> Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.
Yep, great analogy. LVT is the optimum tax from the point of view of maximising production incentives, but actually practical ways of extracting significant revenues from people tend to skew towards "this person/organization has liquid funds available and wants to do something enough to pay the tax on top". (For related reasons LVT-style approaches to taxation work rather well when the finite resource being taxed is something like broadcast spectrums which the average person doesn't own)
As for Single Taxing, convincing the public theres some ethical principle that PE funds buying tech stocks deserve to keep all of the rewards for risking their money on a particular venture and homeowners who lived through the area's dodgy-reputation years don't is a complete non-starter even though anyone with an economics degree can tell you why such an argument might be made...
Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...
Well yes, in reality you want a system where you don’t wait until the lease expires because that would leave many short lease properties without investment. It is trivial to value (competitive real estate market, rational negotiation, market interest rates) a lease extension from 30 to 99 years (enabling development) and the state shouldn’t really care about it unless it wanted to take ownership early as part of a wider land development plan.
The state is technically repossessing it when you own a lease, but it’s not something you had rights to anyway, or had paid for. The terms of what you own are up to the lease end date, under the terms of the lease.
They've essentially said "pen company won't let us use their pens as neutron flux regulator rods, so anyone building power plants for us isn't allowed to use these pens as pens"
(and yeah, there might be a completely legitimate reason to stop your subcontractors from using HuaweiSpyPens, but determining that ACME Pens is just as dangerous because they refused your neutron flux regulator order looks like a punitive measure, not practical risk reduction)
I don't think anyone doubts that subcontracts exist. They doubt that Anthropic's insistence that Claude isn't capable of being the operating system for an automated killbot and associated terms the DoD previously agreed to means that there's any danger to the US military from Lockheed Martin using Claude as a code assistant to build GUIs.
What if it’s a GUI to manage deployment of the kill bots? I worked for a DOD contractor on software. All our scenarios were more related. It was like “OK you’ve overthrown the civilian government of this Middle Eastern country, including the radio regulators, and now we need to coordinate radio frequency assignments for the tactical squads.”
Code which renders dots on a map isn't going to magically reorder itself if the GNSS endpoints get switched from manned to unmanned assets just because it was authored by Claude, and if the subcontractor isn't auditing and testing the code outputs properly then they're the supply chain risk, not a specific code-gen tool they use. Obviously if instead of being used as code or report generating assistants, LLM agents are used to execute combat decisions in real time that introduces a lot more risk. That's... literally Anthropic's argument against using them for that specific purpose.
It doesn't make much sense to determine that because Anthropic continues to insist that Claude is unsuitable for use as some sort of super advanced loitering munition, Lockheed using it to write job ads is as much a threat to national security as a Chinese comms terminal.
It's not like the DoD and their subcontractors and their subcontractors' subcontractors aren't used to all sorts of fine-grained separation when it comes to what is and isn't classified or export controlled under normal circumstances, or that Hegseth taking a break from fantasising about soldiers' testosterone levels for long enough to decry Anthropic's stance as 'woke' makes the decision look like one based on operational effectiveness.
When I looked it up earlier, it seemed to me that to scale this up we would require larger rockets than Starship if we cannot launch hundreds of times per day.
People use that argument because one of the chief bullshit arguments put forward by proponents of space based datacentres is "space is cold", when what they actually mean is "space lacks the possibility of using relatively efficient conductive cooling, so we need to expensively launch large amounts of additional mass to use radiative cooling, consider the extent to which we can shield our miles of active cooling loops from impact, and under current plans all of this mass must be replaced on the same cycles as the chips"
"Space is cold" is classic zero effort to make, significant effort to refute stuff: proponents imply complete nonsense about vacuums being optimal for cooling and anyone who understands why this is a lie to gull retail investors ends up getting bogged down in "sure, but Boltzmann equations proving it's prohibitively expensive doesn't prove it isn't possible"...
Yeah. Starcloud is notable for two things: firstly that they've raised a lot of money and secondly that theyve already abandoned the nonsense in their white paper and shifted to a "lots of satellites" model like everyone else exploring orbital datacentres...
"Guys with guns" can be found to work for pretty much anyone willing to pay them. Organizations don't struggle to recruit hired guns for organisations that are illegal or regarded by much of the public as akin to the Gestapo, they're not going to collectively boycott guarding buildings housing the cute little chatbot on their phone out of social impact concerns.
The disadvantage is that your power generation infrastructure needs replacing at the same time as your chips (at least under current designs) which negates any advantage of needing fewer solar panels at any one point in time and less energy storage.
Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.
It's mostly overflowing with wannabe business influencers using AI to generate all their "insights". Say what you like about the Instagram selfie set, at least they put the effort in.
Yep, great analogy. LVT is the optimum tax from the point of view of maximising production incentives, but actually practical ways of extracting significant revenues from people tend to skew towards "this person/organization has liquid funds available and wants to do something enough to pay the tax on top". (For related reasons LVT-style approaches to taxation work rather well when the finite resource being taxed is something like broadcast spectrums which the average person doesn't own)
As for Single Taxing, convincing the public theres some ethical principle that PE funds buying tech stocks deserve to keep all of the rewards for risking their money on a particular venture and homeowners who lived through the area's dodgy-reputation years don't is a complete non-starter even though anyone with an economics degree can tell you why such an argument might be made...
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