This is an old article. Musk has spent close to half a billion himself this election cycle.

Establishing a wealth tax based on the rolling 10 prior years worth of PAC donations would feel somewhat fitting. A basis point per $50k or something.

Maybe donations to political parties could be just taxed at 200% (technically ~76% but 200 sounds better)?

To give a million to any party you have to pay 2 in tax.

Even better, tax progressively. 0% under $100, 200% above $1000.

I think the key thing is to make the tax payment a fraction of the donor's excessive wealth, rather than a multiple of the payment.

Musk dumping $360M into a political race is trivial to him. Making it cost three times as much to make the donation isn't a huge factor.

Making contributions have an impact on the donors total wealth will democratize these massive campaign spends.

What other countries do is cap the max an individual can donate at like $1500 or something. Works fine.

I don't know why this wouldn't be reasonable for the USA.

There are indeed caps on contributions to the political campaigns of candidates.

However in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations (including so-called Political Action Committees) and unions cants have their expenditures capped. A subsequent decision in SpeechNow.org ruled that contributions to these PACs can't be capped, as long as the PAC doesn't coordinate with a candidate.

So here we are. I'm not sure if taxation on these types of contributions would be considered limitation of free speech, but I'm willing to give it a shot in courts.

But this doesn't help with taxation of the rich. There are very few ways the rich can't easily dodge. Tying tax to something they actually spend money on and can't really hide it because of the scruitany on the spending of poliitcal parties would be one such additional way.

That would make it more expensive but still worth it for a billionaire who really cares about their favorite getting elected.

All of that money should go to lower funded candidates so spending above the limit becomes self defeating. Republican mega donors might end up supporting a small communist party more than their own.

We can't stop them using money for influencing politics. But this way the society could get a fair residual from that activity.

You could just tax political donations or political ads. I'd suggest 50% federal tax, 25% state tax, and 25% local tax.

If you are taxed as a (lower than 100%) percentage of your donation, there's still a calculus that could make any amount worthwhile if leading to a lower percentage tax/higher percentage gain on your entire principal.

How does that dynamic work if the tax that is collected is used to publicly fund all candidates equally? There can be reasonable rules around parties/candidates having a basic threshold of nominations/support etc.

> Some seem to sincerely believe that renewed immigration law enforcement is morally evil.

No one believes that, this is a strawman. Notice how there were no large protests, no continual protests, and no widespread outrage before ICE's tactics were changed and a bunch of insurrectionists were hired? Yes, you do notice that "except for a few years recently".

Is there anything that may have changed in the past few years that may have caused people to be against ICE?

Yet.

I’d argue it was double click.

If they would have stuck to the original white paper and remembered the section on ads, Google Search would still be worth using.

i also got a very clear and straightforward answer. asking from Canada - i wonder if that makes a difference?

Yeah, it's special cased for US users. It is also not robust. People are having fun circumventing the censoring by asking it to answer like a cat or something.

I get the same results as hightrix from the US.

I'm in the US

Same thing

Where are you located?

Continental United States

I’m betting he will step down the day after the midpoint in his term. Giving Vance the opportunity to rule for 10 years.

The whole point of taxing wealth is that these leeches are not paying their fair share today. So if Zuck leaves, he’ll just go not pay taxes in another state while using the states resources.

This isn’t a threat. I’d argue many Californians would enthusiastically support this.

Isn’t zuck a net positive for whatever state he ends up living in, considering that the portion of the states taxes that he pays far exceeds the portion of the states resources that he uses.

I realize I’m not a typical consumer of Facebook products, but I can’t understand why anyone would use a “personal agent” built by an advertising company. The incentives to use your data for negative purposes are extremely high and the potential for abuse is basically guaranteed.

For me? A local LLM as powerful as opus 5.5 would be interesting. Or a good local 3d asset generation model. Or something as powerful as Opus 5.5 that works nearly instantly.

All this incremental progress is just more of the same. I want a real novel capability, not just more, faster, cheaper, “smarter”.

.. HN is actually hilarious

We are barely 4 years in since the release of a historically important tech. Of course the next few years are incremental. thats how it always works.

Even last year, before opus 4.5, long-horizon agents didnt really work. I would not say the last 12 months are only incremental

what's even more funny is most of what they are asking for exist in some form.

As an aside, I remember when sora 2 launched and thinking, "wow I wonder if we'll ever get something close this in open weights?" The prevailing sentiment was "maybe 5 years." Yet, we have Minimax H3 and Flux a year and a half later.

So you mean I can't run multiple frontier-level agents on my 9 year old 1080Ti?! That's ridiculous, seriously the pace of development has completely stagnated.

No. Ad-hate is justified regardless of the product being sold or the platform presenting the ads.

Ads ruin everything.