This is a bad system for several reasons:

-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?

-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?

We’re defining a system here with numbers out of thin air with no context around anything. These are fundamentally badly designed systems. No amount of fiddling with the parameters will make up for the fact that it’s fundamentally flawed.

Also, beyond that, you would be amazed how many scenarios exist for people and businesses to secure large loans that this would impact. The goal is to actually tax the super rich who are dodging taxes, not kneecap legitimate useage. You’d hurt hundreds of thousands legitimate borrowers and just shove Bezos and Musk into using alternative mechanisms to leverage their security holdings.

I know you think I don’t understand your proposal. I challenge you to consider that I do, and still think you can reconsider the root cause of the issue and come up with alternative ideas. You’re stuck on the loan aspect. That’s a symptom, not the cause.

They aren’t used interchangeably so this implies a different definition or at least distinct connotations.

The problem isn’t that i “don’t understand the gap”. The problem is that this isn’t what I’m asking.

How do you define for the purposes of this hypothetical law which loans would be taxed as income?

Telling me how rich Bezos is is completely tangential.

I’ve been trying to use the Socratic method to prime the pump that

-The root of the problem isn’t the loans themselves, it’s that they can “realize value” from shares (using them to secure a loan) without selling them.

But that doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere because of how excited people are to hear any question to be somehow a doubting of how rich these guys are?

If that is the case, and you step back, can you consider an alternative strategy besides just some messy spaghetti definition of “income loans” vs other loans?

My mortgage was many times my yearly income.

So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.

Like, you’re not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they’re not trivial.

How do you establish that a loan is or isn’t “acting as income”?

How is how well known they are relevant? Would that make a leak more or less palletable? Are you familiar with the “five eyes”?

I get your point, but intelligence agreements break down if countries start letting their personnel leak information.

Canada has access to sensitive US intelligence. What do you think would happen if someone in CSIS leaked it?

Like, Israel bad, it was probably ethically correct to leak it, but I think your line of reasoning isn’t fantastic from an actual argument perspective. It was a tweet sized, easily consumable expression of disagreement, and I can appreciate that art for what it is.

He’s already conditioned his base with fake pictures and videos of tons of stuff. He’s already convinced them to reject a reality they can see and hear and touch.

Putin could release that tape, DNA, and have the Pope and Joe Rogan personally attest to it’s authenticity and it wouldn’t matter.

Trump would say “deepfake” , fake news, radical left fabrication. His base would believe him. We’ve been living in a post-truth world for longer than most of us are willing to admit.

There is no kompromat that could shake his base.

Modus Tollens

Whisper is fantastic and has different sized models so you can zero in to what gives you the best mix of speed/accuracy for whatever hardware you’ll be running it on

I think a lot of Americans don’t understand that the USA hedgemony isn’t a divine right, it was a deliberate construction with tacit agreement of convenience from the western world.

Much like an economy, belief makes it so.

Much like the UK’s arrogance has driven them into geopolitical obscurity, so will the USA’s.

In 15 years, Americans are going to wake up and realize that their voices are irrelevant in the world. I don’t know how y’all are going to handle it.

Lol oh shoot, I’m terrible at this app

100 million people even getting involved twice every four years (once for the primaries and once for the election) they could literally put anyone they wanted with any policy into the white house.

Pretending voting fixes issues? My brother in Christ you guys couldn’t be bothered to vote! Trump lost ground in terms of absolute number of votes. Fewer people voted for him in 2024 than did in 2020.

Like jfc imagine saying voting doesn’t fix things 2 days after an election where you forgot to vote.

The levers which incentives wages closing the gap on the “super inflation” are probably more realistic than the levers that would cause the prices of everything to deflate.

Not even the pope

If a 45 year old not wearing a costume and strung out on Ketamine says trick or treat at my door, they’re getting candy.

What am I, the fucking Halloween police? ACAB.

Each of them only does it once, and thinks it’s just a matter of luck when it happens to someone else

4 billion a year to house 86,000 people is $46,500 yr/person.

$3875/mo/person

Being honest, with a budget like that I could rent an apartment in NYC that I can only assume is quite a bit nicer than a literal homeless shelter

20P