I hope she sues and takes them for a lot!

It’ll blow over. Remember when the hot new thing was voice controlled assistants - that didn’t happen either.

The article is about the US, so doesn’t mention the UK. But to quote the article “Loopholes benefiting the very wealthy should certainly be closed. The biggest problem in the American tax system is at the very top. The resetting of the basis for capital-gains tax upon death allows billionaires who hold on to assets, borrowing against them to fund spending, to avoid the levy entirely. The dodge is outrageous. Yet ending it would yield only a tiny amount of money, probably less than 0.1% of GDP annually. The same goes for raising inheritance tax, a good tax that has never generated much money.” I suspect the same in the UK.

The key point remains reasonable though - you can do all that but you just don’t raise enough money to meet people’s expectations

Find a political party you like, join it, start getting better people elected. Find an activist group (real, not online), wrestle with the compromises necessary to actually get anything done. Remember - a small group of dedicated people is the only thing that ever changes the world

The solution to lobbying and citizens united isn’t tax changes - it’s transparency in political funding and the electorate giving a fuck. And, pretty obviously, if most of a governments tax income came from a few hundred individuals they’d have enormous power, even if you did fix the lobbying/citizens united problem- they could just leave and crash your income overnight

Read the article. They’re in favour of closing loop holes and ensuring tax is progressive all the way to the top end (so taxing the mega rich properly) but point out the inconvenient (and true) truths that it won’t raise enough money to fix everything, and it concentrates political power in an even smaller number of people (those who are paying for everything) and encourages a culture of dependency in everyone else.

I did leave myself a “could be idiots” get out clause

At least it’ll self correct in a couple of years - use a tool, look like an idiot, stop using tool

If true they’re all idiots, but I don’t believe the story anyway. All the data question answering LLMs I’ve seen use the LLM to write SQL queries on your databases and then wrap the output in a summary. So the summary is easy to check and very unlikely to be significantly wrong. AI/ML/statistics and code is a tool, use it for what it’s good for, don’t use it for what it’s not, treat hype with skepticism

Well that article was a great pile of nothing

With capitalism and the adoption of a free market economy. Less on the democratic oversight

Accepting the ambiguity you point out, saying that capitalism inherently promotes poverty is a stretch. It’s demonstrably the spread of liberal free market capitalism over the last 50 years has been the key to dragging more people out of poverty than ever before. It sure ain’t perfect, and needs to be moderated with appropriate democratic oversight and regulation, but it’s worked better than anything else we’ve tried

Also poverty existed long before capitalism

The point about centaurs is good too

I’m glad you’re enjoying it 😁

Agreed, we should always expect such coherence and conciseness from our leaders. Up your game Starmer!

That’s the one. Coherent, concise and on point. A very nice change. Why we would ever accept anything less from our leaders is beyond me

Glad it’s not just me. I kinda hoped that someone trying to make a positive change by doing what they can with what they’ve got would get more support - but no, just performative nonsense

Sure - if not this then something else. That’s a problem for the people of the United States to solve (no one else can). She’s doing the best she can with the tools she has to advance her vision for Venezuela, which seems better than anyone else’s…

What’s to dislike about Machado? . She’s brave politician and activist with more legitimacy than just about any other potential leader of Venezuela, who is clearly prepared to do what it takes (suck up to Trump) to get the power to make things better for Venezuelans. Surely better the current dictatorship?