"If you make the tax too high it starts discouraging the behavior you're taxing, which can paradoxically reduce overall tax revenue."
I am generally against more taxes, but the structure of this one is quite good in terms of the incentives. If wealthy people who only live in the city part-time stay in hotels instead of buying second homes, the net effect should be to increase the cost of hotel rooms and reduce the cost of owned-housing. NYC charges nearly 10% tax on hotel stays, so recoups some of the cost there. Having property in your city mostly being occupied by people who live their full time, particularly when property is already very expensive, seems like a good thing overall.
> increase the cost of hotel rooms and reduce the cost of owned-housing
Reducing the cost of $5M+ homes will slightly help some wealthy people who live in NYC, and there will be a modest trickle-down effect into less expensive properties. But I thought the goal was to generate tax revenue from the taxes, which wouldn't happen to the extent they end up in the hands of NYC residents.
EDIT: apparently it hits all homes over $1M, which means it will hit more homes but also won't generate revenue to the extent the homes end up being owned by New Yorkers.
"I thought the goal was to generate tax revenue from the taxes, which wouldn't happen to the extent they end up in the hands of NYC residents."
You're right, I'm saying I think it is a good tax for reasons secondary to revenue. We all know NYC is going to squander the money, at least they might make housing slightly cheaper for the average New Yorker in the process.
And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.
I just had chatgpt draw a table of wealth distribution by year based on best data sources it can find.
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.
>And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history
Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.
I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.
It does! A system which drives indistinguishably different from Waymo 99.999% of the time is L2. You might very well never experience that unlucky 1 mile in 100,000, but if there's 1M Teslas on the road driving a daily average of 33 miles, it's going to happen hundreds of times each day. An L4 system must guarantee that it can come safely to a stop before human intervention is required, and I don't think you can achieve that guarantee by pushing the nines on an L2 system.
If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
I don’t know that there were any promises anyway. But if there were, then an investor could have plausibly believed that that was a better long-term business model.
It’s early days for these LLM hosts, maybe investors could be worried about taking the really annoying business notes before users are properly addicted.
In what way would that be securities fraud? I guess you could get nailed under Section 17(a), but really hard to make a case they're defrauding investors by representing they were going to make ads worse performing than they ended up making them.
In order for it to be securities fraud it has to be tied to a securities transaction and the misstatement has to be material to a reasonable investor's decision.
"Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people."
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in a large general area as proof she committed the crime. Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.
anxiety in the sense you're talking about is a function of private surveillance and in that regard America is much worse. State led surveillance in Chinese public spaces is real and effective in producing compliance (20 years ago public theft, pulling people off motorcycles was a daily occurrence) but in private China is a significantly freer society.
Foucault used to distinguish between models of authority that operate on "make die and let live" vs "let die and make live". China's the former, the US with its moral busybodies both in progressive and religious flavors the latter.
The US now is a society of public disorder and personal policing, China is a society of public order and largely indifference in private life. Of course the former creates anxiety. American Beauty, a film about permanent surveillance without any state, would make no sense in China.
I think it’s a cultural thing. On average, people seem to hate cops more in the USA.
Personally I like having little cop boxes in 5 minute walking distances in Tokyo. There are people who are very against it, bring up bad encounters, but net positive, I would say.
You didn't ask for data... You asked: "In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?"
That requires a specific example, which you were provided with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.
By this same argument ANY police makes life hard for regular people because they sometimes fuck up, so let's just get rid of police too. What's the worst that could happen.
The general sentiment in the thread is that this is too powerful a technology in the hands of unqualified law enforcement. In the same way that I don't trust federal law enforcement in the post-Snowden era, I don't trust local law enforcement with mass surveillance tools.
Luckily we don't have to use the poor as a crutch for this argument. Public camera networks capture everyone sleeping on the sidewalk, regardless of their income level.
Single example is worthless. Is there a pattern of this happening far more often? Overall, do fewer people get incorrectly arrested or detained as a result of this technology, or more.
No, we should build the massive, privately-owned, nationwide surveillance apparatus with taxpayer money! It's for science, after all! We have no data on whether or not cameras covering every square inch of space, hooked up to a centralized surveillance database is actually good for society. We need to conduct this methodologically and scientifically. We'll be able to come to an objective conclusion with enough testing!
That PR article doesn't answer the questions, and raises more:
- Why didn't SPD commission an independent study?
- What kinds of crimes were studied? Is this catching jaywalkers or homicides?
- Only mentions arrests. What about convictions? How are victims receiving justice?
- Where's the data and the reproducible methodology?
- How many people were tracked who didn't commit any crime at all?
There's so much wrong with that article that it's hard to come to any verifiable conclusions about the efficacy of the program. And again, doesn't answer any of the original questions.
They provide law enforcement timely information about the location of wanted (e.g., stolen) vehicles. Law enforcement can act on that information. If law enforcement does not have that information, it cannot act on it.
Law enforcement can act on that information, but they can do a lot of things. Whether they actually are is a different question.
You're also ignoring the risk here. These devices open up a whooooole new class of mistakes that can be made. There have already been people wrongfully jailed due to surveillance technology.
These systems have provided incorrect data, and law enforcement often misuse that data to stalk, attack, and wrongfully arrest innocent people. Privacy matters to everyone - especially for ones who don't care about privacy.
One of the services that is most underfunded is the service of arresting, trying, and incarcerating homeless people who commit petty thefts, vandalism, and in some extreme cases physical assault or even murder. Insofar as cameras drive down the cost to the legal system of gathering enough evidence to convict and incarcerate people who do these things, this would make life better for regular people.
Police officers have on many occasion used these cameras to track people outside of the scope of their jobs. Usually it's a man tracking a woman (like an ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, or just a random stalking target).
1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI, eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
X restricts what you can view without logging in. Many folks don't want to log in to X, for obvious reasons. Posting an xcancel link is kinda like folks posting various `archive` URLs to bypass paywalls, work around overloaded servers, etc. That's an extremely common practice here that usually goes without comment.
I am generally against more taxes, but the structure of this one is quite good in terms of the incentives. If wealthy people who only live in the city part-time stay in hotels instead of buying second homes, the net effect should be to increase the cost of hotel rooms and reduce the cost of owned-housing. NYC charges nearly 10% tax on hotel stays, so recoups some of the cost there. Having property in your city mostly being occupied by people who live their full time, particularly when property is already very expensive, seems like a good thing overall.