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Look at me, I’m a philantropist! I non-bindingly pledge to probably promise that if possible and convenient, I can be considered to essentially intend to effectively donate up to half of my arguable net worth to a cause one might consider charitable.
Oh and a legal defence fund for unfairly maligned non-sex offender friends of Jeffrey Epstein counts as a charity, by the way.
Is this the famous trickling-down I keep hearing about?
Often, things become crimes that get prosecuted when they are done by the wealthy vs. normal people. To be clear, the reason for this is that governments/prosecutors want money and there is a lot of money in going after Kjell Inge Røkke for an illegal boating license but there isn’t for a father letting his 15-year old child drive in a parking lot. There’s a lot of money going after a billionaire for tax evasion but not in someone having a side hustle where they make money under the table selling $50k worth of widgets per year.
lmao
I suppose I recommend people think something like “ok, how bad was this really” when they look at billionaire crimes.
double lmao. triple, even
The rates do seem subjectively very high. Way fewer than 10% of people I know have been convicted of financial crimes! But I wonder if founders and CEOs are being blamed for financial crimes that their companies commit, and approximately all successful companies commit financial crimes, defined broadly.
so… close…
“There’s a lot of money going after a billionaire for tax evasion but not in someone having a side hustle where they make money under the table selling $50k worth of widgets per year.”
Lol and indeed lmao. “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.
(…and who has a “”“side hustle”“” with a $50k p.a turnover?! At that point it is no longer a side hustle)
“widgets” must be a euphemism for “opioids”
It’s a sign of how completely economically detached from reality these guys are. The annual turnover threshold here for mandatory VAT registration is around €35k, and a lot of small businesses don’t even reach that. Selling widgets and turning over €50k max would not be considered to be minor tax evasion…
To be clear, the reason for this is that governments/prosecutors want money and there is a lot of money
The signs of ur-libertarianism.
Governments can both print money at will and also want to take money from everybody because they cannot print money at will.
How pig-headed does this schmuck have to be, not to realize that if there is a “lot of money”, that means the billionaire has committed a more serious crime? A billionaire who evades his (or her, but lbr most of these people are men) fair share of tax offloads that cost onto the public, who are much less able to afford either tax hikes or lost services.
You’re right, it’s a totally libertarian attitude.
Yeah there is a certain thing wrong with (right) libertarians, I have called it the inability to see exceptions to rules before (which leads to the weird logic about NAPs, and the dumb ‘defending the undefendable’ book and a lot of discussions with libertarians where they use some weird thing to claim that their logic holds because the other side beliefs a few things which, when taken to the extreme, are contradictory) but it is more than just that, this inability to see that a billionaire stealing millions once is a bigger crime than a few people doing a bit of shoplifting or drugs or whatever crime they think is equivalent to the billionaire is baffling.
I used to think this libertarian freedom thing was allright, and then I read libertarian books, and listened to libertarians argue. Not sure if Ben_West is a libertarian btw, im just going into an anti liberarian rant. (This all has not been helped by the fact that some libertarians I used to know turned hard far right a couple of years ago).
Oh man I learned about “Defending the Undefendable” last month. It’s amazing to see the original source of all the stupidest arguments I’ve seen around the internet.
It is not only a pretty dumb book (loved by libertarian logicbros), but it also has for some reason a homophobic cartoon in it. It was really weird, and it came out of nowhere in the bit about stripmining (it also strawmans the anti-stripmining people). Content warning, but here it is. (I was so ‘wtf’ when I read this I made a screenshot of the cartoon when I read the book years ago, and now I’m thinking of this comment by David). Note it is a book from 1976, so that makes it even weirder in a way, you could say ‘ha, the point was to upset people, he got you!’ but this was before the aids crisis even, being a homophobe wasn’t something that was that unpopular.
E: and forgot to mention, one of the funny things of the book is that he defends Ebenezer Scrooge, as being a penny pincer is good or something, but that wasn’t the main point of a Christmas Carol, his misanthropy is way more a point that him being a miser, his lack of connection to the rest of humanity is the problem (and well him ranting about ‘surplus population’).
Oh, so that’s where the punching someone when you see a yellow car/VW beetle thing comes from. Interesting to note that of all the customs to observe in a social encounter (such as “don’t suddenly punch people for stupid reasons”) Duncan chooses the convention mostly followed by tween boys for the purpose of annoying each other.
Anyway, I guess the book fails to defend the undefendable, then? Seems pretty obvious, to be honest.
No I was just ranting about that book and libertarians, I have no idea where the game comes from. And yeah Duncan picked a really bad example (just as the book does) to defend his points.
Shot, in the post:
Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through.
Chaser, from the comments:
Josh You and I wrote a python script that searches Google for a list of keywords, saves the text of the web pages in the search results, and shows them to GPT and asks it questions about them from a prompt. This would quickly automate the rest of your data collection
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I have a lot of trust in ChatGPT’s ability to make things worse even if they’re already bad.
Honestly I’m just going to call them all criminals
Yea but you (rightly) consider every act that doesn’t put your creation as the highest priority a crime.
the data collection process was too time-consuming
Just to show how time-consuming this process might have been, it consisted of two people doing google searches and assigning the names them to a handful of categories.
1 - I copied the list of signatories from their website. 2 -Gina Stuessy and I searched the internet for “(name) lawsuit”, “(name) crime” and also looked at their Wikipedia page. 3 -I categorized any results into “financial”, “sexual”, and “other”, and also marked if they had spent at least one day in jail. 4 -Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through. The final dataset includes 115 of the 232 signatories.[2][3]
Have we considered that we’re wrong for criminalizing the smartest and most philanthropic people on the planet?
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I, too, am of the opinion that the members of the better classes, signified through their wealth and fortune, should not be subjected to the same criminal laws that the peasants must abide by. They should instead be allowed to do as they will. The poor really shouldn’t believe they have any standing to judge their betters.
Exactly if they really have a problem with it they should just throw a start up at it and quit bitching
Summary point 5 is fun.
I conclude that the rate of criminal behavior amongst major philanthropists is high
Great!
which means that we should not expect altruism to substantially lower the risks compared to that of the general population,
Ok, not super clear what “the risks” are here. One interpretation is that they are saying “just because someone donates money doesn’t mean they aren’t a criminal”, which is correct. But it’s not clear! Anyway.
and that negative impacts to EA’s public perception may occur independently of whether our donors actually commit crimes (e.g. because even noncriminal billionaires have a negative public image).
So close! Why do “noncriminal” billionaires have a negative public image? It’s almost as if legality isn’t the decider of morality!
Perhaps one day EAs will gain class consciousness and a sense of morality beyond an uncritical elision of ethics via utilitarianism; we aren’t there yet.
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While true, the majority of them (in terms of humans, not dollars) are merely capitalists of the “temporarily embarrassed” variety.
The thing about the 1% is that they’re a really small part of the population. Less than 5% of all people are in the top 1% richest people. Extremely rich people may be overrepresented in EA, but I doubt they are overrepresented enough to beat all the prole EAs in a fistfight should they all suddenly become militant communists or something.
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my bad. When I said “class consciousness” I meant a full mental transformation to radical communism, words are difficult
