Income is money that comes from actually laboring and contributing to society. Wealth tax is tax from sitting on your ass doing nothing.

Also, taxes don’t have to be a flat percentage. Like income tax, a good wealth tax would be progressive. Only wealth beyond a certain amount would be taxed, and the percentages would scale.

This is why we should have income taxes that are as low as possible, but still progressively scaled. We should similarly have a progressive scaling wealth tax, but it should be much harsher than the income tax because we want people to work.

The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.

The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.

For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.

There are many similar human behaviors. Why do people smoke, drink alcohol, eat junk food, avoid exercise, and make all sorts of other harmful choices? Because the pleasure is immediate, and the consequences are not.

Same reason people get sunburned. If the sun burned people immediately, like a hot pan in the kitchen, everyone would use sunblock. But because it burns slowly, people walk themselves right into it.

If there is a button to avoid the pain of homework, to immediately go have fun instead, and there are no immediate consequences, all but the most disciplined, determined, and diligent students will press it. Knowing and acknowledging the future consequences makes no impact on the behavior.

I have had one of these accounts since it was known as Google Apps For Your Domain. It’s the primary Google account for me and several of my friends. We weren’t using it for business then, and we are not using it for business now. I only ever wanted to have a normal consumer free Google account, but I also wanted for me and my friends to be able to use our domain on our email addresses instead of gmail.com. Because of that, we have been trapped in Google Workspaces for twenty years. Such a big mistake. If only I had a time machine to go back and stop myself.

Just last week I got an e-mail that said our still-free Google Workspaces account has been flagged for violating the personal non-commercial use policy. We either have to upgrade to a paid account, have our accounts deleted, or appeal.

Of course I appealed with no expectation of success. There was no way to add any information to the appeal. It was just a button. Yes, I appeal.

The appeal was, unsurprisingly, denied. No explanation. No evidence. Just a flat denial with no further options or information provided.

Do you want to read the policy? The link they give is here:

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/billing/transition-from-a-free-edition

The only policy I can find on that page is the phrase "personal non-commercial use." If anyone has a link to a more detailed explanation of the policy, so that I might find any hints as to how we may have violated it, please let me know.

Now for me and a handful of friends it seems our only option is to pay the absurd price of $7/month per seat for the same exact service we would get from consumer GMail accounts other than the custom domain on our e-mail addresses. At least that’s until we go through the huge effort of doing a bunch of Google takeout and re-imports to somewhere else. Yes, I have automated backups because I have been prepared for this sort of situation. But it’s still going to be a painful migration that I would rather not have to do in the first place.

I know people sometimes post stories like this on HN hoping that a powerful person at the big tech company will notice and come in to fix the situation. I can’t deny, I wouldn’t complain if that happened. But I have no expectations of that. I also don’t like getting special treatment. What I really want is for all users to be treated just as fairly.

Instead of begging for help, what I want is to advocate for a legal remedy. I actually agree that private companies should be able to set almost any usage policy they want for their services and ban anyone at any time for nearly any reason. However, I believe they should have the legal requirement to publish those policies in full. If a user is found in violation of those policies the company should be required to cite exactly which part of the policy was violated. Furthermore, they should be required to produce the evidence that led to their decision.

I also think it would be ideal if they were required to supply a real-human appeals process. But at least if they cite the policy and provide their evidence it would make it easier for users to seek a remedy via the legal system, or by arbitration (if there is a binding arbitration clause).

Lastly, I want to advise and remind everyone. Any time you sign up for any platform you do not control, always be prepared for those accounts to be deleted at any time without warning. That’s why I put the backup process in place a very long time ago. And that is why I stopped signing up for new proprietary platforms. The ones I still use are the last ones I will ever use. However much the hassle is to setup self-hosting, I promise you, it is a lot less painful than being forced to escape a proprietary platform when it inevitably boots you out or shuts down.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695419

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.

Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.

We have already learned our lesson. Prohibition doesn’t work. But advertising does work. Banning advertising also works. We should allow people the freedom to participate in vice, but ban all advertising for it. Anything harmful to society should not be advertised. No ads for cars, guns, recreational drugs including alcohol, unhealthy food, fossil fuels, or gambling.

Who knows what comes next Kai? Hopefully everything.

I don’t need a new browser. I don’t need a replacement for Google Maps, since Google Maps is actually good and Kagi will never even catch up to Apple Maps. I don’t need any AI trash.

Just have everybody work on the search engine to make it is faster, more reliable, and free of content farms or slop. That is the only reason I’m paying for Kagi.

Any of these problems could force a person to resort to using their speaker instead of headphones. But if we had standard heapdhone jacks like the old days, there would be far fewer excuses.

It also doesn’t help that it’s been a very long time since phones came with headphones included.

I would guess some people will say traffic is down because people are using LLMs to get news and are not reading news sites anymore.

My hypothesis is that all these tech sites are writing about are LLMs. People are sick and tired of reading about that, so they are not going to those sites anymore.