881–890 of 957 posts
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Yep. And good luck figuring out how to impress girls that spent every summer of their childhood in Paris and Switzerland.
The incorrect assumption is that you need to impress those girls at all.
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The whole Buffett vs his secretary tax thing is just as misunderstood as the 1992 hot coffee lawsuit against McDonald's, which at the time was considered to be frivolous and a sign that the legal system in the US is broken. I recommend reading the actual facts behind this case [1] - it will make you appreciate our legal system. Similarly, the Buffett story can be traced back to an interview he gave in 2007 where he s…
>> the average tax rate of the employees in his office was 32.9% In 2007, 33% didn't kick in until around $200K (married filing jointly) so not bad pay for Omaha. >> But in reality he's just deflecting from other potential sources of taxes, such as taxing people on wealth vs on income (which someone in his wealth bracket can easily live without). Given that he has pledged to give away 99% of his wealth either while h…
Wealthy people wanting to polish their legacy while still directing the use of their wealth from beyond the grave by establishing endowments and non-profit foundations etc. isn't really a new phenomenon, though there is much less emphasis on monumental architecture these days.
I'm not sure if anyone has studied whether such foundations and endowments are particularly efficient allocations of those resources compared to the government (either is in principle less efficient than the market, but the government steps in where society in general judges that markets have failed, and non-profits generally step in where donors, specifically, perceive the government has failed as well, but I'm unsure whether that implies more or less relative efficiency in allocation).
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> Bill Gates has openly admitted how much his environment helped. Being genetically gifted as he is is only part of the equation. He also grew up in an affluent enough area to have early to computers as well as the time and supportive environment to pursue it. Not to mention the role his familial connections had in his landing that sweetheart deal with IBM.
For the unaware, his mom was an acquaintance of the IBM CEO by virtue of both serving on the board of United Way, and Microsoft came up in conversation between them. A few weeks later IBM contracted Microsoft to write the operating system for the first IBM "personal computer".
He got business connections with IBM, he is a skilled negotiator, he got an expensive education paid by his parents, founded his own business with his parent's money (do you have a $150k allowance?) and knew intelligent but "poor" people who were even more skilled than him who he then could hire to actually do the important work.
In short, he was born a billionaire.
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Slavery was leveraging the forced labor of other humans. Leverage is not always "wonderful".
Fitting slavery into "A mechanism by which a small input can result in a larger output" feels like a stretch. But I agree that there is moral and amoral leverage. I of course only love the moral kind.
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Slavery was leveraging the forced labor of other humans. Leverage is not always "wonderful".
Fitting slavery into "A mechanism by which a small input can result in a larger output" feels like a stretch. But I agree that there is moral and amoral leverage. I of course only love the moral kind.
In the case of the founder, as I have mentioned, hiring someone gives them leverage. But conversely, a person taking a job with a large company gives the employee leverage. For instance, as a Google software engineer, you have the ability to command huge amounts of computing hardware that Google has at its disposal. Different roles may have varying degrees of ability to leverage the corporation's scale to their purposes but it's certainly a very real thing for many roles.
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>Why should the lucky one on top capture most of the value? Because they were first or best to do it. MySpace was already a thing, several other social media sites but today they're mostly dead while FB is not. Luck does have a lot to do with it. I feel trying to quantify luck though will get us no where. Trying to "correct" for it, even more so. >The people like Newton and Einstein who actually had revolutionary ide…
>Because they were first or best to do it. MySpace was already a thing, several other social media sites but today they're mostly dead while FB is not. Luck does have a lot to do with it. I feel trying to quantify luck though will get us no where. Trying to "correct" for it, even more so. I think this is a fundamental feature a winner take all/most market. FB beat out myspace and happened to win, but if not them it w…
What do you feel is the "solution" ?
>I don't think they should be because I don't think billionaires should exist. But I do think the value they created was much bigger than the value Zuck created. They were better at creating value than capturing it.
How much do you think they should be worth and why? I have some ideas, however I think it just comes down to the fact that some things are more easily monetizable than others. I don't think that's necessarily a problem.
>That can only be explained through how the wealth distribution has changed between now and then.
How do you come to this conclusion? I feel there are more factors than any one person can point to for the reason why people are "worse off"
>The issue is that the wealthiest are capturing a larger percentage of income now than they did 60 years ago.
Is it income? I still fail to see how Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates etc. Having an ownership in their respective billion dollar companies makes the average person worse off.
> I don't view our age as being more innovative than a time where we invented the atom bomb and went to the moon and other cool shit.
It depends on what you view as "innovative" - by this logic, I fail to see how going to the moon helped the average person. I can agree with the sentiment though.
>Jeff Bezos isn't more innovative than those guys, he is just having his workers piss in bottles to squeeze out every last cent.
I don't think Jeff Bezos is a billionaire because of this. Stuff like that certainly happens at other places, you just don't hear about it because its not as interesting. These aren't billion dollar companies by a long shot. Poor working conditions aren't exclusive to billion dollar companies. I'm not defending it though, that is terrible. I've worked in a warehouse and thankfully I never had anything like that happen but I did see some questionable things.
>Did not realize that Yang supported it, learn something new everyday. Would like to hear his reasoning beyond the short blurb on his website as he has always struck me as deep thinker.
I feel you. I really liked him. Still do I suppose, its just I do algotrading and I was shocked to see all that about "profitable algorithms" - I don't think he personally wrote that but I guess he has to be responsible for what is on his site. I will have to see if he's ever been asked about it directly.
A shocking amount of people seem to think they know how "wall street" works... I don't even know and would be silly to pretend but I do know that trying to eradicate "profitable algorithms" and imposing FTTs would be disastrous. That is what I'm worried about in regard to "going after billionaires". I'm not an economist though, so I can't pretend to know what will or will not happen. All I know is that the same principals when applied to "wallstreet" or trading in general always end in disaster and only end up hurting the "average person" indirectly.
I'm bias though, as I've personally worked on a few things that were only possible because it was funded by wealthy people with an idea. To me I hardly see a difference if their company is worth $100m or $1b. I suppose it affects how many projects they can realistically start... but eh.
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This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation. Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker. The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place. Basically the sum is greater than its parts. If you want to know where pro…
That analysis is not inherently dependent on the labour theory of value. You can frame it that way, but value need not come into it at all. Business owners are capital owners; they have power which arises from the fact that they own a business. They can offer jobs, which everyone needs, but no individual employee is necessary to them. It's a buyer's market, and as a result, the business owner has a lot more power to…
That's how a lot of countries are governed but it doesn't actually have to be the case. There are places where there are more businesses than employers which gives more power to employees. A lot of export driven economies are basically based around the principle that workers in those countries are cheaper than any other country. Governments introduce policies that reduce the purchasing power of employees over time.
>What we wind up with is a system where business owners have substantially more money than workers, purely as a product of the fact that they can use their power to make this happen.
Yeah the real problem is that governments love to listen to what businesses have to say at the expense of workers.
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Or that business with a million employees could just return a greater share of the wealth to the employees instead of the owners, thereby avoiding triggering the marginal tax
“Return”? The employees never had it in the first place. Amazon runs on razor thin margins on the retail side so I pay $50 for a keyboard that cost them $45 wholesale + $1 to store + $3 ship + $0.20 labor for the 10 seconds employees interact with it. That 80 cents of profit goes into the business and is used to expand. Jeff Bezos is rich because his ownership stake (stock shares) are worth a lot of money on the stoc…
Meanwhile searching products on Amazon is still a shitshow and it's generally not possible to disable third party listings.
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> Yes, cause otherwise you'll link to something and when I do "ctrl+F taxes" it wouldn't lead me to something that argues against your point ;) Yep, I underestimated your unmitigated pendantry. I suppose shouldn't have assumed that you would know that the New Deal involved raising revenue. Concise data from the 1930s isn't super easy to come by, you are going to have to look at broader economic trends and make your o…
> I suppose shouldn't have assumed that you would know that the New Deal involved raising revenue. Concise data from the 1930s isn't super easy to come by, you are going to have to look at broader economic trends and make your own conclusions. I don't really need concise data, just some rough numbers. How much did they project the revenue act would raise, how much did it actually raise. How much did it impact investm…
You were being pedantic about how the New Deal raised revenue. Literally the only reason I linked it.
> Do you want me to show dozens of examples of FTTs failing? Do you simply need more?
If you have examples in the United States or the United Kingdom, sure I'll take a look at them. Otherwise, I don't really see the point, when no other country has had global financial controls comparable to the US/UK in the last 100 years. Further, I've already said that FTT is only one approach, and not one which I have specifically advocated for at any point in this thread. You are arguing against yourself on that one.
We already tax wealth, so it's not clear at all why you think it's so catastrophic. It sure doesn't seem like you've done real research if you haven't been able to come around on the existence (and non-apocalyptic nature of) property and estate taxes.
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> The fundamental problem with taxation is that governments are even worse than individual billionaires like Jeff Bezos at choosing what to do with large amounts of money. Citation needed. When Governments had lots of revenue, they assist the population with public services, which tend to benefit the lowest stratum of society the most. But the cumulative effect is to raise the quality of life of society as a whole. T…
> Citation needed. When Governments had lots of revenue, they assist the population with public services, which tend to benefit the lowest stratum of society the most. But the cumulative effect is to raise the quality of life of society as a whole. Citation needed.
> Citation needed.
That's actually fairly uncontroversial. Small government fetishists insist that left unfettered the flourishing market and voluntary charity would more than make up the resulting gap, but any evidence to the contrary is generally taken as proof that we just haven't lowered taxes and deregulated enough.
The defense of Communism that it hasn't actually been tried for real yet doesn't make any more sense when applied in turn to laissez faire capitalism.
On the other hand, we have quite a bit of data about the broad middle ground, and it is pretty clear that the current settings for the US economy are that taxes are currently too low and not progressive enough (how much is a matter of some debate), and that we probably need to revert to Reagan-era levels if only to be able to afford to refresh and replace crumbling public infrastructure that has been a drag on the economy for a while (because putting off maintenance doesn't save money in the long run) and step up enforcement of existing regulations.