You definitely should pay more marginal tax as you make more money, up to some point. The first $10 or $20k you make should be tax-free, and then the tax rate should become progressively higher after that, but should max out around 30% or so. But that's only 30% of income, not 30% of net assets. Taxing assets is theft. Taxing income is progressive.

However, the accumulation of wealth into the hands of people who make good investments (i.e. making good choices of what to spend it on so that they invest in something profitable) is a valuable feature of the system, and is the reason it's allowed to happen. The government is bad at choosing projects to invest in. The market does it automatically and in an efficient and distributed manner. Picking the right investments is the useful work that entrepreneurs and capitalists are providing to society. If you do something to prevent more capital being given to the people who are making the best investment decisions, then you're actively discouraging the efficient allocation of capital. That would be a good way to run your country into the ground.

The government's job is to regulate the negative aspects of capitalism. That means it has to prevent tax loop-holes for the wealthy (as you said), stop corrupt officials from profiting from their position, punish companies for monopolistic behavior, and reduce the influence of money in the political system. These are the things we should be voting for. Not a 5% government approved theft of assets.

The issue is too many people don't look at political party plans, they simply adopt a political party as their identity. They are not republican (or democrats!) because GOP propose plan with item 1,2,3, but rather because being republican is part of their identity. Once that happens and facts goes against that political party, it make the brain analyze it as an attack against identity, and use defensive reaction mechanism to protect identity, chief among them wholesale rejection of facts.

This is not only the republican which do that, but republican happens to be associated with right wing / authority / strength as an image (not necessarily a truth just an image) and far more likely currently to have the facts going against them.

I didn't say 'no parents', I said 'most'. Also, you're posting on slashdot so your 5 parents that you work with are highly likely to be working in the tech world. Sure, people who understand technology are more likely to be skeptical of social media and AI and are going to teach their kids online safety and are going to limit it. But that's certainly a minority of parents. The vast majority of non-computer people will go onto google, type a question in, and 100% believe the entire AI blurb that it spits out at the top. Just like most people will eat too much junk food. You're talking about products that are literally designed to circumvent rational thought and appeal directly to our dopamine receptors. It's not a fair fight.

Realistically most parents aren't monitoring what their kids are doing online. When my kids were in grade 7 and starting to complain that all their friends had devices (and cell phones), I was shocked to learn that many of the kids in their grade had already seen Deadpool. This is an R-rated film, and specifically it has explicit sex scenes and a ton of gore. I'm OK with parents making decisions for their own kids and even watching an R-rated film with them if the parent has OK'd it (I watched the Matrix with my kids when they were 13), but it was clear that these kids just had an iPad with Netflix and Disney+ installed and there was no parental locking, so they could watch whatever they wanted.

Believing that parents will monitor what their kids do online is like believing they'll feed them breakfast every morning. We have breakfast programs in schools for a reason.

I'm not sure that's true. You can cut emissions first by just installing solar panels, which is very cheap and offsets a lot of the energy use at peak times (mostly due to AC). You can also make sure you've developed your hydroelectric sites. Then you need to up the nuclear generation, which is nearly zero emissions and can provide base load power. Then you're only left with your variable load, which is typically provided by natural gas. The only zero-emission substitute for that is battery capacity, which is expensive but certainly feasible. For example, "In Ontario, 87% of electricity is produced carbon-free from hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar. But the remainder comes from natural gas plants, especially during peak hours as they are usually the generating resource responding to short-term changes in demand." (source)

How big are the buyouts, roughly?

Take a note of the countries that were at that conference, and the ones that weren't. The biggest consumers aren't there.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz drops oil supply by about 20% worldwide. That's the amount that has to either be replaced with production elsewhere (likely Russia) or replaced with alternatives (wind, solar, nuclear, etc.). Nobody is suggesting that we're going to replace 100% of fossil fuels with renewables. For a small island nation that already has diesel generators, this means a large up-front capital investment to build a large amount of solar and/or wind and a large battery bank, but the ongoing costs will be lower than purchasing diesel fuel. Unfortunately capital (the thing you use to build stuff) is expensive right now and looks like it will stay high for a long time, so that makes the initial construction a lot more expensive. Which means less spending on other stuff for those nations, like building industrial plant, schools, roads, etc.

They (conspiracy theorist from r/UFOs) take

1) a long period of time (the first "case" is from july 2023)
2) they take various profession and places mashed together
3) various situation mashed together (missing, suicided, murdered, one guy missing stating he did not want to live with his brain deteriorating etc...)
Then suddenly they find out there is a dozen such a case.


The thing is I would be not be surprised if you take so many different places, and people, over so many years, and check for disappearance/murder/suicide you would find similar number, but nobody will make a CT over your random white collar guy.

I didn't know one of Elon Musk's kids was involved with this.

Think about the incentives involved in the new AI race.

We've inventing a new type of machine. The machines are big and huge and complicated and consume enormous resources, so they're necessarily centralized. These machines are wondrous marvels. You can ask them a question and 9 times out of 10 they give you a relevant and useful answer.

People are naturally trustworthy of machines because we view computers as infallible. If I store contact information in my contacts list and go back and retrieve it later, the information is still there 100% intact. It augments our brains with perfect memory and recall. After all, that's what computers do.

So almost everyone trusts these new machines intrinsically. Few people question the answers that are given, and even if you were a little skeptical, it's much less work to convince yourself that it's probably right than to track down the supporting material.

The organizations that control these new machines have a perverse incentive. They can make far more money by manipulating the answers that the machine produces in subtle ways for their benefit, or for the benefit of their paying clients. "What is the best dishwasher?" "Are there any pharmacies in my area open until midnight?" "Summarize the political platform of candidates X, Y, and Z." "What medication can treat such-and-such disease?" These are all prompts that can be monetized by the AI provider.

We know they will because companies have been inserting paid advertising and results into our search queries and emails for years.

Imagine the power that you wield if you own a machine that everybody trusts implicitly with their most important questions and most sensitive information.

That's clearly what we're building. We can't say we didn't know and weren't warned.

I'm pretty sure zipline would have a lot of incentive to patent it. But you can license patent rights.

I can understand all that, but it still doesn't say why acting deserves special treatment.

Coders enjoy coding. AI has taken a chunk out of that, and people treat it as beneficial. It's taken a lot of translators out of the picture. They enjoy what they do. It's taken a slice out of countless jobs that people enjoy doing, and there's been a bit of a murmur about job losses.

Then we get to acting, with a famous actor being deep faked into a movie with the consent of his estate, and everyone is up in arms because actor and celebrity.

The sad bit is yes, this obsoletes many aspects of human engagement, just as the industrial revolution rendered a lot of manual work. It will continue to do it. The question is how we as a species adapt to it, and utilise it to our benefit.

It's not just a child. It's a child plus a network of organised crime that specialises in tooling for illicit compromise, which said child has access to, plus contacts with compromise experience to learn from. This changes things significantly.

Cybersecurity is a hellishly expensive thing if done to the degree that's found in financials and the like (where a bad compromise could have serious international ramifications).
Most places don't have the budget to hire enough of the right staff to protect against a dedicated attacker with up to date compromise tools. It only takes one flaw for things to start going very wrong indeed.

It's a case of "Taking security as seriously as you can afford to" as an operational expense, and keep insurance up to date for if you're ever compromised.

I salute the naming committee from that group. Well done.