> it has cost California both Larry's presence and all the tax revenue it made from him.
1. Google itself isn't moving. I don't think Larry is closely involved anymore, and a move out of state seems to prove that.
2. How much tax revenue did California even make from him? If he doesn't sell stock, then he has no capital gains to tax. That's the whole point of the wealth tax. The ultra-wealthy are infamous for tax avoidance schemes such as rotating loans against their stock to avoid capital gains.
He better watch out. Google instituted a strict return to office mandate. They also frown on people working apart from their teams. He might have to go back and badge in a couple times a week to make it look like he’s still working out of the Mountain View office.
The Page Family operates a number of philanthropic initiatives, non-profits, and other companies outside of Alphabet. All of which pay taxes, provide jobs, and benefits to Californians.
It's short-sighted to think Page doesn't pay taxes nor contribute to California in significant, meaningful ways.
California just traded what was supposed to be a one-time (lol) tax on total net worth - not liquid assets or even income - for generations of extracting value from the Page family.
I get it's fashionable to hate on billionaires right now - but this is just plainly terrible government policy. California should be encouraging people like Page to move here - not push them away.
It's also short-sighted to assume Google will remain in Mountain View just because it's there today. What makes SV so special today that Boston, Austin, Denver, Orlando, etc don't offer? What about the "Next Google"? Will it's founders even start a business in California?
That's what we should be concerned about - create a climate where it's not even a question where to build your company; California should be the obvious right answer.
What philanthropic initiatives or non-profits? Regarding philanthropy, this Forbes estimate [0] suggests Page is not particularly engaged in philanthropy compared to others in his wealth class.
> It's short-sighted to think Page doesn't pay taxes nor contribute to California in significant, meaningful ways.
Provide documentation and numbers, otherwise this alleged "significant" contribution is just hand-waving.
> generations of extracting value from the Page family
If Larry can just up and leave now, on very short notice, then there's absolutely zero guarantee of any future "generations" of value.
> I get it's fashionable to hate on billionaires right now
Fashionable? Why do you think it's fashionable now? For no reason?
> California should be encouraging people like Page to move here
It's a total perversion of the fundamental idea of capitalism that governments are competing for companies and wealthy people. That's not how capitalist competition is supposed to work.
> What about the "Next Google"? Will it's founders even start a business in California?
Larry and Sergey met at Stanford as students. They didn't choose a state because of tax policy.
Let me offer a public benefit to driving away the billionaires who refuse to pay higher taxes: less local spending on politicians, i.e., corruption.
#2 is a problem with California’s tax laws. A marginal land value tax would easily tax wealth without wealthy people having to sell assets. Also, more economic activity, such as rich people buying products and services, results in sales tax and income for other Californians.
NYC had a similar budgetary/fiscal issue too and they thought they'd manage it by assessing more taxes on companies and people. The result was corporate as well as individual flight.
It's tough to slim down on spending. Be it individuals or governments and quasi-governmental organizations. Companies can swiftly implement spending cuts and RIFs --sometimes aggressively.
Governments, though, there are threads throughout --elected officials often trade support for positions and favoritism and if they take those away, so do many of their fiercest people who get out the vote. Also, their voters are averse to having the services they've grown accustomed to getting cut.
So sometimes you need that official who knows he or she is a one termer but will go in and cut and cut. People will hate them but it will allow the government a chance to make a turnaround.
IMO capital gains taxes are bad as well, they discourage efficient investment allocation (you are stuck with what you have now).
It would be better if we mainly taxed consumption directly. If you are a billionaire but spend $100k/yr I am fine with you paying the same taxes as anyone else spending $100k/yr.
Taxing consumption hurts people more at the lower end of the income scale than at the higher end. It all comes down to what reserves you have to accommodate different scales of financial events. For example, will not having enough money for a tank of gas break you, or just annoy you? Could you survive needing an ambulance ride? Do copays keep you from seeing the doctor, or are they just a rounding error on your income?
I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.
At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.
If having less money hurts people, then the government should give them more money.
Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?
>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).
If you are able to leverage the current value of stocks to gain personal benefit, you should be taxed on them as if you recognized the value. If you just let them sit, don't use them as collateral, don't take out loans against them, then they shouldn't be taxed.
But if you recognize some benefit based on their value, you absolutely should pay taxes on that value.
> The version of me you know — the writer, the ranter, the one who tears into accessibility failures or rips Linux a new one — that’s a persona.
> Not fake. Not dishonest. Just deliberate.
It’s tuned for the internet, built to survive in a world that eats subtlety alive. It’s the volume turned up, the emotion sharpened, the thoughts sculpted until they’re worth reading.
It is justification. AI writing has certain characteristics more frequently than non-AI writing. These in particular are easy to see and cite as justification. Others like the use of the "it's not X, it's Y" construction and the way that adjectives are used are noticable too but not as easy to point as justification because longer explanations are necessary.
Indeed. People use em dashes. And curly quotation marks. And emojis in headers. And use boldface and italics to emphasize things. And overuse the "it's not X, it's Y" construction. People could also do all of these things at the same time. Or maybe do them sometimes and not other times for fun.
It is obviously impossible to be able to tell with 100% certainty whether or not something is written using AI. But I think this most likely is. Could be that it's just copy edited with AI and not wholly AI slop. Who knows. Either way, it reads very much like AI to me.
The use of em dashes is a human right. I ask that people not discriminate against em-dash users—we should be a protected class—and I refuse to abandon them. Perhaps I’ll have one engraved on my tombstone. He died doing what he loved—dashing.
I encourage people to discriminate against me because I write like an educated African who works annotating AI training material.
Why not? I am a descendant of Africans. I am a mildly successful author by tech nerd standards. I was educated in the British Public School tradition, right down to taking Latin in high school and cheering on our Rugby* and Cricket teams.
If someone doesn't want to read my words or employ me because I must be AI, that's their problem. The truth is, they won't like what I have to say any more than they like the way I say it.
I have made my peace with this.
———
Speaking of Rugby, in 1973 another school's Rugby team played ours, and almost the entire school turned out to watch a celebrity on the other school's team.
His name was Andrew, and he is very much in the news today.
Funny thing is I started using them in the last 5 or 6 years myself in place of commas where I wanted to interject some extra info. Of course I'm lazy and don't bother typing the actual em dash, I just use a regular dash. Now I feel gross using them because I don't want people thinking I turned my brain off.
I have always used double-dashes instead of emdashes, and it annoys me when software "auto-corrects" them into emdashes. Moreso since emdashes became an AI tell.
I also see AIs use emdashes in places where parentheses, colons, or sentence breaks are simply more appropriate.
Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are.
Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books.
Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
There's nothing I hate more about new Apple MacBook Pros than the batteries that I can't replace myself. It's such an ordeal go get an aging battery replaced, and I tend to go through them within a few years, due to high usage. Nowadays Apple appears to be demanding that you mail the laptop to them, instead of allowing same-day replacement, which I've done in the past.
I loved my 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro, when I could simply flip the laptop over, unlatch the latches, and replace the battery entirely within seconds. It's an total shame we lost that. You could even carry an extra battery with you in a bag when traveling, in case you didn't have access to a charger.
> The majority of American voters in 2024 asked for this
It was 49.8%, which is not quite a majority.
It's also worth noting that Kamala Harris received precisely 0 votes in the 2024 Democratic primaries.
[EDIT:] I see that the parent comment has now changed "majority" to "plurality."
If I could make one Constitutional amendment, it would be this: publicly finance all election campaigns, and make private contributions illegal bribery, punished by imprisonment of both the candidate and briber.
I think a competent opposition party would be great for the US. But regardless of the candidate, US voters had three clear choices in the 2024 Presidential election: (1) I support what Trump is going to do, (2) I am fine with what Trump is going to do (abstain/third-party), (3) Kamala Harris. I think it’s extremely clear 3 was the best choice, but it was the least popular of the three.
Option 4: I am not fine with what Trump is going to do, but I am also not fine with what Harris is going to do. And, since Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different than Biden, that could amount to "I am not fine with what Biden has been doing the last four years".
Was that less bad than what Trump has done in one year? Yes. But Trump in his first term was less bad than this, and recency bias means that what we didn't like about Biden was more prominent in our minds.
But my option 4 looks just like your option 2 in terms of how people voted. I'm just saying that the motive may have been different.
Oh man that hits the biggest nerve in me. Never again should we allow primaries to be skipped. I don't care if the incumbent is the most popular candidate in history - running a primary makes sure the best candidates will be picked and refusing to run an election and then having the gall to suddenly anoint a chosen candidate was an absolutely disastrous decision.
Democracy is a healthy process - I don't know why we buy the stupid line of "we need party unity" when what we need is an efficient expression of the voters will and having that expression is what best forms unity. There are some old Hillary quotes that make me absolutely rabid.
To be fair there were primaries, but the DNC only pushed Biden's candidacy. So there really wasn't any other candidates on all the ballots except uncommitted. When he dropped out in July their simply isn't enough time to run a functional primary and campaign for the vote in November. We can't really delay the election to have a primary. The delegates of the DNC do get to vote on who they want and by the time Kamala stepped in she did get the most votes.
It's really a problem of money though. The DNC really are the king makers when it comes to candidates. That and PAC money are the requirements to get a nomination. At least when it comes to presidency. Smaller elections you get more freedom to have a successful without such things. The whole system needs an overhaul unfortunately and I don't see any candidate from any party looking to fix that any time soon.
Other western democracies are much smaller or have much more uniform systems than the US as well. Not to say it's impossible, but it would take reworking the system. Right now the only elections that are highly publicized and known about are the ones every 4 years for president. Next is every two years election for congress and that's a big drop off in participation. Things like primaries you really have to go out of your way to know about them happening and when and where.
The first couple states really end up determining who usually wins the nomination and financial backing. It takes time to move a candidate between places and set up multiple events and fundraisers. Now in state and city elections the US can do those quickly as well. Smaller area to cover and campaign and the community stays informed. It doesn't help that national elections involve institutions like the electoral college instead of a popular vote. That's a different problem though.
My first thought when I read the Biden resignation letter was - Harris endorsement is brilliant fuck you to the Dem insiders that are ousting him. I am still lowkey convinced that he voted for Trump out of pure spite.
> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.
Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk.
Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.
> It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.
Some places.
You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done.
It's standard op nowadays to acknowledge that your experiences are not universal, and that different organizations operate differently.
> You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done.
Neither. I just meant it's common.
The comment I replied to said, "they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process."
I think the commonality of the practice shows that Ars Technica doesn't need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process, if office staff is even gone in the first place (again, Ars Technica appears to be open for business today). There's certainly no legal reason why they'd need to wait to fire people.
Does Ars Technica have a "policy" to only fire people on weekdays? I doubt it. Imagine reading that in the employee handbook.
Besides, President's Day is not a holiday that businesses necessarily close for. Indeed, many retailers are open and have specific President's Day sales.
> (again, Ars Technica appears to be open for business today). There's certainly no legal reason why they'd need to wait to fire people.
They normally aren't, they probably write the stories on the weekdays and prepare them to automatically publish over the weekend, with only a skeletal staff to moderate and repair the website. Legal, HR, and other office staff probably only work weekdays, or are contracted out to external firms.
Their CEO posted a quick note on their forums the other day about this which implied they don't normally work on holidays and it would take until Tuesday for a response.
> Their CEO posted a quick note on their forums the other day about this which implied they don't normally work on holidays and it would take until Tuesday for a response.
Judging from today's editors note, if things need to happen more quickly, then they do.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth. I didn't call for anyone to be fired.
throw3e98 is the one who suggested that Ars Technica was going to fire people, but not for a few days. I merely suggested that if anyone was getting fired, they would likely already be fired.
I don't condemn Ars Technica for not firing the guy, but I do condemn Ars Technica for the terse hand-wave of an editor's note with no explanation, when on the same day we get a fuller story only from someone's personal social media account.
"Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here."
They aren't allowed to use the tool, so there was clearly intention.
Run by a Dr. Ian Cutress. Never heard about before, seems to describe themselves like this:
> Industry Analyst, More Than Moore. Youtube Influencer and Educator.
Seems they're one example of the sad trend of people going from being experts and instead diving into "influencing" instead, which comes with a massive list of drawbacks.
1. Google itself isn't moving. I don't think Larry is closely involved anymore, and a move out of state seems to prove that.
2. How much tax revenue did California even make from him? If he doesn't sell stock, then he has no capital gains to tax. That's the whole point of the wealth tax. The ultra-wealthy are infamous for tax avoidance schemes such as rotating loans against their stock to avoid capital gains.
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