> Higher order thinking is more important and rare.
I was just talking with a friend the other day about how many problems and issues would be solved if people were more conditioned to asking, "...and then what?"
This is a classic for the people who dream of interstellar travel. Okay, you figure out the problems (good luck) and after some 40-400 years land on some dead rock in the Alpha Centauri system. Congratulations! Now what?
And then you start colonizing? You take the supplies out of the generation ship you took to get there and then build housing and then farms. You build up industry and have lives until there's civilization and you can send messages back to Earth to share what life is like on Alpha Centauri. You and your children make art and music about your new planet, same as people did on the old one.
Why does it matter how much the shares of his company are worth? They just represent ownership of a company. It's not like their existence is somehow holding back wealth from the market or from other people. And if he wants to sell the shares to make some cash, then he's going to have to pay taxes on that, which is good for everyone else. And he wouldn't do that unless he planned to spend or invest the cash receives, which is also good for everyone else. I fail to see the harm.
I think one could argue that taxation should be higher, and harder to dodge, and I would agree with that.
But once you start saying that some people shouldn't have more than others to some degree, that's a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Why is it okay for middle class Americans to buy nicer clothes and move into bigger apartments when people are out there starving? If it's not okay for someone to have the net worth of Qatar, why would it be okay for someone to live in an apartment that's worth more than a poor township in South Africa?
At some point we have to accept that inequality exists, and that although almost everyone could do something to minimize it, there's an ethical and practical line that needs to also respect individuality to a large degree, if we want people to feel incentivized to do things, to feel ownership, to maintain autonomy. And where to draw that line is tough to say exactly, but it probably shouldn't be a line, it should probably be smooth, or at least smooth-ish. So I feel like we're just coming back around to progressive taxation. Which we already have.
That, exactly, is the problem. It's not even about money and tax evasion but power. Why should one person have more say over the company they work for than 10,000 other employees? Or even worse they don't even work there anymore and just control it from outside?
Even if they are a perfectly good and business smart person who never makes bad decisions or abuses their workers. They will eventually die or sell their share, and in either case it will end up with people who care less about the company's long term health than the founder did. Profit maximizers with no ethics and no feeling of responsibility.
I think the concept of shareholders is the problem. Layoffs, cartels and price inflation happen when the people who make decisions get all the benefits but none of the downsides. If it was up to me I would ban stocks and replace them with time limited shares that give you a right to part of the profits for 1 or 5 or 10 years, but zero control over the company. Leave power to workers and returns to investors but never bind the two together.
Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly? Who is getting hurt here? It's not like borrowing is increasing his net worth. Just like anyone else, he has to pay back what he borrows, he immediately owes an equal debt. And that requires actual income, which gets taxed.
> Just like anyone else, he has to pay back what he borrows, he immediately owes an equal debt. And that requires actual income, which gets taxed.
In theory, maybe, but in practice that is not what happened over the past decade(s). Instead our retirement funds are paying it back.
When the market grows it makes the collateral worth more, which lets the holder keep refinancing the debt instead of selling assets and realizing taxable gains. As long as the assets appreciate faster than the debt grows, the borrowing can effectively roll forward for decades. Eventually the estate pays the debt out of the assets themselves, but this is not necessarily out of taxable income earned during the person's lifetime. The US markets has seen exceptional genuine growth, but the trillions of 401(k), IRA, etc money flowing in to them over the last 40 years is no small consideration.
> Well, why does something have to be done about this, exactly?
The something here is what's required to have a functional tax system. Without addressing this situation I do see an argument that we have one. How important that is to one is another question.
the people getting hurt is anyone who would have bought something but was outbit by larry page's free money glitch.
he doesnt necessarily have to pay it back either. he could just take out another loan against his same now higher valued assets to pay off the old loan
Not the parent commenter but I've found RSS feeds have replaced most of my desire to browse reddit, and other social media. You can even paste a YouTube channel into a feed reader to get a true channel subscriptions feed.
For starters, don't let other people control your diet of information. So get off social media, where random algorithmic feeds serve you slop you didn't ask for.
Instead, pick out your own internet information diet. Make it a project. If you're not afraid to use AI, it can help with this tremendously.
Then you need to build habits that replace your unhealthy browsing with healthy browsing. IMO it's best to just install tools that make it difficult or even impossible to do the unhealthy browsing.
> Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
I think you're the only person here who really gets it.
We already have dozens of methods commonly used for preserving/impersonating/representing people who aren't in the room, and who are possibly deceased. These mediums have evolved over time, from spoken word and song and music, to scribbles and drawings and painting and sculptures, to acting and plays, to writing and printing, to audio and video, to computerized media, to AI-generated computerized media.
Of course any medium can be used tastefully or distastefully. But what the people in this comment section are overwhelmingly reacting to (and attempting to moralize) is their distaste for the medium itself. Distaste for a new medium is extremely common throughout history, and if history is any indication, this distaste tends to disappear quickly as older generations die and are replaced by newer generations for whom this "newfangled contraption" feels like a natural part of the world.
Robin Williams himself famously did humorous impersonations of recently-deceased celebrities and politicians. He was an irreverent comedian. You guys need to relax.
Robin Williams' daughter's complaint isn't, "AI is easy." She's complaining that impersonating her father in this way is disrespectful and that he wouldn't like it.
Do you think anyone deceased that Robin Williams made fun of, or their families, would've said, "You know what, nevermind that this is disrespectful, it took work!"
Don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning. Certain people don't like AI coding for various ideological reasons, and so they will, not coincidentally, consistently fail to find it productive or helpful.
As long as we don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning for other certain people as well, who like AI coding for various ideological or financial reasons.
> Inside just about every company on the planet are conversations this week revisiting the idea of giving these labs access to ANY data
This claim is just so dramatically far from the truth that it's hard to believe y'all aren't living in a fantasy land. This seems much more aligned with the world this commenter wants to exist rather than the world that actually does exist.
> Nobody using Muse the tool knows or gives a fuck who Muse the band is, the band itself is twice their age.
Muse is incredibly popular. They're in the middle of a tour right now, too. Just saw them live two weekends ago. I'm sure there are tons of people who both listen to Muse and will use Muse the AI tool. I'm sure that's true for many of the AI tool's creators, too.
Since when was the default to assume malicious activity and victimization, and then to ask for proof otherwise? Obviously we should do the reverse. There should be evidence of theft rather than assuming theft as the baseline.
For starters, if the band's handles were taken non-consensually, then the least we should expect is a public complaint from said band.
This is doubly true in a world where social media handles are routinely bought, sold, and traded. And triply true where the supposed victim of this crime is an incredibly popular group of people with an extremely massive platform, and it's 99.9999% likely that Meta knew this going in.
When a company is known for being malicious by default, to the point of knowingly covering up their ongoing and extensive contributions to teen suicides, it is not unreasonable for people to expect they would steal social media accounts to suit their interests.
They are pure unadulterated evil. They are guilty until proven innocent at this point.
I am agreeing it is unlikely it was actually malicious, but it is Meta and they deserve no charity. If it is even a small possibility they did the evil thing, we should all operate on the assumption they did the evil thing anyway until proven innocent.
I hope all the non charitable assumptions they deserve snowball enough to hurt them.
It became the default due to how Facebook behaves. If facebook employees even occasionally acted like human beings with an ounce of decency, it might be worth not assuming they're evil sacks of shit.
I was just talking with a friend the other day about how many problems and issues would be solved if people were more conditioned to asking, "...and then what?"
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