[1] https://mailchi.mp/06871ce9876c/new-campaign-seeks-federal-f...
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-...
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.
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.
“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...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/politics/fact-check-oklahoma-...
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...
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-...
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.
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
Both arguing the same points at the same time is quite the Baader–Meinhof coincidence.
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...
EDIT: I’ve misunderstood your comment, I don’t have any alternative accounts on hacker news!
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...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
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...
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...
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...
>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...
"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...
Here is dang’s explanation: >>37421874
It sounds a fair banning for me.
> 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.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-social-media-biden-...
https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-has-vi...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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
[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)
"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."
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/
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.
“Payments can be spread out over subsequent years”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-threatens-jail-for-facebo...
---
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
https://www.yahoo.com/news/news/mark-zuckerberg-rather-under...
> 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...
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...
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...
eg Facebook replacing people's email addresses, one wonders if it was partly a way to fight Google+ >>4151433
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...
> 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).
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 >
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.
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...
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?
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.
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...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/all-the-texts-fox-ne...
> 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.
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.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4626145-rfk-jr-no-vacc...
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.
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
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...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Before that the rate was significantly lower.
"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...
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).
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...
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.