821–830 of 1001 posts
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
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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…
There is actually a reasonable way to fix this as currently implemented. Engage with the platform in some popular areas that have their own targeted advertising. My feed is filled with STEM projects and gardening with a spritz of actual content from friends. When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the…
Besides, even for my interests, I don't want to see a bunch of random if topical chaff. It's extremely rare for the algorithm to pick up on the kind of advanced, nuanced, and obscure discussions that I want to see, simply because they are invisible to it by their very nature.
Plus for whatever reason the algorithm thinks I'm super big on some things that make absolutely no sense... for example one recurring topic seems to be posts about various corporate logos and how they are constructed, yet I have never willingly engaged with anything on FB having to do with logos or graphic design. Another favorite topic it likes to show is really bad humor, like jokes so basic and elementary that I have a hard time understanding how anyone finds them funny. Oh and the obligatory horny bait.
It's nice that you've somehow managed to cajole your feed into something you can tolerate, but your post strikes me as suffering from the same kind of myopia common amongst tech workers who have never stepped outside their bubble. We as a group need to be pushing back much harder against the algorithmic slop that seems to dominate pretty much all popular social watering holes.
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You know what else was a "great idea" that was supposed to be only for the wealthy class? The income tax [1]. 100 years later and all of a sudden everyone is paying it. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...
Yup I totally agree, because bad things can happen we shouldn't try to do anything. Much simpler.
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You know what else was a "great idea" that was supposed to be only for the wealthy class? The income tax [1]. 100 years later and all of a sudden everyone is paying it. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...
Yup I totally agree, because bad things can happen we shouldn't try to do anything. Much simpler.
I can explain it to you with a simple example:
Imagine, for instance, you're making 50k a year and have a brokerage account that has appreciated by 100k and that you're being taxed 20% on unrealized gains in year x. In year x+1, say your account falls back to where it was before. You paid 20k plus another 10k, and you will need to set aside another 10k. In essence, your income has been reduced to 10k, which could make daily life impossible for many people making 50k annually, especially those with families.
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Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.
The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%. The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize th…
Even if losing 100% is unlikely, someone could lose control of their company. Say I own 51% of my company. Harris wants 25%. I sell my shares to cover it… if my math is right, I then own 38.25%, the year after that, 28.6%, then 21.5%, 16, 12, 9… the control is gone. I lost my company. Let’s say the company was worth $1B. At 9% ownership I’m now under the $100m net worth threshold. So I would have paid $420M in taxes. Then let’s say the stock tanks… I have been selling off shares flooding the market, the direction has been taken from me, the decisions aren’t good and I’m powerless to stop it, the company’s value drops by 85%. Had I never paid any taxes on unrealized gains, my stock would be valued at $76.5M, below the threshold of the tax. But instead, I paid the government $420M, my new position is $13.5M, and the company I founded and build from the ground up is slipping away.
This may be dramatic, but it could happen. $13.5M isn’t nothing, but it is when the government taxed you 420M.
And what happens when all this stock is sold and floods the market? Does the market crash? When the market tanks, what happens to everyone’s 401k, the middle class… they get screwed.
Someone tell me why I’m wrong, because this is there my mind goes with this stuff.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing more bootstrapped companies staying private, instead of everyone going after VCs who are looking for a big return, either through going public or an acquisition.
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Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.
Nobody with assets over 100m has a "pile of gold", as you put it. Those assets are always productively invested in some form or another. But you would prefer that those investments be pulled, because the government are clearly much better at employing those assets productively?
Do we make them give 20% of their unrealized paint to members of the public so they can make their own paintings, hoping they too will fetch $1m each?
If the IRS took control of 20% of the paint, borrowed against it to fund the state, but then the artist decided to quit does the government somehow force them to paint?
If the artist said this ahead of time and this was priced into the future value of their paintings (now worth $0 because there will be 0 paintings) does the IRS revalue their unrealized gains down to $0bn?
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This is an extremely disingenuous and intellectually dishonest strawman of the views that people of the political party that you're attacking actually hold. This shouldn't be on HN: > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship cur…
It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.
Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
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The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%. The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize th…
It seems like it would make sense to stop allowing people to put up their stock as collateral on these types of loan, rather than taxing unrealized gains. Even if losing 100% is unlikely, someone could lose control of their company. Say I own 51% of my company. Harris wants 25%. I sell my shares to cover it… if my math is right, I then own 38.25%, the year after that, 28.6%, then 21.5%, 16, 12, 9… the control is gone…