She was also a vegetarian, a lifelong animal rights activist, close friend of Paul Watson (founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society), and the founder of her own Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the welfare and protection of animals.
People are complicated!
I’m not whining on their behalf, I’m warning that this approach to taxation will not hit the intended target. Billionaires whose assets are mostly concentrated in stocks have no reason to make California their primary residence. They can live anywhere in the world and if forced to they will do so.
If you want an effective tax on tech billionaires you should find a way to tax an asset they can’t move: intellectual property. That’s where all tech billionaires ultimately derive their wealth. I personally am against IP altogether, but I’ll take an IP tax as a consolation prize.
It goes without saying that land value tax is another tax on assets that can’t be moved. I also want to see LVT tried.
The taxes aren’t on one person though, they’re on everyone. Everyone looking to sell their stocks at tax time => price goes down because no one is looking to buy.
Liquidity issues.
For example, loads of elderly people in California own homes that have very low property taxes which were assessed decades ago. If their property values were re-assessed today they wouldn’t be able to afford the property tax and would have to sell their home and move (possibly flee the state).
Now that’s not the situation these billionaires are in. They aren’t tied up in a single house they’d have to sell. Their issue is that they’d have to sell a lot of stocks to pay a wealth tax, an event that could trigger a huge market drop in the price of those stocks.
You can be extremely asset-rich while being relatively cash-poor. I say relatively because these billionaires likely have millions in cash sitting around but that might not be enough to afford tens of millions in taxes every year (which must be paid in cash, not stocks).
Seems like every day the internet continues its downhill acceleration into full on Dark Forest AI slop apocalypse.
We really ought to be working on more and better tools for sharing human created and curated spaces.
No one was making clothes even before that. It was an extremely niche hobby. Just like gardening and home canning and countless other homestead-type skills. People just don’t have enough time to do all that and work a full time job and raise kids.
In the old days when all of those skills were in full practice, people lived on literal homesteads and that stuff was their full time job. They also taught all their children how to help with it and basically ran the household like a small factory for producing food and clothing.
I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.
The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.
The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.
Religions don’t just pop up out of a vacuum. They reflect and reinforce the predominant cultural practices of the time.
You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.
If you are not the customer, you are the product!
It may not be a single gene. A lot of stuff that affects the brain is polygenic and very complicated, just as there is no single gene for intelligence.
Being a psychopath may also confer reproductive advantages for some people. Most psychopaths are not murderers but are somewhat well adapted to blending into society. It’s kind of like how parasitism works in nature, but this is at a social level.
If he’s a psychopath (and there’s a good chance he is) then therapy is unlikely to work. Psychopaths treat therapy as either a waste of time or an opportunity to work on their manipulation skills. They can’t be cured because their brains are just different.
Most people these days are terribly out of shape, overweight/obese, and have way too much body fat and way too little muscle mass. People eat way too much fat and carbs and way too little protein. They also don’t move nearly enough, of course, so eating protein without doing the work is not going to help.
Since I’ve started lifting weights and trying to build muscle and lose weight, I’ve begun to realize how difficult it is to get enough protein to do that without spending a lot of money on meat or eating a bunch of legumes (and feeling awful all day the next day).
Forget 410 grams per day. It’s hard enough to get 100 grams per day without supplementing.
Amazon reviews say the book doesn’t debunk our need for protein. The bigger you are in terms of muscle mass, the more protein you need in your diet. That doesn’t change if you’re vegan.
Vegan strongman Patrik Baboumian eats 410 grams of plant-based protein per day, a lot of which is made up of vegan protein powders. These are exactly what this report about lead is warning against.
Plants are ultra-concentrators of metals in soil, including heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Protein powder is an ultra-concentrated product, further increasing the risks of high lead levels. Anyone like Baboumian who wants to build a lot of muscle while maintaining a vegan diet needs to be very careful about where they source their protein powder.
Commodification is not the right word here. Financialization is the usual one.
Commodification implies that housing is being mass produced and prices are dropping as profit margins fall. That’s clearly not what’s happening.
Financialization implies that housing has become an investment that is increasingly targeted by the finance industry. This is actually happening a lot more than people think. Finance companies have full time real estate staff who are out there buying up housing on a daily basis.
Sure you can have a unique identifier. That’s not the issue. The issue is that anyone can contact you via your phone number! This is not a problem with chat apps where people need permission to add you to their contact list. Why not have a system like that?
Same goes for credit cards. They should need to ask for permission to charge your credit card. Merely knowing your credit card info should not be enough.
Yes but they could also rent out extra rooms. Every Airbnb I’ve stayed at has the owners living there.
Even if you limit to one house per person you’ll still get housing as an investment. A house in Malibu is worth way more than a house in Arkansas.
And yet everyone waits until a few months before tax time to put their money into RRSPs. I have seen it first hand. The money just floods in.
It doesn’t have to happen on one day to move the price. Prices move whenever there are more buyers than sellers or vice versa.