Yeah, it's all illiquid illusory non-wealth when they have to pay taxes, but when they want to buy a newspaper or social network they suddenly have 40 billion in hand.
Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.
> Yeah, it's all illiquid illusory non-wealth when they have to pay taxes, but when they want to buy a newspaper or social network they suddenly have 40 billion in hand.
Yes, businesses are allowed to buy and sell things without being taxed on the sales. If you want to change that rule, you are going to change a giant number of things purely to get at the billionaires you've spent the last few years being trained to hate.
> Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.
It's missing the planetwide jungle for the trees if you think giving politicians the ability to reach into ownership percentages of businesses and deciding how much they want to charge you for owning a business is a check on power.
Mass forced sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, 13 million heihaizi (unregistered children = "illegals" in their homeland), ongoing repercussions in the skewed gender ratio and demographic cliff / "4-2-1" families...
And all for supposedly controlling a birth rate that had already fallen to 2.7 by the time it was implemented. And modern scholarship suggests the typical effects of economic development would have kept it running down steadily without all the costs incurred by an unevenly enforced law, given what happened everywhere else that had no birth-control policies.
The whole world seemed to buy into the narrative at the time, but history has shown it to be an example of misguided authoritarian foot-gun akin to the Four Pests campaign.
Ad hominem is "you're evil therefore your statement is wrong", not "that statement is the mark of an evildoer". And they do "say why": "What right do you have to tell me what i do or do not need?"
Either way, it's no lower in quality of argument than the wild assertion that everyone affected is just "importing things we really do not need" (what does that even really argue or justify?)
It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.
The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.
For sure and that doesn't decrease the value of the protection. There seems to be this somewhat quaint idea that the crops belong to the peasant because he/she planted and grew them.
That's a very modern concept. In the natural world they belong to whatever entity is able to take them.
Life has always been about grabbing as many macronutrients as you can by whatever means possible.
Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
If I had seen the steel version I would have considered it. But all I see is strawmen, as far as the eye can see. An ocean of strawmen, with a few steel islands here and there.
The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.
I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?
I'm actually aware of that and know that you're right. At the same time, I can't help but think that the market response will be for someone else to bid up and capture the slot either way. And if Google would rather serve those ads than enforce their own policies, they could always just loosen the policy.
Speculated to be responsible for the "AI restaurant-menu gore" that made the rounds on social media. Restaurants AI-generate the entire menu sheet from whole cloth, and while it looks "good" at first with modern image models, repeated edits to the menu text/layout transform the passable food "photos" into trypophobia-inducing horrors. (And somehow they don't notice or care)
Notably, the recent ChatGPT Images 2.5 announcement claimed to address this issue specifically ("multi-turn editing consistency")
With local models it's always been easy to edit only a part of an image (inpainting), either by painting a mask or automatically using a small segmentation model. It's actually pretty strange that commercial models have resorted to redrawing the entire image even in cases where the requested change is localized.
Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.
reply