It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.
To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.
They campaigned on the left and have been a minority government working in a coalition with the socialist NDP for the past several years.
I’m in Canada so I have the opposite reaction re: the military. Our military is a joke and if the US ever walked away from NATO we would be totally screwed.
Our government has been run by the Liberals since 2015. All they’ve done is destroyed the jobs market and put housing out of reach for ordinary people. Not a fan!
I think if you want to be a socialist you need to acknowledge that sometimes the government will be grossly incompetent and/or corrupt. Frankly, this experience is what has pulled me to the right. I simply don’t have trust in unaccountable institutions anymore.
Having said that, I think most of the damage to our society has been done by incompetent municipal governments which aren’t part of our party system anyway. They’ve squandered billions of dollars, been grifted by scam artist developers, and destroyed our communities with idiotic urban planning ideas that make livable neighbourhoods illegal.
People change. The old stereotype is that people tend to be very liberal in high school and college but become very conservative with a mortgage and a couple of kids. I don’t know how often that actually plays out but it makes sense.
When you don’t have anything it’s easy to demand a lot of things from the government. When you have money you want to do everything you can to hold onto it and that means not paying taxes. It flips around again when people are super rich though: then they don’t mind paying taxes (because their effective tax rate is very low). It’s the middle class who get screwed the most.
And YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, BitTorrent…
People have a lot more choices now than they did in the bad old days of high cable bills. If streaming services charge too much people will just bail back to free stuff.
There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.
Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.
Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.
She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.
No, but Russian bullets will! Not one step back, comrade!
I think both you and I know the project wouldn’t have worked and in all likelihood it would’ve damaged his reputation. I can’t fault him for opting out of that. As for what he actually did with the money, I am not going to defend that!
We’re talking about two different things here.
Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).
If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?
I don’t think you thought this one through!
To be the guy known for ending poverty for all time, having statues in every park on the planet? Or just another boat to park in your mega-garage of boats?
Easy choice.
Should’ve eaten some sauerkraut and fried onions! The manliest of all vegetables! Has the bonus effect of repelling ladies up to 5 feet away!
Taxing profits just means the company will borrow from investors (by issuing bonds) and then instead of profits paying out as dividends the company shows losses from interest payments.
I would rather try land value taxes.
Putting a huge percentage of a company up for sale on the open market is going to tank the price no matter what the fundamentals are. It’s simple supply and demand: you’re putting a huge glut of supply on the market and not putting similar demand. All those sell orders will begin expiring as the offers drop in price.
The largest owner of shares putting everything on the market at once is strong signal that the stock is overpriced and so buyers will react accordingly.
By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.
I’m neither defending nor attacking capitalism. I’m just pointing out that putting heavy taxes on illiquid assets leads to huge disruptions.
The increase in value of shares above book is called unrealized gains. They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Taxing makes no sense unless you’re going to reimburse the taxes if the shares drop in price.
The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.
How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.
Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.
Shares aren’t always given to you as a reward. If you are the sole founder of a company then you create the shares yourself and decide who to give (or sell) them to. If you choose not to take your company public on the stock market, then what your stake in the company is worth is unclear. Sure, the company may have assets (equipment, properties, resources) but that’s only the book value. The true market value of the company might be much higher.
Look at a software company. The software they create might never be sold, only used to provide services. The market value of the company could far exceed the book value of all the desks, chairs, computers, and other stuff the company has at the office. But you don’t really know that if the company never goes public. So how do you tax it?
if he were able to convert all of his $241.8B to cash
That’s the assumption everyone makes but it’s a false premise. If he tried to sell all his shares it would cause the stock price to collapse, his wealth would plummet, and his companies would be in jeopardy. Far from being able to give all of them $1.6M, they would all likely lose their jobs.
That’s also the issue with taxing them. If someone owns a billion dollar company (based on the price of their shares of stock) we call them a billionaire but they might not have very much money in cash (say a few million). Suppose we want to tax them 10% of their wealth: that’s $100 million! They don’t have enough cash to pay for that, so they have to sell shares, which causes the share price to go down, which negatively affects the company and the workers.
I think the issue is with how we view ownership of a business vs other things, like a yacht. The yacht can be sold to pay taxes and it won’t affect other people. The company cannot. In a lot of ways, the company isn’t just a possession of the owner, it’s a responsibility. These days I feel like we don’t talk enough about responsibility.
Yeah, so if you’re a worshipper of the Greek pantheon you could be right. The Greek gods are powerful but not all-powerful, wise but not all-knowing, and not particularly loving (they have their own agenda). Sometimes they’re even assholes but not particularly evil.