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As much as it fills me with joy to see fascists like JD Vance get mauled by their own past words, I hate how much this will be propped up as an argument against him today.

I think we can all agree that people change their minds, whether it be from propaganda, malicious intent, or genuine education, so the only thing he has to do to escape this line of attack is just say “my opinions changed.”

I’m sure that to a degree, he still believes what he originally wrote, but has simply repressed it in favor of being able to do less thinking about his political positions, and garner more public attention and power.

I don’t think they believe it works.

I think they just believe that shootings are bound to happen, because why else would they be happening on such a regular basis?

It’s the constant deflection of responsibility, from our choices as a society, to some indeterminate outside force.

Poverty and increasing cost of living? It’s all those darn immigrants.

Your job not paying you enough? Must be overseas industry.

They don’t think their prayers will prevent a school shooting, they just don’t think there’s other options to prevent it that will actually work without “taking away their freedom” (-to own a gun that’s more likely to harm them than protect them)

The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.

“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”

That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?

I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren’t the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it’s a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it’s paraphrasing aren’t helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)

Oh yeah, it’s definitely useful for that!

Since LLMs are essentially just very complicated probabilistic links between words, it seems to be extremely good at picking the exact word or phrase that even a thesaurus couldn’t get me.

I primarily end up using LLMs through DuckDuckGo’s private frontend alongside a search, so if my current search doesn’t yield the correct answer to my question (i.e. I ask for something but those keywords only ever turn up search results on a different, but similar topic) then I go to the LLM and ask a more refined question, that otherwise doesn’t produce any relevant results in a traditional keyword search.

I also use integrated LLMs to format and distill my offhand notes, (and reformat arbitrary text based on specific criteria repeatedly for structured notes,) learn programming syntax more at my own pace and in my own way, and just generally get answers on more well-known topics a lot faster than I would scrolling past 5 pages of SEO-“optimized” garbage just designed to fill time for the ads to load before actually giving me a good answer.

I have never once found an “AI” feature integrated by a corporation useful.

I have only ever found “AI” useful when it’s unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don’t need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won’t solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.

I, too have seen the ability of Sci-Hub to give me free access to research papers.

It’s terrifying how easy it is to get access to scientific literature for free! Wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

True, but these ultra-wealthy individuals aren’t taking loans out on anywhere near the majority of their portfolios.

If a billionaire has $1B, they can put $900m in the illiquid startup, and $100m in their own brokerage account.

They can get loans using $100m of collateral, only paying tax on $100m, instead of paying tax on the other $900m that they aren’t even actively using for loan collateralization.

True, but all home buyers already pay property tax for the properties they’re buying up, and these properties will be owned by someone, regardless. If an institutional home-buying group doesn’t buy a house to immediately rent out for higher than the mortgage rate, someone else will get a mortgage on it for themselves instead.

But if these wealthy investors are now not earning as much money from intangible assets with highly elastic demand, such as stocks, they might not have much of an issue switching more investment capital to a tangible asset with more inelastic demand, for a now only slightly lower rate of return: Real Estate.

The fact that real estate was excluded from taxable assets in this proposal, when the only subject of these taxes are people with over $100m income, is crazy to me. It should be included.

I was mostly thinking of this on a continuous basis.

This tax would be assessed continuously, but it would only be assessed once as an income tax for the business. Then, the business is not considered an individual anymore, and doesn’t fall under these new tax rules, meaning any investments would no longer have an ongoing tax on unrealized gains, only once realized. Any of these wealthy people could start a new, privately held LLC as a holding entity.

I’m not saying this proposal is bad in any way, I’m certainly in favor of it. I just think it has some problems that could lead to tax loophole fuckery that might reduce the income it’s expected to bring in.

It applies only to individuals with at least $100 million in wealth who do not pay at least a 25% tax rate on their income (inclusive of unrealized capital gains). Payments can be spread out over subsequent years.

Within that $100 million club, you’d only pay taxes on unrealized capital gains if at least 80% of your wealth is in tradeable assets (i.e., not shares of private startups or real estate). One caveat for this illiquid group is that there would be a deferred tax of up to 10% on unrealized capital gains upon exit.

Without any changes, this would push investors towards the non-included class of real estate, which would exacerbate the housing crisis.

And on top of that, I can think of a million ways they could skirt this regulation with some clever accounting.

Create private startup as a personal asset holding fund > Transfer shares of publicly-traded liquid investments to private startup > Give yourself illiquid shares of the startup that have a time-bound restriction before they are allowed to become liquid (but don’t have to become liquid, and can stay illiquid for any longer period of time chosen)

Result: You, the individual, don’t hold all the liquid investments. You hold an illiquid asset that’s backed by all of the liquid investments. Illiquid assets are not fully taxed under this proposal.

They need to fix this sort of loophole, otherwise it would just be an invitation for the ultra-wealthy to posture about how they’re “already being subjected to so many harsh tax laws,” while not actually paying the relevant taxes.

I feel like this says more about these students’ schools, rather than the students themselves.

How have I never heard of this before!? I’ve been looking for exactly this for ages now.

Already spinning up a docker container!

Sources, in case anyone’s interested:

Independent photo from different angle pre-speech

Associated Press livestream & coverage

It looks like they were meant to be there as props to demonstrate how the price of food as increased. (the blurry signs above seem to be showing % increases in the price of goods)

Of course, they naturally didn’t think through how it would look when zoomed in 😂

I have to disagree with this.

A study done recently using data from the 2020-2022 US midterm elections found that people’s views on abortion directly affected changes in vote choice, while other factors like the economy were blamed on both sides, and were substantially less influential in swaying votes. (here’s an article with more detail regarding the study)

I don’t think most are single-issue voters, on either side, but yes, Republicans do tend to vote more single-issue than Democrats. That said, if the Democrats stopped making access to abortion a central campaign issue, not only would it lose them support from those who are, y’know, big on women’s rights, a substantial amount of the population, but it wouldn’t actually change most Republican voters, since they would still be able to vote for a candidate that would be more strict on abortion.

The only shift caused by de-prioritizing abortion as a campaign issue would be pushing more Democrats toward either Independent, or right-wing candidates, both of which make it harder for the Democrats to win against the explicitly anti-choice party of Republicans.

The majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal.

When Republicans say they want to ban abortions, and try to play it off as a popular position, they are lying to your face.

Even a substantial portion of Republican voters want abortion to be legal.

They aren’t just fighting most Americans, they’re fighting themselves too.

Both jokes can be true 😅