Again, accumulation is a necessary mechanism of the system.

If you were running a centralized economic committee (like in the soviet system) then you need a way to figure out which committee members are making good decisions, and which are making poor ones. So one way is to give all the new ones a small portfolio and get rid of the ones that run it into the ground, and promote the ones that do well by giving them larger portfolios.

Under a free market system that allows personal ownership you're essentially doing the same thing. The people who make sound financial decisions will grow their wealth by making good choices of what to invest it in. The guy who sets up a really efficient trucking company in an area that has a lot of demand for transportation services will accumulate wealth. When his son takes over and stops maintaining the fleet and takes the proceeds of the company and buys a huge yacht, his wealth starts dropping.

When the government takes some percentage of profits and invests it into medical care, education, or roads, then we see general efficiency improvements across society (healthy educated people are more productive).

But if society were to take a chunk of wealth from people who've accumulated it and they handed it out as lump sum cheques to average people, you have to carefully consider what's actually happening. First of all, wealthy people don't have wealth sitting there in a bank account. Almost all of their wealth is in the form of shares of companies. So in order to pay the tax they have to sell a significant number of those shares on a market. That will drop the price of those shares, including the price of the shares sitting in people's retirement funds. So who is going to buy those shares? Who has the cash to actually buy them? It's not even clear to me that there's *this* much cash sitting around ready to buy shares. But what's certain is that the people who are getting the lump sum cheques in the mail are almost certainly not the ones buying those shares. So we're moving shares from people to some other people who have cash sitting around waiting for a good deal, and that cash is then paid to the government and given out to the population. Those people then spend it on, presumably consumables like food, clothes, televisions, electronic devices. Maybe a few of them pay off debts. Very few of them will invest it with the same economic smarts that lead to that wealth being created in the first place. So you forced the top wealth accumulators to sell their shares to some people who were sitting on a pile of cash, for a discount, and then you gave that pile of cash to the people who did nothing more than drive up inflation. I'm not sure this is good for the economy at all.

Paying a share of corporate profits to the government who use it to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure sounds like a better plan to me.

This is just the latest app produced by the "I could code this in a weekend" crowd.

Selling shares could mean the different between control and loss of control of the company. As in, you have loyal people on the board who understand your vision, and suddenly depending on perent ownership you and your friends will be minority stakeholders and you can get kicked out of your own company. Remember, it happened to Steve Jobs famously. But it's actually fairly common the founders get kicked out of their own company when they no longer have controlling amounts of shares. You'd be handing control of the company to people who bought shares solely because they want to make money. Don't care about the vision, don't care about the industry. Which is OK, but also they won't know how to run things. Next thing you know the company gets run into the ground.

Also, what about private companies .. are they going to be tax exempt .. you're going to value them based on how many people want to buy shares? What would those shares be worth when they're stolen from the owners? This is like Zimbabwe seizing white owned farms and handing it to people clueless about farming.

He must have read that BS book that Oprah was promoting years ago called The Secret. "It is based on the belief of the pseudoscientific law of attraction, which claims that thought alone can influence objective circumstances within one's life."

The asset tax is dumb. how is he supposed to pay that tax without diluting his ownership stake? When he announces he's selling shares, the value of OpenAI will drop just by that. So does he pay tax on the new or old valuation? I don't see how anyone would just go along with that. He'll be fucking pissed. I mean, if you had $30 billion and someone pisses you off beyond anything by taking what you put your heart and soul into you'd do every legal means to makes sure whoever done that to you pays. He'll hire a posse of lawyers to ensure he gets back at them.

If you're concerned about that, why are you OK with setting the precedent that the government gets to decide what is in, and not in, the models?

When the Democrats come in, they'll vet the AI models properly.

We can't have this cultural rot. And btw, circumbinary planets? WTF. You're born orbiting a particular star, not some woke circumbinary bullshit.

All the vibe-coded slop .. instead of buying enterprise software .. it will just get vibe coded by the IT department. Think about that .. instead of buying a license for Photoshop a design company can just vibe code a photo editor that has what they need. "create a full featured photo editor with some custom features like ..."

AI will create new jobs and opportunities.

Have you been to Iran? Nearly every middle class and above home in Iran has a satellite dish -- and that includes, and actually especially the elites. They're not transmitting .. but all of them are literally illegal (punishable by jail time). My point is that not just that you're giving Iran too much credit on their ability to crack down on shit, you're giving its elites too much credit on their ability to be without internet. Iran's leadership rules by fear, bravado, and random arrests -- their actual technical capabilities are weak. They don't do anything evidence based, the whole point is to be somewhat random as that elicits the most fear. For example, somebody within the IRGC, who likely actually owns a Starlink unit themselves, complains about their neighbor by accusing him of owning Starlink and then that guy disappears. I'll bet anything they haven't caught one actual Starlink owner.

Think about it .. the US landed C-130s, and a bunch of other aircraft including helicopters deep in their territory --- hung out for like 45 minutes and left. They couldn't track noisy ass helicopters and you're telling me they can find a phase array antenna Starlink? Most units of which, I can pretty much guarantee, are owned by government-connected people. And btw, they can be solar powered and planted some distance away from whoever owns it.

If these were easily detectable people wouldn't be smuggling these in like they're the iPhone.

So your argument has now devolved to people are better off poor? You went from being envious of billionaires to saying people don't need any modern amenities.

I didn't say he wasn't happy did I? Btw, how many people would trade their smartphone and live a 17th century life? People had the choice not to buy smartphones yet everyone in the world wanted/wants one.

here, record the sound from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I dunno seems to work really well in YouTube videos. This guy did extensive testing, watch from the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...