The main problem I have with a wealth tax is that it depends on the timing. I don't see any natural way to decide when it should be assessed. Also how do you decide what time period of wealth accumulation to consider? Maybe you can clarify how you justify it, but I think it's a can of worms,

Everyone is assessed once a year at tax time already. There's no technical problem assessing wealth per se. You fill a form with your data. Sign it. If you omit items and are found out, the IRS comes after you.

There's no time period in wealth tax. It's based on marking to market. At any time, you have a number which represents your total wealth. At tax time, you give %X of that number to the IRS according to a published schedule.

You have the right to bear arms. The rest is a negotiation between You and The Law.

Nah. Only those who count.

Sorry, you're not in Kansas anymore. Most slashdotters won't get the reference.

Both the Saudis and the Chinese have such a clear incentive structure to help prevent the problem. Everyone knows that there is a line, and bad things happen if the line is crossed. But the exact location of the line is not known. This causes a chilling effect and cautious behaviour automatically.

I'm not sure that a profits tax is a good lever for your purpose. A much simpler, more powerful answer is a wealth tax. Money is power. Entities and People who have Money are therefore dangerous and should be cut down to size by slicing away their power automatically. Profits alone are once removed from the power, and depend on an arbitrary accounting mechanism which interferes with enforcement.

Lovely! Two Brits pretending to be Americans who are outraged at the State of the States, warbling away in melodious language for the secret entertainment of their compatriots. Meanwhile everyone awaits for the Colonials to wake up and stomp in :)

The rich people are stable geniuses. They don't need no sycofefe, it's all dynamite in a barrel.

In Donald Rumsfeld's sense.

You're not addressing the fact that the bill for AI startups is coming due very soon. Being more expensive than India outsourcing is irrelevant when the investors want their gazillion returns that they were promised only a couple of years ago.

Maybe change the language to xx-bork?

Yes! And soon after the family came together to say his name for the first time in centuries, they said his name for the third time. That's when strange goings-on started happening at the mansion. The sisters had come and had said the forbidden words, and now they started having super-powers. But there would be a price, oh what a price to pay! It began the third night, when there was a knock on the door. A foreboding, measured, powerful knock. Read what happened next by signing up at Slashdot Reject Summaries Online, a new venture by non-editors fed up with repeating Slashdot story summaries. That's Slashdot Reject Summaries Online, a new venture by non-editors fed up with repeating Slashdot story summaries. Read what happened next there. By signing up. At Slashdot Reject Summaries Online!

Being born as a British Colony, they learned from the best... ahem... East India Company.

Just use DeepSeek. As long as you don't mention Madison Square it will do all you ask, no problem.

Quake III's contribution to Humanity

The reason is Ed Zitron has been making the rounds of business media lately pointing out that their (OpenAI, Anthropic) accounting doesn't add up at all. It's very enlightening to business types, who don't really understand our technical discussions about the mathematical limitations of LLMs, but understand very well when "profitability" is an accounting trick, and when sufficiently large markets simply don't exist for the implied returns from stratospheric valuations. The Emperor's New Clothes And All That.

The latest domino is Meta/Facebook who, like ElonCo, have announced that they have no use for all the GPUs that they bought previously, and are hoping to rent them out to customers instead.

Presumably, these customers will be able to do the kind of "Great Things"(TM) which the AI scientists on staff at Meta aren't able to do themselves. I'm talking about those AI scientists that Meta hired for $100m with great fanfare last year.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing World Hunger and Cancer solved in the third quarter this year by Meta's customers accessing NVDA chippies at a fraction of the price that Elon intends to charge, or failing that finding a way out of the continuing Hormuz Crisis by asking Google Gemini to make a plan and emailing it to the White House.