Risk without labour is just jumping off cliffs.

But hey, let's talk about risk. Most of these ultra-wealthy people don't know what risk is. Some of them really did come up from nothing, sure, but Musk had millions of dollars backing him in the form of his wealthy father. Trump, famously, would have made more money investing the money his father gave him in a stock ETF than going into real estate.

And further, I think it's reasonable to make a profit on some risk. I'm sure that the folks that own my favourite local coffee shop took on some risk to do it. You can't be sure a shop is going to succeed. I'm glad they have, and I wish them every success.

Of course, they've also worked VERY hard at making it a success. For those people that do take risks, it's their own LABOUR that makes these businesses work (that, and a bit of luck--opening up a month before COVID would have been bad luck, and nothing to do with risk OR labour).

But once you get in to the many hundreds of millions of dollars, I think we should be able to agree that there's never anything risky in their lives ever again. I'll keep repeating this every time I get a chance, but you can't make a billion dollars on a salary. $5000/day for 500 years is still not a billion dollars. It's a level of wealth that is impossible to accrue by any work of your own. It takes the work of other people.

As I said in another comment, if you have Jeff Bezos and no workers, Amazon is nothing. If you have all of Amazon, but no CEO, you can probably make a lot of money. The labour of the people at Amazon is what made it huge, and what made him rich. It is necessarily the case that those people produce more value than they are remunerated for--that's what a profit is. But when you have such a huge profit value, it tells you that the gap is *enormous*. Why is that okay? Why don't we think that those people that actually made the software and delivered the packages--the things that define Amazon as a company--don't deserve the value that they created?

It used to be that a CEO would only make 20x what their workers did, and they would be paid a real salary, one that could be taxed. Now they get paid hundreds or thousands of times what their workers do, just in stocks so it can't be taxed. They have an endless army of lawyers and accountants. They'll pay $80 million to avoid a $10 million tax, just to show you that they actually HAVE the money, they just refuse to give it back to the governments and people that provided the conditions to make them so fabulously wealthy. The roads, the education system, the laws, the safe borders--all these things went into the building of these hoards.

Work is how you make value. You have to plant crops and harvest them; or drill into the ground and extract and refine the petroleum; or write the software and fulfill the orders. All of that is labour. I have plenty of ideas and if I never execute on any of them, the idea is worth zero. That's why I'm banging on about wealth.

It's not impossible to tax; that's loser talk for defeatists. We made these laws, we've created these monetary fictions, we can write new laws and come up with more equitable systems. Stocks and bonds don't HAVE to exist, but given that they do, I think we can figure out a way to make sure that people don't become extremely wealthy and leave the rest of the country fighting for scraps, living paycheque to paycheque, hoping that their insurance premiums don't bankrupt them before the medical expenses do.

And hey, it doesn't have to be a wealth tax the way I define it--I think the things you suggested are de facto wealth taxes. But based on what you're saying, it sounds like you also believe in the necessity and the moral correctness of taxing them, especially when you and I are paying much higher proportions of our comparatively meagre holdings.

It's small segment of the population, the 0.1% and the 0.01%. They can be taxed. They are not special.

Not to mention the most '70s guitar riff ever to grace the small screen!

Awesome effects, awesome sets, awesome props, awesome music. All they needed were some awesome screen writers, which they unfortunately didn't have.

1. Governments have been and can be remarkably effective at distributing money. This is why Musk's DOGE ploy found nothing.
2. Whether what the government is spending money in wasteful areas or not is a matter of opinion. I suspect that you and I would have some agreement as to where here, but we'd also have some disagreements. That's fine. It does not invalidate the utility of government.
3. A government that would effectively levy a wealth tax would be, in my opinion, more likely to spend the money on priorities that would benefit people.
4. Individuals do not have the capacity to direct their wealth that benefits even just themselves; your spending alone cannot buy you the roads you want or the healthcare you need.
5. Even if we ignore literally 100% of this, and the only thing the government does is take the money from billionaires and light it on fire, this is still a net benefit. The power of the ultra-wealthy comes, obviously, from the massive disparity in how much they have vs. how much everyone else has. Eliminating that gap provides an INHERENT benefit. The Wealth Gap (not necessarily the Income Gap) is toxic to the functioning of any society.

I don't care if my taxes go down or not, what I want is a playing field that's relatively equal and a society that can take care of the poor and needy.

This argument from nihilism is absurd on its face.

Let's play pretend.

For a moment, let's say that a billionaire made their money by killing people. Straight up murdering them. They hustled hard, they made $1 billion.
Are they successful? Yes. Do they deserve that money? No. Should we take it? Yes.

Billionaires only get that way by exploiting workers that actually create the value. You work for Amazon, you make that company what it is. That guy at the top did SOME work, sure. He may have even have had the good fortune to be at the right place at the right time. But Amazon without any CEO could still be a powerhouse company. A CEO without the employees of Amazon could never make anything that valuable.

The wealth that the billionaires have accrued has all been done through dirty tricks like paying themselves in stock + $1 as a salary. It completely avoids income taxes. Even if they paid themselves $10s of millions a year, at least then income taxes would've captured some of that. These guys with billions have barely ever paid any taxes over their lifetimes. Sure, sometimes they sell some stock and pay a big bolus of tax, but if you amortize that over their lifetimes, it's not much in proportion to their overall wealth.

Even if you're a wise investor and put a lot in the stock market and retire with a huge fund, you'll have to pay taxes on those gains one day. The billionaires won't. I don't understand how you can want them to get away scot free, but you're okay forever paying money to the government that you seem to hate. This is the system working against you, and people just trying to get it to be a little more fair, and somehow you still don't like it. You're not a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire, my guy. You're just a working stiff like the rest of us.

You'll never be a billionaire, man. Neither will I. But if I were, I would pay a mere 5%.

I'm paying 30% right now on my income that I need to live. 5% of a billionaire's wealth is NOTHING to them. Tokens in the game. They don't need that to live. They don't even need that to buy their next super-yacht. They only need that to hold over our heads and make us somehow believe that they EARNED it, even though for some reason those of us that work for a living don't deserve that? We didn't earn it?

It's ALREADY unfair, taxing billionaires is trying to even the field even SLIGHTLY.

Yeah, those are the doctors and lawyers and actors and all the people that WORK for a living. None of them are billionaires.

See, you're conflating the top 1% of income earners--the key word there is INCOME earners, not dirtbag CEOs that pay themselves $1 salary a year and take the rest in stock--with the ultra wealthy. The 0.1% and the 0.01%.

I'm all for lowering taxes on the top 1% too, if you start taxing the people that are hoarding the wealth. $10 million in assets? Whatever. Not even worth our time.

$100 million? Yeah, now we're talking. 1% of assets a year, minimum. They'll make that back so quickly they wouldn't even notice it. You could make it 2% or 3% and they'd never feel it. Man, we're paying 30% of our INCOMES, and somehow it's a hard sell to get 3-5%--TEN TIMES LESS--of a billionaire's wealth.

You're looking at the wrong numbers, the wrong population. Nobody cares about the working 1%, they're not relevant here. We're trying to get money out of people that don't pay income tax AT ALL.

Do they still own the buildings? The land? They can still be taxed.

American citizens working in Canada STILL pay taxes to the US government. They government will tax you no matter where you are, if they want to. Of course, that only applies to WORKING people paying INCOME taxes, because governments loooove to tax labourers, and not the people extracting profits by underpaying labourers. (That's how billionaires become billionaires. Fundamentally, they have to under-pay everyone that creates actual value in the company whose stock they hold.)

Let them leave. They're not paying taxes, so by definition, THEY'RE NOT CONTRIBUTING. But they won't leave California because they LIKE California. They like making businesses in California. They could've done it anywhere else already, but they didn't. California has an education system that generates the workers that they need. It has nice weather and pretty people and hollywood.

And tax the shell companies for owning the summer homes. Like, all of these things are *human constructs*. We *invented* shell companies. There's nothing special about them that makes them untaxable except our willingness to go along with the fantasy. Change the laws, tax whatever you have to. Stop taxing the workers that actually DO THE WORK and start taxing the leeches that threaten to take their money away and not contribute to the very places that made them rich.

Or, y'know, eat them. Also an option.

Taxing the wealth is a better solution. It just IS.

I could explain the whole 'tax wealth, not work' thing, but I honestly don't have the time and I think if you're interested enough, you'll read about it.

Taxing wealth is not new, and at this point, it's necessary. Large amounts of wealth will sit and accrue value merely by existing, which is why billionaires that try to give away their money actually have such a hard time doing it. It gains in value faster than you can spend it because a billion dollars is an INSANE amount of money. (If you made $5000 every day for 500 years, you wouldn't be a billionaire.)

A lot of proposals are to tax wealth over a certain threshold (like $100 million+) at a mere 3%. That's what you can get just by holding some really boring bonds. Any billionaire that can't keep up with that won't be over the threshold for long, and then they too can enjoy being taxed at a normal rate like the rest of us.

We know where the wealth is. We tax unrealized gains in real estate all the time--it's rolled into my mortgage. We seem willing to tax everyone except the people that have an undescribeable amount of wealth. Doctors, lawyers, stock traders--chump change. Tax the people with 10s of millions of dollars in assets. They'll never even notice the difference in real terms, they just have a philosophical problem with not having the maximum amount of ill-gotten wealth that they possibly can.

(Aren't you glad I didn't talk more about not taxing work? This is me reining it in. :P)

What's the thrust of this article?

Some of the companies are making a profit, some of them aren't. Some of them will go bankrupt, some of them won't. China has let more car companies fold than north america has ever even HAD. Isn't part of competition letting the failures die instead of giving them a fat handout because the CEO is pals with a politician? Let them price their vehicles whatever they want, and if they run out of money, that's how it's supposed to work, isn't it? Is the problem that China is doing capitalism better than the capitalists (who are actual oligarchs and authoritarians in waiting)?

Also, I don't want to hear a goddamn thing about subsidies to car companies when both Canada and the USA still give subsidies to oil and gas companies, who are making windfall profits *right now*. Somehow they still get tax breaks instead of shouldering windfall profit taxes. At least China was subsidizing a new industry that needed to get off the ground. Where's the sense in giving money to people that already have it?

Oh, right--it's the CEOs being pals with politicians thing again.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

If a company builds touch-screen support into their OS, you expect affordances to the UI to support actually using the touch screen. If they don't want to do that, they shouldn't support that feature, that's why. This is the dumbest comment I've seen on slashdot in a long time.

I don't think everyone hates touchpads. A lot of people likely prefer them (at least the Apple ones) because they've spent so little time at desktop computers. A lot of (most?) computer users that don't JUST use touchscreen devices are on laptops. The Macbook is Apple's best selling mac, after all.

At nearly every price tier, Macs are competitive with PCs, at least when we're talking about laptops. If you spec out a $3000 Macbook Pro, you'll be hard pressed to find a PC laptop that performs as well for less money. The real difference is that Macs only come at quite discrete price points, so you might not be able to find something that's going to match your budget.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.