a quarter of what you started with. If that was 51%, it's now 13% and the MBAs come to ruin your company.
Taxes don’t fund the government. All of the money the government collects via taxes is written off in a spreadsheet and disappears. The government then creates money, however much money it wants to, in order to fund its activities.
I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.
You learned in school that electrons orbit atoms, but that’s not how it really works is it? Trying to reason with a simplified model in mind can only lead to misunderstanding.
Electrons don’t have orbits. Capital gains aren’t paint.
What you need is to remove barriers to competition and enforce antitrust laws.
This is inaccurate. We used to have higher tax rates on paper but nobody actually paid them because the tax code of the time had many enormous loopholes that have since been closed, which happened at the same time as the rates were lowered. Real government revenue per capita has been increasing over time.
Taking money away from billionaires just reduces their power, it doesn’t make any difference to the government itself.
And btw, the status quo you mentioned is funded by the billionaires that would be affected by this tax.
The discourse as I interpreted it, was that there was a need to censor those who are expressing opinions that are not "legitimate".
Have you considered how this is supposed to work? If being homeless means you get a free home, millions of people would purposely become "homeless" so they could eliminate their housing costs. Also, homes are quite expensive, especially in areas with high homelessness, so where does the money come from?
Meanwhile one of the primary actual causes of homelessness is zoning that prevents new housing from being built, causing people to be unable to afford it. If you just have the government buy up existing housing stock for the homeless, the scarcity is not resolved at all, you just cause new people to become homeless because you remove the housing they'd have bought from the market.
To actually solve it you can't just do the naive "have the government pay for it" thing, you have to understand the root cause, which is that you have to not just give housing to the homeless but build new housing across the overall market so it isn't in undersupply.
> Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
This is exactly the same level of not thinking it through. Mark Zuckerberg has billions and it gives him control over Facebook. But if you take his money and leave Facebook, someone will still be the CEO and that person will still have all of that power. The problem is not the money, it's the size of the company.
Should government spend 25% percent of GDP? Who cares. Governments shouldn’t aim for a specific number, they should spend enough to make sure full employment is achieved, according to saving desires and the private market’s appetite for investment.
Whatever the private market isn’t willing to invest, the government should take care of.
Whether that’s 10% or 50% is literally irrelevant.
My original account still exists and my face is in the videos as well but but I have no way to log in and support couldn’t or wouldn’t help me.
The public at large however is not informed enough to have a legitimate opinion.
> hypothetical tax on people
It is literally part of Biden's tax proposal and is endorsed by Kamala's campaign. None of us are making this up.
Free speech doesn't require a platform to work nor any intermediary. It is a boundless idea.
Either way, I’m far more concerned about Trumps $4k tax on me (in addition to the tax hike he implemented on me when he was president but I’ll let that slide).
Blaming Biden/Harris for this is an incredibly revisionist take thats surprising considering its very recent 'history'.
Cool, ok.
"Millions upon millions of posts might have been deleted, researchers threatened, media and social media leaned on in various ways, all documented, but the consensus is accurate. Science is a popularity contest, and you're snake oil".
Sssure.
"Money is speech, and the only alternative I can imagine is communism".
Sounds like a you problem tbh. A deep one.
"State secrets can include genuinely bad stuff, so 100% of everything they censor must be bad. Go ruin an island if you want better".
Sane take bud. I actually hate improving things where my family and I live. Also my solution to scientists being censored at global scale was in fact to move to a private island and become a dictator. How did you know? So impressive.
"The lab leak theory is for cranks. If those censored, pressured and threatened scientists wanted people to see their evidence, they should have demonstrated their evidence. Also they don't have a right for their evidence to be seen, or a right to investigate for evidence."
I'm out.
> Actually, I think you are making this up.
Quoting New York Times: "The vice president supports the tax increases proposed by the Biden White House, according to her campaign."
...
"That’s how much more revenue the federal government would raise if it adopted a number of tax increases that President Biden proposed in the spring. Ms. Harris’s campaign said this week that she supported those tax hikes, which were thoroughly laid out in the most recent federal budget plan prepared by the Biden administration."
...
"The tax plan would also try to tax the wealthiest Americans’ investment gains before they sell the assets or die. People with more than $100 million in wealth would have to pay at least 25 percent on a combination of their income and their unrealized capital gains — the value of the appreciation in the stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets that they own but haven’t sold. The so-called billionaires-minimum tax could create hefty tax bills for people like Elon Musk who derive much of their wealth from stock they own."
> Either way, I’m far more concerned about Trumps $4k tax on me (in addition to the tax hike he implemented on me when he was president but I’ll let that slide).
He cut taxes did not increase taxes. This just tells me you are a lying shill for the Kamala Harris campaign. Do better.
Yes, Japanese users love to jump around NSFW borderlines, dominate social network mediascape with risque contents, hates clarifying standards, opposes that idea of harm mentioned, and rapidly develops political gadgets to support tightly PDCA'd and manually fabricated data if in any way pressured towards obsolescence. For any amount of exposure of human skin, humanlike contours or messaging, Japanese users come up with ways to sexualize that and digress fast into the depth. And Japanese content strive and dominate with unparalleled productivity, relentlessly pushing down that borderline.
It's also just Japanese.
Really, frankly, I don't think it has to be any way softened or sugarcoat. None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior. Only Japanese and terminally Japan-influenced people do that. There's no French Battalion of Risque Artists Without Ethics that obliterates Mastodon, but Japanese content creators rapidly self-organize into one. There's an all time global YouTube Superchat amount statistics[1] kept by a Korean company, and it's, like that.
And while at it, the globally offending Japanese users don't benefit a lot from social media platforms being a planet scale unitary tower of Babel, other than that they're given a free pass to go anywhere and mess up stuffs randomly. So the rest of the world is just self inflicting harm by help spreading those locally-relevant globally-sketchy contents and influences one-way globally. I'm almost feeling sorry for a lot of what are locally colloquially known as "impression zombies", Sub-Saharan African/Middle Eastern/Indian subcontinent spammers trying to take advantage of Twitter viewcount payout program only to be hopelessly confused and devastated by Japanese content impossible to blend into or even understand, like kittens thrown into a mirror maze.
So, if the world don't want to play the game of dealing unbeatably cheap, high quality, and ethically incompatible Japanese content, the solution should be to completely cut it off. Just split the network, its operations, ethical standards, all into separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option.
It should be that easy.
1: https://playboard.co/en/youtube-ranking/most-superchatted-al...
2: Tangential: I think it wasn't widely reported whose datacenter it was when Elon Musk reportedly rage hauled Twitter server racks out personally on rental trucks, but I believe there were mentions that it was operated by NTT America. NTT of course stands for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. So he couldn't handle Japanese company in custody of Twitter. lol.
For me, it’s as simple as: you can only tax actual dollars, not unrealized, hypothetical capital gains. What’s the best way to get that point across?
- sex work is against Instagram TOS and they take active efforts to ban people doing it, including design features such as limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans
- because that's where the audience is and advertising there is effective, there's an entire industry in working out how to promote sex work on Instagram without getting banned
=> Insta ends up as part of the sales funnel despite actively trying not to be. See also Twitch. There is of course no evidence of them intentionally onboarding people into this, it's an emergent feature of being a site that posts images. Then have to censor aggressively, and even then sex work exists at a sort of "censorship shoreline".
On the other hand, Reddit and Twitter have never really cared, and only with some campaigning effort have they been made to censor nonconsensual intimate images. Twitter made its pornbot problem worse by selling bluetick promotion.
It's not hard to imagine social media discussion being made a lot more meritocratic, and a lot less censorious.
Vital scientific perspectives on topics that affect literally billions of people ought not be secretly censored for political purposes by non-scientists. That isn't really a huge demand; it's pretty basic freedom and science and health stuff.
Nowhere in my comment did I claim free speech requires a platform or an intermediary, they happen to be relevant in the context of the discussion we're having, just as television would be relevant to a discussion of free speech in broadcasting. Free speech doesn't require telecommunications infrastructure, yet it still applies, and broadcasters (even of public access stations) have the right to refuse to air content they don't want to.
You're the one putting limits on free speech despite also calling it a boundless idea.
Said blowhard moving to using generative AI to come up with even crazier nonsense makes no difference. There is no logical reason for you, outside of whatever entertainment value you can find, to be listening to him in the first place and, even if only deep down, you know that.
Yeah I'd wait for her to specifically say that before you sell your unrealized gains in a panic and flee the country. The self martyrdom thing is super weird imo.
> He cut taxes did not increase taxes.
Look up the SALT deduction cap as part of the TCJA. I paid ~$3k more than I would have if the SALT deduction was intact and I itemized. I am a shill for the Kamala campaign though, because I support America.
Correct, the choice was theirs. They probably didn't want to keep spreading ivermectin conspiracy theories, it's bad for advertisers.
We should be demanding ruthless efficiency from the government, not dreaming up new ways for them to take our stuff.
And so he is now attacking Biden strategically to build relations with Trump.
I'm saying he might have found the circumstances distasteful but he didn't find them a violation of his rights worthy of a lawsuit.
I don't personally have a lot of respect for the people still using Twitter. I deleted my account before Musk bought them when they responded to a notorious TOS violator being elected President by changing their TOS.
All we have to do to hold the incumbents accountable is log off their service and log on to another one. Nearly 100% of the power in this situation is in the hands of the users.
You feed the Algorithm(tm) garbage and it returns you garbage, and somehow it's all the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
One of the reasons I'd like this policy even more if the shares were sold to the government and the government is forbidden from voting outside of exceptional (e.g valuation crash over x years) circumstances.
But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
And at the exact same time, the exact same people were "asking" for scientific discussion of many kinds to be shut down across Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, among many others?
Because it wasn't just Ivermectin. It was the lableak hypothesis, investigating the WIV, following back GOF funding, vaccine contracts, vaccine side-effects, vaccine effectiveness, lockdown effectiveness, natural immunity discussion, etc etc etc; all restricted and suppressed to fit whatever the Biden admin decided.
That's not hyperbole, that's simple and well documented fact. And, as was directly pointed out in this letter/article, the Biden admin wasn't above using lies to shut down politically inconvenient (and true) stories.
Homelessness crisis -> provide housing for all -> not enough supply? build more -> can’t build because of zoning? fix the zoning -> etc
It’s the same thing with wealth inequality. Tax him until his wealth isn’t that unequal. If you then decide that the CEO of facebook has too much power you can break up Facebook, but that’s a separate issue.
Personally I disagree, because while the gain hasn’t been realized, you can act on the assumption that it can be realized at any point. There are really degenerate strategies once you get to this level of wealth, such as taking out loans with these “unrealized gains” as collateral and realizing the gains without paying taxes.
> while driving a Mercedes it's typical for the rich to register their properties to a friend/family/classmate
I don't especially know what these platforms could do to stem the issue, I just think it's one more reasons 13 year olds should play outside
They can earn a lot of money via Telegram Bug Bounty Program if they can prove it
Why should I treat your comment as valid information?
This is an ad hominem fallacy/attack. Instead of discussing the actual argument, you instead attack the person making it.
> Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality.
This is an opinion, completely non-factual and unjustified by any reasoning. And, the only possible underlying belief from this paragraph is "some people having more wealth is intrinsically bad" - completely separate from the negative societal effects of that wealth, and from any moral framework that even allows you to describe "bad". You just believe that it's bad.
After Musk took over, not only he removed the moderation team, he also introduced many policies that encourages extreme content (well actually, it encourages encouragements, but extreme content draws the most encouragements, which is a well-know phenomenon). For example the blue checkmark for sell and encouragement based revenue sharing.
Current problem that Twitter suffering is the result of those policies from Elon Musk himself. A YouTuber John Harris suspected that Musk is doing this to mock something (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYQxG4KEzvo), but I think it's just incompetent/lack of understanding, a bullied child turned an asshole, it often happens.
The right are currently targeting facebook and tech firms because they want to be able to influence the ‘algorithm’ to support their policies.
They are current churning out concepts such as the ‘censorship industrial complex’, and finding ways to publicize blame on “liberal Californian tech firms”.
The right wing think tanks are posturing about this from the perspective of free speech - while avoiding getting down into the weeds of trust and safety decision making.
I am on board with better freedom of speech protections - but not someone pontificating on principles, but ignoring the massive amounts of failure when you run moderation on “principles”.
This is where they lose credibility for me, and the power grab becomes apparent.
This letter is almost certainly to appease the Republican Party so that Meta is not dragged into hearings near the election.
Even political content?
When I visit Reddit's Popular page it's pretty obvious which party and candidates they are pushing.
Good luck getting it out of her anytime before the elections. If anything, she is going more socialist (more extreme left).
I also think the scale is different between FB and SO, and SO has a much narrower definition of "on topic", as well.
Plus - nothing was at the scale of Facebook or social media during those halcyon days.
Do you think platforms WANTED to invest in manpower dependent labor?
Platforms started moderating because things got bad.
Between engagement driven metrics and the sheer ludicrousness of moderation, any sense of order is swiftly smashed.
There are more policy updates and clarifications in a year than there are days.
Why assume intelligence where randomness would achieve the same.
On top of all of this, bans were frequently appealed and overturned.
That the crank can actually change things just by thinking about it, like some kind of half-assed troll telekinesis. Wow. You've apparently got a few fans for your idiocy, they're downvoting away.
People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.
In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.
Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it. If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.
Wealth inequality doesn't have any direct effects - merely having more money than someone else doesn't do anything. It's only after the money gets spent that you see negative effects, and the magnitude and type of spending determine the effects. It's more accurate to call this "spending inequality".
This proposal doesn't address the problem because it doesn't affect spending - only wealth. (a capital gains tax is actually a deceitfully name wealth tax) Wealth doesn't do anything until it's spent. That's the main problem with this proposal - it doesn't even try to address the problem it pretends to address.
As to how to actually address the problem: there's two types of wealth inequality that most people are concerned about - that between the super-rich and everyone else (discussed here), and that between the poor and everyone else (not discussed).
Thank you for engaging honestly, it's a breath of fresh air in this thread.
The ~wealth~ spending inequality problems of the super-rich seem to be mainly manifested in corruption - donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying. You want to regulate/outlaw those specific things.
However, aside from corruption (which is a huge problem) most of the spending inequality problems seem to come from the middle and lower class. For instance, cost of housing and living - I think that that's being driven by the middle class having more access to capital in a supply-constrained environment (which is partially caused by big hedge funds buying up housing to rent it out - which again is a separate problem that can be addressed separately and isn't fixed by the capital gains tax). People like Zuckerberg aren't personally buying up housing all over the US on their own - this problem isn't at their level and this tax wouldn't help.
Cool, then let's just do away with them altogether. This is great news. All those people saying I needed to pay taxes so I can have roads and schools and a military and everything must be wrong.
Anyway, you're entitled to yourself and W's interpretation. Me, I go with the ACLU on this one.
Yeah because Trump is the one who's going after his opponents using the judical system.
> he won't fix jack shit, because that would actually require working
He won't fix shit, neither will Kamala, or Biden. They're all in it for themselves yeah.
TikTok split screen slop is a xx million dollar business at this point so you can expect a huge investment to pump out even more slop YoY
For practical purposes though, the kind of censorship that we're concerned with in this conversation can't be done by anyone other than a government or a lunatic with a gun. Companies just don't have any authority over anyone except themselves. They can't deprive you of your ability to speak, only your ability to use their property to do so.
It was called "New Wave Cinema".
> separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option
This is the maddest I have ever seen anyone be about Japan that didn't involve WW2. We don't even do this for China or Russia, who arguably cut themselves off in the other direction.
> None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior
C is heavily censored. Japan is, officially, more censored than the US. Korean gatcha waifu games became a serious political issue that I think ultimately got a minister fired.
1. inflation - a regressive tax that disproportionately takes from the poor
2. taxation as a % of wealth - takes from everyone equally
The fact is the rich pay a WAY lower tax rate, we can spend the next 1000 years playing legal cat and mouse over how to tax these people but it doesn’t get us closer to option 2 unless the government gets aggressive about collecting tax.
There were plenty of things besides a myopic fixation on one single problem to the exclusion of literally everything else.
It takes an extreme amount of privilege to look back and say we should have done any of that.
… it was unethical, immoral, authoritarian and plain evil. I don’t care if any of it “worked” because even if it did the costs vastly outweigh any of the “working” bit. The fact it requires a lot of contortion to show any effect at all should give a reasonable person a concerned pause. Any idiot off the street should be able to clearly see the effects of masks and lockdowns without reading a bunch of statistics first. This is clearly not the case at all….
And again, doesn’t matter if “it worked” because “it worked” only holds true in the most myopic, sheltered, privileged world view possible. For any view that sees the world through a lens besides Covid, what we did was clearly insane.
If I might infer you are implying that the President can't fully control the bureaucracy due to various checks and balances put in place against capricious replacement of the whole thing (which the US tried early in its history and discovered was hellishly disruptive)... The question presents itself again. If Trump can't "lead the nobility," as it were, why elect him again?
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4626145-rfk-jr-no-vacc...
You’re also introducing the risk of being liquidated if there’s a big drawdown in the asset. If you borrow against your stock and then there’s a 50% drawdown, you could easily find yourself worse off than if you had just sold the stock.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that by no means implies that the post is ok or somehow blessed by the mods. The likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it*. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
You can help by flagging such a post or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. It was only because someone brought those unacceptable comments to my attention that I was able to respond. We can't moderate what we don't see!
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/dang...
So... Harris 2024, yes?
Snark aside, as long as democracy functions, all power ceded to the government is ceded willingly by a majority of the people.
That is, by definition, the people exercising their collective will, which is to say it is the decentralization of power.
And please, we are nowhere near communism in the USA. We aren't even approaching socialism, despite what your bogeyman solicitors are shouting at you.
Do better.
Only for the little man
Even the Tax Foundation, which is a biased source that is anti-tax in general states that the effective rate for the top bracket was 6% higher then than it is today (https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...)
> donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying
Those are indeed ways of exercising power that can be outlawed, but there are other ways of exercising power that are impossible to outlaw. For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else. How are you going to outlaw that? And even the charitable contributions of the ultra-rich are controversial and probably wouldn't happen in a true democracy. E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending[1]:
> If you look across global health, they’re funding everybody. Nobody is more than one degree removed from the Gates Foundation. So it’s really difficult to avoid the foundation’s money.
Basically they wield so much power that even their charitable contributions to society are inherently political, unlike say if I volunteer at my local rescue mission.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/bill-gates-foundation-c...
EDIT: added the word "extreme" to clarify
It is not THE culture of $SOCIALMEDIA to onboard young women into sex work, but once you find the bubble of thirst posting and find out there's money in it, it is an attractive pathway that the people in that subculture are happy to introduce you to, same as porn has always been, it's just that marketing and connecting to new talent is now much cheaper than it used to be
What Facebook does though, is horrific. They are not just letting illegitimate science have a platform, they are actively and intentionally propping that shit up because it creates victimhood communities.
What was the outcome of the $450 million?
I'm sorry, the $450 million judgement was for systemic fraud committed for decades prior to his involvement in politics.
Further, the going after him for retaining government documents could have been avoided completely if he didn't lie to the FBI, lie to them again, and then lie to his own attorneys so they'd unknowingly lie to the FBI on his behalf. It's not like they were benign documents about what the secreatary of HUD or eudcation eats for lunch; they were SCI documents pertaining to Israel's nuclear weapons program...that were gifted to the Saudis so the Saudi PIF would in turn fund a golf tournament Trump could host at his courses in an attempt to give the middle finger to the PGA Tour.
The Facebook case was then refiled by Biden's FTC pick Lina Khan in 2021, and made "more robust and detailed than before". [0]
Khan (who was fast-tracked to the position) also went after Microsoft and Google during the same period. [0] And Twitter. Some of those cases could have begun earlier too - what's important is that all those cases were active while Biden's admin was making "requests".
The Biden admin had a massive stick to wave at the tech giants, regardless of who started each lawsuit and when, and demonstrated both the power to make judgments and to easily make problems go away [1]:
> “You are now 0 for 4 in merger trials. Why are you losing so much?” demanded California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at a House oversight hearing this summer. “Are you losing on purpose?”
> ...
> In her interview with CNN, Khan said she was “quite happy” with the FTC’s merger work
All the leverage was sitting right there for any request from Biden to have a lot of implied 'stick' behind it.
Companies consented to remove content without looking too deeply at it, and a lot of problems went away. I guess that could be a coincidence, but the giant 9+ figure lawsuits would certainly be worth a mention, no?
* * *
0 - https://www.vox.com/2021/8/19/22632826/facebook-ftc-lawsuit-...
1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/16/tech/lina-khan-risk-taker...
Price shocks are bad because they can cascade and cause businesses to fail, resulting in layoffs, etc.,. Stability is one of the most important things in the economy.
1. Why would a repair shop accept a repair job without the return information?
2. Why would a repair shop start snooping on their own client's machines even if they were unable to contact their client?
3. Why are there multiple disk images, some "raw" and some pre-organized released to different press organizations and Trump sympathizers?
4. Why did the FBI warn Facebook in 2020 about the laptop story to "cover it up" when the FBI at the time was lead by a man appointed by Trump himself?
Yes, they tend to go to super PACs, not government election offices.
> What was the outcome of the $450 million?
Election offices having more funding to do their jobs.
Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.
The only "pressure" that was put on FB, was the same put on Twitter, which was that reports and requests from Administration employees has some higher gravity than other reports. The "investigation" here, and Zuckerberg's responce are not evidence of wrongdoing, only political maneuvering.
Or a subset! Facebook is also a very effective social credit score if viewed through that lens.
You can't really deduct realized losses either (annoyingly). You can use them to offset gains in future years, but they're not a deduction.
Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.
So your premise is that the government gets the shares, but can't sell them and can't vote? To begin with this implies that they would never be able to spend the money, and then what's the point? Moreover, that's effectively taking those shares off the market, so if the policy applies to everyone (i.e. price goes up so all shareholders have a capital gain) it would be equivalent to a reverse stock split, which is a paper transaction with no real effect.
> But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
Those workarounds aren't free. VCs are wary about putting a lot of money into a company without a corresponding allocation of voting rights, i.e. the exact opposite of "the founders keep voting rights for themselves". Also, first time founders often don't know they can even do this and by the time they figure out it's important it's too late.
Not to mention the cranks that did exist were more likely to be amusingly erudite windbags than moronic spammers pasting unfunny conspiracy "jokes".
People on welfare aren’t getting nearly as much out of the system as people who have amassed massive wealth, so they should put in substantially less.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Before that the rate was significantly lower.
this is not me saying there's zero benefit to moderated dialogues, but what's better for overall intellectual pursuits? a dialogue that's inviting, or one that always coldly and dismissively rejects all opposing beliefs or understandings?
i have recently learned, that dialogues seem to benefit from communication and spaces that are supportive and empathetic in their approach to first understanding differences in reality and experiences, before entering discussions on truth and objective realities, and therefore confronting and challenging, and at times overcoming what are limiting beliefs -- from the irrational to the rational.
there's empiricism around this as well (SET: a framework for communicating with people who have vastly different experiences than you, including those labeled "delusional") -- it frames Support and Empathy as the necessary foundations in any dialogue, before one can discuss the difference in each party's Truth.
i'm not so sure the whole categorically "you have less right to sit at this table because i've judged your experience as non-real, and therefore less relevant) is compassionate communication, nor productive when systematically, algorithmically applied.
"On 6 June, the court ruled that the country’s wealth tax went against the European Convention on Human Rights because it forced savers and investors to pay tax on income they had not earned.
The decision has opened the door to legal redress for hundreds of thousands of people who were overcharged by the tax authority.
Outgoing state secretary for finance Marnix van Rij estimated that the upfront cost would be €4bn – or £3.37bn.
But the true cost could rise by billions of euros per year while the government works out a new system to replace the controversial levy – a system not expected until 2027."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/how-netherlands-wealth...
Like the fact that wealth inequality is bad, and we know that it’s bad. It’s just a fact, and if you want to ignore the facts because your opinion doesn’t agree why them that’s ok, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
GDP is not income. Federal receipts aggregated across all tax brackets provides zero information about what the highest tax bracket paid.
Mark Andressen will be in the picture somehow, I just feel it.
Anyway, here's the problem with unrealized gains. If stock go brrrrr up 10-fold, wow! Huge unrealized gains! Get taxed on it. Unexpectedly, now the stock crashes, or it's found the company was doing something illegal, or the finances were fraudulent, or it was a ponzi scheme, etc, etc. Now stock is worth -zero- dollars overnight. Now I don't exactly what the logistics are going to be, but even if you hit those unrealized gains in tax year 2023, and the stock collapses in tax year 2024.. you had better get those gains that you were taxed on (but never got!), you had better get them back, plus interest.
Welp. Kamala Harris' economic advisor confirmed the plan to tax unrealized gains on CNBC Squawk Box. There goes her full tilt to Socialism. Communism is next in line.
You can find the raw data here though (Tables II: distributional series, you're looking for tab TG2b): http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/
And then you can see that the highest effective income tax rate ever paid by the top 1% was 23.4% in 2001. The most current number from that table was 2019 when it was 20.3%. Whereas the highest rate from the mid-20th century period when they were alleged to have been paying such high income tax rates was 21% in 1945. In 1953, when the US had its highest marginal tax rates (92%), the effective income tax rate on the top 1% was 14%. Which is more typical for the period; 1945 was an outlier, it being the height of WWII.
The thing that has actually come down is not effective income tax rates on the top 1%, it's corporate income tax, which is a consequence of globalization. "Corporate income tax" is not a good fit for an international supply chain because tax avoidance and jurisdiction shopping is too easy if you're trying to tax something that only exists in a spreadsheet ("corporate profit") instead of something that has a definable physical location (goods, workers, real estate, etc.) So corporate tax avoidance is higher (because of transfer pricing etc.) and corporate rates are lower because it's easier for corporations to set up shop somewhere else if the somewhere else is taxing them less, which puts tax jurisdictions in competition with each other. But that's not an easy one to fix without abandoning globalization, so other taxes got raised to compensate (which brings us back to, government receipts as a percent of GDP haven't really changed).
That big pile of sketches you made as a teenager? Well it says here that some person bought an “early Banksy” for $500k this week so we the government would like 20% of your $49,999,995.60 unrealized gain by next Tuesday please.
What? You burned them in an attempt to avoid the wealth tax? We have a dealer from on the line saying he’ll pay $2m for the ashes and $10m to remove the fire place for display in Brad Pitt’s private gallery. Tap tap tap 20% of $12m less $2k for your upfront building costs is… let’s just round it up to $2.5m. Please submit your check by next April.
Oh hang on, Elon Musk has tweeted saying he’ll pay $69m for the fireplace plus a $420k bonus payment if you throw in some vials of your own tears. He wants them to hand out in gift bags at his next toga party, apparently. Can you get back to us with how well hydrated you are so we can run the numbers on these unrealized capital gains?
The numbers I was looking at before were referring to the overall tax rate, which included both income tax and corporate taxes. With that said, the overall tax rate for the top 1% has gone down significantly since 1950 (from 45ish percent down to 32ish percent). As you mentioned, that is mainly due to the lower corporate income tax rate.
Given that drop in the overall tax rate (along with rising income inequality and increasing debt spending), it seems clear to me that the income tax rate was not raised enough to compensate for that loss but that's a separate discussion.
All this to say that - my original point that the rich were effectively taxed higher back then still stands, and government bureaucrats were not getting rich off of the higher tax rates either (that was a response to the person I originally replied to, not you)
Including corporate taxes in the overall rate doesn't make a lot of sense to do. Corporate taxes are on a different entity and who really pays them depends on the nature of the business.
For example, there are a lot of businesses that are simply capital intensive. You need to make a large investment in order to operate. Nobody is going to invest in them unless the returns can beat alternative investments like bonds, but that will be the after tax returns in both cases. Bond interest and dividends are both taxed, but corporate income tax is an additional tax, so with higher corporate taxes every company in that industry would have to generate higher profits to attract investors. So higher corporate taxes drive mergers/dissolutions, the market consolidates to give incumbents more market power and the tax mostly ends up getting paid by customers or employees rather than investors.
Conversely, if the market is already consolidated, it might mostly get paid by investors. But it also acts as a force to keep the market consolidated for the same reasons, which is not super great.
The point being, you can't just assume corporate taxes are always paid by the rich or the owners of the company.
> Given that drop in the overall tax rate (along with rising income inequality and increasing debt spending), it seems clear to me that the income tax rate was not raised enough to compensate for that loss but that's a separate discussion.
Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates -- it's often measured on the basis of pre-tax income, and has increased significantly even using that metric, largely as a result of market consolidation and regulatory capture. Incumbents that capture government regulators and exclude competitors become megacorps and then their executives and owners extract disproportionate income. Taxes rates have little to do with it.
The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP are around the same, federal spending as a percent of GDP has gone up.
> government bureaucrats were not getting rich off of the higher tax rates either
But there weren't higher tax rates -- and the real measure of what there is to get rich off of would be government receipts, if not expenditures. Receipts are flat as a percent of GDP, but up quite a lot in real dollars and real dollars per capita as a result of growth in population and real GDP per capita. Spending is up even on top of that because of deficit spending. So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now.
Which they are. Of course, "they" are Lockheed and healthcare companies and members of Congress, but there's little doubt that it's happening.
I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
> Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates
Sorry, I meant wealth inequality. I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
> The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money
Yes, I'm aware. Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
> But there weren't higher tax rates --
There were though - according to your source.
> So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now
No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
It's Piketty/Saez/Zucman. They did a lot of work to compile the data but they have a particular conclusion they're trying to support, so the data is probably accurate but they're organizing it in a way that supports their position.
> I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
I don't think that really fixes it because it isn't the underlying cause. The problem here is market consolidation, e.g. Facebook is too big. So Zuckerberg has "billions of dollars" but in fact the vast majority of that money is in shares of that one company and what he really has is control over an enormous and disproportionately powerful corporation. Which is a problem, but taxes don't solve it, because the corporation is still just as big even if nobody has a controlling interest. Wall St would still put someone in charge of it and that person would still have massively disproportionate influence.
Whereas if you do something about the market consolidation then individual corporations don't come to be that size and their owners/executives don't come to have that much influence or money. So higher tax rates neither solve the problem nor are necessary if you do solve it.
> Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
The current level of spending is pretty useless. Indeed, it's actually one of the causes of the problem -- a lot of the money is going to the megacorps. It's probably better to stop giving it to them to begin with.
> There were though - according to your source.
On corporations, not rich people.
> No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
The thing they're lobbying for is the tax dollars. Lockheed and healthcare companies are getting rich from tax money. And the same for Congress, though the mechanism there is less direct. They allocate tax dollars to corporations that then funnel a portion of it back to the legislators in various ways.
Lemmy.world is fine social media site. One could just host their own private instance for friends and family.
It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.
It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.
It's always "it". Endless massive shipments of novel artificial porn, leaking out of the nation-scale languistic and cultural isolate bubble of Japanese, which maintains internal meme-fusion self-sustainance condition and positive meme-pressure neither requiring nor exploiting meaningful amount of external contacts.
So all those efforts for Japanese compliance under self deceptions at both sides that Japanese exist on the same social graph just ends in vain. These people are both there and effectively not there. The internet has no physical dimensions and these people will happily move to wherever there is free-ridable Twitterlike infrastructure, but trying to first integrate them into something they don't intend to blend in and then trying to apply the same ethical standards used by now-minority part won't make sense(just like how IRL across-culture immigration fail unless naturalization was the voluntary goal from the beginning).
Therefore I genuinely think segregating the Internet is for the best interest of all - knowing full well that this term is historically related to situations where one of two groups enslave the others, based on my understanding that it was, unbeknownst to some, how it always had been. What's the problem formalizing that, especially if this many people are this frustrated other this particular problem.
---
PS:
- by the way, someone else in the comments said situations similar to horrible status quo GP/GGP described do not apply to Threads, which reuses Facebook infra. Just, you know, guess which country has single abnormally low Facebook adoption. Or list social media that are nice and correlate that with user countries of origin. Not by regions, but by flags.
- wrt China: I think China and GFW is interesting one - with Google lockout, TikTok ownership controversies, collapsing white collar job market, etc. So far their closed Internet don't seem to have achieved fusion status but rather duplicating imports - I don't think censorship is sole or primary cause for that behavior; they have no issues sneaking in Inmu meme on anything from military propaganda to nickname for export HSR.I think this has more to do with Instagram wanting people to stay on Instagram than discouraging sex workers. I'm guessing there's a long list of things the offsite link isn't allowed to be aside from porn. Hate groups and gambling sites come to mind.
In your example, a stock went up 10x overnight. Mature stocks don’t do that, so you must be investing in something very risky.
What a tax would do is incentivize you to realize some of your gains to pay the tax. If you don’t want to do that and would rather keep gambling, then you’re free to do that. If the stock then crashes and you lose all your money that’s on you.
Obviously you have to think about implementation to make sure you’re not charging a tax that people can’t pay, but that can be figured out.
You see scantily clad women promoted cause many slavering str8 guys actually do frequently click on stuff like that.
Definitely you'll see that our baser instincts and emotions are taken advantage of way more often; sex, anger/outrage, desire/jealousy.
It's no wonder that "watch this super wealthy person show off their wife/cars/house/yacht" is so damn popular.
Like, just as a basic common sense test, if it were possible for the government to spend as much as it wants without taxes, why wouldn't a politician implement that, eliminate taxes, and immediately become the most popular politician in the history of the world? If it were as easy as you say, surely that would have happened. Since it hasn't happened, it stands to reason that maybe you don't know what you're talking about when you say the government doesn't need taxes to fund spending.
Just for a second, imagine seeing the sale of roughly 5% of all stocks across the board... what would the side effect of that be? Since all of the very wealthy would be doing the same, that means that the prices will likely go down by more than 5% triggering more downstream sales.
It’s a closed system at the end of the day so the wealth isn’t vanishing into thin air.
They will be incentivized to do this otherwise they will get nothing for their shares.
I come over and tell you, “this isn’t healthy! Nobody should weigh 10,000 pounds, we weren’t designed to exist that way!”
You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
But, the problem with that is that this is common sense, and it’s even backed by a bunch of science and observed reality. Someone who weighs 10,000 pounds basically can’t exist, and if they did it would be so ridiculous it’s almost incomprehensible.
I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay, not the other way around. You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
Who do you know that has over $100 million in net worth that you feel would be hurt by a proposal to tax unearned gains on people with $100 million net worth and above? I don’t know anyone like that. What I do know is that I would personally benefit from my government having more income to fix potholes and pay teacher salaries.
And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest. It’s in my best interest as an average person who isn’t a billionaire or millionaire for these wealthy people to not exist. They’ve done nothing positive for me and everything negative. Every penny or nickel or dime that goes to their extravagant pay package is a penny or nickel that could have gone back to me, their customer. It would be better for me if my company CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $20,000,000 a year. That could at least buy us a solid pizza patty.
> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
But if your definition of "virtually uncensored" is that there are uncensored instances, then IRC, forums, etc. are just as "uncensored" as ever. There's just a lot more internet users on moderated platforms now.
Assume you have a new country with no money. How does anything get done? The central bank needs to issue capital that the government then allocates first.
Eventually this money makes it down to the citizens of the country who spend it. Then the government can tax that money, and that gives it non-inflationary spending room to reallocate those resources.
For example, there’s a car company that’s using up most of the country’s steel supply. But the government wants to shift the country’s manufacturing from cars to other green industries. What the government can do is tax the car company so that it’s not able to use up as much steel, which frees up resources for other industries to utilize.
The same goes for people, since people are a country’s most important resource. Through taxation the government can influence the resource allocation of the country. That doesn’t mean that the government can’t spend without taxes though.
If you want to learn more there’s plenty of resources out there, you can start with Keynes, skip anything from chicago, move on to MMT for the latest theoretical thought.
Not really, no. For example, actual scientists were discussing the possibility of the COVID pandemic having arisen from a lab leak seriously and looking for evidence that could support that theory but the conspiracy nuts were going on about it being a “ChiComm bio weapon” because their goal was political rather than learning the truth. (Only the latter encountered terms of service actions, typically due to racism or targeting specific people, but their supporters often falsely claim they were in the former group)
That’s the easy rule of thumb: is someone approaching the problem rationally, etc. or are they starting from the position they want and trying to work backwards? Are they willing to seek out evidence and adjust based on new information, or do they find reasons to dismiss it?
Hmm, why might it be important to have a non-inflationary means of spending? I wonder. Of course, the government can print money. They can't just print all the money they want forever with no consequences.
> For example, there’s a car company that’s using up most of the country’s steel supply. But the government wants to shift the country’s manufacturing from cars to other green industries.
A car company is not "using up" the steel supply. They are meeting consumer demand for cars. If consumers found green technologies more useful than cars, they would buy that instead, then the green technology companies would be able to outbid the car companies for steel and they would buy it. If they aren't it's because people find cars more useful than whatever "green technologies" are.
Also, if there's a high demand for steel, new steel suppliers can enter the market and increase the supply of steel. There's no need for the government to manage this and it's generally harmful for them to do so, since they are allocating resources away from something people have demonstrated they find useful and towards something they don't find useful. This is not optimal. We should want the resources to go where they are most useful and valued, not where some bureaucrat decides he or she likes them to go.
Further, the people working backwards sometimes end up right anyway.
I just don’t see the risk of letting some tin foil hatters do their thing, or much much less risk than letting our discussion platforms become censorious, propaganda machines. Maybe if we let the less censored versions run and there ends up being negative effects then I can re-assess, but until then the default should be to let people be dumb and invest into better education.
For the record, I saw very little of the full on conspiratorial stuff, and lots of the more sane lab leak stuff, but I saw it basically entirely de-boosted and censored. So we have already a really strong case study for why we shouldn’t let people even attempt to split those hairs.
If an issue can be addressed with a scalpel, it should be addressed with a scalpel. Any man who insists a machete is required is just looking for an excuse to swing his machete.
This is such a goofy argument. The US 2% of its budget on infrastructure. It spends 4% on education (yet literacy rates are only marginally higher than they were before compulsory education). Military spending is 20% of federal spending, and could be 1/4 of that without any risk whatsoever of invasion.
You don't need more tax revenues to pay for the stuff that makes business possible.
You need it to maintain your patronage system.
Has Tesla ever received a check from Medicare? Probably not. But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.
Has Salesforce ever asked for regulation or assistance from the FDA? Probably not. But because the FDA exists, Saleforce's employees don't have to spend time verifying their medication is authentic and does what it claims to do, so they can spend more focus on their work for Salesforce.
Even beyond government: how much do you think a Ford or Chevy have benefited from the US's culture? They certainly don't sell many large consumer trucks Europe or Asia. That profit exists because of the ideals and beliefs Americans have about how they should live their lives and what type of car they need to do that. Yes someone made the truck, and the truck maker should reap most of the benefits, but some of that profit should feed back into society that supported it.
Sure, we probably spend too much on the military and there exists some cronyism that we should strive to stamp out, but make no mistake that anyone with 100M in investable wealth has earned it with substantial help from the society we have all built together.
Which has implications --- beyond political/policy --- for MMT, in that MMT is (if I understand this bit) built in part on the premise that increased government spending won't increase expectations of future inflation (which needs to be the case in order to use control of the money supply to cover debt service).
Mostly though I'd just make two dumb arguments:
* Economists do not seem to like MMT ("not even a theory; what does it predict?")
* MMT was for a time part of the branding behind Biden's proposed and actual spending, which did not go well politically.
I hope I'm wrong in some lurid fun way you're going to spell out for me. :)
But my main contention is that we had a ton of loose monetary policy for nearly 2 decades with no major inflationary issues.
Then we had a short supply chain shock and a minor catch up in real income and boom inflation. That’s fairly compelling to me.
The perhaps-facile analogy is pump-priming, a.k.a. fiscal stimulus, summed up in the old Kingston Trio song Desert Pete: You come across a hand-operated water pump in a well in the desert (hah!), with a bottle full of water sitting there, and a note explaining: You can "borrow" the water and use it to prime the pump; once you get the pump going: "Drink all the water you can hold, wash your face, cool your feet | Leave the bottle full for others | Thank you kindly, Desert Pete."
But that only works if the pump is working and has sufficient "raw material" (water in the well). And if you drink most of the bottle of water (borrowing for consumption instead of for boosting productive capacity), then the pump won't draw water, and you'll angrily claim that priming it doesn't work. As Desert Pete warned, "Now there's just enough to prime it with, so don't you go drinkin' first. Just pour it in and pump like mad and, buddy, you'll quench your thirst."
The lack of acceptance of MMT among mainstream economists is of course a red flag. But then in medicine, Marshall and Warren asserted — correctly — that many common stomach ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria and could readily be cured with cheap antibiotics instead of with major surgery. They were scorned by mainstream physicians and surgeons protecting vested interests. And eventually they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
So lack of acceptance isn't dispositive; as I read somewhere but can't find online, old economics ideas don't die out until old economists do. (Or maybe it was physicists?)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deficit-Myth-Monetary-Peoples-Economy...
That must be why there were no successful companies in the United States before 1965.
> But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.
Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.
> There is a broader definition of "infrastructure."
"The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have already held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. Adn the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but to change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer, and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language." ~Hayek
This is factually and objectively wrong, in multiple ways.
First, don't understand the difference between "an insult" and an ad-hominem attack. An ad-hominem is a logical fallacy where you attack the character of a person making an argument, rather than addressing the argument itself. Whether or not it is insulting is completely irrelevant - they're orthogonal axes, and the fact that you conflated them means that you don't know what they are.
Second, you did not state a fact, you expressed an opinion. You can't read my mind, you don't even know me in person, and even if you did, there's no objective test for “root cause syndrome”, which, as you said, is a term that you have invented yourself. (your statement "Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality." is also an opinion that is not a fact) You don't even know the difference between an opinion and a fact. You should stop claiming that your opinions are facts, and learn the difference.
> Like the fact that wealth inequality is bad, and we know that it’s bad.
Provide a citation for the fact that wealth inequality is bad. If it's factual, it should be easy for you to provide a study that proves that it's bad by establishing a causal link between them, and doesn't merely express a correlation. (prediction: you won't, because I've never seen any evidence ever cited despite having read hundreds of comments expressing opinions like yours)
This is emotional pleading, dishonest framing, and a false dichotomy. Are you going to make a real argument, or continue to engage in emotional manipulation?
Of course there were. There were also lots of successful companies before we had highways or municipal plumbing. So I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.
>Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.
Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in. Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there. They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.
Regarding your quote. Was your intention to imply that I’m a totalitarian because I’m using a slightly different definition of a word than you? That seems a bit severe.
Let’s ask Wikipedia about infrastructure:
> One way to describe different types of infrastructure is to classify them as two distinct kinds: hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure.[4] Hard infrastructure is the physical networks necessary for the functioning of a modern industrial society or industry.[5] This includes roads, bridges, and railways. Soft infrastructure is all the institutions that maintain the economic, health, social, environmental, and cultural standards of a country.[5] This includes educational programs, official statistics, parks and recreational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and emergency services.
I don’t think it’s by any means a stretch to say Medicare or the FDA are institutions that maintain economic/health standards.
> You can't outlaw the exercise of power, so the extreme power imbalance itself is the core problem for humanity; and the only way to fix that is to take some of their power away.
This is not the only fix. It is possible to outlaw specific exercises of power that actually harm people, such as lobbying and bribery, without taking any money away at all, and it's possible to level the playing field in other areas such that money is much less of an advantage.
> For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else.
By simplifying the legal system, and removing barriers to entry in the legal profession, such that people can effectively self-represent, both because they're legally allowed to, and because the legal system is simple enough that individuals can comprehend it and argue effectively. (this will also greatly reduce the effectiveness of high-powered lawyers, because the simpler the system is, the less advantage the best lawyers have over the worst ones)
The legal system is inherently flawed in that richer people have a massive advantage over poorer people - that is the problem, not that some people have more money and so can take advantage of it.
Please, seriously, think about that for a bit - our economy is filled with systems that are unfair or exploitative (e.g. legal, healthcare, non-compete agreements, the rent collusion that's currently happening), but the solution is not to start taxing the ultra-rich, because that still leaves those systems in an exploitative state, and they'll continue to take advantage of the middle and lower class even if you eliminate all of the rich people.
> E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending
This is also very feasible to fix - make the status of being a tax-deductible charity contingent on not doing the bad things you want to disincentivize. This is similar to how Title IX is a huge lever over public institutions that prohibits them from doing some bad things.
No, I won't. This is a logical fallacy, that of the false allegory. It's not an argument in general, and in this particular case it's an extremely bad allegory that's also trivially inapplicable to this situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence that being physically overweight is directly unhealthy for you. Meanwhile, there's zero evidence that having a lot of money is the sole cause of any negative societal phenomenon. Think I'm wrong? Drop a link right here. Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid.
> You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
In the case of your actual comments (as opposed to this irrelevant story you're spinning), this is true, because you are repeatedly making emotional non-arguments without providing any facts whatsoever: "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", etc. These are purely manipulative, emotional, non-arguments that are meritless and valueless, and are a symptom of someone actively trying to manipulate others. Repeatedly pointing out how much money someone has is not a valid argument.
You're inventing a completely fictional, irrelevant world because you're unwilling to or incapable of either providing a single rational argument, or a single piece of evidence.
> I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay
Over a hundred million people in the US, where I live, disagree with you. I have nothing to prove, because it's an extremely popular belief that it's ok to be rich.
Additionally, you have it exactly backwards: in almost every country in the world (and especially the US), things are assumed to be OK to do unless people explicitly decide otherwise. You can invent a new sport, make a new game, write a new book, and do whatever, and that's OK unless it violates established laws, or people decide that your specific thing is bad. This idea of "things are bad to do by default unless you prove otherwise" is completely hypocritical, because you have absolutely done novel things in your life that nobody else has done before, and felt not a shred of guilt, because you do not hold the internal belief that your actions are bad by default unless you explicitly justify them to others.
> You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
False. I've made extremely rational and detached counter-arguments to your fallacies. You are the one making objectively emotionally pleading statements like "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", and fallacies like the false allegory, the appeal to pity, and the red herring. I've pointed out your fallacies - you've continued to make more of them. You've shown that you don't even know the difference between arguments and emotional pleading.
> And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
This is a red herring. Nobody else brought up this double standard, nor did I mention it, nor is it relevant to this argument. It's just another way for you to emotionally manipulate.
> Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest
This can be used to justify every single kind of evil. Someone can make this argument to justify why they can murder, rape, steal, lie, and cheat, and it works exactly the same way, because they're just doing "what's in their best interest".
Your comments demonstrate an inability to differentiate between opinions and facts, and between emotions and logic. You should stop confidently conflating those things.
For example, I have some red lines on who I'd vote for, and genocide support is one of them. [It's crazy that needs to be said, and that it's controversial. Crazy.] Whether Trump would arm genocide even more is utterly irrelevant.
For that simple and non-negotiable reason, neither main party can represent me. Any party that arms and enables the atrocities the world has witnessed for the last year is too corrupt for me.
"You have to be practical - Trump could end democracy"... Any blame for his election is on the lady who refuses to heed either the Genocide Convention, our own Leahy Laws, or the will of 77% of her own party.
Like - you really think an admin that vetoes ceasefire in Gaza four times would be above using their political power to warp narratives on social media? This shit is documented bud. They did it.
Why would you pretend they're above using the leverage which they were clearly flexing?? 'Because Trump would be worse.' See how little sense that makes?
The main reason I suggested it is because MMT is the only innovation happening in economics, and understanding the core concepts has been very helpful to me.
The only other game in town is synthesis, which has been a dead end for decades and has very poor real world predictive power.
It’s definitely not mainstream though, I agree with you there, but I would argue that that’s because there’s a lot of people who would have to admit they were wrong for decades if MMT was accepted.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
It's the calls to action by the tinfoil hat crowd that is problematic and most typically why platforms shut down their posts. The buried lede in most stories about censorship on social media is the people getting posts removed weren't just spouting tinfoil hat theories but were directly or indirectly calling for violence or harassment of certain ethnic groups. A veiled or coded call for violence is still a call for violence.
Social media, no matter stupid claims to the contrary, is not a public forum or town square. It's owned by private interests. It may be publicly available but it is not owned and operated by the public.
Private platforms don't usually want to amplify racist dog whistles or other coded rhetoric when they've been made aware of it. Attention seekers love when they get censored because they can run to another platform to complain they got censored for claiming COVID leaked from a lab but not the follow up post where they used that as justification for torching an Asian market.
Also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et all all started off pretty uncensored and unmoderated to build the moats. Then they started cracking down once the feds and political influences kicked in.
Companies are no more successful with Medicare than they were without Medicare, so simply claiming that it is "directly related to success" is meaningless.
> Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in.
Your argument was that Tesla was paying lower wages, which was objectively false. Now you're really branching out! This first claim is just a low-effort handwave. They benefit because... the program exists? Compelling.
> Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there.
People went to work before Medicare, and more freely, because they kept more of their income. So the only difference you're actually stating here is that "they know they will receive benefits", which, again, is tautological--the benefit of the program is that people know the program exists. Amazing.
> They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents' healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.
How is this a benefit to tesla? Vibes?
> Was your intention to imply that I'm a totalitarian because I'm using a slightly different definition of a word than you?
I was merely observing the age-old tendency of people who advocate for the never-ending growth of the state to manipulate language in service of their goals. It usually takes the form of conflating less popular things for which they're advocating (welfare, etc) with obviously necessary things (roads, bridges, the electric grid, etc) which already enjoy broad support. I don't doubt that you are sincere in your belief that this new definition is legit. (Who wouldn't happily use terms which make their policy preferences sound better?) Yet this is an obvious example of the old trick, which is always worth calling out for the benefit of the uninitiated.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
Here’s a Harvard philosopher who points out many of the same points I did regarding political power:
https://ideas.ted.com/the-4-biggest-reasons-why-inequality-i...
Here’s an article from the council on foreign relations that talks about how inequality is a drag on the economy and fuels populist authoritarian movements,:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-inequality-debate
Here’s a Saint Louis Federal Reserve article which doesn’t necessarily prove that wealth inequality is bad, but helps to detail how wealth inequality has grown along the lines of education and generation (so you might need to explain how “the younger generation is more poor than previous generations at their age” is good for the economy): https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-ine...
Let me know when you’ll be dropping your links that say that wealth inequality is totally cool and awesome.
I think you need to stop debating people by attacking their logic and reasoning abilities just because they disagree with you. I mean, one of your points was that 100 million people agree with you that being rich is okay. Well, that’s an opinion that 100 million people hold, right? There are more than 100 million Christian’s and over 100 million Muslims, but they can’t both be right.
>> Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid.
So, you still have provided exactly zero evidence for your claims.
> Let me know when you’ll be dropping your links from reputable institutions that say that wealth inequality is totally cool and awesome.
This is a strawman fallacy - I never claimed that wealth inequality was "totally cool and awesome". My point is that it's a correlation without a causation, and that wealth inequality is not the causing factor. It's still up to you to provide evidence for your claims.
> I think you need to get over yourself and stop debating people by attacking their logic and reasoning abilities just because they disagree with you.
You need to learn how to actually use logic and reasoning. Almost every single thing that you've said in this entire thread has been emotionally manipulative and fallacious. You're not merely "disagreeing" with me, you're making invalid points to justify something morally dubious - it's entirely reasonable for me to point out those fallacies and that emotional manipulation.
Also, literally the definition of a "debate" is to use logical arguments to argue for a point. You cannot have a "debate" with out logic.
It's also extremely ironic that your last statement is yet another emotional plea, because you can't justify your positions with logic or evidence.
I honestly suggest spending some time to think about why you're unable to justify your positions and beliefs with logic. Usually, that means that they're either purely driven by emotion, or logically inconsistent with each other - neither of which are good for either you, the people around you, or society as a whole.