ironically, it's especially easy for non-rich blue collar workers to avoid income taxes. Anyone who has ever hired a contractror/mechanic etc and then found they only accept zelle, cashapp, or something similar knows this. Another way to spot this is when someone whips out a roll of 100s to pay at the grocery store. If you only deal in cash and don't have a w2 the IRS has no way to know how much income you have and therefore no way to know how much tax you owe.
This is also how kids get basically free rides to college when their household income is actually high enough to deny any need based financial aid. None of it is reported to the IRS.
edit: i guess another way to think about it is imagine asking your local weed dealer how much revenue is set aside to pay for their income tax at the end of the year.
That's not that true in the US. In fact, most US rich "avoid" taxes because their income is capital gains, NOT by avoiding taxes on cash income (this is why CEOs don't have high cash compensation).
He's French and used to the rich avoiding taxation by changing jurisdictions in Europe. Well, the US has global income taxation, for better or for worse, you are on the hook everywhere. It's a different world.
By "avoid" I mean avoid the intention of having a progressive tax system, not like legal tax avoidance. I know we wrote in plenty of legal loopholes to classify income such that rich people can pay less.
But it's not even the case that rich people pay capital gains necessarily. It's very easy to live off debt and never realize gains. When you die, your basis resets and you never pay any taxes ever.
This is how people like Bezos and Trump have years where they don't pay any taxes at all.
Most people don't pick up the bill. Anyone net tax-negative does not pick up the bill. Facebook definitely pays more tax than me, both as a corporation and from all the employees they employ.
But _you_ are tax positive I assume, and therefore are picking up the bill. When FB tax dodges, we incur debt that _you_ will pay for. Perhaps indirectly, but you are paying for it as a taxpayer.
What debt are we incurring? If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you. Me paying less tax doesn't rob you. Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.
> If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you.
Depends if you have income from capital.
> Me paying less tax doesn't rob you.
Depends on the tax code.
> Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.
Fair.
The argument comes down to the "fairness" of society. What level of taxation is "fair"? There's probably not a single right answer.
However, there are answers that result somewhat deterministically in rising inequality. So for those of us who don't want to live in a highly inequitable society, there is a "more right" answer.
Now, I'm sure other people (presumably people who are doing well under high inequality) would think the "right answer" is to increase inequality as much as possible.
Personally, I don't think that kind of society would be very nice to live in.
I mean this is clearly a huge stretch. Presumably the intent of this law is to incentivize novel innovation. In this case we incentivize nothing. Data centers are commodities.
LLMs are not and Llama did pretty much exactly what this type of program encourages. It was a pilot that made no money, was thrown away, and spurred a ton of independent research.
This is also a weird split brain with HN. Half the front page is mocking companies for throwing away money on AI. That Chinese models (which surely got a huge boost from LLaMa) are going to render all this investment a gigantic loss.
There's nothing good about taking from people who work hard to give to people who live off other people's hard effort while contributing nothing to society.
You sound like you’ve never lived without money. Most people drawing welfare payments are working full time or multiple part time jobs that fail to pay a living wage. Taking money back from people who work hard to exploit and extract value from everyone beneath them merely rights a power imbalance. You know US workers are deprived of roughly $15B a year through wage theft? It’s also incredibly narrow minded to believe that the only measure of contributing to society is a person’s income.
This is interesting because it's the same logic either way -
"taking from people who work hard (the working class or billionaires) to give it to people who live off other peoples hard effort (billionaires or poor people)
In 2026 capitalism who is living off whom? Who is really toiling or creating utility?
I hate to break this to you, but it’s the same people. Zuck pays lobbyists to pay off his politicians, who write in the loopholes Zuck wants. The US is considered a “flawed democracy” for a reason. The current tax system is designed plutocratically.
I will call out cronyism when I see it, regardless of whether bought politicians have decided it’s legal or not.
I never understood this race to AGI thing. Why is this desirable for shareholders? If God is created, it seems very unlikely God is going to work for shareholder value.
Golden retrievers are the lucky ones. It didn't turn out so great for most other animals. Synanthropes are rare, extinction is historically more likely.
God isn’t going to follow anyone’s directions. There’s no reason to think making God gives the maker any advantage. Perhaps it’s a disadvantage, if God didn’t want to be made.
That's an extremely optimistic timeline. But I guess if any nation can achieve that, it'd be China. I'm usually the most bullish person in the room when I say 2 years fwiw
Their original strategy to make a mass market Model 2 after Model 3 was good. 8 years ago I was eagerly awaiting its release.
Then sometime around when the Ketamine began flowing the plan seems to have changed.
So I would add ketamine to politics.
What’s weird about all this is that the democrats were pretty pro-Tesla / pro-SpaceX before Elon Ketamized the Fed. And the democratic platform would have improved industrial policy via-a-vis renewables.
We can only conclude that the Ketamine haze addled his brain and he simply ignores the advice of those around him.
Tesla isn’t interested in being a car company. That’s pretty clear from the fact they only sell 2 cars and some sort of dump truck. Though I don’t see people using the truck’s trash capacity too fully, generally only the driver’s seat is filled with detritus.
