Had no idea they even did anything. Was waiting for this. Nice to see some consequences and something resembling an attempt at integrity.
Now they just need to do something about all of the other writers! With the exception of the science lady, the security guy, and the british car guy, it's indistinguishable from the kind of PR-copy-paste blogspam 'coverage' you'd see from a place that will never have the reputation Ars used to.
Complete just means the limit of every sequence is part of the set. So there’s no way to “escape” merely by going to infinity. Rational numbers do not have this property.
How to construct the real numbers as a set with that property (and the other usual properties) formally and rigorously took quite a long time to figure out.
... for "Cauchy sequences", which are basically sequences whose terms become "closer and closer together".
You can still have sequences with no limits (a_n:=n, going to infinity, where all successive terns differ by 1 and which does not have a limit in the usual metric), as well as sequences with multiple limit points (in which case, subsequences can be considered).
Btw this is "Cauchy completeness", so it is a bit different (but equivalent) way to approach the construction of the real numbers from Dedekind's, but it is also one that can apply to more general metric spaces.
I still remember the core architecture of code I wrote 20 years ago at my first job. I can visualize the main classes and how they interact even though I haven’t touched it since then.
Meanwhile some stuff Claude wrote for me last week I barely remember what it even did at a high level.
The problem with this is when something breaks and your manager says “why haven’t you figured it out yet” as you spend hours digging into the 200 PRs of vibe slop that landed in the past day.
Now you could say that expectation has to change but I don’t see how—the people paying you expect you to produce working software. And we’ve always been biased in favor of short term shipping over longer term maintainability.
IMO capital gains taxes are bad as well, they discourage efficient investment allocation (you are stuck with what you have now).
It would be better if we mainly taxed consumption directly. If you are a billionaire but spend $100k/yr I am fine with you paying the same taxes as anyone else spending $100k/yr.
Taxing consumption hurts people more at the lower end of the income scale than at the higher end. It all comes down to what reserves you have to accommodate different scales of financial events. For example, will not having enough money for a tank of gas break you, or just annoy you? Could you survive needing an ambulance ride? Do copays keep you from seeing the doctor, or are they just a rounding error on your income?
I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.
At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.
If having less money hurts people, then the government should give them more money.
Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?
>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).
Consumption tax + land value tax + compensatory UBI should be a winning combination. Someone can hoard all they want but will pay when it comes time to spend the hoard.
You can also reduce or eliminate the tax on essentials like groceries.
Wealthy progressives don’t like it because many of them hold a huge portion of their wealth in housing. They imagine that they can somehow fix inequality without fixing distortions in the housing market.
As I said, I argue for some earned income tax. I'm a proponent of a progressive earned income tax as a way of reinforcing the social contract: we all contribute, we all benefit.
No one tax "solves" the problem. The problem, as I see it, is wealth hoarding beyond what any normal person would need to carry them through to the end of life. Instead of listing everything we should tax, maybe it'd be shorter to say that we look at what billionaires do to avoid taxes and close those loopholes. Then watching them again, and every time they come up with a new tax evasion strategy, fix it.
I wish I had the resources to develop an AI system that could find and document all instances of tax evasion by billionaires. But if I did that, I suspect I would need to be extra careful crossing streets, going near balconies, and reminding people that I'm not suicidal.
My issue is claiming the problem is wealth, and then wanting to tax income, which is not wealth. That is how rich people keep wealth taxes low (e.g. land value tax rates).
All wealth sits on land, and all land is already constantly appraised and subject to land value tax. It would be a trivial change to collect marginal land value tax rates using beneficial ownership.
As an additional benefit, the income tax return, which enables a ton of corruption at worst, and time waste at best, is gotten rid of.
If you are able to leverage the current value of stocks to gain personal benefit, you should be taxed on them as if you recognized the value. If you just let them sit, don't use them as collateral, don't take out loans against them, then they shouldn't be taxed.
But if you recognize some benefit based on their value, you absolutely should pay taxes on that value.
1. The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.
2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.
3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.
4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.
> 1. The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.
If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.
> 2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.
This is just a slippery slope fallacy.
> 3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.
Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.
> 4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.
With this argument you can defend never paying taxes to CA then, do you think it would be better as a complete anarco-capitalist state? It makes me sad that USA's public governance is so bad that this argument is always used to defend rich people not paying taxes; the political system is so absolutely broken that people prefer to allow ultrawealthy folks to keep hoarding even in the face of very real issues fracturing society stemming from that instead of thinking about how that money could fix many public issues.
> If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.
Its his voter shares, he wont get them back. Larry and Sergei currently control 51% of Google votes, if they sell any more they lose control of Google so they can't afford to sell.
> Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.
If it’s blackmailing, it’s blackmailing that is legal and extremely common. Similar events have occurred in multiple jurisdictions around the world whenever wealth taxes are attempted. The only way to prevent this in a country like the US that doesn’t allow retroactive taxation is to institute an exit tax, but this is also not legal at the state level in the US. Oh, and you also likely need capital controls, another no-no inside the US.
Capital flight is so historically common that there’s a common phrase to describe it. I have no idea why CA thought they were any different.
I made a SO clone in 1 week at a previous job (ok not 100% feature complete obviously but good enough to start using). This is by myself with no AI of course (10 years ago).
With Claude Code today I could do it maybe 2x faster? Maybe not that much even though, a lot of time is spent not on purely mechanically typing out characters so it’s not a huge savings necessarily.
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