791–800 of 1001 posts
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You want to tax people twice? Corporations pay taxes on profit. Shareholders pay taxes on dividends and capital gains.
Sure. Why not? We already get taxed multiple ways. I pay income tax and sales tax
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I dunno--of all the AI based products coming out, the whole "AI girlfriend / AI boyfriend" thing bothers me the least. If someone can afford it and they want a play relationship with a computer, then I don't see the harm. It's probably safer, better and healthier than many real-human relationships are. If they're getting what they need out of the computer, who are we to judge? I would change my opinion if it could be…
The issue isn't in the individual but at scale, what % of our population are we okay with separating with reality? What secondary effects of that inability to live in reality will show their heads? What will politics look like when everything can be made up and treated as equal to reality? What will the mental health of society start to look like if every person who's on the edge has a computer to tell them they're t…
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Indeed that has not happened: https://tinyurl.com/3dutardj
No that's just a really misleading graph. Most of the gap disappears once you include variable pay like benefits, overtime, bonuses, stock comp etc. See this explanation and corrected graph: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/economic-synopses-6715/w...
1. Even the article you shared mentions that starting in 2003, earnings has stopped tracking productivity. "Total compensation remains close until 2003, but does not follow 2003’s uptick in productivity growth (behavior which remains a topic for future research)."
2. They use average earnings and not median earnings. Average earnings include people like CEOs. This by consequence shows that inequality among workers has also increased. Check out chart 4 here to see how much smaller median wages are compared to average: (https://www.csls.ca/ipm/23/IPM-23-Mishel-Gee.pdf)
3. Apart from the average vs median difference, the biggest point of contention between that study and more recent ones is the measure of inflation used. The 2007 study you cite uses a measure of inflation that also includes things paid by employers like medical insurance. It turns out that using that one leads to significantly lower inflation. If you use consumer price index, what workers actually pay out of pocket, the difference again becomes larger. Citing page 37 of the study above: "In other words, that the prices of consumer items has risen faster than a broader index of prices that includes net exports, government goods and services, and investment goods. Therefore, for a given increase in income, the purchasing power of the consumer has fallen faster than that of business for investment goods and foreigners for U.S. exports."
The article I shared before plus this other one describe all the discrepancies (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/). Specially see chart 10 in the PDF study. That shows all possible variations of how you measure productivity and income. No matter how you look at it, the most substantiated conclusion is that income has NOT matched productivity.
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
The top 1% pay 40% of the Federal income tax.
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> where's my royalty check? I support the idea of UBI with zero conditions, but not this. You didn't get royalties before AI when someone was heavily influenced by your work/content and converted that into money. If you expected compensation, then you shouldn't have given away your work for free.
> you shouldn't have given away your work for free. Almost none of the original work I've ever posted online has been "given away for free", because it was protected by copyright law that AI companies are brazenly ignoring, except where they make huge deals with megacorporations (eg openai and disney) because they do in fact know what they're doing is not fair use. That's true whether or not I posted it in a context…
I just don't think the AI is doing anything differently than a human does. It "learns" and then "generates". As long as the "generates" part is actually connecting dots on its own and not just copy & pasting protected material then I don't see why we should consider it any different from when a human does it.
And really, almost nothing is original anyway. You think you wrote an original song? You didn't. You just added a thin layer over top of years of other people's layers. Music has converged over time to all sound very similar (same instruments, same rhythms, same notes, same scales, same chords, same progressions, same vocal techniques, and so on). If you had never heard music before and tried to write a truly original song, you can bet that it would not sound anything like any of the music we listen to today.
Coding, art, writing...really any creative endeavor, for the most part works the same way.
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Actually real wages have increased a lot since the 70s if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance. The problem is that a lot of that money is being wasted by an inefficient healthcare system, and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place.
>if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance You shouldn't. >and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place. They are free to lobby for socialized medicine, but they don't because they like how the current system helps lock employees into bad jobs for any amount of healthcare.
The correct number to use is called "total employee compensation". This includes:
1. salary
2. paid days off
3. health care benefits
4. retirement benefits
5. employer 401k contributions
6. incentive stock plans
7. taxes paid on behalf of the employee (such as the so-called employer's contribution to social security)
8. free food in the company cafeteria
9. any other benefits that cost money
The cost to employers for these benefits adds about 30% to total employee compensation.
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Are you saying Amazon isn't a positive? Or that Bezos didn't contribute to making Amazon what it is? I think it's pretty clear Amazon is quite a positive given by how many people like using it so much for it's convenient 1-stop shop, quick shipping, and hassle-free return process. Are you saying it would be better to have to shop at 1000 different little websites with probably crappy or at least inconsistent return p…
People would be more likely to shop in their local stores, buy local products, and sustain the local economy.
There is such a wide variety of products that people go to Amazon for. I know I do. So many things are niche I can't see how any local stores could exist to stock things like that in even a 1 hour range from a majority of the population.
How many people are going to drive hours to go to a special boutique that has this random thing they want or need?
Maybe people use Amazon to buy routine things that could easily be stocked locally. But I guess I use Amazon to get things that I can't really get or even usually find anywhere else for that matter. Most come from small operations using Amazon as their sales platform. Amazon is providing a lot of discoverability and logistics to them and I am not sure I would even stumble across the seller if I had to find some tiny website that they operated themselves.
I am not sure most people would prefer to shop locally, most people don't seem to even go to the store anymore and instead use delivery services for everything. This saves so much time to allow us to do other things that we enjoy in our lives. I don't think small shops would be able to offer this level of convenience.
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Yes, I pay property taxes every year that are based on the current assessed values of my home and car. Only special classes of assets are subject to property taxes. "Wealth tax" proposals are a generalization of the idea of real property taxes so as to stop penalizing specific asset classes like homes.
If you dig into how property tax is allocated, your tax will only go up if your house appreciates more than similar properties - which usually has something like redevelopment or other externality. It is normally not a fixed percentage of your value, but simply "here's what the county/city paid this/next year, divided amongst the properties proportionate to the value." Some, like sewer, etc, are per-property, but mos…
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems The top 1% pay 40% of the Federal income tax.