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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

#641

Post by zefalt »

andy_ppp wrote: post #363
kansface wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax I very strongly believe you to be wrong: 1. Unrealized gains is unworkable. Billionaires will spend tens or hundreds of millions yearly to avoid paying literally billions in taxes because the expected value is net positive. The IRS won't win chasing down money scattered across the globe. This is not a productive use of cap…

1. Capital gains tax is already essentially optional for the richest now with various tricks. Of course taxing people is difficult, are you saying because it’s hard let’s not bother? 2. Where will the capital go (all the best investments are in the US), if this happens lots of great businesses will be available to buy at a discount to people with smaller than $100m stock portfolios 3. Potentially true but I would sti…

5. This has been brought up so many times by in the past few years and is very unlikely to pass scrutiny.

---

The federal government has the ability to tax "income." Unrealized gains are not income as gains have not been clearly realized.

The closest legal definition for "income" comes from:

The Glenshaw Glass case

In Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955), the Supreme Court laid out what has become the modern understanding of what constitutes "gross income" to which the Sixteenth Amendment applies, declaring that income taxes could be levied on "accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion". Under this definition, any increase in wealth—whether through wages, benefits, bonuses, sale of stock or other property at a profit, bets won, lucky finds, awards of punitive damages in a lawsuit, qui tam actions—are all within the definition of income, unless the Congress makes a specific exemption, as it has for items such as life insurance proceeds received by reason of the death of the insured party, gifts, bequests, devises and inheritances, and certain scholarships.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_U...

See case law section

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

#643

Post by cvalka »

drdaeman wrote: post #529
dmix wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has that FSB leak analysis been vetted by anyone besides that Russian newspaper that published it? If it's true then he was reckless in his traveling not just to France.

Good point. No, I haven't seen any independent confirmations yet.

Yes, independently vetted.

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

#644

Post by 3np »

Everyone: Please stop the flaming of Zuck, Meta and any politicians in this thread? Nobody cares how much or little you trust Zuck and these comments contribute nothing to the discussion.

There is great significance and potential conversation here regardless of how accurately Zuck is laying out facts or his intentions behind this letter. We don't want that getting drowned by all-to-predictable echo chamber.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

FWIW, I'm as distrustful of him as the next person but I do think he's deliberately accurate in representation of facts and events in this letter. Including this spicy gem at the end:

> Respectfully,

> /s/ Mark Zuckerberg

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

#645

Post by strangattractor »

rnd0 wrote: post #488
silverquiet wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who…

>A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) bu…

Maybe Zuck should apologize for that - he's quite good at groveling to Congress. He may also want to apologize to investors for totally shifting Meta's focus to VR despite it being clear that it is not as big as he claimed. But he likes being underestimated.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/news/mark-zuckerberg-rather-under...

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

#646

Post by alasdair_ »

tracker1 wrote: post #150
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 feel an exchange tax that included loans would probably be a much better approach. Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster. So you have to sell, or leverage the property to pay taxes. What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger economy, and what would the effect be? Also, who…

One solution to deciding how much an asset is worth is to let you declare any value you want for it, with the caveat that if someone is willing to pay you more than the declared value, you must sell it to them.

Now obviously things like transaction fees need to be factored in, and timing should matter - you should have the option to increase your stated value if something changes (or even to say "yes, okay, it's really worth X" and keep the item at the higher valuation).

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

#647

Post by mandmandam »

jasonlotito wrote: post #461

Key point here for me was that this was on FB, and no one else. Zuckerberg might regret doing this, but he did it. No one else. And, unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this. So, really, nothing more to add. Should note: The Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that because Face…

... What?

Apologies if I'm missing the sarcasm, but Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and even LinkedIn all suppressed certain stories, keywords, etc. For Twitter and Google at least we have documents proving Biden admin requests. I think there's a whole lot more, but the point stands regardless.

> unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this

"We could make things real hard for you for four years. We were thinking about breaking you guys up actually, you're sort of a monopoly. Anyway, here is our request - we'd never force you though. The choice is yours." [Ominous stare.]

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

#648

Post by saalweachter »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #595
rnd0 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) bu…

> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for. And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all the thinking for you?

It frees you up to focus on the most important part of the experience: organic ad clicks.

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

#649

Post by 3np »

SecretDreams wrote: post #146
renegat0x0 wrote: post #49

- 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…

> I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media" Darn, I guess we will have to shut down social media since it cannot be run ethically. A tough loss for the world..

Or migrate towards a more decentralised and permissionless model where no single entity is "running the show".

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

#650

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

iamacyborg wrote: post #640
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that this is a useful distinction. It starts to sound an awful lot like philosophy 101 "what is a p-zombie" horseshit... if both people are asking the same questions or using the same rhetoric, why would their internal, unknowable-without-telepathy intent make any difference whatsoever? If you do think there is an actual distinction, somehow, even then should you care? Because people who want to censor t…

> If you do think there is an actual distinction, somehow, even then should you care? Well yes, because one is trying to get to a positive outcome while the other is trying to confuse and mislead you for ideological reasons.

If they're both saying the same things, then it truly does not matter. The crank might accidentally arrive at the positive outcome, the sincere skeptic might mislead unintentionally.

You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.

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