Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil),

I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.

That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.

You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market.

That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.

Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.

Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.

My problem with this take is that you forget, the corporations are made up of people, so in order for the corporation to be evil you have to take into account the aggregate desires and decision making of the employees and shareholders and, frankly, call them all evil. Calling them evil is kind of a silly thing to do anyway, but you can not divorce the actions of a company from those who run and support it, and I would argue you can't divorce those actions from those who buy the products the company puts out either.

So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products?

I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything.

With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.

The bait-and-switch model is absolutely amazing as well. Start by offering a service covered with ads. Then add paid tier to get rid of ads. Next add tier with payment and ads. And finally add ads back to every possible tier. Not to forget about keeping them in content all the time.

> Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.

I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.

We're talking about corporations here, where are they going to go? If you had a competent government, you would say "fine, then leave. But your wealth and business is staying here" at some point the government has to do its job. These corporations pull in trillions of dollars, its wild to me to suggest that suddenly everyone would stop working and making money because they were taxed at a progressive rate. Its an absurd assumption to begin with.

We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.

And the middle ground is to only enforce it on corporations in exchange for the protections given to the owners.

Want to make more? then take personal risk.

> made up of people

People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power.

Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance.

The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.

I don't really agree with some of your assumptions. At many companies, many of the people also are evil. Many people who hold shares and public office are also evil.

I don't think it's necessary to conclude that because a company is evil then everyone who works at the company is evil. But it's sort of like the evilness of the company is a weighted function of the evilness of the people who control it. Someone with a small role may be relatively good while the company overall can still be evil. Someone who merely uses the company's products is even more removed from the company's own level of evil. If the company is evil it usually means there is some relatively small group of people in control of it making evil decisions.

Now, I'm using phraseology here like "is evil" as a shorthand for "takes actions that are evil". The overall level of evilness or goodness of a person is an aggregate of their actions. So a person who works for an evil company or buys an evil company's products "is evil", but only insofar as they do so. I don't think this is even particularly controversial, except insofar as people may prefer alternative terms like "immoral" or "unethical" rather than "evil". It's clear people disagree about which acts or companies are evil, but I think relatively few people view all association with all companies totally neutrally.

I do agree with you that taking personal responsibility is a good step. And, I mean, I think people do that too. All kinds of people avoid buying from certain companies, or buy SRI funds or whatever, for various ethically-based reasons.

However, I don't entirely agree with the view that says it's useless or hypocritical to claim that reform is necessary unless you are going to "do something". Yes, on some level we need to "do something", but saying that something needs to be done is itself doing something. I think the idea that change has to be preceded or built from "saintly" grassroots actions is a pernicious myth that demotivates people from seeking large-scale change. My slogan for this is "Big problems require big solutions".

This means that it's unhelpful to say that, e.g., everyone who wants regulation of activities that Company X does has to first purge themselves of all association with Company X. In many cases a system arises which makes such purges difficult or impossible. As an extreme, if someone lives in an area with few places to get food, they may be forced to patronize a grocery store even if they know that company is evil. Part of "big solutions" means replacing the bad ways of doing things with new things, rather than saying that we first have to get rid of the bad things to get some kind of clean slate before we can build new good things.

"the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating"

Sounds like the effort needed for bonuses here in the US. Why try if the amount is largely arbitrary and generally lower than your base salary pay rate when you consider all the extra hours. Everything is a sham.

Norway is Saudi Arabia with snow.

Their entire economy and society are structured around oil extraction.

There are no lessons to learn from Norway unless you live somewhere that oil does from the ground.

You could use this logic to posit that any government, group, system, nation state, militia, business, or otherwise, isn't "evil" because you haven't gauged the thoughts, feelings and actions of every single person who comprises that system. Thats absurd.

If using AI and other technology to uphold a surveillance state, wage war, do imperialism, and do genocide... isn't evil, than I don't know if you can call anything evil.

And the entire point of taxes is that we all collectively decide that we all would be better off if we pooled our labor and resources together so that we can have things like a basic education, healthcare, roads, police, bridges that don't collapse etc.. Politicians and corporations have directly broken and abused this social contract in a multitude of ways, one of those ways is using loopholes to not pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else by a large margin... another way is paying off politicians and lobbying so that those loopholes never get closed, and in fact, the opposite happens. So yes, taxing Google and other mega-corporations is a single, easily identifiable, action that can be directly taken to remedy this problem. Though, there is no way around solving the core issue at hand, but people have to be able to identify that issue foremost.

Great, so we only want the real high risk takers, the top gamblers,to play in the big league. Those who are so rich they no way to lose their personal comfort and are blind to the personal risk - and probably are careless about anyone's else just as well

You'd never figure out who was "evil" because it's just based on your own interpretation of what evil is. Unless of course you want to join me as a moral objectivist? I don't think Google doing military work with the US government is evil. On the other and I think the influence and destruction caused by advertising algorithms is. Who gets to decide what is evil?

I take issue with "don't blame the employees". You need people to run these organizations. If you consider the organization to be evil you don't get to then say well the people who are making the thing run aren't evil, they're just following orders or they don't know better. BS. And they'd be replaced if they left? Is that really the best argument we have against "being evil"?

Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it! And all that says anyway is that those replacing those who leave are just evil too.

If you work at one of these companies or buy their products and you literally think they are evil you are either lying to yourself, or actively being complicit in their evil actions. There's just no way around that.

Take personal responsibility. Make tough decisions. Stop abstracting your problems away.

> the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating

This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system.

Regarding Norway, taxes aren't in the same ballpark as in some US blue states.

Also, it's a very simplistic view to think that people are only motivated by money. Counter examples abound.

If your defense is trying to argue about what’s evil, you’ve already lost.

Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil. What’s “possible” expands based on your morality it doesn’t contract. If being polite makes a sale you’re going to find a lot of polite sales people, but how much are they willing to push that expended warrantee?

> Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it!

I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…

By definition we can never know for sure, but I believe the number of people who stay silent is many times bigger than those who voice their opinion. They've learned it is unproductive (as you say) or worst case, you're told you've got it all wrong technically speaking.

Complaining is not unproductive, it signals to others they are not alone in their frustrations. Imagine that nobody ever responds or airs their frustrations; would you feel comfortable saying something about it? Maybe you're the only one, better keep quiet then. Or how do you find people who share your frustrations with whom you could organise some kind of pushback?

If I was "this government", I would love for people to shut up and just do their job, pay taxes and buy products (you don't have to buy them from megacorp, just spend it and oh yeah, goodluck finding places to buy products from non-megacorps).

Don't we have that already? Bootstrapped startups with the founders money on the line typically don't play in the 'big league's till way after the founder is at risk..

Don't forget get your stock on and index that almost all retirement funds are required to put money into every month versus the old school stock market where it was a market not a cable bill (you have to pay for the whole bundle if you want it or not).

My point was that complaining isn't enough and in my experience most people just complain but don't even take the smallest action in line with their views because it inconveniences them. Instead they lull themselves to sleep that something was done because they complained about it, and there's no need to adjust anything in their lives because they "did all they can do".

Instead of taking action they complain, set up an abstract boogeyman to take down, and then nobody can actually take action to make the world better (based on their point of view) because there's nothing anyone can do about Google the evil corporation because it's just some legal fiction. Bonus points for moralizing on the Internet and getting likes to feel even better about not doing anything.

But you can do something. If someone thinks Google is evil they can stop using Gmail or other Google products and services, or even just reduce their usage - maybe you can switch email providers but you only have one good map option. Ok at least you did a little more than you did previously.

> Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil.

Depends on the considerations and what you consider to be evil. My point wasn't to argue about what's evil, of course there is probably a few hundred years of philosophy to overcome in that discussion, but to point out that if you truly think an organization is evil it's not useful to only care about the legal fiction or the CEO or the board that you won't have any impact on - you have to blame the workers who make the evil possible too, and stop using the products. Otherwise you're just deceiving yourself into feeling like you are doing something.

Again, you say that as if I am using the products of companies I consider evil.

The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.

I don’t assume people need to be evil to work at such companies because I don’t assume they notice the same things I do.

I was writing about the general case. I apologize if that wasn't clear from the start. I don't know anything about you personally though I'm sure we'd have some great conversations over a glass of wine (or coffee or whatever :) )!

> The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.

This seems to be very common behavior in my experience. Perhaps the rhetoric doesn't match the true beliefs. I'm not sure.

It's easy to set up an IRA where you can trade individual securities instead of index funds if that's what you want. Most people aren't competent traders and will underperform the index funds.

Ahh ok, sorry for misunderstanding you.

It's my fault. Sometimes I'm not very clear.

Which industry? Bonuses in the tech industry tend to be somewhat arbitrary and thus ineffective for motivating employees. Bonuses in other industries like trading or investment banking tend to be larger (sometimes more than base salary) and directly tied to individual performance and so they're highly effective at motivating ambitious employees.

Increasing marginal income tax rates on highly compensated employees might be a good policy overall. But where are we on the Laffer curve? If we go too far then it really hurts the overall economy.

Higher taxes is the wrong solution to the very valid problem.

We all recognize that a democracy is the correct method for political decision making, even though it's also obvious that theoretically a truly benevolent dictator can make better decisions than an elected parliament but in practice such dictators don't really exist.

The same reasoning applies to economic decision making at society level. If you want a society whose economics reflects the will and ethics of the people, and which serves for the benefit of normal people, the obvious thing is the democratize economic decision making. That means that all large corporations must be mostly owned by their workers in roughly 1/N fashion, not by a small class of shareholders. This is the obvious correct solution, because it solves the underlying problem, not paper of the symptoms like taxation. If shareholder owned corporations are extracting wealth from workers or doing unethical things, the obvious solution is to take away their control.

Obviously, some workers will still make their own corporations do evil things, but at least it will be collective responsibility, not forced upon them by others.

If you have ever seen the prank interview between Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, "Do you wear wigs? Have you worn wigs? Will you wear wigs?" and Elijah breaks down laughing in total shock at how hilariously bad the interview is...

...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)

Historically, unchecked corporate power tends to mirror the flaws of the systems that enable it. For example, the Gilded Age robber barons exploited weak regulations, while tech giants thrive on data privacy gray areas. Maybe the problem isn’t size itself, but the lack of guardrails that scale with corporate influence (e.g., antitrust enforcement, environmental accountability, or worker protections), but what do I know!

I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.

corporations, separate from the people in them, are set up in a way that incentivizes bad behaviour, based on which stake holders are considered and when, along with what mechanisms result in rewards and which ones get you kicked out.

the architecture of the system is imperfect and creates bad results for people.

Advertising is just the surface layer—the excuse. Digital ads rely on collecting as much personal data as possible, but that data is the real prize. This creates a natural partnership with intelligence agencies: they may not legally collect the data themselves, but they can certainly buy access.

This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.

That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.

I prefer the angle that describes this as a shift from value production to value extraction. Value production means coming up with new goods or services, or new/better ways to make existing ones. Value extraction means looking at existing economic exchanges, and figuring out how to get X percent of some of them.

> This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system

Not a cliché - a fact. I'll explain to you.

The incentive structure of progressive taxation is wrong: it only works for the few percent that are extremely money hungry: the few that are willing to work for lower and lower percentage gains.

Normal people say "enough" and they give up once they have the nice house and a few toys (and some retirement money with luck). In New Zealand that is something like USD1.5 million.

I'm on a marginal rate of 39% in New Zealand. I am well off but I literally am not motivated to try and earn anything extra because the return is not enough for the extra effort or risk involved. No serial entrepreneurship for me because it only has downside risk. If I invest and win then 39%+ is taken as tax, but even worse is that if I lose then I can't claim my time back. Even financial losses only claw back against future income: and my taxable income could move to $0 due to COVID-level-event and so my financial risk is more than what it might naively appear.

Taxation systems do not fairly reward for risk. Especially watch people with no money taking high risks and pay no insurance because the worst that can happen to them is bankruptcy.

New Zealand loses because the incentive structure for a founder is broken. We are an island so the incentive structure should revolve around bringing in overseas income (presuming the income is spent within NZ). Every marginal dollar brought into the economy helps all citizens and the government.

The incentives were even worse when I was working but was trying to found a company. I needed to invest time, which had the opportunity cost of the wages I wouldn't get as a developer (significant risk that can't be hedged and can't be claimed against tax). 9 times out of 10 a founder wins approximately $0: so expected return needs to be > 10x. A VC fund needs something like > 30x return from the 1 or 2 winning investments. I helped found a successful business but high taxation has meant I haven't reached my 30x yet - chances are I'll be dead before I get a fair return for my risk. I'm not sure I've even reached 10x given I don't know the counterfactual of what my employee income would have become. This is for a business earning good export income.

Incentive structures matter - we understand that for employees - however few governments seem to understand that for businesses.

Most people are absolutely ignorant of even basic economics. The underlying drive is the wish to take from those that have more than them. We call it the tall poppy syndrome down here.

(reëdited to add clarity)

As scale grows the moral ambiguity does also. Megacorps default to “evil” because action in a large number of circumstances for a large number of events does as well, particularly when economic factors are motivating behavior (implicitly or explicitly). Essentially being “non-evil” becomes more expensive than the value it adds. There is always someone on the other end of a transaction, by definition.

To quote the email from Hulu that recently dropped into my inbox:

> We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers.

So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.

A large corporation is more than the sum of its owners and employees, though. Large organizations in general have an emergent phenomenon - past a certain threshold, they have a "mind of it own", so to speak, which - yes - still consists of individual actions of people making the organization, but those people are no longer acting as they normally would. They get influenced by corporate culture, or fall in line because they are conditioned to socially conform, or follow the (morally repugnant) rule book because otherwise they will be punished etc. It's almost as if it was a primitive brain with people as neurons, forced into configurations that, above all, are designed to perpetuate its own existence.

Agreed, I think part of it boils down to the concept of 'limited liability' itself which is a euphemism for 'the right to carry out some degree of evil without consequence.'

Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company.

Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities.

A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'.

The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.

> amorality

That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies.

I don't like it.

Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]?

What if coined the word "alegal"?

Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal "

[0] https://edrls.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a-moral/

It was always a game of maximizing captured value. In such a game, creating value and capturing some portion of what you're producing is far less effective than value extraction, moving value around such that it's you capturing it, not someone else. A market, then, will by default encourage the latter strategy over the former. However, if the society in charge of a market observes value extraction occurring, it can respond by outlawing the particular extraction strategy being employed, and punish the parties participating. Then, for some time, market participants will turn to producing value instead, making more humble profits, until another avenue for extraction becomes available and quickly becomes the dominant strategy again. This cycle continues until the market eats the forces that would seek to regulate it and reign in extractive practices. That is what we're seeing here, at least in the US there is basically no political will behind identifying and punishing any new forms of harmful behavior, and we barely enforce existing laws regarding eg monopolies. Common wisdom among neoliberals and conservatives both is that big companies are good for the economy, and it's best to tread lightly in terms of regulating their behaviors, lest we interrupt their important value production process. One wonders if there are perhaps financial incentives to be so pro-corporate.

I would argue that since the dawn of capitalism (whenever you place that), there have been moral structures in place to promote value production and stigmatize value extraction. The precise balance between the two moral verdicts changes back and forth over time. In the USA in the 21st century we seem to have entered a period where the promotion of value production is unusually low and simultaneously the stigmatization of value extraction has dropped close to zero.

Some one has to pay for those Ads.

That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.

So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.

Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.

Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia has to have a special room in their HQ that's available 24/7 to some goverment officials. Men in black come and go as they please, and while what is actually happening in that room remains a mystery, they can tap straight to the system from within with no restrictions or traceability.

Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.

Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.

PRISM [1] is the best evidence of how short-lived most people's memories are. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook were the first 4 members. It makes it pretty funny when companies like Apple (who also joined more than a decade ago) speak about trying to defend customer's privacy against government intrusion. There's so much completely cynical corporate LARPing for PR.

And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

Hardly per capita they export similar amounts of petroleum products, but Norway’s GDP is 80k/person vs 30k/person in Saudi Arabia. Norway exports slightly more/person but their production costs are significantly higher which offsets it.

The difference is Norway’s economy being far less dependent on petroleum which is only 40% of their exports.

This goes back to the release of the no-ads Hulu plan. Due at the time to fun shenanigans and weirdness around the exact licensing deals for a few shows. (At least one of those shows is VERY long-running now https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ad... - not sure if there have been any new ones through the years or currently )

I'm also on the 39% marginal income tax rate in New Zealand. That income tax rate isn't the problem. Keeping $60K out of every $100K extra salary I make is plenty of motivation to work harder to make the extra $100K... especially because the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.

The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company, so I don't understand that part of your story. The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax, and NZ has a very light capital gains regime.

I have started my own company and I do agree that there are some issues that could be addressed. For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.

But NZ's tax rates are lower than Australia and the USA and most comparable nations, and NZers start a lot of businesses, so I don't think that is one of our major problems at the moment.

Nice story, but…

> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia

See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert

> Keeping $60K out of every $100K extra salary I make is plenty of motivation to work harder

That's good that it motivates you. It doesn't motivate me any more. I'm not interested in "investing" more time for the reasons I have said.

> the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.

I'm pleased for you. I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.

> The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company

I am just less positive than you: it feels like win you lose, lose you lose bigger. I'm just pointing out that our government talks about supporting businesses but I've seen the waste from the repetitive attempts to monetise our scientific academics.

> The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax

Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?

> NZ has a very light capital gains regime

Which requires you to sell your company to receive the benefits of the lack of CGT. So every successful business in NZ is incentivised to sell. NZ sells it's jewels. Because keeping a company means paying income tax every year. NZ is fucking itself by selling anything profitable - usually to foreign buyers.

The one big ticket item I would like to save for is my retirement fund. But Labour/Greens want to take 50% to 100% of capital if you have over 2 million. A bullshit low amount drawdown at 4% is $80k/annum before tax LOL. Say investments go up by 6% per year and you want to withdraw 4%. Then a 2% tax is 100% of your gains. Plus I'm certain they will introduce means testing for super before I am eligible. And younger people are even more fucked IMHO. The reality is I need to plan to pay for the vast majority of my own costs when I retire, but I get to pay to support everybody else. I believe in socialist health care and helping our elderly, but the country is slowly going broke and I can't do much about that. I believe that our government will take whatever I have carefully saved - often to pay for people that were not careful (My peer-group is not wealthy so I see the good and the bad of how our taxes are spent). Why should I try to earn more to save?

This doesn’t make sense to me. Ads on the main networks are sold by auction. Price pumping is built into the system.

All the more ironic nowadays because the most popular politicians are the highest value extractors who moved the value production overseas, leaving the now jobless voters angry instead with... immigrants/lgbtqa+/other races/other religions, who basically had no saying and no role in the above move.

are they talking about trailers?

> It doesn't motivate me any more.

I find it hard to understand how $60K means no motivation but $100K would be highly motivating.

> I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.

You said later that you care about the public health system and helping the elderly. That's where a large percentage of our taxes go.

> Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?

No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business. I agree with you that it's a problem our businesses often sell out to overseas interests who hollow out the company. But the general pattern of making most of your money by selling shares in the business is completely normal worldwide.

> being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior

Even megacorps will do categorically good things if it helps their bottom line.

> Great, so we only want the real high risk takers, the top gamblers,to play in the big league

It either takes risk of private capital or future taxpayers' taxes to create big leagues. I'd take the former over the latter.

The alternative is to make consumption the will of the people, so people buy things they want, and from vendors they like.

I think "this isn't free; you pay with ad views and your data is sold" is something that should be on a price tag on services that operate this way, though. It doesn't work if the price isn't clearly advertised.

> This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system.

This ad hominem stuff is very out of place. Why not solely engage with the argument?

> but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.

One of the second order consequences of progressive taxation is that it increases gross wages for higher earners, as people care about their net pay being larger, not their gross pay.

An extreme example, in the UK the tax rate is an effective 60% between £100k and £120k (ish), so people's salaries get driven through that zone quickly. This obviously means there's less money to give to other people.

> I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…

This sort of discussion gets a bit tricky because it often turns out one person is not having a discussion; they're trying to advertise something about themselves.

Licenses == Rent

That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".

Elbonia? How much mud did the men in black have to wade through to get to the secret room?

Corporations are totalitarian systems. Just because the dictatorship has people, doesn't indicate anything about it.

I’ve seen a lot of people in European countries and former European colonies decry the high tax rate as a reason for low entrepreneurship and just accepted it as a good enough reason but looking at the numbers and the reasoning specifically here made me start questioning things.

The marginal rate in NZ is 39%!? That’s LOWER than in California, the land of “serial entrepreneurship”, for anyone with a successful startup. Not to mention the US tax rate doesn’t include a myriad of other small taxes that for some reason are not included in that number. On top of having a higher tax rate the average Californian entrepreneur also has to source extremely expensive healthcare.

It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.

Oh, it has been that way with Hulu for at least a decade. Source: I paid money for their OG “ad-free” tier back in the day, only to end up seeing ads.

Perhaps "loss aversion" is important to me: I'm not a spherically rational Homo economicus.

Our society mostly works because of our non-monetary rewards, not because of monetary incentives. My teaching and nursing friends work for their own satisfaction, and more money is not a high priority to them.

I am not particularly motivated by money. I suspect you are a businessperson that believes money is strongly motivating? I chased financial success for 15 years when I started from $0: however I now hope I have enough and I hope it won't be unfairly taken from me. Yes, money was a big incentive then (and my personal costs have been very high), but now I have other goals.

I suspect I psychologically find high marginal taxation demotivating (48% if we include GST). Maybe because I have too many acquaintances and family sucking at the government tit. I see where government money goes because I have a wide variety of acquaintances including retirees, elderly, unhealthy, and unemployed. Yeah, I know they are not living the high life (well, maybe my drug-abusing anti-social acquaintances think they are).

> No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business

Which requires an intense amount of work, and sometimes a significant loss, and usually requires selling 100%... Why should I sell at 4x earnings when I can hold on to the business - even if I don't want it? Taxation has too much influence on my investments because rebalancing across other investments has too high a cost/risk.

I guess I'm an idealist. I believe in startups, and I believe they help all New Zealanders. But the incentives of our taxation system mean that founding a startup is foolish: I don't recommend to anyone that they should be a founder (even though I have won the gamble). The unrecoverable costs of anything but spectacular success are too high. The non-monetary rewards are poor in my experience. The expected median return for a startup founder is about $0. Our social systems and taxation systems need to encourage business inception and growth so that all of NZ can be better off.

Thank you for your questions. It is always good to be asked why!

Arrr matey climb aboard yer don't need Hulu where we're going

Mentioning "myriad of other small taxes" in California just shows your unbalanced bias: NZ has a myriad of other costs that California doesn't.

Sales tax 15%, 91 petrol USD5.34/gallon, means testing for many things, no tax friendly retirement savings (IRAs/ROTHs whatever). Auckland housing is less affordable than San Francisco https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...

I pay for private healthcare insurance because I want better outcomes than waiting for years to get urgent surgery. I have seen loved ones literally killed by our healthcare system (unnecessary death - not just normal risks of medicine). Our public health system is good when it works but it has some sharp edges. Although I assume poor NZers are better off than poor Californians for heathcare access.

> It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.

I am telling you that it demotivates me. We don't always know why we think things and I don't have to be perfectly rational. You might be right, but calling it an excuse is extremely rude.

We judge morality when there’s some meaningful downside and people at their worst, because a little unpleasantness can dramatically outweigh a lot of nice behavior.

“I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”

I’m not really judging other people here. I remember working on a project and realizing I was one of those cogs keeping ICBM’s operating and it really just hit home.

Not thinking anything about who you’re working for is just kind of the default. However, IMO if you do feel something is wrong then that’s when the obligation to carry through comes in.

Right! I was going to say something like that. Google is in all honesty, corrupt. Then again, most big corporations are this way. Google and Microsoft seem to be a bit more than others, though.

Yes that's definitely newspeak! It's also the reason why I run adblock. It's gotten me in trouble a few times with streaming services, they don't love it. I still run it.

It's been happening since the invention of the internet. Wait, probably because that's where it came from. OK OK not the web itself, but first there was ARPANET.

> For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.

Hard to avoid cheaters.

A policy could be that the government could pay for 2 years of current salary and you only get one chance per person -- however I can't imagine how the government could get that into the budget.

The policy I implied is be to reward winners with a tax break to offset their risk. Difficult to sell to any voters that don't understand risk/reward or voters that believe business owners are greedy worthless bâtards.

Ha: if the business fails you lose money (the wages you didn't receive), and if the business wins you are taxed: "Privatise the losses, socialise the gains" ;)

Being pushed in front of a bus would be rather unpleasant.

Magagagia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...

(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,

mandatory to be installed by law,

just in case,

for some random chase.)

Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,

where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .

( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )

What are the odds?

I don't think it's the default. Lots of people think about what they do, in my experience. If you think ICBMs are purely bad, fair enough, but I imagine lots of people believe they - particularly when not fired - perform a vital defensive service, and are worth working on for that reason.

Those people are full of shit. I'm Norwegian and a software engineer. Income tax generally tops out at about 46%, if you earn $200k you'll pay around 40%, at $500k you'll pay like 46% or so and it doesnt go much higher than that even if you earn a million dollars (10 million nok).

So the difference between earning a decent salary of $80-100k and a great salary north of $150k isn't much tax-percent-wise. If you make another $1000 you take home about $500.

Also keep in mind we don't have to pay for health insurance, we don't have to pay for our kids to go to school, if we get sick and can't work we have a social security net that will take care of us indefinitely. Norway is a great place to live. The people who complain about taxes are idiots who don't know how good they have it. If you make $200k+ you're living a fucking great life, if you make $400k it's even better. Hell i used to make like $35k and I got by on that. $50k is perfectly liveable. And those people pay like 20-25%.

I'm happy to pay taxes, I'm doing great and I don't even earn that much yet. I expect to nearly double my salary within the next 5ish years. Maybe more than double.

Then you have middle class+ Norwegians with a big house, $100k+ car, sweet boat, cabin in the mountains etc complaining about taxes. Man shut up you're literally top .1% in the world you won the damn lottery.

And I prefer cold committee who measure risk and are committed to some public values. You choose silicone valley, VCs and no public healthcare. I prefer the Norwegian model.

It's a voluntary totalitarian system though - you don't have to work at (insert company you think is evil) so your comparison falls short.

It works great when the innovation happens elsewhere and is freely shared.

What do you use that blocks ads from streaming services? I’ve had no luck.

A choice between a totalitarian system or starvation is not a choice.

Right now, I use adGuard. Any adblocker such as uBlock origin should do this. However they tend to ban uBlock origin, because it's widely known. Or at least when they go after adblock, they go after that one first.

Oh on a browser client - yes that makes sense. I made a bad assumption that you managed to block them on streaming devices like roku or apple tv.

Not yet, lol! I like to use my computer for everything still, hah.