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.

I will happily do so. Bear in mind I used Google and Gemini to help me find the sources and summarize the numbers, so take that for what you will.

First the problem is the definition of "productive allocation of resources". If you're a billionaire, either inherited or building a tech startup, that money goes to things that create new businesses, and your wealth is the reward of investing your time, energy, and resources into others. Very few billionaires can become one without average people buying what they're offering, be it rent from real estate or social media posts; the only exceptions are lawyers or finance people. The other hard part is it's not quite apples to apples; business people create jobs through their companies, whereas governments provide social safety nets to try and lift people out of difficult situations. Both can create jobs, but in very different ways and for people facing very different situations.

What we do know is that the California tech ecosystem, entrepreneurs deploy capital very quickly, creating jobs very fast. But by California's own data, the tech ecosystem now has 1.8M jobs in California, which is 9% of the State's workforce, but accounts for 19% of California's entire Gross Regional Product at $623B per year. On top of that, some older studies show that high tech employment is a net job multiplier; it is calculated that every tech job results in 4.3 jobs in services and local goods. Another estimate says that California's tech sector directly and indirectly supports 4.2M jobs, or 20% of the entire workforce statewide. That's with roughly a $150B and $200B annual deployment of capital. Notably, that capital comes from two sources, revenue generation (which also generates taxes, but is essentially lost as an expense) and investment. The investment part is key because the money isn't lost; while the money gets spent by the company, the source of the funds is the value retained by the investor, who often trickles money back to the money managers who backed the VC, and those money managers are often pension funds and insurance companies who serve individual needs.

Now let's look at the State Legislature. The annual budget of California hovers around $300B annually. They fund payrolls for state employees like teachers and various safety nets. Public sector job multipliers are around 1.3 to 1.5X. So right there, the tech sector where most billionaires are located, use fewer dollars to deploy into high paying jobs that have a statistical knock-on effect of creating 3 extra jobs for every tech engineer hired, whereas state employees create 1 extra job for every state employee job.

So there is one metric, backed by studies, showing that with less resources (around $200B spend annually) 4 jobs are created or maintained vs. the State budget which spends $300B annually but only 1.3-1.5 jobs are created or maintained.

But the bigger issue, and one of the key sources of why governments do not deploy capital efficiently, is the stated purpose of this tax. It is, per the SEIU who sponsored this, a one-time, emergency 5% tax to prevent the collapse of Californai healthcare and help fund California public K-14 education and state assistance food programs. Along with a bunch of other outright salesy stuff about how only 200 people will pay the tax who have $2 trillion. Sounds good for poor voters right?

The problem is, they're seizing assets to pay for expenses. This one-time tax will fund issues for 5 years; ok. What happens at the end of 5 years? The problems in education and health programs and food assistance are still there. Further, you practically guarantee capital flight. One study shows that with the billionaires who have already relocated ahead of the deadline, California has lost out on $2.7B in recurring annual tax revenue. Six have already left (Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, David Sacks and others), but many others are considering leaving. This tax, if passed, is retroactive back to Jan 1st, 2026, but that may be entirely unconstitutional. So you can be sure this will be litigated up the Supreme Court, costing California tax payers more money before they collect on the fund. The tax bill will also remove an existing cap of .4% on "taxes on intangible and personal property", making this an entirely new tax and would allow for unlimited future wealth taxes; the government will have every right to extend this down to the middle class, including personal homes and going around Prop 13. So absolutely the State Legislature could raise property taxes if this bill passes because it is a Constitutional Amendment, and they would not need to to voters at all.

So how's that for allocation fo resources, plus sources and the like? You can refute the studies by being partisan, sure, but you can't change the facts. Six billionaires left California before the tax went into play for a direct loss of 2.7B in annual revenue, and many more will leave. They will challenge it in court, creating issues before they collect. In the meantime, those people will be spending money outside of California, creating those jobs elsewhere, whereas more people are going to need social safety benefits as their jobs move to other states right when California is losing tax payer dollars.

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.

WE have a solution. Property Tax. We've been taxing unrealized gains for decades.

In California it's a bit problematic because of Prop 13 which fixes property taxes at the purchase price of your home + 1.1%/year and no more, but in other parts of the country municipalities can just assess the value of your home to raise your property tax.

The key is how much is too much. 5% is too much. Maybe 2% is too much. 1%? Not really.

Part of the issue is also the definition of "billionaires" in California. There is an enormous difference between say Donald Bren who personally owns the entirety of the Irvine Company that owns roughly $19B in real estate or the Segerstrom Family who built South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa along with several other properties in Orange County and as a family are worth roughly $3B, vs say Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra who founded the Legal AI platform Harvey who are as of their last raise made them billionaires but their company is not yet cash flow sustainable.

Frankly though, if the CA billionaires who made their money the traditional way in things like real estate can't come up with 1% of the value fo their assets in cash, then they're overvalued. And if a tax like this disincentivizes ballooned valuations in CA tech startups because there are real cash implications the higher you go, then maybe we'd see a little more rationalization in startup valuations, or a stronger focus on revenue and profitability to pay these things.

Again, I think 5% is too much. But 1%? I could get behind this.

The US Government provided SpaceX with $278M in NASA Commercial-Off-The-Shelf grants in 2006; when SpaceX was valued at roughly $27M. If as a condition of providing those grants, the US Government took a 1 or 2% equity stake, then the IPO of SpaceX would have returned $25.2B - $50.4B.

The Government provides $30-$50B per year in grants to private companies and startups. That money is gone as far as the government is concerned; lost anyways. If they took 1 to 2% equity in return for those grants, even if a fraction of those companies got acquired or went public, the government would be reaping serious rewards, and many companies would happily give a small amount of equity to the US Government.

I am dead set against 50%; Sanders is insane and doesn't know economics at all. But 10% of Intel in exchange for financial assistance provided, and 1-2% equity in every company they support with that money going back to the treasury if the companies are successful? I don't see a problem with that at all.

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.

Rather than guillotining anyone, the solution ought to be regulating the growth-rate of data centers so that they don't eat the economy. There's no reason to allow them to grow "as fast as possible" when it's not even clear how useful they'll be long-term. Unregulated capitalism leads to violent boom/bust cycles which cause economic pain.

Every computer manufacturer would love to have margins like Apples', and would raise their prices in a heartbeat to get them, if they could. You can call that corporate greed if you want, but it's also standard capitalism.

The more pertinent question to ask is: why is Apple able to command a premium, without losing sales, while other computer manufacturers cannot do the same?

The standard Slashdot answer will be "because Mac purchasers are idiots", but I don't think that is the reason. I think it's because Apple is able to sufficiently differentiate its products from those of its competition, such that customers don't make their purchasing decisions based on a dollars-per-megabyte analysis. If Macs were sold with Windows and featured a consumer-gaming video card (like most every other PC in the world), it would be different, but Apple is the only (legal) source for a MacOS-running computer, and its one of the few providers of a unified-memory architecture for local AI execution. Until it gets some direct competitors, that gives it the ability to name its price.