Wouldn't they retain a lot of ability to do that from abroad? A wealth tax targets wealth in your country. We've seen plenty of loopholes for foreign political influence lately and I don't think there are any laws against non-residents holding majority shares in US companies, right?
USSR had no rich and everyone one was poor (except for the party’s apparatus).
So, how would it work here? Why eliminating the rich (whatever is the definition) would achieve a different outcome than that of communist regimes of the past?
This doesn't even make sense. Poverty is a relative term. Poverty requires wealth.
Anyway what little meager juice that these ideological labels had after the cold war is now gone with china as king of the hill.
We can all agree private investment = rapid growth, and state intervention both in terms of social safety nets and actively ensuring fair competition (where that is necessary—banking, anti-trust, food/med production, etc) = stabler economies (or we agreed on this for a few decades after the great depression anyway). It's what the point of the economy is—to serve the disproportionate interests of rich or the collective (one might even say... democratic) interests of people—where there remains substantive disagreement. I hope we can leave this farce behind that how we talk about ideology has any relation to how the terms were actually defined in lieu or acknowledging material reality for a change.
> This doesn't even make sense. Poverty is a relative term.
It makes perfect sense. Citizens of USSR were poorer than their counterparts in the west, didn’t have access to the same variety of food, cloth, etc.
I do remember all these things from my childhood, and my parents made more money than the average because they worked for the oil and gas industry that paid extra. So, when people are trying to sell me the whole “collectivism” and anti-rich sentiment, I am a bit wary because no one can explain how “this time” is going to be different — it seems none of the activists/advocates actually lived in such systems, so they have no clue. I lived the consequences, and I do not want it for myself or anyone else.
I would say the point of the economy is to ensure that both the rich get what they want, but also to ensure that others are not poor and left behind. This is not the case today, and thus a series of reforms is needed. But it’s doesn’t make a believer for the “let’s abolish the rich” thing.
> Citizens of USSR were poorer than their counterparts in the west
Well that's because we're a bunch of greedy bitches who never learned how to play nice with the other kids—capitalism. It would take a hell of a lot more wealth generation for humanity to justify this kind of economic dysfunction.
I mean we made something far worse than the gulag with the american prison system (basically, the punitive theory of rape). It seems we just became all the evil that the soviet system was allegedly supposed to cause from the western perspective 50 years ago.
Yes, taking the whole families in the middle of night and sending them to Siberia to build railroads is exactly the same as American prison, access to attorney, etc.
> Also, you are strongly implying the USSR taxed the wealthy disproportionately. They did not, so your entire argument is silly.
They absolutely did. The tax was 100% and then camps for the whole family.
My argument is not silly, in fact I did not make any. I asked how exactly we are going to be better off without the rich, and what kind of metrics were used to make the analysis. So far there was no answer.
Saying someone’s argument is silly and then walking off is silly.
It's really not. Even without considering Alsace Lorraine, there is a lot of people with German origin in France. In general, it's very common to see people with family name from Spain, Italy, … And also from the old colonies / protectorate like Lebanon or Vietnam.
Japanese companies and institutions are recently under a wave of cyberattacks. LLM assisted or LLM driven attacks are already the new normal. Mostly off the back of abliterated Chinese LLMs, I'd argue.
Anthropic's 'proof of concept' is interesting but the frontier is evolving far ahead of what's apparent to even niche audiences such as HN.
The fact that latent behaviour can be encoded into the model weights, and is difficult to discover through static analysis, is an absolute security nightmare.
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