We found out in a congressional hearing that the dirty Little secret of Google is that their self-driving cars are actually just remote controlled cars that occasionally use some fancy Lane assist features. But when anything needs to be done that's even slightly complicated it's a human being in the Philippines driving the car.

I don't want the damn things on my road not that it matters. There is so much money involved I don't get a say and neither do you. So I've got remote control cars being piloted by people in foreign countries over high latency internet connections and I just got a kind of accept that that's a thing I need to worry about now.

They have everything they need, land and water and electricity and tons and tons and tons of money. The billionaires can go anytime they want. California doesn't need them.

You're right about one thing though keep taxing billionaires and there won't be any, just citizens. And I think that's a good thing.

You have to consolidate your loans into private loans to do this and as soon as you do that you lose all the protections that come from having public loans. You will then have your wages immediately garnished by the private company that owns your loans

Trump is a crook and everyone knows it. Every single thing he does has to be scrutinized for the angle. Meanwhile they just retired Air Force One and replaced it with a foreign made plane that is probably stuffed full of listening devices. It was also a 1 billion dollar bribe to Trump and he plans to take the plane when he leaves office, if he leaves office, and use it as his personal taxpayer funded jet.

I used to think the baby boomers could burn everything to the ground for everybody else and get away with it but Trump is accelerating the pace so fast I don't think they're going to get away with it. The older ones of course will die before the shit hits the fan but if you're under 60 you're in for a world of hurt and maybe even the under 65 set isn't going to get away with it

The people who built the submarine intentionally sailed it into international waters in order to get around the regulations that would prevent them from deploying an unsafe submersible like that. There were regulations in place to stop them. The point I was making was that it is trivial to get around those regulations because you can just load your shit up sail it out into international waters and suddenly blammo no regulations.

The solution would be additional regulations that prevented them from taking the unsafe submersible into international waters but nobody wants to do that because we often use workarounds like that to allow underpaid crews of sailors to go out in unsafe vessels to make money for billionaires or at least multi multi-millionaires...

I don't know why you would write something so obviously wrong. Did you just point chat GTP at my post and ask for a conservative themed reply? Or are you really that dedicated to being obviously wrong?

You're trying to boil down complex processes to a single sentence. That's the kind of thinking a 12 year old engages in. I'm not insulting you but I am calling you out. You are a full grown man and I think you know better.

There's a guy on YouTube that does these hilarious videos about how formula 1 teams cheat. So the formula One governing body will come up with all sorts of rules and the racing teams will do increasingly crazy shit to cheat those rules and win, oftentimes they will violate the Spirit of the rule without the letter of the rule and get away with it until next season.

That's why doing a simple straightforward regulatory framework like you suggest doesn't work and it doesn't exist. You are there have arbitrarily applied rules by a well ruling class or you don't really have any rules because they are child's Play to get around.

This is why the law is so stupidly complex and why we need lawyers to interpret it. It's like patching and operating system only the operating system is basic human reality so you can't just delete everything and start over.

I get the impulse to want to go back to a simpler time when everything was more straightforward but we just can't do that. We have to live in the world we live in.

Is because if something can save a billionaire half a plugged nickel they're going to do it. It's the same reason we worry about nuclear meltdowns. Yes all of these problems have long since been solved but it costs a bit of money to solve them. That's money that could go to making the next trillionaire.

America has tons of land we can put wind and solar farms on. It makes absolutely no sense to take the risk of our virtually untethered billionaire class skipping out on some maintenance or proper storage of nuclear waste in safe locations. We already know that we as a country are unwilling to curtail even an ounce of their power. There is a thread here about taxing Californian billionaires that is dominated by people convinced that if you tax people with more money than God then the next obvious thing is they're going to text you until you lose your house. That is actually in that thread.

I would block any attempt to deploy nuclear power in America outside of military applications because sooner or later American voters are going to do something stupid and put somebody stupid in charge and it's going to blow up in my face. I mean for fuck sakes we are about to give Iran $300 billion dollars cash and that's the best we can hope for out of the mess that the American voter put us in. And you want me to let those idiots decide how nuclear power gets regulated? Not a fucking chance. I would rather die from lung cancer breathing in toxic fumes from a coal fired plant.

Nuclear problems are social not technical and so us nerds like to pretend they don't exist because the last thing we want to think about are those filthy filthy humans getting in the way of our super cool technology

We're always trying to shift the blame to government but here I don't think there's anything the government could really do unless we want to start walking down ports. The guys who did this crap already knew what they were doing was unsafe and that any regulator that came across it would shut that shit down fast. So what they would do is they load everything up and then take it out to sea until they were far enough out that they were no longer covered by Canadian law.

At that point all you've got is maritime law which is pretty lax.

There are ways to stop this but it would require a lot more regulation and good luck getting that implemented with all the money and politics. It wouldn't just affect assholes like these it would impact every business on the planet. Now I would argue that's a good thing because we could certainly do with more regulation after 50 years of deregulation but again, money in politics.

Once you got that much money get out of the way and let somebody else take a crack at it. I mean look at bezos and muskrat. What have they done for us lately? It's pretty clear once a billionaire gets up to the top they stop being useful. At best you get one good idea out of somebody and that's really stretching things.

You had your turn now get out of the way and let somebody else try

Now instead of attacking the basic concept of taxes because you lost that argument you're retreating to a different argument. This is a Gish scallop or a Mote and bailey. It's a logical fallacy because you're losing the argument.

You don't have a choice. You will have a government and it will be a large powerful Central government. That's because government is like a nuclear bomb. Once we invented it we were stuck with it. It's too useful. You cannot put that genie back in the bottle.

So instead of throwing up your hands and giving up like a fucking child you need to be an adult and actually fix the God damn problem. And then you need to do a fucked ton of work on maintenance so that when the systems start to break down, and they will just like your car breaks down, you have to get up off your ass and fix it. And that's your life. Over and over and over again fixing shit that other people try to break because human beings are not perfect animals.

Being an adult sucks. But you don't have any other options

Because if you're not stupid you don't have a single supplier. Even if one of the other suppliers isn't quite up to snuff you make sure that they get up to snuff so that you don't have a single supplier. Monopolies suck.

It is way too fucking complicated to explain to the American voter. You have to dumb down our solutions because 60% of the country reads and therefore thinks that a 6th grade level or the level of a 12 year old.

People understand having a ruling class is bad and they understand that the billionaires are our ruling class. So you can go to them and say let's tax the billionaires.

When you have a problem the best solution is the one that you can actually implement.

Their assets are valued at whatever they need to be valued for them to get the loans they want. And those loans are below market rates so that they never pay much of any interest on them. This is how they're able to live off debt. You try to live off debt for a while let me know how that turns out for you at somewhere between 10% for a secured loan against the house you live in or 22 to 30% for an unsecured loan. The banks will cut you off around $150000 to $200,000. Then they take your house. They don't do that for billionaires or other members of the ruling class. Those guys get to keep the leverage assets. Trump went bankrupt multiple times and nobody ever seized much of any of his property. That's because they're the ruling class and they take care of each other.

They live in an economic system completely different than the one you live in. It's not about money it's about power. They have it you don't and neither do I.

I want them to stop existing. No one should have that much money. It's not even money anymore it's power and no single individual should have that much power. You shouldn't want them to have that much power either. It's just common fucking sense that you don't give that much money and power to a single person. Hero worship should have its limits.

You can't eliminate the loopholes. Because they will always just buy more. That's what happens when you give someone unlimited money and therefore unlimited power. It's only by the blunt application of direct democracy that you can short-circuit that process.

Remember billionaires don't use loopholes. Instead because they are the ruling class they are allowed to borrow money at below market rates against their assets without any risk of those assets ever being claimed. Imagine for example if you could mortgage your house at 3% and if you didn't pay the loan you got to keep your house. And because it's a loan you never pay taxes on it. That is how a billionaire does it. That is only available to them because they have power. It's not about money it's about power.

That's not a loophole that is a fundamental breakdown in our economic system because they exist outside of our economic system. You shouldn't be able to borrow money below market rates but they can. And you shouldn't be able to put your assets up for a loan with zero risk but they can. They are completely outside the economic system you live in.

It doesn't do any good with my paltry income for me to pay extra money. That's not taxes that's charity and charity has existed for thousands of years and has always failed to meet people's needs.

You don't get to opt out of civilization. Especially in 2026. You're going to pay your dues to the club of civilization whether you like it or not. In exchange for that you will get reliable access to food and shelter and medicine and education and transportation. You get to pretend you are a big boy who does everything on his own while doing that too.

This isn't about Fair share. This is about a functioning civilization that services and improves the lives of a social species. Because of human beings aren't a social species then we are eventually going to go extinct. You can't have nuclear bombs lying around with a non-social species.

You're thinking is basic, it is grounded in the thought processes of a 12 year old child who never grew up and hopefully you will eventually be in the minority. Because if not then we're about to Fermi paradox ourselves.

Learn some nuance, read some books especially some history books. Go start with A people's History of the United States. Maybe read some of what's senator Warren has written. The two income trap is a good start.

If they wanted to raise your taxes they would just raise your taxes like how Trump did it using tariffs.

This isn't about getting revenue this is about curtailing the power that comes from having that much money. This is about saying, hey you Mr billionaire you can't order me what to do just because you have fuck loads of money because I'm going to take that money from you. You'll still have a lot of money so you can pay me to do stuff and I will do it but you won't have so much money that you can utterly destroy my life at the drop of a hat if I even slightly annoy you.

Don't you get tired of being a billionaire bitch? I don't mean like how you're repeating there talking points which you certainly are but what I mean is they can order you to do whatever the fuck they want and you're going to do it or they're going to effectively kill you. Maybe they won't put a bullet in your head like they do in Russia or China but they can make you completely unemployable and they can kill any business you try to start.

The only reason you're safe is because they're busy with other targets. That's no way to live your life son. Always pretending that you are your own man when you really belong to somebody else because they called the shots.