mathraki

Agreed. So people will either drop out of the workforce for such jobs, or will require more money to do those jobs.

As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.

I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.

And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.

A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.

I am a PhD dropout but as a startup founder i was able to get an EB1 in the business category (not technology/science which is the common route, even though i was CTO and had a couple papers). Something for founders or senior business leaders to consider.

Where are the expert witnesses in this case?? Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion??

I put myself in their shoes, if I had never looked at a line of code I couldn't even start to imagine what an API vs real code is. I'd probably think it's some made up concept that Google is using to save money and circumvent the law.

A tradeoff that I find fascinating is that of democracy vs authoritarian gov't. It's the question of our days.

I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages:

- very efficient in redirecting resources as needed

- the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently

- no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges)

HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1])

So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%.

In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

As a European immigrant who came to the US to be an entrepreneur, I can tell you there are many reasons for the US leadership so far, many of which are still true. My top list:

- biggest unified market. This is HUGE. Not like the EU "unified" where you can't even speak the same language, but really unified. This means an early idea has big enough of a market to worth pursuing, among other things.

- a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk

- world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country

China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above.

If China was ever to become democratized and continue its growth trajectory it could truly challenge the US gobally but that may not happen for years or decades.

Overall I think we should welcome more innovation, even if the US has to share some of the leadership it had until now. But articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else.

The thing to keep in mind is that leadership in data management lasts about 5 years, definitely less than 10. An (incomplete but representative) timeline:

- late 90s: Early DWs like Redbrick

- early 2000s: Oracle, Teradata

- late 2000s: Shared-nothing Data Warehouses (Vertica, Aster Data, Greenplum) - bought up by Teradata, EMC, HP

- early 2010s: Hadoop and Hive

- late 2010s: Redshift and cloud DBs

- early 2020s: Snowflake

- late 2020s: probably something else...

All these technologies felt they were here to stay at the time, but they didn't. Will Snowflake be the exception? Maybe, but the odds are not nearly as great as their valuation implies.

A lot of commonplace stuff can cause harm above a certain dosage. Which is partially why Prop 65 is failing.

99% of things in Prop 65 are fine in moderation. And the 1% that isn't (I would love to be warned of that myself) - well, it's lost among everything else.

I was in CA last year and surprised to see Prop 65 warnings outside every coffee shop because apparently Coffee "may" cause cancer.

It's time for CA to take a step back and stop pretending its citizens are toddlers. People can make their own decisions.

Meantime, organizations like this doctor group go around collecting tax-deductible donations, potentially state/federal grants and paying full time staff.

Waste of resources on so many levels.

I agree, but you can make the same argument about people borrowing less if the fed increases interest rates by 0.1%. There are a ton of factors that go into someone getting financing and moving interest rate by 0.1% should be a non-issue. But on average these things do change people's behavior.

My principle is we should remove all obstacles for starting/running/investing in companies, which are the engine of the economy and create both wealth and jobs, and we should tax outcomes and consumption. Also, we should keep things simple to avoid both overhead and tax avoidance that comes with complexity.

Think about it, it will be cheaper/better for $1M of US capital to be invested in UK vs the US.

In the US both you and the founder/management team/other investors all pay tax if company is successful; in UK, only you (as US citizen) pay tax. You and the founders/management can split the difference and will be better off.

These things may sound small but play out significantly at scale (like interest rates etc)

Where else is that money going to go?

Other countries, for one. Capital is global.

It might even create a whole new financial instrument or class of investments.

Absolutely. There will be a layer of, essentially, financial parasites taking value away from value creators to make this 'work'. Not sure what's great about that.

So 5% - 3% = 2% real annual growth.

So 1% wealth tax is equivalent to 50% tax on the return of the asset, every year.

Say what you want, but this makes holding the asset or investing a lot less attractive. It will affect people's decisions and willingness to invest. Maybe we're OK with less investment but we shouldn't assume there is no impact.

In addition what if this is a volatile asset (read: startup) whose value goes up and down? Will the gov't give you a refund if it loses 20% of its value 10 years in?

What if the asset is illiquid (again:startup)? Who will lend to an otherwise not-wealthy startup founder 1% of their company's paper value every year to pay the tax? Because if the startup fails most founders will have to declare bankruptcy (having paid years of paper wealth taxes with no positive outcome in the end).

The point is that it creates direct and indirect obstacles to starting/investing/running/owning a company. Which is one of the big job/wealth creators of our society.

IMO you should do the opposite - remove all obstacles to start/invest/run a company and tax the outcome - or, even better, consumption. If you feel those taxes are too low, then raise them.

People want to exit but in most cases can't because the company is not doing well. Everyone who has tried fundraising with bad results knows it's super hard. Despite popular stories in the press, that's the fate of most startups.

Having a struggling company is super stressful, adding the government asking you to come up with money to pay personally, because you are 'wealthy' on a paper would take it to a different level.

So the government takes a board seat (or two or three) eventually in the company?

There are a lot of rights and some obligations that come with equity ownership in a company beyond financial return.

That's exactly what capital gains taxes are tho?

I'm shocked people think a wealth tax on startup founders is OK. Let's think of a scenario for instance:

ACME startup raises Series C @500M. Founder equity is worth 100M on paper. Founder needs to borrow money every year to pay 'wealth' tax. After 10 years of struggles, company sells for $100M, VCs get money back, founder makes no money. But now founder is millions in debt for past 'wealth' tax payments. Founders will be declaring bankruptcy in those cases. And interest rates for wealth tax loans will skyrocket as a result, making effective wealth tax rate much higher.

Problem is startup founder 'millionaires' and 'billionaires' are only that on paper. Any asset that is volatile (like startups) will become impossible to own long term even with a small wealth tax.

More computation = more data. That's the real problem. Processors will get faster but for some applications we'll never have more data. So yes, new approaches are needed.