Thanks for the fucking tip, Sauron.
On another tangentially related topic, Smaug wouldn’t even be in the top ten richest beings if he and his stolen wealth were real.
The CEO of a… checks notes… mass surveillance company named after a skrying orb used by an evil sorcerer in arguably the most famous fantasy series of all time… warns that a… wealth tax on billionaires (like himself)… would cause… mass surveillance…?
So business as usual?
I, with a straight face, suggest we should fire the Palantir CEO out of a cannon off a tall cliff into the ocean. Preferably one with jagged rocks on the coastline.
So Mass surveillance CEO say taking away their power will cause more of it? Makes sense /s
It’s threat of punishment. There’s the money, and then there’s the rest of us. We’re at the point where the money doesn’t expect further pushback (with teeth) from us.
The bearings will continue until my morale improves.
Which surfaces? If we’re talking nails on chalkboard then it’s all smiles. But a well greased main gear? May wanna push for a harsher threat.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
He needs to be taxed at 100% of his wealth.
All individual wealth over $50M should be taxed at 100%.
If you can’t live very comfortably on $50M, you need budgeting advice, not more money.
20-30 is plenty.
He says it not as a warning, but as a threat.
Conveniently glossing over the fact that we, in a normal world, would only be using the AI to look at all of their stuff and not ours. Stupid idea all around.
Why can’t we just use the numbers we already have? I mean they say Musk is worth x amount, Bezos owns x amount. They get those big numbers from somewhere. Tell them how much tax they owe based on how much they theoretically own. They can pay their taxes with their theoretically valuable stocks/shares whatever. They are going to be all like, “I can’t afford that. Nobody has that much money!”
To which we will say, “Fine then, uh give me that super yacht right there and 10 super cars and we will let you start a payment plan.”
If people don’t pay their taxes the government can seize their property to cover it, right? This is how we can achieve the reduction of billionaire wealth and find a path to balancing out all of the money we owe ourselves from all the government shenanigans over the last century or so.
You’re trying to be fair while they are hanging you by the toes, beating you with a rake, and then catching the nickels that fall out.
Then they use that money to buy more rakes, and do that to everyone you know until they’ve robbed the entire world.
They’re not planning a fair fight. They never have fought fair once in their entire lifetime. The more you fight fair, the more people die horribly.
How is taxing someone an unreasonable amount of money based on what seems to be an arbitrary gross calculation of their apparent wealth with the intention of taking their assets to pay for it fighting fair?
To actually be fair, I would prefer my government be more fair than less fair as a general rule.
CEO of Tech Industrial Complex vendor argues against a strawman created to scare people who own a gadsden flag.
It should be legal to spit on this guy if you see him in public.
Only if we don’t tax them enough.
If they can’t afford it, they can’t do it.
We’re already under mass surveillance, they just haven’t made the AI tools capable enough to sort that data into a digestible format
But they’re working on it. That’s the real reason for all that massive datacenter buildout. It will finally be possible to monitor everything everyone says and does.
There won’t be anything stopping people from unplugging their tech and just walking away from it. Go back to writing checks and paying cash. Buy an old school flip phone in case you need to call somebody. I mean, the internet is mostly shit at this point already.
There won’t be anything stopping people from unplugging their tech and just walking away from it.
Except all the Flock and other surveillance cameras creating a panopticon in meatspace, too.
Both of my next-door neighbors have Ring doorbells. I cannot leave my house without Big Tech knowing it, even if I leave my phone at home.
Flip phones are triangulable. They also have microphones.
There won’t be anything stopping people from unplugging their tech and just walking away from it.
Facial recognition cameras in stores and public buildings, on poles next to roads and bike paths, and in every modern car you pass near will still be recording and reporting your location.
Go back to writing checks and paying cash.
Checks are just as traceable as credit/debit card transactions. (Perhaps even slightly moreso, since they all come as a package deal with a nice handwriting sample and a memo line saying what the check is for, in your own words?)
Cash is going to be (mostly) traceable soon, too, as more and more places ‘voluntarily’ sign up for programs where they scan and record the serial number of every bill that passes through, in or out. Cash will only be untraceable if you’re very careful about where you get it and where you spend it. And even then, unless the people you get it from and give it to are also just as careful, it will still be fairly easy to reconstruct a picture of where the money went. If $300 is withdrawn from your account, and then later a drug dealer deposits the same $300 in their account, the surveillance state won’t 100% for sure know what happened there, but they’ll have a pretty clear idea.
Buy an old school flip phone in case you need to call somebody.
Can still be used to trace your location anytime you have it powered on. And old school phones are even easier to remotely eavesdrop on, with no option of using encrypted messaging apps instead. The phones (and other devices) of everyone else around you are still listening in on everything you say.
Unless you can ensure that everyone around you gives up all technology just like you do, you’re still subject to mass surveillance.
So … anybody want to go form a tech-backward hippie commune with me, way out in the middle of nowhere?
We’ll just have to increase taxes until they can’t afford surveillance I guess.
