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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.





  • I don’t really care what they look like. If any truck actually could meet the promises these made, I’d buy the shit out of them:

    -All electric

    -Sophisticated sensor suite to improve operational safety

    -Working performance comparable to F150

    -low maintenance

    -Can be used as home power backup

    -not a Deathtrap

    -not a Killing machine

    It hits the electric points, but that’s it. It’s a bad truck. It doesn’t fulfill any of the “smart” promises. Death trap killing machines in constant recall that can’t handle rain… Let alone do work.

    The aesthetic doesn’t even make my list of complaints. It’s like the whole industry has been trying to make trucks as shitty as possible for like 30 years. Give me a '94 ranger electric conversion kit and it’s game fucking over cyber truck.











  • I completely agree that if there are tools that can allow a vehicle to “see” better than a human it’s absurd not to implement them. Even if musk could make a car exactly as good as a human, that’s a low bar. It isn’t good enough.

    As for humans: if you are operating a vehicle such that you could not avoid killing an unexpected person on the road, you are not safely operating the vehicle. In this case, it’s known as “over driving your headlights”, you are driving at a speed that precludes you from reacting appropriately by the time you can perceive an issue.

    Imagine if it wasn’t a deer but a chunk of concrete that would kill you if struck at speed. Perhaps a bolder on a mountain pass. A vehicle that has broken down.

    Does Musk’s system operate safely? No. The fact that it was a deer is completely irrelevant.