Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 378 posts

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#301

Post by bryanlarsen »

cayleyh wrote: post #265
bryanlarsen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No capital gains tax is due until gains are realized. Lütke's gains are almost completely unrealized.

Better yet, he gets loans, collateralized against those unrealized gains to the current value of the gains, and then writes off the loan interest against his present and future taxes! Amazing!

Probably not. That strategy is a US strategy that takes advantage of holding the loans until death, then using the step up basis to zero out the unrealized gains and then pay off the loans.

Canada doesn't have that. At death, assets are deemed disposed, so trigger unrealized gains as taxable income on the last tax return. It often results in the estates of upper middle class people paying a lot of taxes.

But not the truly rich like Tobi who have good accountants and lawyers. He'll have moved his stock into a trust that doesn't dissolve on death.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#302

Post by vivekd »

otterley wrote: post #300
vivekd wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I don't think there's any historical data showing a correlation between loss of voting rights of a % of the population with totalitarianism. I think among the few countries where it has been tried would be Canada stripping Japanese of voting rights in WWII. Of course this was bad, but at the same time it doesn't seem to have, at least not in most people's view, turned Canada into a totalitarian states. In…

> among the few countries where it has been tried would be Canada stripping Japanese of voting rights in WWII. Of course this was bad That's the point. > There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration. The "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being impl…

>Find us a person who honestly believes there a class of citizens (other than convicted felons, minors, and mentally incompetent) shouldn't have a right to vote who doesn't want to use it for political gains.

Easy the philosophers Plato and Socrates who believed that only philosophers and those who sought wisdom should have a say in the affairs of the sate. I mean philosophy is full of ideas of how nations should be organized and it's interesting because there's no dogma around it and no villainizing disagreements

>e "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being implemented, not being discussed.

Great because last I checked Tobais Lutke was discussing the idea not implementing it

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#303

Post by matthewdgreen »

dd8601fn wrote: post #223
matthewdgreen wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.

None of the legit ones are at risk from vibecoders.

I don't know what a vibe coder is to you, but I expect there are dozens of experienced software developers on HN who are willing to throw a month of work over the course of a year (and a few hundred dollars of Codex and Claude Code subscriptions/tokens they're already paying for) to write customized software for their friends and loved ones to use. And that while many of these tools will be mediocre or won't get maintained, a non-trivial number will be open sourced and will form a new layer of competition with existing SaaS businesses. (And even if I'm wrong, we're barely a year into the era of coding agents. Wait til 2027 to make big predictions.)

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#304

Post by bdangubic »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #303
dd8601fn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the legit ones are at risk from vibecoders.

I don't know what a vibe coder is to you, but I expect there are dozens of experienced software developers on HN who are willing to throw a month of work over the course of a year (and a few hundred dollars of Codex and Claude Code subscriptions/tokens they're already paying for) to write customized software for their friends and loved ones to use. And that while many of these tools will be mediocre or won't get main…

never going to happen. there aren’t dozens but tens of thousands and every knows that everyone is a “coder” now. hence no one will be switching off any of the platforms they are on and these “competitors” will die out or keep paying $20/m to vercel to keep the lights on.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#305

Post by Redoubts »

marcosdumay wrote: post #253
sph wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please produce your evidence that Mussolini's ascent or style of government was a "society ruled or controlled by people of great wealth", as defined by Wikipedia. Fascist political philosophy is about racial purity, militarism, autarky, and suppression of dissent through political violence. In fact, one of their methods of enacting such worldview was by appropriating the wealth of rich people to advance their own pu…

If you read your link, you will discover it's not focused at Mussolini's fascism at all, but still talks about the merge of the government and corporations... Because it's a very important feature of that regime. Maybe try it next time.

> the merge of the government and corporations

This is not plutarchy, the direction of control is going the other way.

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#306

Post by Redoubts »

duped wrote: post #233
sph wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You should understand language before debating vocabulary. I am quite well read on political philosophy and history, and I will continue to call out fascists when I see people talking like fascists. Rhetorically, what you're doing is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally don't like calling out things like this when I see them because it's not a logical fallacy as much as bad rhetoric, but in this case I…

[flagged]

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#307

Post by Jenk »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #289
Jenk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this. Aspirations.

I don't buy that. You can't convince me someone shopping at Dollar General has aspirations of becoming Elon-Musk-wealthy.

"That guy has lots of money so he must be successful, clever, and probably correct, so I'm going to support them" is still an aspiration - and you probably should realise that there are people in dollar stores that think "One day, that could be me."

Re: Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

#308

Post by consumer451 »

robinhood wrote: post #4

Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable. I'm rich, so my opinion must be more important, right?

> Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme.

This is just because the latest people to have gotten crazy-rich came from tech. IMHO, the same can be said of all people who became emperors in a minute. (which is a whole new thing)

We are all just humans, and none of us are evolved for this. This could happen to anyone of us... could it not?

I think many of us have seen the changes that occur when this happens. Again, we are just not evolved for this. How could we be? The number of people that this happens to is a tiny fraction of the species, and so those who experience this, get really weird.

Post reply on HN