351–360 of 1001 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the gospel, for sure. However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
> However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit." This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith. Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issue…
No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5).
Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
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.
If you're a billionaire who does the "take out loans against your unrealized cap gains" trick, then you, you know... can't sell your stock. So then your stock passes to your kids -- who, due to the stepped up basis, yes, do not have to pay cap gains on that stock.
But there's a 40% estate tax.
Estate tax generally isn't very relevant even to the ordinarily-rich, because it has an extremely high deduction (about $27M for a married couple), but for a billionaire it's absolutely relevant.
Now, sure, if you paid both the cap gains and the estate tax you'd pay that much more taxes, but if you compare a normally-wealthy person (pays 15-20% cap gains and 0% estate tax) and a billionaire (pays 0% cap gains and 40% estate tax), it's obvious that the billionaire, eventually, pays a much higher tax rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. It worked really well. So whats changed? Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform its…
> young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all > The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. Kicking people off was and still is censorship and moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people off now and just police the content instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the four dead comments I see, two are content-free trolling and one is a completely unrelated discussion about Jim Jordan. The fourth is a bit more borderline, but I think a reasonable person could conclude that the commenter is more interested in getting people riled up than having a discussion.
> The fourth is a bit more borderline The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay." Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Below are a couple examples from ChatGPT: Please don't do this.
What’s the preferred way of citing my source? Or are you saying ChatGPT isn’t a valid source?
Edit: typo
- some people cannot think abstractly about speech, because it is skewed because of actions of Elon Musk, or Zuckerberg, or other individuals - it is certain that governments want to control the narrative, and it is not always done in our interests - sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation enters the room] - Everything at CEO level is "political" - centralization of social media and forums allowed f…
... or any media. The messenger cannot not shape the message even if he tried. If he becomes a mere conduit, someone else will shape the message. People are (trained to be) emotionally-driven and thus their biases can be shaped
When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are. Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
> 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.
In Pavel's interview with Tucker Carlson, he mentions how he (VK) met with Zuckerberg, and he told them new features they were planning. And Zuck nicked them all. Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
Agree, Zuck has zero integrity and I think he sees the tea leaves in where things are headed in November and is trying to say he was bullied into making alot of disastrous decisions that he and he only ordered for an administration/party that he personally donated $400M+ to.
Things are headed strongly in the opposite direction you're implying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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