Fun fact for you. Modern firearms haven't used black powder for a very long time, that's why when people fire rifles you don't see huge clouds of smoke
There are also many kinds of gunpowder, rifles use different powders to say shotguns or pistols. Although often times shotgun and pistol ammunition uses the same class of powder (slower burn rate iirc)
I don't really care if there is a wealth gap. Even though I'm definitely on the lower income side
What I think we should focus on instead is making sure everyone's base line needs are met. So healthcare (including dental), housing, food, etc. And I don't think you need to tax wealth to do it, rather you'd be better off closing off issues in the current tax system and increasing taxes in the upper brackets For the lower tax brackets you could even implement a negative tax rate to achieve it without having to resort to a blanket system like UBI
By all means suggest something else. It feels like 90% of the time people that are anti capitalism either suggest communism or don't understand that they just want capitalism with tighter regulation What's your suggestion?
They likely make him pledge something as collateral. I doubt they're just giving him unsecured loans just for fun
You want to tax existing assets? How on earth is that supposed to work? You just make people liquidate assets to pay a tax? The idea of taxing an unrealised gain is ridiculous
For the record he is paying 200M in tax on that income. Though I agree 20% is probably too low here, that's up to your govt to fix and isn't a failure of capitalism but of the specific implementation
Actually quite interesting in the case of Ballmer as he was an employee compensated via stock rather than straight up cash
You'd consider that an investment as he was investing his time to be a business manager while being compensated probably less in cash that would be normal for the position
So as early Microsoft didn't have the cash on hand, or didn't want to give up that cash they could use elsewhere they gave equity as compensation
How do you suggest we should remove this situation? Should we not allow compensation in the form of equity? Or should ownership of equity not exist generally?
Good luck moving literally all R&D to universities I guess
I don't think all research should be in private hands. But I don't think it's reasonable to assume we could move businesses to a crowd funding model and then somehow convince universities to do all of that R&D
Do you want to maybe suggest something practical? I'm not particularly interested in the relentless "capitalists are evil" meme. I am interested in hearing about alternatives with merit Also inert? Are these people really sitting on cash? Or are they investing in various parts of the economy?
I'm confused, you want to have people crowd fund R&D to increase the odds a product goes to market. And then expect no profit on the back of that investment? After the potentially huge initial cost does the company then sell the product at cost? Or do they make a profit now?
Can you give an example of a bailout you disagree with? Pretty much all bailouts I'm aware of recoup their costs Also the reason private equity doesn't bail out these companies is that unlike a government they may not be able to weather a significant period where they aren't getting a large cash flow, as they need to stay afloat as well. A government on the other hand is better prepared to recoup costs over time, and will do so if it means that depositors funds are safe. They are much more likely to let a hedge fund just fold as the participants are capable of withstanding such losses
How are you possibly measuring opportunity cost? This is the opportunity. All you can do is use it to buy goods and services or invest via lending in some form
Say you could quantify that and cap profits. What should happen with corporate profits then? After you've "paid" the original investors? Does the owner of the company now reabsorb their shares? And if we instead allocate profits to the workers, do we also allocate losses? Do workers just straight up not get paid if the company loses money one year?
Sorry what's your alternative? I'm guessing communism?
In that system how do you efficiently allocate capital? Do you use a command economy?
I'm not deifying anything, it just seems that capitalism is the most efficient economic system we can come up with. And combined with regulation seems to produce pretty good results, see most of the better parts of Europe for example
You'd need to look at the actual implementation, it's hard to speculate from a tiny amount of data. What game are you referencing?
And as someone who has done multi threaded programming I can tell you that for games it is unlikely that they can just add more cores. You need work that truly can be split up, meaning that each core doesn't needs work to do that doesn't rely on the results from another core
Graphics rendering is easy for this and it's why gpus have a crazy number of cores. But you aren't going to do graphics compute on the cpu