pydry

it is parasitic to try and prohibit competing app stores and then leverage your monopoly by charging monopoly prices.

everything google is trying to do to discourage graphene, newpipe, competing app stores, etc. is parasitic and it's right that they are being fined by the EU for this behavior.

It's very clear they dont. Maybe they will one day. That day isnt today.

Yeah you did. You wrote "he couldnt turn it [his illiquid assets] into cash even if he wanted to".

>The problem is in the calculation of "net worth".

That is not a problem.

Let them value their own assets. If they value their ming vase at $10k then the government reserves the right to buy it for...$10k. They might get away with avoiding paying taxes. Or the government might get a bargain. The incentive, though, is to be scrupulously honest and accurate.

Some people obviously wouldn't like being put in such a position.

> And, more importantly, the difference is that people choosing to put their money into something is not the same as enabling it to be taken by force.

Im not 100% sure but I think this falls under the category of just saying "wealth taxes not fair!"

no it isnt. illiquid doesnt mean unpriceable and illiquid doesnt mean can't be liquidated. people liquidate their illiquid assets all the time to pay their tax bills.

it being "complex to collect" is a criticism of many taxes which are already being paid. sales tax and VAT are horrendously complicated (far more so than a wealth tax) to collect but we still do it.

>An overlooked issue in popular discourse is that notional asset values are tightly coupled to who owns them — it isn’t transferable. Concepts like “dead equity” have been in the finance literature for a very long time. Elon Musk’s equity only has the value it does because he owns it

even if it were true, it's not a good reason not to tax him.

in fact, it might even help bring some sanity to the capital markets if he and every other billionaire were forced to price their illiquid assets for tax purposes.

theres no efficiency or impossibility argument that prevents this. the only argument boils down to stamping one's feet declaring that it's not fair (that I would have to value my illiquid assets and might be forced to sell them if I underpriced them).

> He couldn’t convert it into cash even if he wanted to.

Elon musk has been converting his assets into cash recently and he has had no problem doing it.

Bill Gates similarly liquidated his assets to fund his charity and didnt have a problem doing that.

Why is liquidating their shareholdings suddenly a problem only when they need to pay taxes?

there are plenty of ways to handle the problem of taxing illiquid wealth but I dont think there is much value in discussing it with somebody pretending that means it is "not real".

it would be like discussing the science behind vaccines with somebody who persisted in calling them "poisons".

illiquid wealth != unreal wealth.

as I said, if it were unreal you wouldn't mind losing it.

if it is illiquid, you clearly do.

economic illiteracy is not the best foundation for arguing against taxing the wealthy. by pretending the wealth "doesnt really exist" and "isnt there" to tax it highlights the underlying greed motivating the argument.

if you dont agree, perhaps elucidate on a more legitimate reason you might have had for confusing unreal with illiquid?

You wont mind if we tax it then will you?

You do, of course.

p.s. liquidity != wealth. try not to confuse them.

Landlords who have their entitlements to land rents or other natural resource rents they've captured ripped away from them would almost assuredly endorse the use of violence.

Land redistribution (of which this is a form) from the landed rentiers to the landless has historically resulted in brutal violence in order to protect their privileged claim on non-human created wealth.

Thats an incentive to rent out the property or sell up to somebody who will.

It would apply harsh market discipline on landlords - a demographic that has usually been rather coddled.

i find it weird how many Russians, Chinese and Americans are weirdly protective of their own government's oppressive behaviours in the name of patriotism.

Sure, those 8 are often thrown away while that 1 often ends up moving mountains but so what?

For vibe coded code from what ive seen it's about 10:0.

We should clearly only write that from now on.

It's more odd that some people don't give him the same benefit of the doubt they would a whistleblower from Russia or China.

if you find the ratio between typing and thinking to be very high then you're probably producing a lot of slop.

This is a common theme I find when I hear about people's AI coding success stories. Where they say "its good at X" where X might be "backfilling unit tests" or "writing boilerplate" I usually think "if you find you need to do X a lot youre definitely doing programming wrong.

Ive actually yet to hear an X applied to production code that doesnt make me think that.

You've missed the point. Nobody doubts writing code well or badly is indeed a skill issue.

The question is that "once you account for all of the things you need to do to make the code very high quality, did vibe coding actually provide any real value?"

I'm certain there are guardrails that help bolster vibe coding but I'm equally certain that when ive prompted something important I usually have to redo it enough times that just writing it manually myself usually would have been quicker.

Then I watch other people who code who dump on that opinion and I see total slop. They just can't tell the difference.

It's enough for them that those people have somewhere basic to live and basic medical care so their stats dont look too bad.

can't trust reviews because theyre spammed with fakes. can't trust brands because private equity buy them out and enshittify.

i have a pair of cheap Chinese earbuds that way outlasted all of the expensive ones I ever bought.

it's really not generally appreciated just how much better architectural decisions made in the context of refactoring are. if you have a time budget for architecture it will always be better spent on refactoring than writing documents in advance, no matter how minimal they are.

The latter being vastly more effective at honing good design because more decisions are made in retrospect.

I find that a spike or a spike PR to demonstrate a new approach (if a software design decision is controversial) is 10x as valuable.

Did not give more power to everyone. At best you could say that it shifted power from landed gentry to industrialists. Even that switchover was less of a change than you'd think.

The practical upshot of the beginning of industrialization was very negative. The enclosure movement stripped families of their land to push them to work in the factories where they would never go willingly. The famines in Ireland and Ukraine were both triggered by redirecting grain to export in order to fund domestic industrial expansion.

The most brutal two wars in human history were that brutal precisely because industrialization made it possible.

>instead lifted the masses from poverty (after some initial turbulent period).

What lifted the masses from poverty wasnt the factories it was the labor movement which occurred in response to horrific working conditions and the reliance those factory workers had on mass labor (specifically coal mining which was incredibly labor intensive and a key economic chokepoint).

The whole of that is glossed over by right wing libertarian propaganda but that last part is particularly underemphasized.

>Contrary to leftist propaganda, the rich are not some cartoon villains and psychopaths

Do you look at peter thiel and elon musk or the robber barons and see anything else?

The few billionaires ive encountered personally were no less sociopathic but they kept it hidden better. Power corrupts. Immense wealth corrupts. That isnt a leftist thing, that's a human thing.

>The reason why the rich currently exploit the poor is because doing so provides them with significant material gains. Once they can obtain the same or even better material gains by "exploiting" robotic labor instead of human labor, the logical outcome is not further abuse

False. It just shifts the focus of their exploitation from human labor to natural resources.

They'll fight over oil and minerals and gas and water resources and at best leave us to rot (homelessness will skyrocket) and at worst they'll find some excuse to exterminate those of us they particularly dislike (Gaza serves as a model here).

The world economy's reliance on human labor has been the best inducement to peace there is. It's no coincidence that all of the countries in the world with lots of natural resources and no industry are the biggest shitholes and vice versa.

>That is (partly) true, but only in the current economic system. Widespread human-level AI changes the equation, and not necessarily in favor of those who are currently rich.

Human level AI (assuming it ever happens) will simply make the fight over natural resources that much more intense because labor will matter that much less.

You're living at the tail end of a relatively golden period in a country where labor was the economic bottleneck and natural resources were relatively plentiful. Venezuela and Angola and Iraq are models of what happens when that equation is reversed.

Nobody gives a shit about appeasing the people who live in those countries, their labor is virtually worthless. They are a model for how the rest of us will be treated in a world where human labor loses its value.