OVERmind
40
13
OVERmind has not written any posts yet.
OVERmind has not written any posts yet.
Quoted phrase is just a big simplification.
One loophole seems to be taking a loan against stocks that a billionaire owns. This way one does not receive an income which would be taxed. All while stocks can continue to give dividends and are immune to inflation. This can be googled with public statistics.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/558352-elon-musk-explains-his-extremely-low-tax-rate/amp/
“Elon Musk paid less than $70,000 in federal income taxes between 2015 and 2017, and he did not pay anything in 2018, according to recent reports.He did pay his taxes in 2016 by exercising more than $1 billion in stock options.
He lives off loans made from his stock options, meaning he doesn’t take a salary from his company.”
Articles like one below also partially describe what goes on with taxes in big companies like Tesla. https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2025/
This may seem true “on paper” but in reality manipulations with stocks and loans systematically allow to avoid paying taxes on much of operations (through legal loopholes). As I understand it.
I am not ready to give elaborated answer by myself right now, but here is googles AI summary “Based on recent analysis of tax data, U.S. billionaires pay a much lower effective tax rate on their true economic income—often estimated between
3.4% and 8.2%—compared to the average American taxpayer, who pays closer to 13-14%. While they often face high statutory rates on salary, most billionaire wealth comes from unrealized capital gains (the rising value of stocks and assets), which are not taxed unless the assets are sold”
Of course calls for violence are bad and counterproductive. Yet for the broader question I highly recommend this video about reasons why existence of billionaires who pay very small (in proportion) amount of taxes is economically and socially really bad.
I am not talking about ideological uniformity between two countries. I am talking about events inside 1 country. As I understand, it the core of socialism economics is that government decides where resources of the country go (when in capitalism there are companies who then only pay taxes). Companies can have races with each other. With central planing it’s ~impossible. The problem of international conflicts is more of an another topic.
As of now, for example, neglect of AI safety comes (in a big part) from races between USA companies. (With some exception of china, which is arguably still years behind and doesn’t have enough compute)
I think I disagree with counter-examples. Dead Hand system was created in a conflict with other countries, it can be viewed as a mostly forced risk. While AI races within companies of a single country are more of a “self-destruction” pattern. Capitalism creates rivals (and therefore races with more risks and less global safety) within one country, more than other economic systems may do so.
.
- The Soviets had the Dead Hand system, which potentially contributed to x-risk from "AI" due to the risk of nuclear warfare, not that the system was particularly intelligent.
“The people you need to soften/moderate your message to reach (or who need social proof in order to get involved) are seldom going to be the ones who can think clearly about this stuff. And we are very bottlenecked on high-quality thinking.”.
I think this is true only in a part of contexts. If we are talking about AI alignment - probably skilled mathematicians or AI researches can be very fit. At least in the directions like interpretability. And this doesn’t necessarily correlate with their desires to do societally unconventional work. Why isn’t that so?
What about the enhancement of human intelligence that was discussed here? (For example How to make superkids - LessWrong).
They probably have more than a 1% chance of success and could accelerate anti-aging research. Even if you consider the current research situation critically stalled.
and yet you do not identify any of these, supposed "other useful properties".
I did it in the second paragraph.
How can you reconcile a prediction of algorithmic breakthroughs with reality? When would that reconciliation take place. Nobody is ever going to look back and say "I predicted algorithmic breakthroughs and there were none"
Maybe many people would do that, but I think at least some would be able to acnowledge the mistake and not rationalize away their prediction. To reconcile their prediction with reality, one, as an option, can make the prediction very concrete and narrow in the beginning. And that's what people here generally try to do, as I see it.
As I understand it, the stated goal of the text was to build a concrete scenario despite this problem. Even though increased concreteness reduces the probability of a particular scenario from the cluster, it has other useful properties.
For example, it is probably easier and more interesting to analyze a concrete story. Building one and reconciling it with reality can be an exercise that improves one`s ability to make predictions.
It may initially seem so, but in fact this strategy even gets called “buy, borrow, die”. In the end loan is practically closed without taxes as well, and feds don’t get their cut. Main factor seems to be that value of assets grows overtime, which hacks tax formula.
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes
Or this explanation
One may say that such system is obviously flawed and is unlikely - but most probably it’s just a consequence of the fact that billionaires are heavily involved in law making process. (Lobbying, networking-corruption, etc)