It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in.
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who just wanted to see the odd picture of a friend or relative, I don't have much use for Facebook these days.
Same here. There was nothing I could do to get my feed to not be full of provocatively insulting and irritating political posts. I’d unfollow, unfriend, block, say “show me less of this” and so on. But when I’d unfriend some person, very next thing on my feed would be political content I didn’t like from some totally random person on my friend list who I’d never interacted with. Meanwhile I’d notice that people I actually knew in person had life events I’d want to know about - got married, took a nice vacation, had children even, and FB had never showed me stuff like that! So I just stopped using it entirely. Then when I went back after a few years, the site demanded my driver’s license. So guess I will just never sign in again.
>A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook.
Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement, but still off the mark.
I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
You're probably using it wrong. I never see the stuff people complain about. When one of my half-dozen Facebook friends posts something, Facebook emails me and I click the link for that specific post and don't see any other crap. I also occasionally participate in some local-only groups which don't have political ragebait or soft porn, just local people posting silly things they saw in the street or local marketplace groups where people sell their household junk.
I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.
Infrastructure is so cheap now. How is there not an ad-free social network? If you eliminate ads and the "intelligent" feed, that must save 95% of the administrative costs.
I get similar things on Facebook too. The problem is, my Facebook profile clearly stated that I'm an asexual female, but the recommendation engine obviously didn't pick that up...
What if they had shown you pictures of men whose penises were obviously showing through their pants? Why was Facebook not being gender-neutral with this tactic?
It's funny how different users can have such opposite experiences on the same platform. My Facebook feed contains zero political rage bait or soft-core porn. Mostly I see pictures of kids, pets, and vacations. I assume the difference comes down to who you follow and which posts you like, but the algorithm is totally opaque so who knows?
There is actually a reasonable way to fix this as currently implemented. Engage with the platform in some popular areas that have their own targeted advertising. My feed is filled with STEM projects and gardening with a spritz of actual content from friends.
When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker news reader isn't.
> pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing
Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.
I get those booty and nipple pics too. I think the algorithm might take 'hover time' in consideration. So it pumps posts that annoys you or otherwise makes you look a fraction of a sec longer.
Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science will get you pseudo-science.
My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird issue of random softcore sex stuff.
I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
I'm observing this happening for a while on mastodon and bluesky as well. And sometimes I'm having a feeling that there are groups who will actively drop their nsfw content in the places where it shouldn't be. Or create content that hangs on a thin line of legality that gives a dubious greenlight to stuff that is clearly explicit.
I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful - even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but as above, people can avoid that.
It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business
I don't think you should put Twitter on the list among the rest, because it's completely on another league.
I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:
- Racist shit like: https://x.com/barrystantonGBP/status/1828414194548461801, https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/1828498157589938272,
- People got bombed to shit: https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828380272322322536
- People got shot: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828409629329760769, https://x.com/datsjackedup/status/1828372131727720509, https://x.com/Haqiqatjou/status/1828518967578706415
- People fighting each other: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828440833835573529
- People got mutated: https://x.com/_NicoleNonya/status/1828212958742081803, https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828241017096614366
- Also post about this news: https://x.com/soaringeagle555/status/1828335179141963944
This is just what I saw when I hit F5 on the home page and then Page Down. You can see those are posted recently, and have very high engagement. Just take look the View and Liked count on those posts I listed, those people are insane. Sure, humans are animals, big fucking deal, I'm there for cute cat videos, not fucking WikiLeak.
And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.
I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?
At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.
Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.
Notice how all the platforms you cite are profit-driven. Such crap is the inevitable result of any corporate-owned social platform. IMO try out Mastodon (and don't join mastodon.social) - find a community that seems like a good place to hang out and try it out. Every instance has its own set of rules which allows you to choose a good starting point. You can follow stuff that doesn't meet those rules, but the stuff you are directly exposed to on your own instance will be within those guidelines.
What's hilarious is that my business account has been suspended by Facebook's automated fraud detection no less than 4 times in the past 5 months. Every time, they send a standard automated message saying some term was violated from a list of rules that's unavailable, and then ask me to upload a "selfie" to verify my business account. A selfie, to verify... my business account where I only add or post things to do with my business. All in the name of their "crusade" to block bots and AI, which of course isn't working, but somehow people who aren't doing anything suspicious keep tripping their automated alarms.
For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
It's a combo of AI making it easy to flood the feed with engagement-bait (that you aren't interesting in engaging in) and users who post stuff you would engage with leaving the service or simply not posting that stuff anymore.
What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
Financially incentivized accounts (dare I say, creators) accelerated rage bait and view farming. It always existed before, but it’s genuinely baffling how worse every algo-feed has gotten in the last 6 years. Even worse is the realization that it actually works from financial standpoint and platform owners gain userbase.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
>It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait.
It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.
More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
> What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos claiming the earth is flat,
this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.
Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time".
What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.
If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
For some reason twitter thinks I want to read/watch star wars talking heads talk about how great star wars is and it's obviously the greatest it's ever been. Tbh I don't care about star wars but no amount of blocking or muting seems to end the amount of star wars content that Twitter thrusts in my face.
The feed is normally manipulated by information suppression concerning undesirable posts concerning their commercial interests (partners and advertisers) normally anyway, I don't see where the regret comes from by having to suppress posts concerning requests from government officials and agencies.
Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community.
We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform.
There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
As far as I know the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on a Mastodon server is an occasional post from your admin saying “hey if you have some money to burn, we run partially on donations”.
After being fed up with political ragebait I deleted my facebook account, and created a new one where I have no friends, and make no posts, and only "friends of friends" (i.e. nobody) can friend request me. I have a fake name, and a blank image for an avatar.
There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
I use https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr on desktop. It's only posts from my friends in chronological order (plus ads). What I've noticed is my friends don't post nearly as much anymore. My suspicion is that is why the algorithm promotes groups and click/rage-bait now. I would guess actual normal friends of ours stopped posting so much because their feeds became so intolerable in the first place.
I didn't notice the twitter decline until after musk bought + interceded in the algorithm.
It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus engagement clickbait.
I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.
Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
Just wait a couple years when truth becomes too difficult to discern. Fairly easy to plug up forums, science journals, YouTube etc with whatever narrative you want once AI gets a little better.
>Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just clog feeds up with spam.
What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it quite well, and in fact did predict this.
They are labeled Luddites by those with much better financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of profit to be made.
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.
Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.
The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%.
The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize the gains, even though you are unlocking capital.
Of course, in the bear market you could get a margin call and have to liquidate at unfavorable prices (and pay taxes then). But not if you are keeping a big enough buffer.
If it goes through I bet you are going to have all sorts of people trying to claim unrealized losses for a tax break, that is gonna be a fun time for the courts.
There's a gradient of risk, though. Suppose someone is sitting on 5 billion dollars unrealized gains by holding the index fund VT. The idea of "risking 100% loss" in VT is ludicrous.
Maybe unrealized gains tax can be formulated as "cushy gains tax" if riskiness can be quantified in a reasonable way based on an asset's age and metrics over time. Then if an asset's risk score is above X, you don't pay tax. If it drops below X, you start to pay tax.
This would probably lead to more innovation and fewer monopolies, as people are incentivized to invest in riskier companies, and companies are incentivized to self cannibalize to maintain a healthy risk score.
OK, but in that case people shouldn't be allowed to put up securities they own as collateral for loans ( a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people).
You think Mark Cuban is risking being homeless or something? How insulting to equate the risk of people who already have over 100 million dollars to the risk of hourly wage employees who live paycheck to paycheck.
When you are wildly wealthy you are not risking anything, risk is merely an input to the math equation that only goes one direction. Up.
I feel an exchange tax that included loans would probably be a much better approach. Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster. So you have to sell, or leverage the property to pay taxes. What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger economy, and what would the effect be? Also, who is going to be able to even buy the stuff, if everyone with enough money/credit is scrambling to make huge tax layouts. Will you be able to deduct the interest on loans taken out to pay these taxes?
It's not like the money is just sitting, liquid in a vault like Scrooge McDuck.
> Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster.
Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at regular income tax rates. After all, that money gets used like regular income (living expenses).
The taxed amount can then be added to the basis when the asset is sold. It would be like reverse of depreciation calculations.
Set an asset and loan value floor so it only affects people with assets $10M+.
After all, regular people pay taxes on annuities, which are similar in structure.
Disclaimer: IANA-Accountant, but I am a taxpayer who tries to legally minimize my taxes.
I love your consideration for the financial problems of some of the most privileged people in all of human history. I just don’t really care that much if they get a big tax bill (I’m sure they’ll find a way to pay) and for a variety of reasons it will be good for society.
One solution to deciding how much an asset is worth is to let you declare any value you want for it, with the caveat that if someone is willing to pay you more than the declared value, you must sell it to them.
Now obviously things like transaction fees need to be factored in, and timing should matter - you should have the option to increase your stated value if something changes (or even to say "yes, okay, it's really worth X" and keep the item at the higher valuation).
> What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger economy, and what would the effect be?
Billionaires already routinely sell billions in stock "at once" (meaning, per quarter or similar, not a $1 billion limit order on Robinhood...), so on that one, we can empirically suggest "not much of an effect on the larger economy".
Taxes are not an automatic good. There are things we want the government to do. It costs some amount of money to do those things. We should figure out what that amount of money is, tax enough for it, and the rest belong to the person who earns it.
Why do people assume we always have to give more and more money to the government? What have they done with the $6 trillion they spend every year so far? What evidence is there that giving them more will improve anything?
Taxes are not for you to punish people you don't like. They're to fund the government enough to perform its necessary functions. That's all.
You know what else was a "great idea" that was supposed to be only for the wealthy class? The income tax [1]. 100 years later and all of a sudden everyone is paying it.
She didn’t even suggest that she supports that policy, it’s just assumed for some reason despite the fact that she’s already made her own choices on tax policy.
To be clear, Norway has also had a wealth tax for years. Summarised: The wealth tax rate is 0.7%(local)+0.3%(national) and is calculated based on assets exceeding a net capital tax basis of NOK 1.7 million for single/not married taxpayers and NOK 3.4 million for married couples. (Ref: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/norway/individual/other-taxes)
And regarding "taking out loans against their own share portfolios": Yes, I agree, this is genius tax avoidance strategy. And, I am pretty sure the interest paid on that loan would be tax deductible in the US! Most large investment banks have a separate trading desk that facilitates these loans via private bankers.
> I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax
I very strongly believe you to be wrong:
1. Unrealized gains is unworkable. Billionaires will spend tens or hundreds of millions yearly to avoid paying literally billions in taxes because the expected value is net positive. The IRS won't win chasing down money scattered across the globe. This is not a productive use of capital.
2. Taxing unrealized gains causes extreme capital flight. This is _bad_ for the US.
3. Taxing unrealized gains will lead to corporations and startups incorporating outside the US and keeping their assets outside of the US. This is _bad_ for the US.
4. Founders would very quickly loose control of the companies they started, including before they exit. That is really bad for startups and the ecosystem.
5. This is almost certainly illegal in the US at the federal level.
6. Every tax for the wealthy eventually targets the middle class.
1. Capital gains tax is already essentially optional for the richest now with various tricks. Of course taxing people is difficult, are you saying because it’s hard let’s not bother?
2. Where will the capital go (all the best investments are in the US), if this happens lots of great businesses will be available to buy at a discount to people with smaller than $100m stock portfolios
3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business in the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it’s $20m for the government and I rate that as a great deal to be honest.
4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control, this is only about companies post IPO.
5. IANAL are you?
6. If the rich continue to be able to accumulate wealth without paying taxes on it forever I think that is the road to serfdom personally. Taxation of the rich will make everyone better off. I pay over 50% tax in Europe, maybe if the rich were paying their share this could be reduced!
Why does no one read the actual proposal before commenting?
It specifically states that this only applies to individuals with 80% of their wealth in tradeable assets. No founder is going to lose control because this doesn’t apply to them!
Tax on unrealized gain is total BS. It's BS right in the name. Why don't they just say collateral assets are taxable, so the loan pegged on these assets will get taxed. The way they are going with is pure stupidity.
I am with you on that. I think they don’t because this trick is classically used by powerful old money families to generate tax free income from dynasty trusts.
I'd much prefer seeing us close up the tax loop holes than create an even more complex system.
Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than further increase its complexity.
Doesn't this "close" the tax loophole in which holders of tradable assets can take out loans against those assets in perpetuity, never paying taxes on any of it?
Seems like DNC party policies always move in the direction of what improves the job market for lawyers and bureaucrats. More complex legal code, more complex maneuvers to get around it. Tax and finance lawyers for the wealthy are going to see a salary bump if this law passes.
I've wondered if it wouldn't be better to shift the tax code to bias companies toward paying dividends, as used to be more universal among profitable firms. Then the shareholders will have the appropriate progressive income tax bracket applied.
> Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating in value over the years.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether various wealth tax ideas are good. But, I don't believe that the concept is as infeasible as some are making it out to be when it's been happening with property taxes for a very long time.
I think we should get substantially tighter reigns on where our tax dollars are going and stop the outflows considerably before we worry about taking more and more dollars from citizens. The government has lost billions in recent years. LOST BILLIONS. No one has been held accountable.
Do you honestly think all the billionaires supporting Harris are actually for that? They’re going to be tons of loopholes and exceptions to these billionaires that give to her. If anything it’s attack on the middle class.
if we tax the super rich then the list of extremely powerful people will be one item long: politicians. i think its telling that they are going after rich conservative people rather than break up blackrock et al.
That sounds like a good thing to me. I would prefer the people who hold power in our society be the ones democratically elected, not the ones who lucked into a leviathan amount of money and can now buy Twitter for fun.
It is a completely ridiculous idea. You can't value "unrealized gains" without using a third-party agency to come up with a number (typically through 409a valuation). And even if the third-party agency comes up with such a number, there is no way to have liquid cash available to pay the tax. To give you an example, say you are a Founder with a Startup that received investments from investors, through various rounds of funding, and the Startup is now valued at $1 Billion. Assume also that you sit on 5 million shares, with 51% equity post all the dilution. You will have to pay tax on $510 million. This $510 million is "unrealized gain". It is an "estimate" of what you would receive if the company was hypothetically acquired for that amount by a bigger company on that particular day of valuation. Assuming 25% tax that would be $127.5 million. Where will you come up with that money? There is no secondary market where you can use your shares to raise that money. You will probably have to take a loan from banks (if they have that sort of liquid cash available for ALL unicorn startup founders/centamillionaires/actual billionaires) and that too with exorbitant interest. Why would anyone want to go through all that hassle? The other option is for you to sell some of the shares to raise money to pay tax. But that is self-defeating because you are devaluing your net worth by the same amount.
It is the most ridiculous idea ever.
EDIT:
> are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios
How is that tax avoidance? You do realize that when they pay the exorbitant interest on the loan, they are paying tax on the interest right? That is typically higher than if they just sold the shares and paid capital gains tax directly. Because here they are paying interest + tax.
High net worth individuals take out loans by risking their shares. Those shares are marked as lein. In other words, those shares get locked with the lender (bank in this case) and in case of the Founder not being able to repay due to bankruptcy, the lender can liquidate the assets (shares) and not be required to get the best value for it in the market.
This is not tax avoidance by any means. This is Capitalism 101: putting YOUR capital to use the way you see fit and taking personal risk along the way.
It’s probably because they got in serious legal trouble last election for donations in support of Biden, and now the whole thing is starting over again as RFK is suing federal agencies for pressuring tech companies to suppress his election campaign.
The only way to win with politics in social media is to avoid it or promote free speech
Do "these people" include entrepreneurs with equity in startups with rapidly increasing value but no way to take money off the table? It doesn't take much to cross "$100m in assets" as a startup, say, $2.5M in revenue at 40x valuation (or $5M at 20x, etc.), even while loss-making.
How should the founders and equity investors in a bootstrapped high growth unicorn that is neither public nor profit-making handle this proposed capital gains tax? Does this mean VC funds would need to set aside arbitrary amounts of cash to cover impossible-to-predict taxes on cap gains during, say, a 7 year window?
It could also make it harder to attract and keep talent, since the earliest stage employees often rely on equity grants as part of their compensation. Does this mean every early stage employee has to have deep enough pockets to cover cap gains tax pre-revenue? And what happens when the company implodes past the look-back for recouping tax overpayment?
It might make sense to focus on closing existing loopholes without creating new burdens and cash flow barriers that could disrupt the innovation and growth ecosystem with unintended second and third order consequences.
---
Edit to add:
It's true that a peeved Wall St donated a fraction to Biden this season relative to the past, and — surely entirely unrelatedly — partnerships and private equity were taken out of the latest incarnation, leaving in publicly traded and the $100M holdings.
If passed, this will be tinkered with, encircling ever more to offset the loopholes inevitably used.
> Do "these people" include entrepreneurs with equity in startups
No it doesn’t, you’re arguing using a straw man here. They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as I understand it. Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you’re exceptionally wealthy.
This all seems very easy to deal with. Pay employees cash not equity. Founders can negotiate with investors to take enough cash compensation at each round to cover their tax bill. Investors can use financial instruments to hedge their risk.
When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are.
Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
Theres no push back because only the uploader knows it even happened. The millions of other people who did not get to see that video never knew there was anything that was taken from them.
Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs.
Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control.
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.
Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
> there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan
This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity.
A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written.
Random copy pasted examples:
- There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us
- And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD.
> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.
Spam is a real problem, but when your platform is doing things like disallowing linking to a NY Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop or mentioning the possibility that COVID originated from a lab-leak, then I think pretty clearly the term "censorship" is more apt than "moderation".
Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts).
(Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
We're not talking about censoring spam, we're talking about real, verified people who are obviously not spamming being censored. The two are unrelated, and Zuck is admitting here that the current administration pushed them to censor things they fully knew were not spam.
I still remember that so many people cheered when legitimate doctors and scientists were banned from Twitter or Facebook, just for questioning either the lockdown or the effectiveness or risks of the vaccines. The doctors may not be correct, but shouldn't we allow people to question science? Our government can do what it does because the people embolden them.
This is the proof that the religion of “I believe in science” is not a friend to creating a culture of science appreciation
It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time
The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
People cheer these things on because they are tired of the other view point and don’t care to question solidarity during a global pandemic.
People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.
In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.
Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it.
If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.
The good and bad of the internet is that everyone appears the same. You might be an expert in X and I should listen to you. And right next to you may be a troll or someone trying to sow discord who twists your legitimate opinion just a bit to influence me. How can I tell the difference?
I will never, ever forgive or forget the absolute amount of censorship and tolerance for punishing “wrongthink” during the lockdown years. Ever. It completely shattered my faith in the government and “Science”.
God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went against the doomer dogma.
And the worst part is the people with the “wrong think” were right. Covid didn’t have a “4% kill rate”. It almost certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe and definitely wasn’t effective. Lockdowns didn’t work and neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of their lives.
And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of “dangerous thought”, and being yelled at by society.
Really? Aren't gore videos legal? That's just one example.
Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?
There is a strong distinction between moderation, which is the removal of low-effort noise / spam / etc., and censorship, which is the suppression of ideas.
I will step a bit to the side of "censorship" and just talk about "misinformation."
The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.
My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.
It's only doomed to fail because we have a strong Supreme Court. All the efforts by the Democrats to undermine this will only make things easier for fascists to take over the US.
It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like.
Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.
I think better of them for trying to get the fake shit off of their platforms. This backstepping is what bugs me. Facebook got a lot of garbage off there. There’s still plenty left, but I think did a decent job of flushing a bunch of misinformation bots into waste disposal where they belong. Take a look at x.com where for $9 a month you can launch a bot that posts / retweets garbage 24/7 and no matter how many times it’s reported for racism/terrorism/etc it will stay up for a while, when it gets killed they just make a new bot. Go look at the blue “verified” badges on any political news story and look at the drivel spouted by these $9 hucksters. A lot of people think free speech only applies to them, free speech means a platform can also exercise their free speech and shutdown the messages they don’t like. Those accounts are free to spread their lies and fake news on other platforms.
Comments like this are usually not good, but in this case I believe it's better to give the link than to try to summarize the numerous points about the state of censorship in the United States and Europe that were made in that interview.
The thing I'm getting out of this Zuckerberg letter is that we've basically learned nothing. It's a nakedly partisan letter designed to signal to Republicans that he's not taking sides. Which I guess is fine, but I'm thinking about Paul Graham's recent tweet about the next round of social networks being designed to be built in to combat trolling, and it makes me think.
This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media, I predict in the next crisis, social media will be useless adjacent for almost everything.
> This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media
You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak theory" because that term has a number of definitions that are very different.
There's the definition where COVID was the result of gain of function research that leaked from a lab through negligence. There's also a definition that it was an entirely natural virus being studied that was leaked through negligence. Then there's the definition that the virus was "leaked" with malicious intent from the virology lab in Wuhan.
While the definitions are similar they have very different implications. Because social media tends to perform nuance destroying compression of concepts down to sound bites no two individuals using the term "lab leak theory" can be assumed to be using the same definition.
You even have an assumed definition of what you mean when you say "lab leak theory". Of everyone that reads your post your definition doesn't match that of half the audience. Even then, plenty of people claimed to be banned from social media for one reason while the reality they were banned from a network for other (or a combination) of reasons. So even the general statement of people being "social media censoring lab leak theory" elides important information and nuance and derives its validity from third hand accounts.
The only definition the government should be involved in censoring would be one that is illegal and in that case they can get their lawyers and proceed with an indictment. Anything else is just propaganda.
Can’t find the claim about the statement not being political anywhere in the linked article. But there’s this:
> Meta’s CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms
Sounds like he wasn’t the initiator of the discussion, but I may be misreading the paragraph.
And it’s in the news because it’s being made newsworthy, not because it’s new.
“A U.S. federal judge,” in 2023 “restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content” [1].
There's just that thing that he forgot to say 'rinse & repeat' at the end of his statement while he's now in the 'rinse' phase. The upcoming election circus will make clear whether he is genuinely regretful or whether he's up to his old tricks. The 'Zuckerbucks' NGO 'Center for Tech and Civic Life' [1] is gearing up again so I suspect the latter to be closer to the truth.
He said it because they got criticized for something that cost them a lot of money. It’s all about how much it costs and takes away from the pockets of the board of directors and owners. For profit companies are amoral for the most part and their only obligation is to make money.
In Pavel's interview with Tucker Carlson, he mentions how he (VK) met with Zuckerberg, and he told them new features they were planning. And Zuck nicked them all.
Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
He also said that he doesn't visit Russia anymore, yet a recent FSB leak indicates that he was frequenting there. And before that he heavily marketed Telegram as ad-free forever. And before that there were quite weird populist PR tactics when professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a mess.
YMMV, but I wouldn't trust a single word from this guy.
This is not the first time Pavel being not very truthful. I rememeber when he was the CEO of Vkontakte, in 2012 he published a post claiming that he is living a modest life: "I don't own planes, cars or homes. My world is walking or riding the subway and sleeping in a 215 sq ft rental apartment. Those who want to be me would also have to give up meat, alcohol and expensive clothes". And just a year later there were the news that he broke the traffic rules while driving a Mercedes, hit a traffic cop, showed an indecent sign to him and ran away into Vkontakte office located nearby while his guard blocked the cop trying to chase him.
There also was a story when he claimed that Telegram is developed abroad but it turned out that many of Telegram employees actually worked at the same beautiful historical office building where Vkontakte was located at that time.
Also, a fun fact, when he was a CEO of Vkontakte, one day he was throwing banknotes into the crowd from a window in that notable historical building. Maybe he was conducting an experiment with universal basic income, who knows.
Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.
Doubtful that he’s “frequenting” there given how he left the country. When the FSB (Russian FBI) demanded he comply with the laws and provide the decryption keys he had his lawyers send a prank letter to the head of the FSB with two physical keys (as in, the actual keys you open your door with) attached to it as a sign of “compliance”. Try that in the US and see if you can “frequent” the country after that.
Agree, Zuck has zero integrity and I think he sees the tea leaves in where things are headed in November and is trying to say he was bullied into making alot of disastrous decisions that he and he only ordered for an administration/party that he personally donated $400M+ to.
“During their dialogue, both tech leaders probed each other’s intentions for expansion. “I remember him asking me whether we were planning to start something on a global basis, on the global level, go for international expansion. I said no,” Durov recalled.
Zuckerberg similarly denied any plans to target Durov's domestic market, yet both moved to expand their respective reaches shortly after the meeting. “We both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks,” Durov noted.”
Tuckster is an "anti-elite" heir to a fortune who grew up in a castle. The only job he ever had was outrage baiting naive people. People like him are against regulation, but will clap any time big tech is dragged in front of congress. It's all a scam. You're being had. Why are you treating any part of his interviews as valid information.
>Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
You can tell because the lizard has begun looksmaxing
However, we know from numerous leaks now that the White House has indeed pressured every major social media company to target specific citizens and censor them.
Always, as a good hedger Zuck, anticipating regime change in the White House by November, is minimizing the potential fallout of his treacherous behavior. Hold him accountable.
Readit News
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement, but still off the mark.
I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
I’m using Facebook wrong
You see scantily clad women promoted cause many slavering str8 guys actually do frequently click on stuff like that.
Definitely you'll see that our baser instincts and emotions are taken advantage of way more often; sex, anger/outrage, desire/jealousy.
It's no wonder that "watch this super wealthy person show off their wife/cars/house/yacht" is so damn popular.
Did you ever try Facebook purity (FBP) ?
If yes, did the forcing of chronological content into the feed, not work? Or did Facebook finally kill the widget?
FBP was the only thing that made FB bearable for a while, but im curious to other peoples experience with it
I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.
When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker news reader isn't.
TikTok split screen slop is a xx million dollar business at this point so you can expect a huge investment to pump out even more slop YoY
Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.
Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science will get you pseudo-science.
I needed to laugh this morning. Thank you.
I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful - even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but as above, people can avoid that.
I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:
This is just what I saw when I hit F5 on the home page and then Page Down. You can see those are posted recently, and have very high engagement. Just take look the View and Liked count on those posts I listed, those people are insane. Sure, humans are animals, big fucking deal, I'm there for cute cat videos, not fucking WikiLeak.And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.
I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?
At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.
Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.
For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
The content that's filling the void is just filler, be it AI, clickbait, memes, etc.
But service owner cannot aggressively cut down on spams and baits because it will mess with the engagement metrics.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
Bold of you to assume those were people and not also AI
It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.
More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.
If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community.
We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform.
There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
They are the main reason I am still on FB. Occasional posts from friends, and I do post (three psots this mont, and that is pretty typical)
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It's so funny scrolling down facebook now where every 20th black box is a post I sorta wanted to see.
It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
Why does this come up so much? Yes... Google, Facebook, Instagram, they're all hamstringing their experience to spite you. They benefit and you lose.
I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.
Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
I suppose there were warning signs, like every previous Internet technology eventually being used for advertising.
What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it quite well, and in fact did predict this.
They are labeled Luddites by those with much better financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of profit to be made.
The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize the gains, even though you are unlocking capital.
Of course, in the bear market you could get a margin call and have to liquidate at unfavorable prices (and pay taxes then). But not if you are keeping a big enough buffer.
Maybe unrealized gains tax can be formulated as "cushy gains tax" if riskiness can be quantified in a reasonable way based on an asset's age and metrics over time. Then if an asset's risk score is above X, you don't pay tax. If it drops below X, you start to pay tax.
This would probably lead to more innovation and fewer monopolies, as people are incentivized to invest in riskier companies, and companies are incentivized to self cannibalize to maintain a healthy risk score.
When you are wildly wealthy you are not risking anything, risk is merely an input to the math equation that only goes one direction. Up.
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It's not like the money is just sitting, liquid in a vault like Scrooge McDuck.
Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at regular income tax rates. After all, that money gets used like regular income (living expenses).
The taxed amount can then be added to the basis when the asset is sold. It would be like reverse of depreciation calculations.
Set an asset and loan value floor so it only affects people with assets $10M+.
After all, regular people pay taxes on annuities, which are similar in structure.
Disclaimer: IANA-Accountant, but I am a taxpayer who tries to legally minimize my taxes.
Let them pay their taxes with stocks. Problem solved.
Now obviously things like transaction fees need to be factored in, and timing should matter - you should have the option to increase your stated value if something changes (or even to say "yes, okay, it's really worth X" and keep the item at the higher valuation).
Billionaires already routinely sell billions in stock "at once" (meaning, per quarter or similar, not a $1 billion limit order on Robinhood...), so on that one, we can empirically suggest "not much of an effect on the larger economy".
Randomly chosen examples:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-liquidated-1-7-180...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/elon-m...
Why do people assume we always have to give more and more money to the government? What have they done with the $6 trillion they spend every year so far? What evidence is there that giving them more will improve anything?
Taxes are not for you to punish people you don't like. They're to fund the government enough to perform its necessary functions. That's all.
Governments can fund themselves in numerous ways, not just taxes. Either way you'll pay.
The key issue is do we want a federal government expenditure of 20-25% of the economy? I'd say no.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...
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To be clear, Norway has also had a wealth tax for years. Summarised: The wealth tax rate is 0.7%(local)+0.3%(national) and is calculated based on assets exceeding a net capital tax basis of NOK 1.7 million for single/not married taxpayers and NOK 3.4 million for married couples. (Ref: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/norway/individual/other-taxes)
And regarding "taking out loans against their own share portfolios": Yes, I agree, this is genius tax avoidance strategy. And, I am pretty sure the interest paid on that loan would be tax deductible in the US! Most large investment banks have a separate trading desk that facilitates these loans via private bankers.
I very strongly believe you to be wrong:
1. Unrealized gains is unworkable. Billionaires will spend tens or hundreds of millions yearly to avoid paying literally billions in taxes because the expected value is net positive. The IRS won't win chasing down money scattered across the globe. This is not a productive use of capital.
2. Taxing unrealized gains causes extreme capital flight. This is _bad_ for the US.
3. Taxing unrealized gains will lead to corporations and startups incorporating outside the US and keeping their assets outside of the US. This is _bad_ for the US.
4. Founders would very quickly loose control of the companies they started, including before they exit. That is really bad for startups and the ecosystem.
5. This is almost certainly illegal in the US at the federal level.
6. Every tax for the wealthy eventually targets the middle class.
2. Where will the capital go (all the best investments are in the US), if this happens lots of great businesses will be available to buy at a discount to people with smaller than $100m stock portfolios
3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business in the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it’s $20m for the government and I rate that as a great deal to be honest.
4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control, this is only about companies post IPO.
5. IANAL are you?
6. If the rich continue to be able to accumulate wealth without paying taxes on it forever I think that is the road to serfdom personally. Taxation of the rich will make everyone better off. I pay over 50% tax in Europe, maybe if the rich were paying their share this could be reduced!
It specifically states that this only applies to individuals with 80% of their wealth in tradeable assets. No founder is going to lose control because this doesn’t apply to them!
Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than further increase its complexity.
You can't really deduct realized losses either (annoyingly). You can use them to offset gains in future years, but they're not a deduction.
I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating in value over the years.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether various wealth tax ideas are good. But, I don't believe that the concept is as infeasible as some are making it out to be when it's been happening with property taxes for a very long time.
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Starting with the pentagon, who hasn't ever passed a real audit. Their budget is nearly $1 trillion.
I wonder how much of that goes to kickbacks, fraud, graft, etc.
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It is a completely ridiculous idea. You can't value "unrealized gains" without using a third-party agency to come up with a number (typically through 409a valuation). And even if the third-party agency comes up with such a number, there is no way to have liquid cash available to pay the tax. To give you an example, say you are a Founder with a Startup that received investments from investors, through various rounds of funding, and the Startup is now valued at $1 Billion. Assume also that you sit on 5 million shares, with 51% equity post all the dilution. You will have to pay tax on $510 million. This $510 million is "unrealized gain". It is an "estimate" of what you would receive if the company was hypothetically acquired for that amount by a bigger company on that particular day of valuation. Assuming 25% tax that would be $127.5 million. Where will you come up with that money? There is no secondary market where you can use your shares to raise that money. You will probably have to take a loan from banks (if they have that sort of liquid cash available for ALL unicorn startup founders/centamillionaires/actual billionaires) and that too with exorbitant interest. Why would anyone want to go through all that hassle? The other option is for you to sell some of the shares to raise money to pay tax. But that is self-defeating because you are devaluing your net worth by the same amount.
It is the most ridiculous idea ever.
EDIT:
> are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios
How is that tax avoidance? You do realize that when they pay the exorbitant interest on the loan, they are paying tax on the interest right? That is typically higher than if they just sold the shares and paid capital gains tax directly. Because here they are paying interest + tax.
High net worth individuals take out loans by risking their shares. Those shares are marked as lein. In other words, those shares get locked with the lender (bank in this case) and in case of the Founder not being able to repay due to bankruptcy, the lender can liquidate the assets (shares) and not be required to get the best value for it in the market.
This is not tax avoidance by any means. This is Capitalism 101: putting YOUR capital to use the way you see fit and taking personal risk along the way.
The only way to win with politics in social media is to avoid it or promote free speech
How should the founders and equity investors in a bootstrapped high growth unicorn that is neither public nor profit-making handle this proposed capital gains tax? Does this mean VC funds would need to set aside arbitrary amounts of cash to cover impossible-to-predict taxes on cap gains during, say, a 7 year window?
It could also make it harder to attract and keep talent, since the earliest stage employees often rely on equity grants as part of their compensation. Does this mean every early stage employee has to have deep enough pockets to cover cap gains tax pre-revenue? And what happens when the company implodes past the look-back for recouping tax overpayment?
It might make sense to focus on closing existing loopholes without creating new burdens and cash flow barriers that could disrupt the innovation and growth ecosystem with unintended second and third order consequences.
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Edit to add:
It's true that a peeved Wall St donated a fraction to Biden this season relative to the past, and — surely entirely unrelatedly — partnerships and private equity were taken out of the latest incarnation, leaving in publicly traded and the $100M holdings.
If passed, this will be tinkered with, encircling ever more to offset the loopholes inevitably used.
No it doesn’t, you’re arguing using a straw man here. They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as I understand it. Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you’re exceptionally wealthy.
Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs.
Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control.
Further Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bondinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessnesshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndromehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
The moment you start fighting spam, you’re obliged to make censorship decisions.
It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.
Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity.
A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written.
Random copy pasted examples:
- There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us
- And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD.
- To gas glowniggers on-sight?
- Hang yourself tranny
Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.
Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts).
(Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time
The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.
In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.
Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it. If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.
God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went against the doomer dogma.
And the worst part is the people with the “wrong think” were right. Covid didn’t have a “4% kill rate”. It almost certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe and definitely wasn’t effective. Lockdowns didn’t work and neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of their lives.
And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of “dangerous thought”, and being yelled at by society.
(But then, that "a lot" is there for a reason. There has been some bad behavior from the platform too.)
Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?
The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without moderation. Cf. Twitter.
The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.
My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.
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It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like.
Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.
This just how effective the censorship was; the actual peer-reviewed science shows that lockdowns did not in fact save lives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut...
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This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media, I predict in the next crisis, social media will be useless adjacent for almost everything.
You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak theory" because that term has a number of definitions that are very different.
There's the definition where COVID was the result of gain of function research that leaked from a lab through negligence. There's also a definition that it was an entirely natural virus being studied that was leaked through negligence. Then there's the definition that the virus was "leaked" with malicious intent from the virology lab in Wuhan.
While the definitions are similar they have very different implications. Because social media tends to perform nuance destroying compression of concepts down to sound bites no two individuals using the term "lab leak theory" can be assumed to be using the same definition.
You even have an assumed definition of what you mean when you say "lab leak theory". Of everyone that reads your post your definition doesn't match that of half the audience. Even then, plenty of people claimed to be banned from social media for one reason while the reality they were banned from a network for other (or a combination) of reasons. So even the general statement of people being "social media censoring lab leak theory" elides important information and nuance and derives its validity from third hand accounts.
Why? Are you implying that it was okay to censor discussion of some versions and not others?
> Meta’s CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms
Sounds like he wasn’t the initiator of the discussion, but I may be misreading the paragraph.
“A U.S. federal judge,” in 2023 “restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content” [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-blocks-us-officials-comm...
[1] https://mailchi.mp/06871ce9876c/new-campaign-seeks-federal-f...
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Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
He also said that he doesn't visit Russia anymore, yet a recent FSB leak indicates that he was frequenting there. And before that he heavily marketed Telegram as ad-free forever. And before that there were quite weird populist PR tactics when professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a mess.
YMMV, but I wouldn't trust a single word from this guy.
There also was a story when he claimed that Telegram is developed abroad but it turned out that many of Telegram employees actually worked at the same beautiful historical office building where Vkontakte was located at that time.
Also, a fun fact, when he was a CEO of Vkontakte, one day he was throwing banknotes into the crowd from a window in that notable historical building. Maybe he was conducting an experiment with universal basic income, who knows.
Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.
If it's true then he was reckless in his traveling not just to France.
They can earn a lot of money via Telegram Bug Bounty Program if they can prove it
Things are headed strongly in the opposite direction you're implying.
Zuckerberg similarly denied any plans to target Durov's domestic market, yet both moved to expand their respective reaches shortly after the meeting. “We both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks,” Durov noted.”
https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/06/39223122/telegrams-pavel...
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Why should I treat your comment as valid information?
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He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his image entirely. Following in Elon's path.
People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and he is a cutthroat business guy.
Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really wants to be President.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-zuckerberg...
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/02/20/james-comers-twitter-h...
Being pressured to enforce your own terms of service by the government ain't censorship.
Zuckerberg is a coward, afraid to stand up to Jim Jordan. What a pathetic letter
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https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-has-vi...
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Exactly this. It is incredible bizarre how his imagine has taken such a drastic turn from being a "hacker" to a "Jiu-Jitsu bro."
I am assuming you believed him because he provided some evidence to support his claims?
You can tell because the lizard has begun looksmaxing
However, we know from numerous leaks now that the White House has indeed pressured every major social media company to target specific citizens and censor them.
I don't know what he thinks he is selling folks on, but it's mostly spam and garbage...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.17152