Another thing that gets lost is that there are a few layers between Jeff and Elon and the rank-and-file. If everyone paid their fair share it'd be a lot less likely that every world-class city has 10% of its real estate locked up in pied-a-terres. The ability to dodge taxes really kicks in at mid 8 figures, not billions.
You realize that Elon and Bezos are stealing from you when you invest and get taxed at 50% marginal, right? They certainly don't pay anywhere near that. The trick they play on you is by lumping you in with them in spirit (hard working go-getters) whereas by actual buying power you're closer to the homeless guy panhandling on the street.
On that note why are the ultra-rich so dead-set on avoiding estate taxation? Shouldn't their children be responsible for growing their own billions when their inheritance takes a 50% haircut?
You don't have to wheel out the boogeyman of communism. The distribution of wealth in this country allows a person to have 1 MILLION TIMES the spending power of somebody who drives a bus, puts out fires or stitches up wounds. Crucially, the distribution is only getting worse.
I find the comment on the role of the government not being ensuring equality of outcomes especially laughable, because it is precisely that government that's been subverted to make the distribution more skewed. I guess the ruling class disagrees with you?
The standard of life you get is one you can afford. GDP PPI does a better job of capturing this than GDP, but better yet look at how long people live. The best raw GDP is gotten when you drive your working class until they collapse and die and thus is a shitty metric for measuring quality of life unless that means the ability to acquire globally manufactured trinkets to you.
Americans have homes roughly twice as big as European homes, and a far higher percentage of Americans are homeowners than Europeans. Home ownership rates are within a few percent of each other too.
At far, far, far lower rates than in the city, so I really don't know what argument you thought you just made.
I live in the countryside. In 2018 our small neighboring town of about 13k residents had their first murder since 1965, and none since. That works out to about 0.12 homicides per 100,000 residents annually. By comparison, Baltimore has 22 per 100,000 annually.
And which do you think is which? Whatever the "intent" of either the US or EU economies, the US has produced far greater wealth and material prosperity for its citizens than Europe has for its citizens.
Material prosperity. Euros don't have the newest iPhones, 3 row SUVs or a gas dryer that gets your load of laundry crispy in 30 minutes flat. They have third spaces, public transit that actually covers cities/intra-city transport and in southern countries actual food (for now).
Nope, even adjusting for health care costs the average American is still roughly 20-40% richer than the average European. This may come as a shock to you, but roughly 20% of Americans are on Medicaid, our state-sponsored healthcare insurance. America does actually provide healthcare for its poorest citizens.
When I run the calculations and take vacation, health, education for the median person they are close to similar.
But these calculations does not take into consideration: less noisy cities, walkable neighborhoods, longer life expectancy, higher quality food, better workers protections, education, etc.
An honest study would need to include the value of the commons.
> roughly 20-40% richer
This is likely wrong. Americans have better purchasing power, but are not necessarily richer.
In fact, America's wealth (and our fairly generous welfare programs, despite what Europeans might think) actually enables the massive obesity rates we have, which is one of the main reasons we have lower life expectancies. If Europeans were richer they'd likely be eating themselves to death more like we do (though cultural and other factors play a role too).
You don't think Europeans can afford to eat the cheap crap that makes one fat? Healthy food is expensive, garbage food is cheap. Obesity is a poverty problem in the whole western world.
No it must be that Europeans can't afford corn fed omega-6 beef, corn syrup water and baked extruded corn mush coated in MSG so they have to get by eating real bread, tomatoes and ham.
Literally next door. Maybe one other building between Autodesk and the Bay Model.
When I started in 1990, most of engineering at Autodesk was in 2320 and 2330 Marinship Way in Sausalito. Later I moved down the street across from Mollie Stone in 3 Harbor. The infamous every-Friday "Beer Bust" was in 1 Harbor during those years.
Ted Nelson had a house boat not far way, too. Wild times.
A few years later we moved up to the new HQ on McInnis Parkway in San Rafael. We also had several buildings on Civic Center Drive and several floors of 4000 on top of the hill. I think I had an office in all of those at one time or another except the HQ building -- I managed to escape that and the new fangled "open office space" they put in that one.
The real question is would a Godzilla incursion be good for property values (novelty, tourism attraction, remove some housing stock) or decimate them (safety concerns, change the spirit of neighborhoods).
Having amazing foundational technology that gets wrapped into subpar products has been Google's standard operating procedure for a long time. That being said, it's not clear that proprietary harnesses are going to be any kind of moat. For OAI and Ant, these are marketing vehicles that need to be good if the 1T+ valuation are to be justified given how easy it is to swap out inference.
US manufacturers' niche is half-ton and above trucks. Even mighty Toyota's offering is playing distant #4 in that market with Nissan capitulating after 20 years of trying.
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