Agreed. So people will either drop out of the workforce for such jobs, or will require more money to do those jobs.
As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.
I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.
And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.
A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.
I am a PhD dropout but as a startup founder i was able to get an EB1 in the business category (not technology/science which is the common route, even though i was CTO and had a couple papers). Something for founders or senior business leaders to consider.
Where are the expert witnesses in this case?? Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion??
I put myself in their shoes, if I had never looked at a line of code I couldn't even start to imagine what an API vs real code is. I'd probably think it's some made up concept that Google is using to save money and circumvent the law.
Expert witnesses play a role in trials, they play no direct role in appeals where fact claims (to the extent they are reviewable at all, which is normally limited when, as in this case, there is a jury-trial-by-right, because otherwise you obviate the right to a jury trial, though its worth noting one of the issues in this case is that the Federal Circuit tossed aside the jury verdict using a standard which is not usually appropriate for review of fact questions in such a scenario) are decided by review of the trial record and, to the extent that the trial record is not sufficient, remand to the lower courts for further proceedings with legal guidance.
> Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion?
We expect the parties to have developed their fact claims at trial or, failing that, to be able to explain to judges why any issues needing factual evidence are insufficiently developed in the trial evidence such that if they were critical it would require remand (and the reason better be something like "we were improperly prevented by the trial court from presenting evidence" or "this is a issue that somehow was allowed to be raised for the first time on appeal so we had no opportunity to present evidence on it at trial".)
> Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion??
Can substitute any field for "coding" above and come to the same conclusion.
Quickly getting up to speed on the terminology and issues of fields in which they have no formal training or first hand experience is a big part of the job description of being a justice.
I don't think so, coding is so different than it has ever been, and is a different paradigm that most other things. Take farming, for example. Fundamentally farming is 100,000 years old. Getting up to speed on modern methods is just adding something else to the stack and, while complicated, those methods aren't totally foreign for someone who understands what farming is.
Something like coding is so alien to a 70-80 year old it's basically incomprehensible. That won't be the case with us in 50 years when were that age because we understand it, but there will probably be other things at that point that are equally incomprehensible.
To play devil's advocate: Architectural diagrams/design specifications for physical buildings are copyrightable. The implementation is obviously whatever the builder does. But in general, I think that is a pretty close analogy to APIs and implementation code. APIs also capture some sense of overall system design as well. So that may lend further credence to support copyrights.
I disagree that the IRL analogy of API is architectural diagrams. A better analogy for API would be an agreement on how to communicate what needs to be done (and what has been done) between two persons. The aggregate effect of that over thousands of people is a working system, coordinated by the mastermind (programmer) who dictates the actual orchestration of the entire system.
If API is copyrightable, I'd love to be the first person to copyright the following API (and variations thereof):
class Processor {
void init();
void process(...);
void cleanup();
};
If I get a nickel for every violation of that copyright...
I like the analogy of computer keyboards. The layout (QWERTY) would be the API, but keyboards differentiate themselves in numerous and substantial ways. It would be unworkable madness if each keyboard manufacturer was required to use a different layout.
My understanding is that QWERTY was developed to solve a mechanical problem with early typewriters in the 19th century (frequent jams). According to wikipedia the inventor spent 5 years developing it. I don't see why he shouldn't have been able to profit from that invention. The only reason we use QWERTY now is due to the fact that early non-mechanical keyboards were designed to be used easily by people who had trained with mechanical ones. If "licensing fees" for QWERTY back then had been an issue, manufacturers would have just used a non-copyrightable ABCD... layout, or paid for QWERTY. I don't see it as a disastrous outcome.
Copyright violation requires copying, and independent derivation is a valid defense.
Patents don't require proof of copying and are always infringed, even with no knowledge.
If you wrote that API, and I wrote that exact same API without having seen yours, you wouldn't be able to sue me for copyright violation.
All I'd have to show in court is that there's a decent probability that I independently created the same API, at which point we'd both have full copyright over our own (identical) APIs, and more likely it would be ruled un-copyrightable due to being too trivial / not creative enough.
Even if independent derivation is a valid defense, with Oracle setting a precedence, people would be taken to court all the time, and what is considered trivial becomes a matter of opinion. It won't be long before the whole situation devolves into automated takedown of GitHub code by big corporations.
Ideally, we shouldn't even have to go to court to begin with.
Then the blueprint is the contents of the communication, not the method of communication itself.
The blueprint would be communicated by mail or sneakernet.
You can copyright the contents of an email (indeed, I think they have an implicit copyright, don't they?), but you can't copyright the way in which emails in general are transmitted and exchange. (That would probably be a matter for patent.)
API design largely determines whether a performant, correct implementation is even feasible within a given time frame. Setting aside whether or not developers can then successfully use the API to accomplish their goals.
Yep, it’s like patenting the ingredient list instead of the recipe. It ignores the process and says no ones allowed to cook any combination of fish, flour, potato, milk, and eggs.
The unique food might be fish balls, but it also covers fish and chips, and a million other things that could be done with that API.
"""Under the AWCPA, an architectural work is statutorily defined as “the design of a building as embodied in any tangible medium of expression, including a building, architectural plans or drawings,” and “includes the overall form as well as the arrangement and composition of spaces and elements in the design, but does not include individual standard features,” such as common windows, doors, and other staple building components. Accordingly, per the definition, while individual standard features and architectural elements classifiable as ideas or concepts are not themselves copyrightable, an architect’s original combination or arrangement of such elements may be."""
Staying in this analogy, aren't APIs more like pictures or verbal descriptions of the facade of the building?
An API spec will not (necessarily) provide you with any internal implementation detail. Architectural diagrams/design specifications very likely will do.
To me an API is more like a survey of the land. If the architect doesn’t know the survey, then the plans might not be compatible with the features of the land... but he could still try. The builder also doesn’t need the surveyors permission to build on the land, the survey is just a description of the land. Owning the survey / API doesn’t do anything to change anyone’s rights.
Nobody is saying that the overall design of a system isn’t subject to intellectual property law. But it’s an area of patents rather than copyright. Amazon until recently held a patent (it just expired) on the concept of having a button on a webpage that you click to buy something. IBM at one point held a patent on the concept of sending data from one computer to another computer. One of Google’s arguments in the case is that Oracle is trying to argue a copyright claim on something that is actually covered by patent law (and which was already found in lower court not to be a patent infringement). If you invented a fancy new way to couple together electrical wiring, or train cars, or drivetrain to a motor, then you would file a patent for it. My take is that Oracle is banking on the fact that an API is written in words (especially in Java...) to muddy the waters enough to obscure the technical and thus not copyrightable nature of an API.
Can you copyright Harry Potter the character? Or can anyone use recognizable Harry Potter reproductions in commercial context, be it alternative books, movies or merchandise?
This is where the confusion lies: Google claims Oracle is copyrighting an interface to Harry Potter (as per your example) -- i.e., they are claiming copyright to any / all characters that are (1) a boy in his early teens (2) has magical powers (3) goes to wizard school.
Now, the question is, where do we draw the line: As per Oracle, there cannot be any other character that does what Harry Potter does.
Copyright law already allows you to copyright specific combinations of unprotectable elements. It's called thin copyright, it's why Katy Parry got sued and lost, and it's software application is called Structure, Sequence, and Organization (SSO). You can in fact claim copyright on all characters that look like Harry Potter, because the standard for copyright infringement is "access and substantial similarity". This is because if your copyright doesn't extend to someone blatantly tracing over your work, then it's not a copyright.
You specifically need to argue that the API itself - the specific combination of types in a specific order, with a given set of Unicode or ASCII characters to identify it - is not copyrightable, not just that it's made up of uncopyrightable things. This is harder, because this same practice in other contexts (e.g. music, literature, and so on) is very much protectable. You need to argue that software is different.
That's a stretch. Oracle is claiming copyright on a specific API with a specific name, specific organization and specific individual components / attributes. It is not claiming copyright on all standard lib APIs. In fact, there is no evidence that Oracle has any intention whatsoever to sue Google over Go or Dart.
As a European immigrant who came to the US to be an entrepreneur, I can tell you there are many reasons for the US leadership so far, many of which are still true. My top list:
- biggest unified market. This is HUGE. Not like the EU "unified" where you can't even speak the same language, but really unified. This means an early idea has big enough of a market to worth pursuing, among other things.
- a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk
- world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country
China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above.
If China was ever to become democratized and continue its growth trajectory it could truly challenge the US gobally but that may not happen for years or decades.
Overall I think we should welcome more innovation, even if the US has to share some of the leadership it had until now. But articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else.
China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and academic works coming out of China, while still facing issues in quality on average, have still been rising in quantity and quality.
When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually.
Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost.
I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate.
You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.
> China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there
I feel that for at least the last century, you need to think of the US population for the purposes of talent pool sizing as more or less the entire world because of its focus on liberty and opportunity. Consider how many accomplished scientists and inventors came from other countries (including China) for this reason. The US has enjoyed a very privileged position of being able to skim the cream of the crop in this way.
Classic moving of the goalposts IMO. 2015 was the last year I could get reliable data for. Wait time? What standards are you basing your comments on and what countries are you comparing the USA to? By any reasonable standard, the US is still very pro-immigration and pro-entrepreneur.
The key phrase there is "in the EU or Canada." But the point of the parent comment is that the USA isn't like those places and that there is such a thing as "American exceptionalism" in terms of having more entrepreneurs attracted enough to a culture of innovation to apply for visas.
Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there
I don’t think it works that way. We’re not talking about building pyramids, or a great wall. It’s not a simple labor issue or China and India would already be winning.
A corrupt authoritarian country can’t innovate at the speed of a free and democratic one.
Or it can innovate a lot faster, because you don't need to convince a majority that your line of research is okay to pursue. For example research with stem cells.
Pyramids and the great wall were pre-fossil fuels, electricity, and internet. Any useful research on sci-hub can be available to a person with half a mind in China. The Chinese space program has made leaps from being the third country in the world with a successful crewed space program in only 2003, and now on their trajectory to have a permanent space station in 2022 - only 19 years later.
Progress is heavily non-linear, particularly so in the last few hundred years, and very unevenly distributed due to various factors (geography, wars, resources, population sizes, etc). The way European and even North American powers developed even 70 years back is not a direct match to how countries develop now.
But you're right that it's not just a labour issue: it's also an energy issue, for power (which enabled hundred-fold ROIs compared to human work, even slave work) and materials construction (which already occurs in the countries you mentioned).
And on that note, the planned construction of nuclear power plants in China is enormous[0] (including new technologies like EPR which work well already there while they're lagging behind in my home country of France) and by the end of that their total nuclear throughput will be higher than France[1]. And renewables are also rising at a fantastic pace there too.
Now there's the current (and soon to be dated) GDP/added-value definition of "winning" from the west. Well, even there it's a steady improvement for China (more so than for India, that's for sure): over two-thirds of foreign executives were already saying Chinese companies were as innovative or more than their companies by 2014[2] and the time to market on their internal market is very different from the rest of the world due in part to entirely different approaches to strict internal processes, which leads to a very different approach to what's "new". As noted in the same article and in my previous comment, while the quality of things isn't quite on par with what the US or the EU are accustomed to, it's good enough for a market that is more than twice the population of the two aforementioned. And by sticking to that metric, one can easily say that what WeChat does in China is the wet dream of basically most of the biggest US tech companies.
I do have many doubts about what will happen to the country and its population as the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption. Perhaps that's more a hope of mine rather than a pragmatic prediction though.
I'm not sure what definitions of "winning" and "innovate" you are using, and I am curious to hear about the places where the country completely fails to innovate or "win" (this is not a sarcastic comment, I'm genuinely curious), because it's getting the world handed to it on a platter these last few years.
I don't wish for the EU to emulate in any way some of the terrible things occurring in China, and I hope that the ideals of the Schengen space and practical EU protections (that I very much cherish) will be one of those things that spread to the world eventually, but I'm not seeing a fantastic amount of "winning" happening in our democratic countries lately, from one side of the Atlantic (Brexit, rise of extremes, EU issues in Poland or Hungary, lack of collective weight on major decisions, etc) or on the other side.
> the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption
I think the Coronavirus disaster has shown that China can be more efficient than all democratic countries where it counts. A serious blow to the prestige of democracy vs autocracy.
> China can be more efficient than all democratic countries
Not all democratic countries. I live in Thailand, which is at least technically a democracy, and the virus has been completely extinguished here. The crackdown was harsh - a month of curfew! - but it worked, and the public was largely on board. Life is back to normal here, with the addition of masks, for which there is 100% compliance - I just don't understand how the US acts against its own interests in that regard. The virus has been crushed. And it's the same in Singapore, after a couple of hiccups. Hell, Thailand is re-opening to tourism!
China isn't 100% autocracy, anyway. There's a very very large gap between China and, say, North Korea, or even Soviet Russia. You can definitely make the case though that the "pure democracy free for all" model like the USA, with its totally unrestricted (and possibly harmful in the age of social media) free speech, has certainly lost if not prestige, then at least the status of the model of governance other countries should aspire to. I would say the USA's handling of COVID19 has been a big wake-up call to pretty much every other democracy of what can happen when "freedom" goes too far.
Calling Thailand and Singapore democracies, even if they like to call themselves that, is like calling Russia a democracy, or calling Saudi Arabia a positive agent for women's rights.
Yeah, LHL or Prayuth-chan Ocha actively subverting elections, hindering the opposition, preventing gatherings, sitting in bed with the military, all signs of a very healthy democracy in either country right?
Singapore can be as bad as Russia - it's just that if they were as bad, nobody would bother to stay along in that tiny island. Thailand is like Russia to Thai folks - recent protests are just evidence of that.
America isn't perfect, but at least you get to have an opposition. Last time the opposition found a reasonable and charismatic leader, we know what the king did in Thailand (it was his sister in the opposition).
Hey, I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that at least journalists don't have mysterious "accidents" and opposition don't get frigging nerve agents in their drinks. It's not Russia.
Check out the 60 Minutes video "Whistleblowers silenced by China could have stopped global coronavirus spread" [0], and then see if you still feel that way.
This isn't accurate. It wasn't "China" who silenced people, it was a local official who eventually got removed and punished. The now deceased doctor, who wanted to report it, got officially apologized.
I clearly remember back when this whole thing started and how pretty much all of the western countries bashed on china endlessly for no actually sane reason. It's what made me start digging into it. This whole mess, we live in now, wouldn't be a thing if china-bashing wasn't the norm in western countries and if they, the respective governments, instead had acted in the interest of their respective people. Which they didn't.
The world got plenty of notice and the countries listening acted successfully.
Even the US enacted travel bans which - if they had followed up and kept working towards suppression of the virus - would have been a great start. Instead the US sacrificed it's gains to political games and now is seeing what happens.
The whistleblowers in China shouldn't have been suppressed. But there was plenty of notice early enough to act.
China confirmed human-to-human transmission on Jan 20[1].
China shutdown Wuhan on 23 January[2] (notice this was after human-to-human transmission was confirmed). Wuhan airport was closed[2], and Chinese did stop all travel out of Wuhan[3]. There are many reports of people escaping the lockdown that night, but it doesn't seem this was some Chinese policy - more that events were moving fast.
It's your country's responsibility who enters its borders. The Trump administration moved fairly quickly and closed borders to Wuhan by Feb 2, which was earlier than South Korea (but later than many countries).
I don't think many would fault that part of the US response, but it isn't exactly clear what people think China was hiding in this period - remember this was the time when people were seeing pictures of the lockdown in Wuhan. Countries can make their own judgement about the severity.
> The extent to which the Chinese system causes the severity to be downplayed matters a lot.
They were welding doors shut to keep people inside. It's difficult to argue they downplayed it.
There is (fair) criticism of the regional authorities in Wuhan downplaying it in early January. But the central government didn't seem do anything to try to hide things.
BTW, if you didn't already know these dates and thought the Chinese gov was hiding things, you might want to re-examine the source of your information.
I don’t think it’s possible to claim that you have the ‘correct’ source of information.
I’m not saying that your sources are worth nothing, but there is reason to doubt that they tell the whole story.
Claiming the central government didn’t seem to do anything to try to hide things, and blaming it on the regular government seems rather blithe.
It is well reported m that a doctor who identified the virus early on was forced to lie and claim he was mistaken.
In an environment where forcing lies is a normal part of government operation, we just can’t know how many other doctors were prevented from speaking out.
We also know that the CCP was spreading the story that the virus was planted by the US military.
Are you really so certain that your timeline is accurate?
> I don’t think it’s possible to claim that you have the ‘correct’ source of information.
What does this mean? I read the WHO reports at the time, and they are still the same. They are "incorrect" in the sense they didn't know things at the start, but they are a correct historical record.
> It is well reported that a doctor who identified the virus early on was forced to lie and claim he was mistaken.
Indeed. And look what happened to the officials who forced him to do that.
> Are you really so certain that your timeline is accurate?
Yes, absolutely - which is why I'm so surprised at the "blame China" narrative.
I'd be quite interested to understand why you think it could be wrong? It was less than a year ago, and the information is all publicly accessible.
I was following Covid from early and ordered masks in late January. The WHO started publishing daily updates at[2] from Jan 21 and prior to that on[3]. People knew and were making preparations for a SARS type epidemic - I'd suggest you read some to see how much people knew and how seriously they were taking it.
Their update on Jan 21 reports:
Additional investigations are needed to determine how the patients were infected, the extent of human-to-human transmission, the clinical spectrum of disease, and the geographic range of infection. [4] (note the human-to-human transmission bit)
China didn't bankrupt itself in the process of a space race, and they're not doing it during the cold war but just because they know they can. If China put a 'cold war' attitude into doing something, you can bet that this would have been done in less time. Just look at how quickly rudimentary hospitals were built for their covid outbursts.
> You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.
Why not have both?
China should in no way have to be “Western” to be trusted internationally. But they could embrace the opportunity to be even more open and generous of a society than they have been in the recent past. They’re certainly strong enough for it.
A few things I would personally love to see:
– More transparent and consistent application of laws
– Celebrate and protect all Chinese of all diversities, not just the majority who hold the most power
– Avoid taking nationalism to an extreme
The second and third especially are serious mistakes other nations (e.g. Britain, Japan, America) have made in recent history. It would be a gift to see China avoid the same.
One and two are basically hallmarks of western Liberalism, so this seems kind of contradictory. To my knowledge, the only historical Chinese government that we would consider Liberal is the current Taiwanese government, and even then that's a fairly recent development (30-ish years). It's not clear how the current regime could get there without wholesale changes in the power structure.
The thing is, your perception of them on these issues is very much colored by the fact that they're not western. It permeates all coverage of them from western sources.
Thanks for the more precise information. It's indeed very much worth pointing it out when a "slight difference in accuracy" in my statement is a population equivalent to 80%+ of the US(!).
It's a misleading way of measuring poverty. In fact, it is irrelevant how many units of currency you earn, as long as your units of currency cover your basic needs plus a bit.
Sixty units of currency are a lot of money when rent costs you ten and bread costs you one.
In Bulgaria, most things are half the price. Food and rent are damn cheap for someone who earns money in euros.
They earn half as many units of currency compared to people where I live. That's an amount of currency with which I could never live where I live now, but there it would last.
I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?
>Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?
Yes. Who said they hadn't?
For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world.
E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough".
1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1).
Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period")
"China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century.""
> "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century.""
China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order.
That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.
America has that story, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. America may not have "class" restrictions like other places, but it sure does have "race" restrictions. And even when the wrong people manage to make it, they (as a group anyway) will still have it taken away from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
There were a national debate on economy centered on the circulation of iron and salt. A representative work is "盐铁论” discussions on iron and salt.
Chinese civilization peaked in tang (in terms of international influence) and later song (in terms of tech and culture).
Then it's a steady declination till the end of Qing.
Ancient China was quite liberal and diverse even in modern standards. But the history took a reverse turn to more totalitarian direction. (China never practiced authoritarian regime, even today, people just cannot admit or bother to learn the nuances of modern China political system, I am so very much disappointed there is no modern day Tocqueville on China, what a pity!)
Xi's approach is fairly conventional in terms of Chinese tradition. But it has swapped the Confucius core with a blended scientific core through learning from Communism. This is a dangerous direction, as there is quite a risk of how to continue this tradition across generations, history has shown that declination and degradation is inevitable within 2-300 years time period. It will be interesting to see how Xi handles his succession. It might be quite disastrous. But it also has a lot of institutional safety backup.
Who knows! To me, this is the single most political affair in the next 10-20 years.
Xi is not a dictator, his life experience does not lend the ambition, nor his power can dominate the check and balance in China. Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose.
Well, he does need to be voted Secretary by the Central Committee. The change that was made recently was to remove term limits - but in theory he can still be voted out. Weak sauce I know compared to judicial oversight but hey, you asked.
I agree with the GP that labeling Xi a "dictator" is hyperbole. I wouldn't even say he's as entrenched as Putin.
For any behavior you believe Xi is doing that showcase dictatorship, I can guarantee that the popular support is secured beforehand, in proportional to the impact of the actions.
Check and balanced exit, as one example, in the ways of how policies are executed between different branches and sectors.
Like if Xi wants to do some thing, the functioning branch has a great deal of influence, as the government officials are not refreshed between different government terms. Like many of Xi's policy can be effectively nullified, if the policy really were not effectively mobilizing the functioning units.
One might fancy that Xi can install his own men that is so effective that the above check is rendered ineffective. That's possible, but it seems even in the imperial era, a sane emperor was not able to do that [1]. Nor I see any evidence that Xi had acquired any such superhuman power.
These are unfortunately not as visible as western systems.
But again, I can only state qualitatively, in the sense that the check and balance is so much more effective than what a lot of people imagine. I am not an expert that can give you a systematic description of the details. I once again lament the missing of a modern day Tocqueville...
> Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose.
So anyone who claims Xi is a dictator has evil motives? No room for honest disagreement? The facts are not only clear and unambiguous, but also so widely spread that everyone knows? Nonsense. "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but evil" is a very cheap rhetorical trick. You sound like...
Well, you sound like the American left. And the American right. And the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party. What you don't sound like, though, is a reasonable person having a reasonable discussion, who has evidence on his side.
European powers were fairly dominant in the world when the industrial revolution started there. The causation link isn't clear to me (if one caused the other or vice-versa - I'd love to hear from people who know better), but the fact of the matter is that local energy sources could be used (coal, as early as the 1700s) so the benefits were clear and local first, and a huge jump in progress ensued across those economies over the last few centuries.
Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels).
Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road).
So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..).
I've been wondering, is Joe Biden popularizing "the fact of they matter is..."? (Again? As I appreciate he probably didn't invent it, but he sure uses it a lot.) I now suddenly see it everywhere...
A tradeoff that I find fascinating is that of democracy vs authoritarian gov't. It's the question of our days.
I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages:
- very efficient in redirecting resources as needed
- the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently
- no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges)
HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1])
So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%.
In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick.
I have lived in China.
Authoritarian is way worse. Putin is not authoritarian in the degree that China is.
It has lots of disadvantages:
- You can loose everything you have very fast, including your live and the live of your children, and of course your money or your home. There are kidnappings in China.
-Your food is not safe. The air you breath is not safe and if you try to do something, let alone measure it, you will get into problems. They can kill you and make you disappear.
- Nothing is true. Have they beaten COVID? You believe so because they tell you so. But the party controls media so you can believe as well in Santa.
-The State in China is one of the least efficient things you can think of, and extremely corrupt. The only thing they are good at is propaganda.
-Lots of politics in China. Have you seen all the people at the CCP? Lots of factions there fighting for power. Those guys are killing each other or pointing fingers at other factions and sending them to jail with each new scandal.
IMO, "check and balances" is not stupid. It is one of the best inventions the West have created.
Coming back has made me realize how valuable is what we have in the West. And how spoiled people are taking for granted what took thousands of years to develop.
Exactly. Monarchies and dictatorships like you say always inevitably implode because no matter how great the current person in power is, there's nothing you can do to guarantee the quality of their successors.
And it's precisely because no system of checks and balances exist that ensures once you roll badly on a succession, that whoever ends up gaining control is able to so quickly destroy whatever has previously been built up.
The only way to truly ensure long term growth and stability, is to build up a robust system, independent of any individual, that has checks and balances set in place.
Also your "strongman" has to not be stupid and keep the economy running, otherwise you get a "great leader" telling their farmers to turn equipment into scrap metal (amongst other mis-scientific advice) and you get a Great Leap into Famine (as you referenced)
I think that this describes imaginary authoritarian country rather then real one. It is not like all policies of authoritarian leaders worked as intended. They don't, the ranks under twist them to unrecognizable.
Also, authoritarian leader willing to sacrifice well being of subjects is not the exception, it is the norm. You can't be authoritarian leader without such willingness.
Also, checks and balances are not stupid. The difference is that stalling of Trump orders happened in the open for well defined reasons.
What's your point? I'm a EU citizen with roots in the Maghreb. I have no interest in singing praises of an economy with which I have major ethical concerns (extended to the issues with the Uyghurs, HK and Taiwan, and I have dear friends in the latter places), and all my personal experiences have had much more to do with countries that are very much not into China's attitude (EU, Canada, Japan, to name a few).
If you keep trying to play this bullshit game of astroturfing warfare, you're going to completely miss the real discussions.
So please tell me again, when do I clock off of what?
China, in its current form, simply doesn’t have the potential to compete with the US in this way. It is a walled garden of corruption, who’s leaders will go to any lengths to retain total control of.
Indian on the other hand, given enough time, could come to challenge the US’s economic domination.
a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk
Many other cultures have the same, perhaps to a lesser extent, but balanced in that regard (say) by more rights for workers or protection from corporate abuse or a higher quality of life.
world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country
Depends how you look at it - for example, per capita the UK has more Top 10 universities than the USA.
articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else
It's important to take a balanced view on these things; a US decline is probably simplistic as you indicate - but a rose-tinted view of it is just as unhelpful.
If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it. That's a way bigger deal than any (often overstated) difference in freedom or innovation.
>If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it.
The world didn't know 3 words of French when that became dominant "linga franca", and din't know English when that replaced it, either.
People learn X's language because there's an advantage of knowing it and doing business with X, they don't do business with X because they speak their language.
The future language will probably just be some bastardization of English and Chinese, with some Spanish thrown in...
Fun fact, lingua franca actually refers to a frankish-arab trading pidgin.
Back on point, that will take time, and it will follow china becoming dominant rather than leading to it. Also, Europeans learning French is a fairly easy lift compared to Americans learning Chinese.
> The future language will probably just be some bastardization of English and Chinese
Threre's already Singlish in Singapore, something like that would have no chance to be a future language. Esperanto has more potential and that's a half dead language.
It's a very hard language with a complex written form. There are likely hard upper bounds to its worldwide popularity.
Look at Russian. Even when the USSR was the most fashionable country on Earth, when Western intelligentsia (eh) was massively convinced that Russians were showing us the future, people were not queuing up to learn Russian. Often Russian intellectuals had to speak another language to communicate with the "outside" (when they were allowed to). It was simply too different in its alphabet, too complicated. The same happened with Japanese, despite Japan being a massive economic and cultural power for more than 40 years. Japanese is occasionally fashionable but it will never be a lingua franca.
English might not be the easiest language in the world or the most regular, but it's definitely easier than any Asian language featuring complex glyphs. Its pronounciation rules are relatively easy. Its lineage is markedly European, which keeps it close to French and Spanish and makes it easier to piggyback on their own spread. Even if it were to lose its importance tomorrow, should the US self-nuke or something, chances are that its replacement would still be based on the Latin alphabet. That's what is used in South America, Australia, Europe, and large parts of Africa, regardless of whether they speak English, Spanish, French... So that's what will likely continue to be entrenched, one way or the other. Chinese will grow in importance for sure, particularly in Asia, but it will never be "the" global language.
There's a joke that the most common language in the world is bad English. I have a theory that the diversity of English speakers makes it more forgiving of pronunciation, word order, and tonal mistakes than languages with fewer speakers.
Chinese is popular regionally in Asia and among diaspora, but it doesn't have the anywhere near the number of outsiders trying to learn the language to tap into the social/cultural system as English does.
English is effectively half-French, like French was half-Latin, which in turn was half-Greek. Europeans basically moved from a language to its immediate cousin, for more than 2000 years.
Han might be half-something too but it's definitely not something anybody ever spoke in Europe, South-America, or Africa. Europeans will likely never speak Chinese in numbers comparable to modern-day English.
I share this sentiment. Another important point is that the US still manages to be a center for education and entertainment for most of the world. While China is attracting more students and artists, the barrier of language still remains as China's majority of institutions essentially cater to the domestic market.
>China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above.
The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. The rest of Asia, Africa, Australia, and perhaps Latin America, wont have as many issues being led by China.
> The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that.
US + Europe, along with other US aligned nations (Japan, Australia, NZ etc) account for >50% of the world GDP[1].
> The rest of Asia ... wont have as many issues being led by China.
Any more details to back this assertion? Just a brief glance at the current geopolitical events reveal the following Asian countries having issues with China: Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. Some other are heavily aligned with the US (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, ...). A lot of these have significant populations and/or economies in Asia.
A society the size of the US has a huge amount of inertia and fears over imminent US loss of global status are overblown. However, the US does have several serious structural problems that will eventually threaten its global position if they are not addressed.
You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded.
Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure.
While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible.
Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale.
It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities.
The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done.
An EU immigrant commenting on US social and economy development, and equally assured of oneself of the same authority on China.
Chinese netizens have a sarcastic name for people with the tendency to comment on grandiose topics with some form of unfounded authority, who unfortunately dont have a long professional career as an academic researcher or as a long time practitioner of that area.
That name is called keyboard politicians, or 键盘政治家/键政
First as an immigrant, you are farm from the dynamism and inner working of the society. An EU immigrant is surely more informed than a Chinese one, but I would put both as largely blank paper compared to a native person.
For China... I left China 2008, and today I consider myself no fundamental difference when dealing with Chinese affairs than an American. Any one who had not lived in China for the past 4 decades, simply have no way to understand the unprecedented changes and the fundamentally different social dynamism in China.
In short, these statements might be true. But more likely to be wrong. And in the end, they not too far from from a gibberish produced by GPT-3 trained from randomly sampled web articles.
> Certainly someone who immigrated to the US as an adult cannot know more about the US than someone who grew up here.
They certainly can, might even get a Ph.d in Cultural anthropology albeit without necessarily grasping small local intricacies, but the same could be said about someone from a different state.
Though US here is a bad example, it's just too culturally heterogeneous compared to China.
The thing to keep in mind is that leadership in data management lasts about 5 years, definitely less than 10. An (incomplete but representative) timeline:
- late 90s: Early DWs like Redbrick
- early 2000s: Oracle, Teradata
- late 2000s: Shared-nothing Data Warehouses (Vertica, Aster Data, Greenplum) - bought up by Teradata, EMC, HP
- early 2010s: Hadoop and Hive
- late 2010s: Redshift and cloud DBs
- early 2020s: Snowflake
- late 2020s: probably something else...
All these technologies felt they were here to stay at the time, but they didn't. Will Snowflake be the exception? Maybe, but the odds are not nearly as great as their valuation implies.
I was in CA last year and surprised to see Prop 65 warnings outside every coffee shop because apparently Coffee "may" cause cancer.
It's time for CA to take a step back and stop pretending its citizens are toddlers. People can make their own decisions.
Meantime, organizations like this doctor group go around collecting tax-deductible donations, potentially state/federal grants and paying full time staff.
WhenI turn into the parking lot at the commercial development where I work, there is a prop 65 warning sign; one on every street entrance. There are many buildings and companies there. They seem like relatively expensive signs, but they provide zero actionable information. Is it in fact my building that is cancerous? Some other business? Should I quit my job? The only thing I’ve ever done with these warnings is ignore them. I don’t feel educated, I just feel tired of them.
Trusting people to make smart decisions when provided with the right information is in fact the goal of Prop 65, because it simply require information to be immediately accessible at the point of sale.
A government that does not trust its citizens to make decisions removes decision making abilities. Like welding shut doors to keep people inside during COVID.
You write of a seemingly rogue CA treating its citizens as toddlers but remember that Prop 65 was a ballot initiative which passed with 63% of the popular vote.
Is any sort of government intervention considered "nanny state"? Prop65 is as not-nannystate as you can get, considering it doesn't try to ban the products or even tax them.
... laws that protect minors as young as 14 from being coerced into sexual relationships with adults up to age 23... laws that limit corporate access to public water sources when the state is in perpetual drought... Oops. Those suggestions went right out the window. And into one of those 90% of fires that are man-made. Maybe someone will come by with a 24-pack of plastic water bottles we can dump on the fire, since pulling from the hose will put us over our government-mandated per-person use restrictions and cost us hundreds in fines... or even jail time!
Education or information is not control or nannying. Decision != informed decision.
I think any regulation that at minimum benefits consumers when it's hardly anything for corporations to add to their existing labelling is good for society and a great allocation of resources.
This is different to the forced wearing seatbelts when driving, which genuinely forces the restriction of one's physical freedom, and yet benefits no one else but you (within the scope of your own decisions) if you have a car accident.
A lot of commonplace stuff can cause harm above a certain dosage. Which is partially why Prop 65 is failing.
99% of things in Prop 65 are fine in moderation. And the 1% that isn't (I would love to be warned of that myself) - well, it's lost among everything else.
Right. Obviously if they put the sign on nothing, no information would be communicated. And the same if they put it on "50% of things" (defined however you like) because everyone knows the median thing isn't a real cancer risk. Maybe it could communicate the breaking of some threshold, but not a meaningful one.
To be truly informative, binary cancer warnings should be rare -- they should appear near a threshold where reasonable people are likely to be swayed by them (but not certain to be swayed by them -- at that point we're probably labeling too few things.)
But enough about binary labels, though. They should have to put figures on them: "Scientists believe that the cancer risk of this cup of coffee is statistically expected to decrease your lifespan by 5 minutes, plus or minus a day, with 95% confidence."
The issue isn't that the regulation is providing education. It's that the state mandates everyone put idiotic signs that are obviously meaningless everywhere.
If the state wanted to be useful they should maintain a useful and easy to understand list of common substances and explain in simple terms exactly what the risk is.
More creation, less control of people for no benefit.
OK, thanks for the education. That makes sense. Didn't know that. I do not live in CA.
But where should we draw the line and balance the scales of helping or promoting human health (including education, which can save lives), restricting businesses who don't care about human health, and allowing citizens to have the freedom to be as unhealthy as they want (which I'll agree should be a human right)?
With cigarettes, the most alarming label messaging doesn't seem to stop its most determined users from enjoying them. Was a fierce cultural war fought against that regulation? IIRC, yes. (From a documentary.)
One factor here seems to be a war for freedom of diet and lifestyle, extending to the desire to not even have to see messages that tell you your lifestyle may be unhealthy for you (or your children), even if the science is clear.
If there's no mention of dose and the warning is based on substandard, uncontrolled evidence, what are you really learning? That if you repeat a small-N "experiment" enough times with the toxin of our choice, some rodent will develop cancer?
So 1% wealth tax is equivalent to 50% tax on the return of the asset, every year.
Say what you want, but this makes holding the asset or investing a lot less attractive. It will affect people's decisions and willingness to invest. Maybe we're OK with less investment but we shouldn't assume there is no impact.
In addition what if this is a volatile asset (read: startup) whose value goes up and down? Will the gov't give you a refund if it loses 20% of its value 10 years in?
What if the asset is illiquid (again:startup)? Who will lend to an otherwise not-wealthy startup founder 1% of their company's paper value every year to pay the tax? Because if the startup fails most founders will have to declare bankruptcy (having paid years of paper wealth taxes with no positive outcome in the end).
> Say what you want, but this makes holding the asset or investing a lot less attractive.
Not really. Where else is that money going to go? It's not enough to just say there is a disincentive, you have to show that the disincentive is so great that it makes other opportunities more attractive. But those other opportunities don't exist, because it is a wealth tax, it doesn't matter what instrument you use, the tax will still hit you.
Also, those numbers are pretty much non-sense in today's economy, with inflation consistently below 2% and nominal capital asset growth being closer to 10%, a 1% wealth tax represents a tax rate of ~12.5%.
I'm not losing sleep over a startup founder who owns so much of a company to be worth over $100MM on paper or otherwise. Startup founders have the ability to sell a part of their shares in liquidity events. If they choose to hold onto their shares above all else, it's on them to figure out how to pay the tax. It might even create a whole new financial instrument or class of investments.
> It might even create a whole new financial instrument or class of investments.
Absolutely. There will be a layer of, essentially, financial parasites taking value away from value creators to make this 'work'. Not sure what's great about that.
Capital can move globally, but if you remain a citizen, you still owe on the wealth tax, because again, no instrument is restricted. If you want to renounce your citizenship to the US and pay the exit tax instead, be my guest, I'm sure we could tighten up any loopholes and remove access to American capital markets for those that want to flee.
I also love how creating liquidity is now considered being a financial parasite. The US is nothing without the financial innovations that we have developed and embraced over the last 150 years.
Think about it, it will be cheaper/better for $1M of US capital to be invested in UK vs the US.
In the US both you and the founder/management team/other investors all pay tax if company is successful; in UK, only you (as US citizen) pay tax. You and the founders/management can split the difference and will be better off.
These things may sound small but play out significantly at scale (like interest rates etc)
> Think about it, it will be cheaper/better for $1M of US capital to be invested in UK vs the US.
That is a vast oversimplification of the problem that ignores all of the reasons to start and do business and business operations in the US, because there are already tons of places that you could start your company at that would result in lower taxes, yet very few if any choose to do so. You are making a huge logical leap that businesses will be as successful running out of the UK with its laws, regulations, and taxes as the US.
The world is not as simple and clean as whatever economic model you can cook up in your head. If it was, companies wouldn't pay developers in the US $300k/yr.
I agree, but you can make the same argument about people borrowing less if the fed increases interest rates by 0.1%. There are a ton of factors that go into someone getting financing and moving interest rate by 0.1% should be a non-issue. But on average these things do change people's behavior.
My principle is we should remove all obstacles for starting/running/investing in companies, which are the engine of the economy and create both wealth and jobs, and we should tax outcomes and consumption. Also, we should keep things simple to avoid both overhead and tax avoidance that comes with complexity.
I'm shocked people think a wealth tax on startup founders is OK. Let's think of a scenario for instance:
ACME startup raises Series C @500M. Founder equity is worth 100M on paper. Founder needs to borrow money every year to pay 'wealth' tax. After 10 years of struggles, company sells for $100M, VCs get money back, founder makes no money. But now founder is millions in debt for past 'wealth' tax payments. Founders will be declaring bankruptcy in those cases. And interest rates for wealth tax loans will skyrocket as a result, making effective wealth tax rate much higher.
Problem is startup founder 'millionaires' and 'billionaires' are only that on paper. Any asset that is volatile (like startups) will become impossible to own long term even with a small wealth tax.
Won't startups just go public sooner? Or maybe private company valuations will become less ridiculous since the value of your shares would actually matter for something besides ego now? I do think that taxing paper wealth is a problem, but if you are creating billions of dollars in economic value, there is usually a solution (e.g. as part of raising that $500M, a portion of that goes towards paying wealth taxes). Anything that incentivizes people to do away with this trend of a decade plus before exiting sounds fine to me.
People want to exit but in most cases can't because the company is not doing well. Everyone who has tried fundraising with bad results knows it's super hard. Despite popular stories in the press, that's the fate of most startups.
Having a struggling company is super stressful, adding the government asking you to come up with money to pay personally, because you are 'wealthy' on a paper would take it to a different level.
This is ignoring the fact that wealth taxes don't effect you until you are extremely rich - even the most aggressive proposals don't start until you are at $32M-$50M in net worth - there are definitely some startups that are struggling while the founders have this much in equity, but the vast majority of struggling startups never hit the $100M+ valuation that would be required.
Not to be a dick, but I don't see why anyone thinks this is valid justification to block a wealth tax - maybe you could argue that the cap should be higher. Income inequality has gotten ridiculous and is only going to get worse as AI technologies mature. There needs to be a way to reallocate wealth from the super-rich to the 40% of Americans who would be unable to pay for a $400 emergency and I haven't heard a better proposal.
The point is that it creates direct and indirect obstacles to starting/investing/running/owning a company. Which is one of the big job/wealth creators of our society.
IMO you should do the opposite - remove all obstacles to start/invest/run a company and tax the outcome - or, even better, consumption. If you feel those taxes are too low, then raise them.
That is exactly what a wealth tax proposes to do since there is no other realistic way to impose a tax on a successful companies. Corporate taxes haven't worked very effectively. When someone sits on $1B+ in stock, there is no way other than a wealth tax to redistribute that wealth.
First of all, this has literally zero impact on the vast majority of entrepreneurs and small business owners who will most likely never hit $30M+ in net worth. And those are the real job and wealth creators.
Secondly, global corporations have the effect of taking wealth from the many and centralizing it into the hands of the few. And this will continue to get worse as AI advances. These corporations are not good for the long-term health of America and I don't think many Americans will care if it becomes a little bit hard to make $100M.
I would think it's valid to make that assumption given taxes must currently be paid in dollars and I don't know of any places that allow it to be paid in equity. I would also think out debt obligations to the world bank must be paid in currency.
This is a problem for startup employees, too, and should be solved in both cases by allowing you to defer the taxes on your paper gains until you can actually realize them (yeah, there would be issues here, but the issues are solvable).
It's like this in some European countries and the situation you describe with founders having to declare bankruptcy has happened some times. It doesn't make it impossible to own volatile assets, but it increases the risk.
Some places the rules have changed a bit to avoid some of these cases where people owe more tax that they can pay, but it can still happen.
More computation = more data. That's the real problem. Processors will get faster but for some applications we'll never have more data. So yes, new approaches are needed.
As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.
I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.
And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.
A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.