My previous [Linux] Thinkpad was a Twist. As much as I loved the machine, I hated the screen BECAUSE it was a touchscreen. It had a shiny/glossy glass surface which made the screen a total horror to see with tons of reflections. And I never used the touch or "twist" [tablet] feature, anyway. It added cost and weight on top of that. I already have a Samsung Android tablet for when I want that form factor.

I made sure my next/current [Linux] Thinkpad had a matte non-touch screen and I am much happier. I have no idea if current touchscreens have the same issue with needing to be glossy and/or glass, but that is my warning for people considering it.

Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.

(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)

You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

>"I think wealth taxes are fundamentally a distraction from the giant loopholes in current systems, and even if you oppose wealth taxes, you should still fix said loopholes."

Totally agree

> First off, people like Musk just take loans against their stock. [...]

Yep, that should somehow end. I am not sure exactly HOW, but I am sure there is a way... one that would not create undue externalities.

>"Secondly, capital gains are just income. They don't deserve a special lower rate. They should be taxed the same as other income, at normal income rates."

As long as it is realized gain, I totally agree. But I also think that realized loss should then also be 100% immediately deductible against income, that is fair (currently you can't, there are low limits, and although it can travel to future years, it is so low it makes it ridiculous). But I do think there should still be carve-outs/exceptions for the non-super-rich for events like selling a primary residence or property (especially if that money is then applied to replacement residence or healthcare expense).

>"can we at least agree that we should be doing these things, and make this the standard globally?"

I can. And I bet a lot of people would agree. But many are driven by envy/hate/delusion and nothing will ever be enough.

>"Nobody has made them yet, so there is no data."

What exactly is "fair" as far as taking someone's money and non-liquid assets? Is it fair that half of Americans pay no net taxes at all and everyone else has to cover that? (Net taxes are all monies the individual paid vs. all value of monies and services given back to that individual).

It isn't even real money, it is almost all valuation of non-liquid assets. You could liquidate it all, then take it all of what was left (it will be a lot less) and distribute it all out, and in a short time, everything would be about the same as it was. And then we would be worse off, because it is likely all the companies associated with him would fail, thousands would lose their jobs, tons of lost revenue and tax for many years, and lost products that make people's lives better.

If you could liquidate it all, maybe at half-value (which is extremely optimistic), that is $500,000,000,000. Give it equally to every person in the USA, it would be about $1429 each. Inflation would temporarily increase due to that and gobble up much of its value. And then no money or value or tax would ever replenish it because the engine creating that money is gone.

His having tons of "money" doesn't "take" it from other people. He created the wealth and expanded the pie. People happily and voluntarily transacted with his companies, getting what they wanted, and the free market valuates the companies based on past performance and expected future performance.

Aside from what you might think of Elon (and there is justifiably a lot of variation in that), he has produced a zillion times more services, jobs, goods, tax revenue, and helped a zillion times more people than anyone on Slashdot ever did, could, would, or will. If you are worried about his control or power, that is a totally different topic, and a function of preventing government fraud, enforcing anti-trust and such.

?"There's no doubt that Musk has near limitless funds at this point. But, "trillionaire" is just paper games. His estimated net worth may be a trillion plus. But, his ability to liquidate even a tiny majority of it is virtually zero. So, the trillionaire moniker is meaningless to me."

Bingo. This is "paper worth", he doesn't have hundreds of billions or a trillion dollars. He has stock holdings that are currently valued at that. The value can (and does) change at any moment, both up and down. And if he sold in any mass amount, it would tank the price immediately. Of course, he still has a super-mega crap load of money and, more-so, money potential.

And to that I say "whatever". He obviously has presented extreme value to consumers who voluntarily gave their money to his companies. For those worried about taxes- his companies pay a lot of taxes and employ a lot of people. As for possible taxing on unrealized gain, that is completely wrong. But I do support closing loopholes, like borrowing tax-free money against non-liquid assets, which is a trick that is often used by the mega rich.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.

Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.

If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.

It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.

The number of accidents you have depends far more on how you drive than how fast you react. If you and Claude are correct about AVs having slower reaction times that just highlights the importance of driving style over reaction time, because AVs have fewer and less severe accidents than human drivers.

The main thing you can do -- and AV systems do, generally -- is leave yourself more space and therefore time to react, which includes driving slower in areas where sudden incursions into the roadway are likely.

That said, I expect AVs to react faster as their systems improve. All of our AI is excessively compute-heavy right now, but we know that isn't essential because our brains do more with less in spite of the fact that our wetware runs on a significantly inferior substrate. As we learn how to build more efficient AI systems, that should reduce AV compute requirements and make it feasible for them to "think faster", and therefore react faster.

The one thing that is clear is that AVs will continue improving on their already better-than-human safety records.

Exactly. My first thought was "this guy gets all the luck".

Hmm. Just from my own bullshit experience, if you find yourself in an empty room, you probably look to the right and then, naturally, you're moving counterclockwise.

Have you ever tweeted something completely made up? What happened? Or, if you haven't done it, what do you think would happen? Suppose, for example, that you tweeted out a claim that "Coca-Cola contains extract of ground-up baby brains". What do you think the legal consequences of that (horrendous!) claim would be?

There is an important legal distinction that this court chose to ignore, which is that you're only liable for incorrect information if it's reasonable to expect that people would believe that you are providing correct information. If you, bubblyceiling, tweet false information, you will not, in fact, be held liable for it, because courts would rightly reject the claim that readers had a reason to believe they should trust you.

Obviously, Google's statements are held to a higher standard that bubblyceiling's. But everyone understood that web search results weren't Google's statements. The question at hand then is whether people believe that Google's LLM's statements are, in fact, statements made by Google, the corporation.

No one could seriously believe that. This court was dead wrong.