I don’t see how addressing this loophole is a bad thing
I think it is a lot of political noise over what is incidental to a country that exists largely as a tax haven and tool of investor expropriation. Do it. Don't do it. You're still a country predicated on money laundering for oligarchs abroad.
Reminds me of the time Vivek Ramaswamy bilked investors for over a billion with a phoney Alzeheimer's drug
he helmed the leadership of Roivant, a multi-billion-dollar American pharmaceutical company he founded, and gallantly relinquished his CEO role in 2021 due to his unwavering stance against ESG principles, despite facing opposition from his liberal workforce. While this narrative might seem appealing, it is akin to the endless "flip-flops" that have plagued his campaign—an elaborate work of fiction that unravels upon a modicum of scrutiny.
Let's start with the basics. Ramaswamy has funded his campaign through the sale of over $32 million in Roivant stock options in February of this year. This could lead one to believe that Roivant, based in Bermuda, is thriving and that Ramaswamy is a great entrepreneur. Except the company reported staggering losses of $1.2 billion in its financial report of March 2023. This isn't a one-time slump: In March 2022, when Ramaswamy was still Roivant's chairman and a major shareholder, the company reported an annual loss of $924.1 million.
Ramaswamy's defenders may argue that Roivant performed better during his tenure as CEO in 2021, but alas, the numbers tell a different story. The reality is that Roivant's finances were abysmal under Ramaswamy's watch. During his tenure in 2019, the company's net operating loss exceeded $530 million. By 2020, the losses had doubled to over $1 billion, accompanied by a 65 percent decline in revenue.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media
Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You're still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You're still securing the URL from a private DNS. You're still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
There's not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP's image's "this is too weird and scary" attitude.
If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting "Communities I'm interested in" on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth "Everyone on . is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!" reactionary in between instances, that's an immediate turn off that I don't think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we're all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).
Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.
Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?
In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.
In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren't pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They're people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you're not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You're seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Wealth in the UK isn't being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.
If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Number of Abandoned Babies in Texas Doubled Over the Last 10 Years
Experts point to a confluence of factors—including the state’s total abortion ban, lacking access to prenatal care and insurance coverage, and concerns about deportation.
...
The outlet stressed that despite the state’s record $32.7 billion budget surplus, lawmakers have declined to invest state funding in awareness campaigns about the state’s safe haven law. This law, like others in states across the country, allows parents to relinquish unharmed newborns up to 60 days old to designated locations, typically attached to fire stations, across the country. Installing these climate-controlled boxes, which also include silent alarms to alert first responders, costs about $20,000 per box.
But state funding has largely been siphoned off to anti-abortion centers, or “crisis pregnancy centers,” across the state. Most of these centers offer no medical services—just disinformation to convince likely abortion seekers to not have the procedure. Texas allocated $165 million to CPCs this fiscal year. In July, ProPublica reported that state funding for CPCs had ballooned from $5 million in 2005 to $140 million this year and that egregious misuse of funds and even alleged fraud were rampant among these organizations.
He's been sold on a fundamentally holistic view of the economy. "This may be uncomfortable now, but I trust it will produce a large national windfall in the future".
It isn't a bad attitude to have on its face. People do need to accept certain short term discomforts in order to achieve long term economic benefits, whether that means working industrial jobs to produce new useful infrastructure or risking personal health/safety in military conflicts to establish national security or curbing consumption to avoid long term ecological harm.
But the mass media this guy is ingesting is bullshit. So the benign "we're investing in the future" perspective is corrupted into a gullible "my local neighborhood wallet inspector is just helping to remove these counterfeit bills from the money supply" political apathy.
He's the victim of an intense, industrial scale propaganda campaign.
Incidentally...
Trump could cut this guy’s nuts off and he’d still find a way to put a positive spin on it
In the Middle Ages and the Ancient era in many places the nobility were seen as also being stewards of the underlings and HAD to make sure they didn’t completely fall into shit.
This strikes me as a touch revanchist.
Middle Ages / Ancient Era nobility operated on a patronage system for their courtiers and military officers, sure. But they obtained the surplus to satisfy the duties of the patrician class by looting and pillaging neighboring city-states or by taxing the working people inside their domain.
Even the original robber barons funded medical research, and built theaters and libraries and other cultural stuff for the society they lived in.
They bought bread and built circuses for the artisan class that they sought to cultivate in their immediate vicinity. But their largesse was very geographically limited. The farther from the center of power you got, the more you suffered and the less you benefited.
Communities on the periphery were as heavily exploited then as they are now. Only the limits of technology kept that frontier relatively close by, with innovations like Roman roadways and early Medieval shipbuilding technologies pushing those frontiers outward.
The Vikings were not funding medical research in Angland. The Romans were not building libraries in the Black Forests along the Danube. The Columbian Era Spanish were not bringing Renaissance art and culture to the Aztecs and Incas or sending over architects to build beautiful stained glass churches in what would be Texas and Florida.
I don’t think even Hitler held the land and the earth and humanity in general with that level of contempt.
The Scorched Earth tactics of the World Wars were pioneered a century earlier. General Custard and King Leopold II absolutely employed wholesale destruction of the agricultural basis of local communities as a means of enslaving or exterminating native people.
The English and Portuguese would employ opium addiction as a means of expanding their empire along the Pacific Rim. The French would make an industry of trapping and killing wild game that wiped whole species out of the New World. Their commercial farming practices in Africa and Southeast Asia would obliterate local biomes for private profit.
This is just more of the same short-term profit oriented expansionism. The machines are bigger and the damage more expansive, but the intent and the incentives are all the same.
His brain has been absolutely broken by online gibberish. But the fundamental material concerns - that debt instruments commoditize our time and labor in a way we should find abhorrent - are reasonable.
I just get the sense that this guy would be happier living in 1970s Yugoslavia - putting his name on the "next car off the factory line" waiting list and following up in two years to travel 50 miles to the factory to pick it up - than he is in the American consumer credit system.
Apple's outsourced just about every other aspect of its business to Chinese tech companies. I don't see why this would be different.
What sets him apart is he is EVIL.
He's an absolute piece of shit. But if you think he stands above Donald Rumsfeld or Steve Bannon or George Shultz or William J. Casey or Samuel Alito on the Evilness Spectrum, you're suffering from profound recency bias.
The history of evil shits running this country goes back a long, long way. Elon's just the latest to claim the mantel. And its safe to say he won't be the last.
What sets him apart is the recklessness and the fecklessness of his actions. He's jamming code updates into a 60 year old system without bothering to bug check them first. Very real possibility he bricks a significant portion of the Treasury software suite before he's done. Prior administrations had an eye towards continuation of careers and legacy of their terms. This administration is treating the term as a Smash-and-Grab, with an eye towards fully expropriating the functions of the federal government to the private sector.
I mean... maybe? The US is ground zero for this aggressive wealth aggregation. But Russia and Germany and India and the Kingdom of Saud and Qatar and even the Evil CCP have a fair share of billionaires. It certainly isn't impossible to do wealth aggregation outside the US. Hong Kong alone has 67 of them.
I gotta say, I disagree. Balkinize Britain. It had 500 years to fuck around. Maybe time to do a bit of Finding Out. Liberate Ireland. Independence for Scotland and Wales. Let London become one of those dystopian Charter Cities, like what they did in Singapore and Hong Kong and Panama and what they're planning for Gaza, and allow the rest of England to wither on the vine.
Then British refugees can flee to Spain and France, where they can reintegrate with the mainland and rejoin modern Europe when they're ready.