danny_codes

Nobody knows what the Laffer curve is. Maybe we should be raising taxes.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make

I don't know if you remember, but Elon recently spent over $200M getting his chosen guy elected. He then went on to waste over $100B tax dollars trying to "cut fraud", retiring in disgrace after achieving nothign.

The impact of having stupid-rich people isn't limited to clean-room economic thought experiments. It is seemingly incompatible with democracy as we practice it in the US.

Regulatory capture by business interests seems like something you'd solve via government, ironically.

Nobody is suggesting that raising the effective tax rate for the richest people will magically fix all our problems.

However, we are saying that making the tax code progressive is better than what we're doing now.

I think we can all agree that Bezos paying an effective tax rate of 4% or whatever is not a fair way to organize society.

Piketty's 2% tax floor on wealth (for those with over $10M/$100M in wealth) is an excellent way to fix this.

Basically the idea is to just accept the fact that the super wealthy will find the loopholes, so instead remove the loopholes. Just flatly put a minimum tax all wealth over $XX million at 2%.

One nice aspect of the policy is that it's a tax minimum: so people with high incomes who are already paying that much, regardless of how wealthy they are, don't need to pay the tax.

Another nice aspect is it's relatively easy to implement. There aren't that many people with $XX millions in wealth.

Just look at growth rates before Reagan/Thatcher in the US/UK and after. If you take the 30 years before and the 30 years after, you'll see growth actually decreased.

Obviously this is correlation, but it's somewhat damning to the conservative gospel (dogma?) that lowering taxes somehow automatically produces more growth.

Given that we have no clear indicator that raising taxes on wealthy people would reduce growth (really, we have the opposite signal from the historical record), there seems little reason not to pursue greater equality.

I'm reading Piketty's book now and it's not isolated to the US.

Once you hit a certain wealth in most OECD countries, you just stop paying taxes. All that is required is to not take any income, which is easily done. So the top of the "income" distribution is a lie. When we say "top 1% pay X of all taxes", we're talking about the top 1% income earners, not the 1% who have the most wealth, or even the 1% who have increased their wealth the most over the last year.

Piketty is clearly correct with his minimum wealth tax proposal. It does seem the only way to tax people who never realize income.

Well if we did that we'd only save 40,000 lives and ~$1T in transit costs a year. Such savings and improvements in quality of life are unthinkable in the US! \s

Are you including corporate spending and government spending, or just private spending? Because private spending for the 1% is largely irrelevant in this context.

It seems unlikely there will be a billion Americans. Population growth is 0.3% and will likely decline further as native FTR declines.

Who cares? Distillation is in the same class of theft as Anthropic stealing their data in the first place. By all means, Anthropic can try to prevent distillation. It'll be like holding back a storm surge with a single bag of sand. At the very least it'll be entertaining.

Plus it's not like Anthropic has any technical advantage over the Chinese LLM providers, they just have access to more compute. Once sufficient compute becomes available it's nothing special, the math for LLMs is extremely basic, any reasonably trained CS masters/PhD student can ramp up to SOTA in a year or two.

I suspect FOSS will converge/create a best-in-class harness within the next 6 months or so. As will most (all?) software, the FOSS stuff somehow always ends up being way better than the closed source stuff.

Negligence is criminally prosecutable.

It's worse than an honor system, because humans are constrained by social forces to some extent, whereas we don't know what AI is or how it will behave

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but the code I get from LLMs would not be considered acceptable to merge before we collectively stopped having standards. People are committing 900 line functions with sprinkled return statements and it's getting into production. If there are productivity gains to be had I haven't seen them yet

Ridiculous. If investors wish to set their money on fire investing in over-valued companies, they are welcome to do so. Protectionism to preserve ROI is a dumb policy. Just look at the US car industry. We're building dinosaurs. On this trajectory we'll have 0% market share abroad in 10 years. Chinese EVs will probably get market share at a 100% tariff because US automakers fell so far behind.

Same situation in protectionism in AI. The rest of the world will simply lap us.

Another shill account I gues

Hilariously bad take. Open weight models can be retrained of fine-tuned, that's the entire point. The idea that the "Chinese government controls your intelligence" is laughable in the case of open weight models. Once the weights are released you can do whatever you want with them. The idea that there's economic capture by the Chinese for products they're literally giving away is stupid to the point of inanity.

I can only assume this account is pure shilling for the closed-source AI labs.

Dealing drugs is highly profitable

Data centers are depreciating assets. I'd class it more like a fancy car than a house.

The difference is that people building atomic weapons knew what they were building. OpenAI/Anthropic have no idea how emergent intelligence works. They're just running in the dark towards the cliff. Leaving it in their hands is the same risk as leaving it to any random guy, because random guy and the labs have the same understanding of what they're building. I'm tired of us treating labs like they're somehow uniquely good at AI. They are not. They simply have enough capital to train. If training was affordable they would have no edge whatsoever.

Why?

Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.

Is it? Uber has been a net loss for society. It increased overall VMT, especially in urban areas, and drove riders away from transit. On the whole this is both bad for cities and bad for city dwellers. We have more traffic and less transit, precisely the opposite of what we should be aiming for.

If corporations can selectively ignore whatever laws they don't like, we won't have a functioning society anymore. Our society is predicated on equality under the law. If general trust in that principle breaks down I don't see how democracy survives.

Except that's not how it was in 2004 before Citizens United. So.. yes, in your made up hypothetical it doesn't look good. But in reality, where we all live, it worked better than the current rules

I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.

Obviously exaggerating.. but not by much.

It released in June..

The scale of public spend is probably much higher in the US..

We won't know how close we are to takeoff until takeoff. My main critique of AI is that takeoff is dangerous, and we're basically running towards the cliff as fast as we can. Will you grow wings before you fall to your death? That's basically the bet we're making, if you believe in takeoff.

Silver lining is that if it goes bad we probably won't live long (as a species) to say "I told you so"

Hetzner has hard usage cutoffs

I recall the Boyle video in this claimed the whole affair cost $100B or so and achieved nothing. So, typical Musk outcome.