> There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal
There might be a local debate about the legality in the US. But from the outside perspective in terms of international law, there is not much to debate. Unless i missed some UN resolution, the US has no jurisdiction in Venezuela.
I have a hypothesis that we're getting closer to a cultural inflection point (maybe half a decade out). With every year, more important and very high-quality cultural artifacts enter the public domain, while at the same time, many low quality artefacts are produced (... AI slop). It'll be increasingly difficult to choose a good cultural artefict for consumption (e.g., which book to read next or which movie to watch). A very good indicator for quality is time and thus a useful filter.
In some years we could have the following: a netflix-like (legal variant of popcorntime) software system (p2p) that serves high-quality public domain movies, for those who like it, even with AI upscaling or post processing.
The same would also work for books, with this pipeline: Project Gutenberg -> Standard Ebooks. At the inflection point, there would be a steady stream of high-quality formats of high-quality content, enough to satisfy the demand of cultural consumption. You wouldn't need the latest book/movie anymore, except for interest in contemporary stuff.
The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee.
For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
I doubt that this is true except maybe for the top journals. Mid and low tier journals cater to scientists whose main incentive is to publish no matter how while moderately optimizing for impact factor (i.e. readers and citations). This lower quality market is huge. The fact that even top tier publishers have created low-ranking journals that address this market segment using APC-based open-access models shows the alignment between publisher and author interests will not necessarily lead to increasing quality, rather the opposite.
Does anyone actually read articles from those low tier journals? Many of those articles are illegible fluff pieces.
That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument from OP.
For academia's sake I hope you are correct, but my experience of the system leads me to suspect otherwise, though only time will tell.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
Calling a system that is 90% foss and public domain "owned" by anyone is a bit of a stretch. I can, fully legally, download all the text of Wikipedia for about 130gb and host it myself.
Besides, Jimmy Wales is awesome.
It's an oligarchy in reality and Wikimedia was having a discussion a couple of years ago about implementing the SDGs, which come from the UN and not the public (who are barely aware of them.)
It really depends on what exactly you want to bet on and on what timeframe. More short term bet? Puts on the AI companies or an AI ETF. Do you assume that the rest of tech stays up even if AI pops? Then you could short some AI ETF and hedge with long QQQ. (=betting that the AI subset of Nasdaq will underperform relative to the Nasdaq.
That would be a highly bureaucratic solution with significant overheads.
Would everyone pay extra tax per kWh or just AI computers? Tax it on the producer or consumer side?
How would you verify that a particular data center is "bad computation" and needs a different tax rate on its energy usage.
Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
Just big AI datacenters. If this encourages people to run local AI, all the better.
> Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
That's not a gotcha.. those are all policy choices. My personal preference is, yes, of course - medical research today is taxed just fine. If there's lobbying to specifically grant tax benefits to medical research, I can see an exception being carved.
You think multiple localised heat centres are more efficient than centralised managed heat centres. Why don't we all just have a coal-fired power station in our back garden?
> Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income.
I find this argument somewhat unconvincing.
Where is most of the wealth? In hard assets, such as real estate and financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. The former are very difficult to hide, for obvious reasons. As for the latter, the ownership of every single share is recorded in large databases (e.g. DTCC, Clearstream and Euroclear). In that sense, the "physical location" of most of the wealth is well known, so in theory it should really not be difficult to tax it.
The unit of account for tax is the currency of the relevant sovereign. Most contracts for income are denominated in that unit of account, even if it is not there is often a highly liquid market (FX) between units of account.
Most wealth is not stored in assets where the unit of account is that of the sovereign. This counts double for assets with a physical location.
This isn't something that can be easily hand-waived away.
My understanding is that you say that taxing things denominated in a foreign currency is difficult? But why? I already pay taxes on my capital gains denominated in a foreign currency (for example dollars). There are official government exchange rates for tax reasons, published daily. I don't see anything to hand wave here, because there's no problem.
Not parent-poster, but I imagine the most difficult cases involve non-public stocks or non-fungible physical assets. Consider the problem of: "Someone purchased an irreplaceable ancient urn for $1m and put their parents ashes in it, what's that in taxable wealth today?"
It's too easy for people to offer hypothetical prices they'll never have to execute on. You could establish a price by forcing people to sell anything to the highest bidder, but that kinda explodes any conventional idea of property, and now the government is spending all its time running a trillion sketchy auctions while no human has time to do productive work anymore because your neighbor is trying to buy your car for $1 and you need to arrange a more-plausible offer before you lose it.
Apologies, in an attempt to be precise I have used convoluted language.
The point I'm trying to make is that assets such as land are not denominated in any currency and typically end up being held for such large amounts of time with such substantial transaction costs that's there would be a large cost involved in knowing what the value of the thing being taxed is.
If I pay you $100k, £100k or ¥100k we can use spot rates to work out how many € that is within much less than 1%.
If I own a piece of land how would you answer the question, "what should the value for taxation be?"
If you go with the last transaction price then this will have a substantial impact on properties that haven't been sold for a long time and encourage people to enter into transactions that look like sales but aren't (such a 999-year lease).
Leave it up to a government agency to decide and this agency will come under huge pressure to favour one type of activity over another. How do you value land owned by the government? What if that land is privatised? The UK's attempts to deal with this when it privatised BT completely destroyed the fibre to the premises industry in the UK for years.
Financial assets are extremely easy to hide. Set up an international chain of shell companies, foundations, and trusts, install a fake beneficial owner or trustee or two at various points, carve out deductibles for IP and "services", and the ownership becomes completely opaque.
And that's just the legal version.
I know someone who used to work as a business lawyer. She spent years trying to track down the true owners in various cases. At the very least it's an expensive business. And sometimes it just couldn't be done.
Of course governments can cut the knot with physical assets, walk into a building with troops and/or police, and say "This is ours now." Or they can order banks to hand over the money in accounts.
But before they can do that, there has to be some certainty about the owner. And even getting part way there can take a while and cost a lot.
A flat tax on wealth would be extremely easy to enforce. Basically if the bill for an asset doesn't get paid it goes to the government, and the bill is trivial to calculate because it doesn't need the rest of the entity.
If you apply automatic tax on bonds people will just not buy them unless you also increase their returns. It's a pointless exercise.
Same goes for stocks, it's just a bit bigger circle in this case.
Capital gain tax is just a bad tax that distorts decisions and make things less efficient for no reason. It's much better to tax resources (mainly land but also infrastructure usage) and charge for enforcement of IP/patents.
But financial assets do not need physical space, so they can be tied to smaller countries which will be very happy to tax them at a lower rate so they can "steal them" from the original country where they were generated.
You can take your financial assets with you but they're ultimately worthless, they're just a construct that represents something which has real value, like shares of a company: its real estate, inventory, employees, institutional knowledge, and future productive output have real value, your piece of paper doesn't.
Distribution of wealth is about the distribution of real resources, especially control over human labor. And that underlying thing can always be taxed, optimized, or even repurposed to better serve the needs of society.
You can still tax based on the persons residence or citizenship. In the end someone can be attributed to wealth, and if they want to stay where they are physically, they should also tax like it.
That analogy sounds good on the surface, but breaks down quickly. In the context of sport/athletics it's your body doing the work, which is difficult to change without exercise (even with steroids). But for knowledge work, as long as you have access to the llm machine, you can quickly pretend it's your work. For students it can be very deceiving, they type their ideas on a device, one button fixes their spelling, another button "fixes" their wording. The line is very blurry, literally the divider in the UI between these two buttons.
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