AI has not yet reached the point where it can convincingly generate long presentations with the precision required for complex, technical academic topics. It will eventually get there, at which point an additional layer of proof of work will need to be introduced. This is an adversarial race.
I think this is an interesting and effective solution, at least for now. Similarly, graduate and master's theses should focus more on the presentation and on eliciting knowledge from the students through critical, thorough questioning than on the tangible outcome of the project, which can easily and bindly be obtained with AI these days.
Taxing capital assets by taking large portions of their value destroys value by forcing liquidity events. Think forcing sales of farms, factories and domain names.
I much prefer land value taxes (and similar taxes on non capital wealth like jewellery) and leisure taxes (ideally taxing people for every hour they don't work). Of course these are difficult to administer in practice, but British business rates and US overtime tax discounts effectively approximate this.
I had the same reaction. It also seems easy to pull apart. What about disabled people who are unable to work?
I think something more like "investment income should be taxed at a higher rate than income earned through labor," accomplishes similar goals but is more intuitive and less problematic.
This is a false dichotomy. Laborers could just as easily invest in job-creating endeavors as passive income earners. All taxes cause economic drag, not _just_ business and investment income taxes. The economy includes every participant, and laborers are not an externality.
I'm sorry, I don't follow. Yes, people who are labourers could also somehow creating funding pools that are big enough to start companies, but so what? That doesn't negate the fact that they will be disincentivised to do so by a tax on investment income.
Not as dystopian as the ability to get wealthier without working and pay no taxes (and even IF you sell to realize gains, your tax liability is still lower than someone who made money through labour)
Your definition of "wealthier" is stupid, though, because it relies on a measure that doesn't actually apply to the person in question. A share's price is just "the last sale price of the same type of share", and that is multiplied by the person's shareholding to get their "wealth". However they don't have any more money by this happening - it's just a huge assumption that the share price would stay the same across all their shares if they sold right now.
The time we actually know what money they would make, making it concrete for tax, is when they sell. And we already do this.
There's multiple advantages to making money from equities that people who make money from ordinary income simply do not have, favourable tax rates, the ability to choose when and how much to realize, the ability to loss harvest, compound interest, everything around how we tax these 2 forms of income is set up to beget inequality.
> everything around how we tax these 2 forms of income is set up to beget inequality
No it's not. Most people don't pay capital gains because things like houses don't have capital gains applied. I.e. the rules are set up so that most people avoid capital gains tax when they gain capital. Everyone pays income tax with the same rules, and some people pay capital gains tax as well if their risks pay off. We tax the profits and let investors absorb the losses.
In an ideal world, the government would sell some of whatever shares it gets at good times to pay off debt, for example when interest is high just before a tranche of government bonds expire
Apparently not. Googling, no one seems to actually do it in spite of some politicians talking about it.
It seems quite a bad idea from a practical point of view.
Not so much because it's socialist but it leads to all sorts of extra paperwork for no good reason. Like say you buy some utility company share for your retirement in 20 years and it fluctuates. Do you want to be valuing it and paying tax and then claiming it back when it goes down every year for 20 years or just declare the gain at the end?
Really? How? Show me a country that taxes wealth and is prosperous. Taxing unrealized gains results in owing tax on money you don’t have and makes starting a funded company impossible.
Why not? We tax property every year on it's assessed value. I think it's pretty clear that the wealthy will need to pay more taxes throughout the world to deal with an aging population.
I'm a little tired of billionaires 'buy, borrow, dying' to get around the paltry taxes they're currently subject to. We need a harder tax to dodge.
Why would taxing the wealthy be relevant to an aging population? Do you think that we tax stuff? We just tax money to buy stuff. If a nation produces less stuff, then spending more will just cause prices to go up, but will not result in the production of more stuff to go around.
Because our current social safety nets all work by assuming the next generation pays for the care of the current elderly. Those elderly do need 'stuff' they need doctors and nurses and nursing homes. Thus taxes will have to go up, and if it has to, it may as well be progressive.
No, actually, we have explicit taxes for SS and Medicare, and we've known they were not bringing in enough revenue to fund those programs since the 80s.
The trust funds are almost dry, so we're either going to have to raise those taxes to fund those programs, or cut a critical safety net to the American public. I know where my vote is going.
Or cut something else. The assumption that all government money is spent perfectly on essentials is a huge issue that afflicts tens of millions of voters.
Do we have an estimate on the number of people capitalism has killed? Serious question.
Include deaths due to poverty and lack of affordable healthcare under capitalism, overworking and dangerous working conditions, and all wars and counter-insurgency waged on alternative economic systems globally.
You'd need a definition of capitalism first. Since for most people, it's just the default mode of living -- e.g. the very term "capital" comes from "head", as in "head of an ox", as early cattle culture practiced capitalism, so it predates the agricultural revolution and was practiced by nomadic groups.
A lot of the language, for example "interest" comes from cattle culture. If you think about it, a cow produces other cows, so it bears interest. You can eat the cow (consume capital) or let the cow produce a stream of milk. Ownership of cows gave you great power.
So asking "the number of people killed by capitalism" is like asking "how many people were killed by everything that's not communism", which is pretty inane, since the point of communism is that it is an ideology, and mass killing for an ideology (that's not religion) is a part of the modern world, not the traditional world of cows and capital. The first ideological genocide was the slaughter of the Vendee peasants by the French revolutionaries, but it was merely the first of many times that urban ideologues slaughtered rural farmers.
Man I always love the straw men you guys stand up to fight this. More taxes = socialism, and not nordic socialism, no, actually, communism. Therefore mass death / genocide. Ok. Sure jan.
Nordics are not socialist[0]. Socialism is central planning and control, sometimes created out of mass killings[1] [2], and often creating many deaths just from incompetent central mismanagement[2] [3] or grisly bureacratic rules[4].
If you tax unrealised gains, say Elon Musk's SpaceX shares, all that means in practice is the government takes a certain percentage ownership stake in SpaceX every year until he has nothing left to tax, or he sells it to someone else and pays tax on that sum (but who would buy anything if it's going to be taxed away?)
What a nonsensical argument. Yes, that's why we're all living in government owned housing, because if you tax something, it inevitably gets taken away, and nobody wants to buy houses, cause the government is just gonna take it away...what?
If your wealth is 100% ownership of Tesla, say, and the government imposes a 5% wealth tax, you have to sell 5% each year of your ownership stake (because the lie of all this is it isn't wealth being taxed, it's ownership) and give it to the government. Until you don't own it any more.
And if you think "well, it doesn't have to go to the government", who else will take it? Who would buy something that they would have to sell 5% of each year? The government, being the only thing that wouldn't be affected by a wealth tax, would become the de facto buyer.
Communism is not socialism. What Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung did was wrong because they did basically the exact opposite of a socialist policy, centralizing power out of workers hands and taking all surplus value into the central government instead of distributing it.
They all turned into paranoid dictators who did everything they could to stay in power, except for Mao who got lied to by other party leaders and regretted it in his final years. None of them represent what socialism really is. Tankies who worship them are a small minority.
Someone says they're going to make everything equal and they just need enough power to do it. Trouble is, that requires all the power, and a) the halfwits who end up in power are nowhere near as good as the people doing the work and taking the risks at deciding what to do and how to do it and b) the people who want all the power can just say that and the credulous believe them.
Edit: it seems perfectly acceptable and ideal even for society to say there is a cost to wealth. As others have mentioned Neovim is in the US is likely mostly tax exempt so this hypothetical doesn't even apply to them.
We slid down that slope a long time ago. Taxes are good and pay for my important things, up until the moment they pay for someone else's important things, then it is theft.
Taxes on unrealized gains are good? Are you nuts? No sane country has them, and it is one of the stupidest ideas that NL came up with. Way to squeeze middle class even more.
Europe is caught in a dilemma: tourism, air travel, and city hopping are its economic lifeblood that keeps the continent running, but these also cause the greatest damage to the environment.
Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.
More like 6%, roughly in line with its population share (5.4%). Not sure if that includes air travel, international air travel often isn't included in national statistics. https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
Whenever I see those statistics, I always find them very weird. Many of our products are made in China, but those are counted towards China's global emission, not Europe's. It also applies to the need of power generation for delocalized industry or importing food. A country handling a lot of industry will have a very high per-capita emission, but the people living there may actually have very low individual emissions.
If it's not significant, can I have 5% of your net worth?
If the EU mandated that products imported are made in a carbon neutral fashion, then importers of products will pay attention. Unfortunately it means higher prices, and the governments will get voted out of office by people voting for the populists selling the electoral promise of "Make Prices Low Again!"...
I like low prices, but I'm not looking forward to the chaos (political, social, what else) and deaths which I'm guessing will affect me within in the next 10 years.
The chaos is already here for us, the majority who are suffering the higher prices. Why do you think we're voting for the "extremist" parties? It's not because of "Russian propaganda", it's because life for the majority of us, normal Europeans, has become quite dreadful, economically and not only.
You're commenting on a comments thread about the possible desertification of Europe, a conversation we're having in the context of the record hot summer.
The extremist parties offer scapegoats and solutions for the unthinking ("The brown people! Remigration! The elite, except we're getting funded by the elite and we'll protect them and fuck you!"), and sadly there's too many stupid people who can't be spoonfed any concept of "think deeper" that like buying those...
The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.
Unless you count the historical city center of Venice as a big city I doubt you'd get many big cities getting even close to those numbers
I can't easily/quickly find some numbers but if we want to accept, with a grain of salt, Gemini research on this even in Venice (I think it counts Mestre as well) it's ~15% and that's the highest it found.
Ok, but why is it the Icelandic crown "bad"? What is the economic cause of it?
I do not know much about Iceland, only that, like New Zealand (and Canada), it is sometimes painted as some sort of progressive heaven that the US should aspire to.
Then, as you learn more, it turns out life isn't that great there.
No idea, I think that being such as small economy its currency fluctuates a lot, more than it is bad per se. That is why joining the Euro would give them a lot of stability, according to campaigners in favor of joining the EU.
The euro is very stable because it's a used by some big countries (in population and economy). So prices can fluctuate but less because there is little currency-related fluctuation.
Also yes, a country can adopt the euro unilaterally, that's the case for Kosovo and Montenegro.
But that's a tough situation because they're not represented at the CBE, they don't get a say in how much money gets created, banks can't get financing from the CBE...
Yes the Euro is/was stable but not because there are many big countries using it.
The Euro is/was stable because behind it there was stable and relatively well managed democracy named Germany. Unfortunately Germany is not doing so well at the moment and that could deteriorate even faster in the future with the right wing populist gaining grounds who are openly campaigning on leaving the EU and the euro.
As you can imagine, without Germany, there is no euro.
The Euro also spreads the risk to other countries which means that one state's failure can propagate to others.
Look at what happened with Greece and the panic that it caused at the time and that was for a small country witha small GDP. Now look at France who is indebted to its eyeballs and on the verge of electing either a far-right or far-left president who both are EU-skeptics and will try to work around the EU if not completely undermine it.
What happens then? As always in a chain, you are only as strong as your weakest link and unfortunately for the Eurozone, France and Germany are both doing badly at the same time and it doesnt seem that there is any light at the end of the tunnel for both of them currently.
Italy is doing slightly better but its economy is smaller and it is still heavily indebted and it will not be able to carry the Euro itself if either France or Germany decide or are forced somehow to exit the Euro.
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