Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

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.

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.

Adobe stock is down 48%+ over the past year.
They're absolutely scrambling for anything. So they're jumping on the AI meme.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-...

I have a Roku stick on an old TV that makes it a streaming TV; it's pretty useful... to watch Netflix or AppleTV or Disney+. Does anyone use Roku's streaming services at all? Maybe it's just me, but I see them more as a dashboard for your streaming services rather than an actual streaming service.

It is actually believed that Russia has substantial Bitcoin reserves. Iran outright runs their own mining operation and mandates private Iranian miners must sell to the central bank of Iran. What they're buying is everything else they need, as both are heavily sanctioned and they use Bitcoin to get around sanctions. North Korea does it for the same reason, to avoid sanctions, but they gain these through hacking and theft.

As per the usual with your comments, your reading comprehension is terrible. At no point do I defend Elon Musk, I think all of his companies are nuts and what we're seeing is borderline feudalism masquerading as capitalism. I am explaining how it works though. You don't have to like or agree with Musk and his way of doing things to recognize that there are people that do, and the value of his companies are based on those people believing it. Which goes back to the point; if he left, he wouldn't be able to liquidate his stock fast enough to turn it into cash before the SEC halts trading and fines him for insider trading. He can't simply walk away. Without him at the helm, those keeping the stock price up would stop doing so and it would tank, so even the vested portion he has would plummet before he got any hard cash out of it.

I was incorrect about his vested vs. unvested; nevertheless an enormous portion of his wealth is still unvested and tied to unachievable goals so my point stands, because in addition to the many, many things that is abnormal and possibly illegal in the corporate structure of SpaceX, it's abnormal for one person to have a voting power of 10 to 1 for their special class of shares (only a few tech companies did this), and it's even more abnormal to be able to vote on behalf of those shares while they remain unvested. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Next time try not using your usual straw man tactic and try reading what people are saying, it's become tiresome.

You're insane. People need money to pay taxes; wealth isn't money, it's the value of your assets. A wealth tax like your talking about is nothing more than simple nationalization of companies and assets; outright takeover of companies by the government. It would wreck the economy for everyone.

Actually, he can't.

The mystique of his companies is that Elon Musk alone is capable of driving the value. People used to think he could walk on water, and despite his own self-inflicted harm to his personal brand with his ill advised foray into politics, they still think he can drive success. The entire value of his shares is based heavily on him being CEO. If he were to walk away, they would tank.

On top of that, as major insider, the SEC would not allow him to sell his shares without notifying the markets of his intention to do so weeks in advance. That gives the markets time to react not just to his departure, but him dumping his shares would dramatically increase the supply of those shares at the same time as lowering the perceived value of those companies with his intended departure. The stock price would crater before he could liquidate them, so he wouldn't end up with nearly the amount of cash with this.

On top of all of that, and this is in the filings, roughly 90% of his stock which is tied up in this trillion dollar valuation is restricted or unvested, based on hitting certain performance objectives. If he walked away tomorrow, roughly 90% of his stock, which is illiquid, he'd forfeit back to the company as they haven't vested yet. For example, much of his SpaceX stock is tied to:

1) Mars colonization - the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars with 1 million inhabitants

2) Space compute - the operation of non-Earth based data centeres providing at least 100 terawatts of annual compute capacity

3) Market Capitalization - that SpaceX reaches a series of corporate value milestones (there are 15 total, some vest at each tranche). the first corporate valuation goal is $7.5 trillion, and they all go up from there.

So it's also a bit of a misnomer for him to be "worth $1 trillion" when 90% of it is tied to goals that are unachievable like a 1 million-inhabitant colony on Mars or building 100 terawatts of computing power in space when it's not clear if the AI market even needs that and that Grok's services are lagging behind Anthropic and OpenAI (hence why he is leasing his data center capacity to Anthropic, Grok's usage is too low and he needs to pay for that infrastructure). What is notable though is that while they have not vested, Musk does have voting rights for those shares.

Now do you see the game he's playing? He can vote on the company objectives with his Class B shares, which similar to Zuckerberg's shares have 10 votes for every 1 of normal shares. So despite not directly owning those shares and they may not vest at all, it gives Musk 82-85% of the shares' voting power to nominate Board members and control the company. Even if he fails to achieve those, he effectively controls it no matter what, which is what this is all about. The broader question though is will the public markets take him at his word. The public markets are much more brutal about what CEOs say, and he runs his mouth in ways that already got him in trouble once with the SEC. Given the size of SpaceX now, he's a significant part of the major indices; the SEC will crack on him even harder if his drug fueled X-posting moves the stock in the wrong way and affects the broader market indices.

He doesn't have that kind of money. He is a trillionaire in value, but not a trillionaire in cash. He has to maintain ownership in his stock position to maintain control of the companies. He can borrow against those shares; that is famously how Steve Jobs financed his life with his $1 salary at Apple, but none of the banks will support him until the stock settles at it's price, and most of hte independent analysts say that SpaceX is at best worth $65/share, not $135.

I was going to say something similar. AI companies today are cash furnaces. The kicker is the data center spend will never decrease due to the need for complete replacement every few years. (Mark Cuban said they are "shitting money at scale"). The only way they get profitable is to increase end user cost by an order of magnitude. That just won't fly. Look at any new paradigm shifting technology - first generation companies are never successful. It's the 2nd or 3rd generation companies 15-20 years from now that will provide amazing products and services we haven't even dreamed up, that are built on the carcasses of 1st gen companies.. Those will be wildly successful.

Remember when we used to mock this?
It's still mock-worthy...

I sincerely doubt this will work. Sure, they'll come up with something and advance some sort of new architecture, but mimicking the brain is going to take a ground-up new approach at a hardware level.

The human brain once you really start to research it is so far beyond our bare bones concepts of systems architecture. One might look at it's complexity as a continuous, non-stop R&D process that has emerged over hundreds of millions of years, but unlike human based R&D projects it is fully capable of trying any and all permutations at once and nips in the bud (through survival) any failed experiments or changes.

To put in actual English, which is insufficient for describing the vast complexity of the human brain, the human brain is a massive parallel processing system with dynamic, inter-changing connections, is capable of self-repair and cross wiring, combines both memory and processing into a single system, and while the brain is generally a centralized system of neurological operation, quite a few of it's functions are distributed in highly specialized systems throughout the entire body.

But most importantly, all of our computer logic is built on a fundamental building block of the silicon transistor, which has an "on" and "off" state, 1s and 0s. Thus it's basic computing function consists of 2 states. A neuron on the other hand is an analog processor that can have up 10,000 concurrent variables operating at once. At any given millisecond, every neuron you have is receiving several thousand inputs simultaneously. When computers store information in bits, neurons store by adjusting the connection strength of individual synapses. Thus while a transistor stores a 1 or 0 and can be connected to 2 to 3 other transistors each storing ones or zeros creating data, a single neuron across it's 10,000 connections can have up to 26 distinct synaptic "weights" or states of being. Neurons integrate chemical gradients, electrical pulses, and physical structural changes that they can make on their own. In essence a single transistor can store 1 bit of information, whereas a single neuron can store roughly 4.5 bits per synapse x 10,000 synapses per neuron, and it uses that storage as processing as well.

I don't think it's possible to mimic the human brain with our foundational concept of silicon transistor architecture. People have tried this on neuromorphic chips and while you can kind-of manage it, the most we've found with these experimental chips is just how little we understand about how it works.

This concept of releasing sterilizing males to control insect population goes back to the 50's; it's not a new science. What failed before was the sorting process to find the correctly bred insects at sufficient volume to make a dent in the process. Verily, Google's life science entity, leveraged Google's expertise in robotics, computer vision, AI and industrial automation to build a system that could identify and sort the correctly bred mosquitos at scale so they could be bred at a high enough volume to make this strategy practical.

In essence the real issue isn't about the science; that was solved. The problem was scale and sorting through large volumes of produced eggs (like data on the internet) to return sufficient results in volume and reasonable cost, so this actually leverages Google's technology focus over the last 10-15 years to solve the key bottleneck.