There really aren't that many billionaires. Most of what we refer to as billionaires are people who have a large equity stake in companies they run. So are we saying once your equity becomes to large you have to start selling shares?
People who say this stuff usually have zero clue how money works.
And if so, who should we hand over the power to? If we tax assets, it will be given to the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital.
These people say they don't want all this power centralized to certain individuals, will in the next breath claim that government should seize assets after a certain amount. They want centralized control, they just want their preferred political party to be the ones with it.
The shares are sold to whoever's buying, so the billionaire can pay the wealth tax, to the government.
This would essentially be the same as when someone wins a car on a game show. The car is taxable income, which means that they sometimes have to sell the car to pay that tax.
> the government, which historically hasn't been all that great at allocating capital
The only way anyone gets to be a billionaire is by hoarding wealth. It's a catastrophically bad allocation of capital.
Do you realize the billionaire has no saying in how much money he “has”? He just owns stock in a company he built from ground up. It’s us saying that that stock has a certain value. It’s us saying the owner is a billionaire. We are the ones making him a billionaire.
And that, together with heavy regulation, is why we have the present situation where young people can't stat families because they can't afford a home. Not the example I would like to follow anywhere else.
I’m interested why you think most of global billionaires are people with large equity stakes in companies?
People who often focus in on just the capitalist entrepreneur sect of the billionaire class often have zero clue how global Class Systems work, and just how many billionaires there are that have never worked an honest day in their lives.
Skimming through the Forbes list, the top ones are pretty much ones I recognize as having been founders, CEOs, and/or early employees of large corporations. As I scroll down the list, there are a lot more that I don't know or believe are merely decedents of those such people, but I still see plenty I recognize as founders or as still running companies. Is it 10%? 50%? 80%?
Don't just assert we're clueless without providing some source to show us that we're wrong. Far too often such assertions aren't actually based on anything but vibes, so "just trust me" isn't much good.
That’s a good question. People in tech all know Stripe, but outside this circle, PayPal and even Square have far superior brand recognition. If you ask my family members what Stripe is, they would shrug.
I suppose you're technically correct (the best kind of correct ;) but I am not so sure that the brand-recognition metric is the best one to apply to Stripe.
PayPal and Square both have a strong B2C presence. PayPal has B2C offerings focused around sending/receiving money. Square, while they don't have a strong B2C product, does spend a lot of time sticking their logo in your face every time you go to a merchant that uses Square.
By contrast, Stripe is an infrastructure company. The best parallel I can think of might be a company like Maersk (one of the world's largest container-shipping companies). Sure, you may not recognize the name if you're not in the space, but odds are that they do affect your day-to-day life as a consumer.
> Square, while they don't have a strong B2C product
Huh? Block (formerly Square) has an incredibly strong B2C product (the #1 finance app on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in the US) called Cash App (formerly Square Cash).
I would define Stripe as B2B2C. It’s not simply a B2B because they help business charge customers. Their value is convincing business to use their platform. Most businesses will choose payment gateways that their customers use. And by far the number 1 request from customers is usually PayPal. They might be invisible to the customer, but business will alway prefer to integrate with payment gateways that will get customers to say yes faster. It’s nuanced, but that has just been my experience. Logically you are correct though, on the surface, brand recognition should not matter.
> And by far the number 1 request from customers is usually PayPal.
Do you have any data on this? I'm genuinely curious. Not only do I have a long list of negative experiences with PayPal that skew my own take, but I also have no idea where to look for this kind of industry-wide data on B2B2C customer-demand.
I don’t. But I used to run a Yoga platform and used Stripe. None of my customers (Yoga instructors) knew about Stripe. They always requested PayPal or Square to the point, I realized using Stripe only made my life easier, but my customers didn’t care. It was a huge hassle to convince them a) to use my platform and b) to use Stripe. So it became 2x more difficult to onboard them. Same thing for their customers. Since I was a new platform, they ask their instructors why it wasn’t PayPal or Square. They trusted those brands to hand over their card.
> As a web developer for 11 years, I can state that web development is devolving to chaos of IE6 era.
This is a poor comparison. The problem of the IE6 and below era was that Microsoft was adding capabilities to IE without standardizing them. Now, browsers add non-standard capabilities to their browsers to trial their implementations (remember CSS gradients) but eventually move them through the standards bodies before formally declaring their support.
If you're using non-standard APIs, and they break for you before Recommendation, that's your own fault.
My understanding is that things actually went the other way. Private browsing came first, then the same approach was used to create more labels than just "private" and not "private". I think more features may be turned off in private browsing mode though.
> We should be doing more to support emotional support animals in general to help those afflicted.
Did either you or the parent commenter read the entire article or the interview at the end? Nobody is saying support animals don't help in any way.
The whole discussion is about the lack of any serious studies or evidence that animals objectively help those with mental health issues, and how exactly they help. How can you say "we should be doing more to support" something without knowing if that thing is actually helping? This is the point of the article.
Not buying these products is a false affordance. Your friends have them, your spouse carries one every time you go out together, your children clamor for them at Christmas. If I have to keep my lawn well maintained or face a fine, there's no good reason that people should be exempt from laws that regulate behavior that has a greater impact to society than tall weeds.
>there's no good reason that people should be exempt from laws that regulate behavior that has a greater impact to society than tall weeds.
Let's re-criminalize marijuana and get alcohol and junk food onto the Schedule I list then. While we're at it, banish low-brow entertainment from the airwaves and pulp fiction from the shelves/Kindle store. Use the full power of the legal system to avenge society's loss of your productivity when you slack off in school or at work. All these behaviors impose a far greater cost on society than an unmowed lawn.
Have you considered that it's actually HOAs which are an egregious affront to individual liberty?
It's not an HOA. It's actually part of the city's code, so it's an actual minor criminal offense we're talking about. But that's not important right now. All of us are required to abide by laws, sometimes over things we consider trivial, like the speed limit. Why should a "person" with far more resources than any individual not be held accountable for their actions?
That's what I did, but it may not be much longer until...
> Couldn't you just, you know, not purchase those products or services?
...means buying a beater that barely runs, because they stopped making cars that aren't "connected."
Or maybe you did buy a connected product, and were really careful to make sure it did nothing you didn't want it to do at the time of purchase...
...but then two years later the manufacturer pushes and update that adds 24/7 tracking and mandatory banner ads. What do you suggest doing in that case? Return your car to the dealer for a refund? Take a time machine back to tell your old self to "not purchase those products or services?"
In short, market thinking is not the solution to all problems, because markets can be broken in innumerable ways. And even if the brokenness can be worked around, people usually lack the expertise or time-bandwidth to do it.
> but then two years later the manufacturer pushes and update that adds 24/7 tracking and mandatory banner ads. What do you suggest doing in that case? Return your car to the dealer for a refund?
I expect, well more hope, someone to try exactly that. Then for some interesting case law to develop.
I sure hope everyone isn't just going to roll over and accept this shit.
Judge: “Well, you signed this contract two years ago, which specifically states that you consent to OTA updates of any kind.”
Done. The judicial system is not always the place to fight these things, especially when you have existing case law working against you. It’s important to remember that we have a legislature whose job is to, ostensibly, make laws. Congress could quite easily make a law that no car company can advertise at you in your vehicle, but I’m having a hard time fathoming such sensible legislation with this current administration.
But my larger point stands: the courts will be of no use here, and rightfully so, because we already have a branch of government that is supposed to deal with this: the legislature. Not “roll[ing] over and accept[ing] this shit” will involve voting, unfortunately.
Hmm, perhaps it's a UK/EU difference to the US. Judges here are perfectly happy to strike clauses in contracts or terms they think unreasonable or at variance to law or custom. Agreed to or not.
Whether it comes down to UK/EU sale of Goods Act, or contract law I could not say.
Is it as clear cut as that? Such a thing would probably be some kind of EULA, and I think those have more limits on the kinds of terms they can include.
I would take it back to the dealer. If they can't remedy it demand a full refund. If they do not give a full refund sue them, but please get a good lawyer. We want good court precedents. Heck you might be able to get the EFF to represent you or something similar.
What choice do you have once every single provider is doing this? Seriously are we supposed to build our own car? Businesses only care about profits, so if one manufacturer sees other manufacturers doing this and making money, they will follow suit, until all cars are just another data mining machine.
What possible motivation would a car manufacturer have not to do this? It's all about $$$
People who say this stuff usually have zero clue how money works.