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Comment Re:ACAB (Score 1) 91

I saw a fake advert in Germany in May 2021, posted in the name of satire.

Alle 17 Minuten ruft ein Polizist Daten von Helene Fischer ab"
Polizeiship

The advert looked like one for "Parship" which is an online dating service.
The text translates to "A policeman/woman looks up Helene Fischer's data every 17 minutes" (she is a singer) and the small print went into more detail of abusive searches by the police (of just one state) in their online database. A lawyer was getting threatening letters from self-proclaimed neo-nazis at her private address, which is not publicly available. Death threats to her and her daughter. It turned out that the data was from that police database and that the policewoman who retrieved the data held political views which tended in that direction.
To the best of my knowledge, the man who sent the threats is in jail. I don't know what happened to the policewoman, but some of her group were suspended from duty and one of them reacted by driving his car into a tree at high speed.

Flook delivers current data (if they identify people correctly) but the problem is wider than that.

Comment Re:In related news, (Score 1) 106

Small difference: drugs are known to be harmful, and illegal. The harm of social media to developing children has only recently been documented

If it is known that social media harms kids, then doesn't the state share some of the blame? Why is there no law?
If it is not known (or only recently came to light), can you really blame the social media companies? You could blame them for trying to block relevant legislation, but not for harm done in the past.
If the harmful effects were known to the companies and they kept it quiet, then you'd have a case, morally speaking. Bit like the tobacco firms.

Comment Re:taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 1) 290

So how about closing that particular loophole, and make them pay capital gains on the profits that they do realize? For instance, by taxing such loans with no "normal" repayment schedule as dividend. We've had similar issues, with business owners borrowing money from their company with no intention of ever repaying it, thus avoiding dividend tax. A new law caps these "non market conformant" loans at 100k.

A cash grab like this is pretty sickening. Even in the rather socialist leaning country I live in, this would probably not stand, local courts and the ECHR might well consider similar taxes to amount to appropriation, and illegal.

Comment Re:How exactly does a 50% tax on stock value work? (Score 1) 193

I'm also not opposed to the idea. Not because of a supposed concentration of wealth. Musk does not have a trillion dollars, taken from elsewhere, sitting in a giant warehouse somewhere; it's all stock in a massively overvalued company that he built. His riches do not make us poorer. And I don't envy him his wealth, he's welcome to it.

What I do have an issue with, is the concentration of power this represents. Wealth, whether in actual dollars, publicly traded stock or private stock, represents an undue amount of influence in politics. If we're doing a tax on large companies, or a wealth cap, this would be the reason I'd agree with it. Not a sense of "fairness".

"OpenAI hasn't had their IPO yet, so couldn't they just find some kind of workaround to avoid this?"
Not necessarily. The tax could be paid in stock, in fact that would not be a bad idea. So that the control of important companies does not remain in the hands of a handful of individuals. Again, the only justification of this would be to prevent a concentration of power.

Comment Re:Of course not! (Score 2, Interesting) 122

But this is rationalizing, dude. This is you realizing that you've voted for blatant corruption and the destruction of democracy in the US, and then trying to pretend that the other side is just as bad.

But the simple truth is the other side is not even close to being just as bad.

But, but, Fox News said they were, and that it was all down to:
- Crooked Hilary (is that what he called her?)
- Obama Hussein
- Sleepy Joe
- Hunter Biden, think of the laptop.

Comment Re:Of course not! (Score 1) 122

Isn't it funny how the Republican Party always gets very concerned about spending and the reach of government when the Republican Party doesn't control government; but just as soon as they do have control they start spending like crypto bros and use government to interfere in literally everything that doesn't fit their questionable narratives?

I can think of a few recent Republican presidents where that did not apply, but The Donald is the ultimate RINO - he was affiliated with the Democrats a few years back but they showed no interest in making him president. The problem is that his hostile takeover of the party was supported by those who should have known better, only a few - Liz Cheney for one - demonstrated any sense of responsibility.

Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 1) 67

Not just "the future", but the future of AI. If you go by future projected revenue as predicted by SpaceX (which is the only projection that justifies their valuation), they are an AI company with a small space division. An AI market in which they are not at all well-positioned. Buying Cursor may improve that somewhat. Maybe that's the plan - buy every promising AI startup with stock, until they hit gold.

Comment Re:Moslems (Score 1) 83

Romansch gets spoken in the valley west of Chur, essentially between Chur and Disentis. It may also be spoken in the valley S of Tamins but I've never been there so I don't know.
Speaking to a local in a small town (maybe Saas Fee) around 20 years ago, he said that the language spoken there had changed in his lifetime - it was German by then and I can't remember what it had been previously.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 30

Are you sure?
I thought the ESR version was a Firefox version from the recent past with security updates released at the same time as the mainline Firefox gets updates. My version is 140.9.0 ESR but it may be a bit out of date, my Linux distribution has stopped providing updates for my release level and their new level pretty much bricked my test system when I tested it there.

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