1,279 karma · joined April 19, 2020
But it's not even the case that rich people pay capital gains necessarily. It's very easy to live off debt and never realize gains. When you die, your basis resets and you never pay any taxes ever.
This is how people like Bezos and Trump have years where they don't pay any taxes at all.
Anyway seems stupid to me
bro it’s a data center. This is commodity hardware. Nothing innovative is happening here. Meta is abusing the tax code and hoping their lobbying efforts shield them
Hint: you pick up the bill
Also I’m confused, do you want a regressive tax system?
I will call out cronyism when I see it, regardless of whether bought politicians have decided it’s legal or not.
Let’s not be naive here.
Then sometime around when the Ketamine began flowing the plan seems to have changed.
So I would add ketamine to politics.
What’s weird about all this is that the democrats were pretty pro-Tesla / pro-SpaceX before Elon Ketamized the Fed. And the democratic platform would have improved industrial policy via-a-vis renewables.
We can only conclude that the Ketamine haze addled his brain and he simply ignores the advice of those around him.
That a common failure mode
Why? Do movie critics need to be directors to critique? Obviously not.
> While you can't do this, capitalism is not failed, outdated, or antiquated.
Why? Capitalism is clearly failing the world. Being outdated is I suppose a relative perspective. I view it as outdated because it doesn't meet the needs of our current technology. Remember that economic systems are a function of available technology: they exist only in a social context. Our technology has already reached the point where capitalism is counter-productive.
I would love to have a replacement system ready to go. My hunch is it will require a lot of compute.
A “planned economy” is very vague. Usually people imply a central committee deciding what to do. Our economy relies on plutocrats to decide what to do. At what point of plutocratic concentration would you call the US economy planned? My point is all these terms are fuzzy.
My point is that capitalism as is practiced in America is a failed ideology. From the vantage of the present day, it appears painfully antiquated. A pathetic vestige of a less civilized world.
It’s interesting because America had the opportunity to lead the journey to the next organizing principle for socio-economic, but instead decided to get stuck in the past. Pathetic, but standard course. I think it’s because our leadership is in their 80s.
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it’ll be the end user, because of regulatory capture. But maybe the political pendulum will swing away from “bad ideas” soon
You are living in fantasy land my guy. Put down the FoxNews and learn actual statistics before posting
Our current oligarch-capitalist system (wherein most of the world is dictatorship or plutocratic) is not capable of equitable resource distribution. However, future, better systems of organization will likely provide better mechanisms for distrubtion.
Capitalism is an old and dying system. It is clearly unfit for the 21st century. It's best thought of as anachronistic, like feudalism. Once it's been excised from our societies, we'll be able to answer your questions.
Remember, the top 1% of households have $12M+ in assets. That's over a million households for whom work is somewhat or completely optional for them and their children. They can live a good quality life off capital returns without any hardship.
This logic still holds down the wealth gradient. Households at the 95th percentile still have to work, but the need is more flexible. The buffer of need could be years long.
So you have millions of people who genuinely don't need to worry about getting paid that much.
Unfortunately many countries like the US are very under-developed, and have trained it's citizenry to approach education as job training. This is obviously an abject failure, and probably a contribution to our anemically slow and pathetic growth rate.
For the upper crust of our society, work is entirely optional. Presumably people therefore continue to work for the process or the reward of the doing.
The point is that we can do it if we want to.
IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.
I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!
It’s not wishful thinking it’s just a fact. Zoning exists because landowners want it. As soon as they don’t want it, it’s gone.
The tech industry has spent the last 20 years (and really in earnest the last 15, accelerating over time) making their tech as addictive as possible.
Current tech is egregiously addictive. It’s worse than most drugs.
The big tech companies are now the most successful drug dealers in history.