YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
Instead reverse the positions: tax and penalize having few children.
As I said last time this idea came up. Punishing people for not having children is a bad idea. If you are single woman, a harsh tax + good benefits is going to result in you having children out of wedlock. Which is dysgenic for society anyway. If you are a single man, you are just fucked. There is nothing you can do to have children on your own, and if you can't get a partner by normal means, you'd have to commit horrendous crimes to do so. The vast majority of people are not Chad + Stacy, sucking and fucking around and never settling down. Punitively targeting everyone as if they are is just revenge porn dressed up as a policy.
YoungAchamian
9hr ago
No need to make it a bioweapon. Make it a cultural meme, narratives spread much faster. If you can create narrative versions of the AI disgust reaction for both left and right cultural environments, then you could release a memetic pathogen that would push the vast majority of people into that AI disgust state
YoungAchamian
10hr ago
Wow the transition to EAR rules and then defining online software files as world wide releases is quite harsh on anything open-sourced. I assume the files in question were just normal guns for manufacture? Nothing super high-tech, needing any sort of classification or export restriction?
I guess it's good to know that anyone complaining about the political targeting via ITAR rules is mostly complaining about their side getting hit with export restrictions.
YoungAchamian
10hr ago
I mean if you want to make linguistic judgements on the "definition" of "work" its a free country. He collected a paycheck from being a senator, senatorial aid, whatever. And has done so for awhile. Assuming normal middle class habits around saving and spending, then at 84 I would expect a low 7 figure net worth. It probably also helps that he hasn't retired like most of his peers at 65 meaning he probably still has neutral-ish spending.
This is a level of pedantry that borders on obnoxious.
YoungAchamian
12hr ago
Bernie has several houses and a net worth of about $3M
He's also 84. Shockingly a lifetime of working and saving does eventually cause you to have substantial amounts of wealth. I think my 65 year old parents probably have about the same levels of net worth from a lifetime of dual-income working.
YoungAchamian
12hr ago
AlwaysHasBeen.jpg
Humans are a jealous species. It's not right or wrong, it simply is.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
A HELOC is the more comparable financial equivalence. Reverse Mortgages are only available to 62+ year olds, and operate differently than a HELOC or SBLOC. While we are definitely approaching gerontocracy with a large number of boomers and X-ers with large home values, I don't think many have homes valued at 100s of millions of dollars.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
since you have to pay taxes on the shares you sell to pay back the interest too.
My understanding is that yes technically, but no basically. As long as your shares increase in value it reduces the loan-to-value ratio, and at some point you use the difference to take out a new loan to pay off the old one with some interest grace period. This very much requires the stock assets to keep going up, which doesn't always happen. But it has happened to enough rich folks that its noticeable.
It's as you pointed out probably not a real loophole, but I think to many people it feels like a loophole. I think the deferring part of it feels like a way to avoid paying taxes while still living large. I would interested in seeing how much of a given UHNW-individuals income comes from this sort of personal loan mechanism before really making a judgement.
I'd be for it if I thought it would actually satisfy the eat-the-rich crowd, which I doubt.
I also doubt because it's envy driven tax policy. It is however I think a fig leaf towards the less unstable set of eat-the-rich crowd. I think even a set of moderates/center-lefts/center-rights are being persuaded by the eat-the-rich-rhetoric around the growing wealth inequality in the US. Doing something to cut down on it is probably going to be a requirement at some point soon.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
Politicians(this includes senators or higher) can fire any bureaucrat they want- but it will be replaced by prison labor, randomly selected from federal inmates.
I like this one solely for the interesting incentive structure it could create where prospective political operatives deliberately risk sending themselves to prison and then bribe during the selection.
Cabinet selected randomly by the selective service system.
Only if we survey everyone who would want to as a Top Secret poll and then exclude them from the selection process. I'd rig an election for this idea.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I would consider it
Stolen valor! Get your own presidential run-viable topic!
YoungAchamian
1d ago
My proposal is a tax on a collateralized personal loan as a means to avoid paying taxes on realized capital gains. I think thats a bit different than taxing a personal loan. Philosophically its about using your high net worth to unfairly secure taxation solutions that allow you to still appreciate your wealth without being required to pay for it. This tactic is not available for the vast majority of people on account of not having 100s of millions in unrealized capital gains.
then when you make money to pay it back
The neat part is actually the stock can appreciate and reduce the leveraged burden allowing you to take additional lines of credit to pay your existing lines of credit. If I understand the process somewhat, you are never really called to pay the loan back unless the stock depreciates greatly in value and the bank views you as unreliable enough to call the loan in.
Maybe banks should be taxed on the value of their deposits too.
Feels like a strawman.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
Right "eventually" but this is more like taxing capital gains. Its a loophole designed to get around realizing the assets and thus needing to pay the capital gains taxes, but still getting liquidity. We do tax capital gains even if that "eventually" also results in consumption. This is just fixing a current loophole. And believe me if Fairtax or LVT was on the board, I'm in agreement. However, unlike other libertarian-adjacent folks though, I live in reality...
YoungAchamian
1d ago
yes HELOCs seem to be the corner-case that presents a problem, and unfortunately any carve out there is just likely to be repealed later down the line. The government loves another way to get free money. I think the easy answer is to tie to just capital gains based collateral, not property.
Go run for office
Ewww. Probably says something about me that I find the idea of being a politician relegated to the narcissistic and sociopathic.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
Uhhh... I had to look this up but you are not taxed on a personal loan, the IRS treats it as debt not income. So saying that you are taxed on the money borrowed is incorrect.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I think a major component of this is borrowing against the shares. Musk doesn't have a liquid net worth of a trillion dollars. But he is borrowing against his shares in order to get liquid capital. Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this isn't taxed. I think the simple answer is that if you borrow against unrealized capital you should be taxed at some value of that capital. You are using that capital with a loophole to get cash. This is probably the cleaner solution to the stupid tax on unrealized gains that the Dems proposed last election season as it really only hits people with large capital assets and limited liquidity, not the average homeowner or stock bro when their shares/homes appreciate. Whether or not this is a fair policy is probably open to interpretation and not something I have made my mind up on. I'm sure people in the comments can tell me why this is a bad policy economically...
YoungAchamian
1d ago
My speculation would be feeding in their massive, gobs of intelligence files about the leadership structure and individual leaders into it and asking for a comprehensive report on which guys are the most amenable to negotiation and which are probably never going to accept a deal (and thus would need to be removed from the table).
It's going to be the former not the later. Feed it a large corpus in intel data on a network and have it use known constraints to approximate who is in charge of who. Probably also who has the most influence or is higher ranked. Maybe even a sensitivity analysis of targets.
Predicting human derived insights in negotiation position based on limited data is a bit too far fetched.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I have yet to see anything beyond the ordinary use of a frontier model. The government/DoD/DoW is boring. The use cases that people envision as some super high-tech, super competent application is almost always displays a a mistaken understanding of how the government operates.
I know they have tried to do COA generation (Course of Action, literally military planning) with frontier models and it did not perform amazingly( worse than human). Now this was with previous generations of LLMs so maybe a Mythos/Fable/ChatGPT5.5 would blow that performance out of the water. The papers are public domain, you could attempt to recreate them with the current models.
Actually, I just scanned some literature before posting this, the latest uses ChatGPT-4o, looks like some performance improvements, some failures. The quote "50-70%" of a COA was used. Looks like many of the systems are large agentic LLM systems with multiple LLMs all working as different features, with RAG from various historical datasets/internal information. Also looks like most of use is in workflows around doing the documentation/summarizing of human-made COAs, and reducing some of the manual/tedious work.
YoungAchamian
3d ago
Yeah but it’s more fun if people need to remember me or wade through my post history to understand my views. Giving them a spoiler in the flair robs them of their sense of pride and accomplishment.
YoungAchamian
4d ago
My music tastes never really change but I'm back in a rhythmic drumming trance mood. Hamrer Hippyer, Blodbylgje, and Lyfjaberg
YoungAchamian
4d ago
- Gothos is a character is Steven Erikson's Malazan
- Achamian is a character in R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse
- DEATH is from Terry Pratchet.
Just characters that I felt resonated and influenced my worldview.
H.L. Mencken at all
No I have not, I'll put him on my book list lol. I generally stick to the White Autist classic genres: Fantasy, SciFi, Philosophy, looks like Mencken is predominately non-fiction?
I'd prefer a "Right-wing Smooth Brain Autist" flavor for my particular flavor of stupid.
Or realistically Gothos + Achamian + DEATH + Nietzsche, but that would require too many brain cells being rubbed together.
Something feels off, I got "Faith First Conservative" which is wild because I am militantly an agnostic pluralist. Looking at the "Gender, Religion, and Society" tab shows extremely opposite views to the modal "Faith First Conservative"
I might have broken the quiz with my uniqueness lol... Reading through the options, I have some of the positions from a couple cores but disagree with other position in that group. Maybe Pew just hates classical liberals.
warlike values. That is, manliness, courage, honour, bravery, leadership, assertiveness
Also violence, cruelty, might makes right, honor feuds, glory seeking, ruthlessness, predatory opportunism, clannishness. Warlike values are not restricted to "virtues" that you like. We just had the whole Nowak vs Digwa discussion. Digwa is acting with virtue in a warlike tribal society. Do you like those virtues in the practical application?
No, that's what made good people/humanity. You do not need to „account“ for it.
This is nonsensical, local selection pressure make people good for surviving those local selection pressures. It is not a universal minimum in the gradient space of values. You'll have to give actual evidence than Tengri Mongolian values and behaviors should convey actual virtue in Christian Renaissance Italian society or Imperial Chinese society. I cannot convey how quarter-wit I find this weird objection. Your argument is that we should take known heavily biased data, do no normalization, no attempt to account for outside factors, and use it to build models and they will just generalize for any situation. It's statistically and mathematically illiterate.
you do know
I do not, but I am learning you lack imagination, introspection, and/or the ability to see the whole system. You cherry picked a bunch of warlike values that you think are virtuous, conveniently did not include any that you don't view as virtuous and then attempted to put them as words in my mouth. You left out virtues that real societies have considered virtuous but that you do not. Proving my point that virtues are culturally defined. You derive from a western-christian cultural milieu, you have a biased set of virtues. You could have the epistemological humility to understand that, but clearly don't.
Yes, capitalism likes the low, because capitalism is a demon and wants slaves in the form of degraded men
This is a wildly crazy sentence. Capitalism does not want anything, it is not sentient. In so much, if you believe the idea that Capitalism is egregore, then it wants to perpetuate its own existence, and derive profit. Profit is a-moral, multi-agentic, and a stable signal. It is up to a society to use Capitalism and Profit as a tool of how they see fit. One does not blame the hammer for how it used.
Modernity favors
Modernity favors cooperation, rule/norm-following, individualism, but also self-promotion, narcissism, materialism, strategic coldness, status management, narrative control, and the ability to dominate without looking like a brute.
It's pretty opposed to the old martial values because it is not the society of warriors, it is a society of merchants and priests. The selection pressure are different. If you want to make the argument that we should return to being a society of warriors, that is a better argument, but you should actually make it.
You are treating "warrior values" as though they are eternal truths rather than the self-justifying morality of a particular ruling caste.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Historical incidence rate of what? A particular value set? A behavioral distribution? A comparative cross-sectional study of different civilizational values throughout history and their effectiveness and pros/cons would be interesting but one would need to account for local selection pressures. Warlike values are very adaptive in violent, tribal, resource-scarce environments but not very useful in post scarcity western society where cooperation, norm-following, and restraint are likely more adaptive.
Virtue arguments are always boring because they are unfalsifiable and unrealistic. But i would disagree that it's just bad people coping. Needing to view people with a different value set from you as "bad" is already Untermensch behavior indicative of being a slave to basic primitive tribal impulses. Any real "highest type" would already be able to not be chained to those primordial impulses.
I think about it as rewarding for taking an action vs imposing a penalty for not. There's a third axis for how easy/capacity to take that action is. I think its probably more permissible to impose penalties for taking an action if it requires a conscious single decision to take that action, for example littering. Or if the action you want people to take is very easy to do. The ACA "tax" is somewhere there, though it was mildly contentious. EV and solar credits are rewarding a particular behavior. The problem stems from imposing a penalty for not taking an affirmative action, made worse by that affirmative action being downstream of other affirmative actions that additionally require another party to also take those same actions. Since person A can't control what person B is doing and requires person B to also do it so that person A can, punishing person A for not doing it is fairly tyrannical.
I'd say something like raising the overall tax rate and then giving a cut is not really a punishment. We understand the side eye thats really happening but theoretically its just raising the tax rate to pay for the deficit, and then lowering for people that are making "future taxpayers" as a reward for the socially approved behavior. But you'd have to do a blanket increase, doing targeted increases is just punishment. Last time this came up there were even more draconian punishments for the childless.
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