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Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

politico.com

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Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#331

Post by shepherdjerred »

Malidir wrote: post #250
bko wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Zuck is lying about being asked by the White House to censor content or regretting it?

Neither, he is getting onto the bandwagon that he (and his well paid pr team) know is populist. He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his image entirely. Following in Elon's path. People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and he is a cutthroat business guy. Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really wants to be President. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-zu…

I'd vote for him over most of the recent candidates

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#332

Post by nightski »

fooker wrote: post #293
nightski wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you have to pay the loans back. Which requires income which is taxed. This would only work if you either don't spend any money (which then what is the point of the loan) or if your assets are always going up and increasing in value beyond that of the loan which inevitably will not be the case.

> Which requires income which is taxed And there lies the loophole. These loans are often structured as some kind of business expense that can be paid from pre-tax income. So, ultra rich people get to double dip here. No taxes on selling stocks for money, as there's a loan, plus no taxes on the income for paying it off.

That's not a loophole, it is illegal. You can't deduct personal expenses from a business. I realize the rich do it, but if that is the problem let's go after that.

Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the capital gains regardless if there is a loan or not.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#333

Post by ensignavenger »

pkaeding wrote: post #304
nightski wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you have to pay the loans back. Which requires income which is taxed. This would only work if you either don't spend any money (which then what is the point of the loan) or if your assets are always going up and increasing in value beyond that of the loan which inevitably will not be the case.

The actual loophole is the step-up basis for inheritance. This allows you to never realize gains, living off loans against them. Then, when you die, your heirs inherit the appeciated assets, and the liabilities. But, their cost basis for the assets is stepped up to the then-current fair value. So, they can sell off assets to pay the loans off, but have no realized gains.

But charging taxes on the loan won't really reflect that well. Also, there are limits on inheritance before estate tax kicks in, so folks with 100's of million in assets passed on to their heirs are still paying estate tax, it won't be tax free at that level.

(Edited to correct "inheritance tax" to the technically correct term, "estate tax")

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#334

Post by jzb »

Malidir wrote: post #250
bko wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Zuck is lying about being asked by the White House to censor content or regretting it?

Neither, he is getting onto the bandwagon that he (and his well paid pr team) know is populist. He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his image entirely. Following in Elon's path. People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and he is a cutthroat business guy. Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really wants to be President. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-zu…

Elon's path may not be the best path to popularity.

If Zuck wants popularity, maybe a good way to go about that would be to de-shittify Facebook, Instagram, and so forth so that those platforms respect their users.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#335

Post by o24ro2u34o »

object-a wrote: post #184

It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in. I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds

I deleted my Facebook account in 2013 and haven't missed it at all

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#336

Post by philwelch »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #222
lupusreal wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If censorship is too "challenging" to do right then maybe you should knock it off.

Censorship is something governments do. What you're discussing is a business decision Facebook made. They deemed it to be in the best interests of their shareholders not to amplify those peoples opinions. Zuck now regrets that decision, but it was still his decision.

It was a business decision made at the direction of the government.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#337

Post by ragnese »

_heimdall wrote: post #112
andy_ppp wrote: post #109

I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of d…

I'd much prefer seeing us close up the tax loop holes than create an even more complex system. Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer. We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than further increase its complexity.

> Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.

I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating in value over the years.

I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether various wealth tax ideas are good. But, I don't believe that the concept is as infeasible as some are making it out to be when it's been happening with property taxes for a very long time.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#338

Post by BlueTemplar »

dilap wrote: post #262
driverdan wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail. Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.

Spam is a real problem, but when your platform is doing things like disallowing linking to a NY Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop or mentioning the possibility that COVID originated from a lab-leak, then I think pretty clearly the term "censorship" is more apt than "moderation". Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficie…

Sounds like it's the FBI's credibility that is shot - imagine Facebook had done nothing and it HAD been a Russian propaganda operation ?

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#339

Post by hnpolicestate »

sangnoir wrote: post #277
AlbertCory wrote: post #248

If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News: Click your username at the upper right: Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no") There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.

HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead. HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to…

[flagged]

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#340

Post by zooq_ai »

sangnoir wrote: post #277
AlbertCory wrote: post #248

If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News: Click your username at the upper right: Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no") There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.

HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead. HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to…

The HN crowd like reddit leans massively progressive/democratic. As such any thinking outside normal or contrarian views are massively suppressed. Classic contrarian (to HN) around WFH, Capitalism, Elon Musk, Tesla, Regulation is downvoted and even flagged
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