Yet he’s taking DoD money for Starlink in Ukraine. At what point do his antics turn from the craziness of a billionaire to espionage and being deemed a Russian asset?
Musk openly stated that he spoke directly with Putin after the Ukraine invasion had started. The super wealthy have no loyalties and will sell anyone and anything to the highest bidder. I’ve said it before, every penny after $1 billion needs to be taxed at 100%. Time to reign in the oligarchs.
But then who would create the underpaying jobs?!
The state love making those, I wouldn’t worryy
Funny how that (along extreme wealth inequality and the destabilizing effects therein) could be improved by taxing billionaires.
Is that just liquid assets, or do you also want to tax them on stock they own in companies?
Honestly I don’t know. It’s really more the sentiment that I’m expressing. I’m aware that the wealthy are very good at playing shell games. No measures would catch everything.
You can definitely tax the hell out of dividends and sales. They are free to hold as many imaginary value tokens as they like, but the second they try to convert those tokens into actual currency, that should be heavily taxed. This goes for stock as well as cryptocurrency/NFTs.
They use loans currently to get cash against their assets.
Where do they get the money to pay off those loans?
There are lots of ways to sell assets in specific scenarios to reduce tax burden or eliminate the tax rate to 0%. For example, a billionaire can take a loan and pay the interest only for years. Then in a year with losses on investments then can sell some assets to pay off the loan and pay no taxes.
Except if the money they are using to pay the interest and the money received from the sale of those assets is taxed appropriately. Interest on business loans should not be deductible, nor should investment losses. The government is not responsible for their poor business decisions. Of course, there can be delineations for investment loss write-offs based on total gross income from all sources. A small business owner or an individual that holds an investment account with an AGI under $1million or so would reasonably still have access to such write-offs or deductions, but anything over that $1million per year is free game, losses or not.
Agree in principle but the ultra wealthy would simply find new creative ways to hide their income.
Do not let perfect get in the way of good.
Your reasoning here is irrational, and frequently repeated by many.
“They will find another way, why even try! Gosh!”
Okay, then we’ll block that way, and the next, and the next, and the next.
This is iterative development and is how the whole world works. I cannot grasp why so many people have this defeatist attitude toward resolving problems.
Yeah any system that involves humans will require maintenance and adjustments by humans. Because humans always find a way to fuck things up. There’s this weird compulsion to demand a system that can’t be fucked up by humans. But it’s not possible. Also it’s not necessary… if a system involves humans it means there’s humans around to do the necessary maintenance and adjustments to that system.
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Suggestions have tried and failed numerous times. An easy example is closing loopholes in taxes. Another is reforming estate taxes and capital gains taxes.
The problem is we have solutions already they’re not being done. Get off lemmy. Find representatives that fit your worldview and vote vote vote.
The alternative which I feel is more likely is continue the slide to fascism everywhere until it reaches a head then on comes the bloodshed.
We really need to do better teaching history in school because Jesus Christ online forums are full of people trying to reinvent the wheel and detached from the real world.
No one asked you to be here. You chose to have a convo in an online forum
Comments like these are not only unhelpful, they hurt progress moving forward. Do you also apply this logic to domestic abusers (wouldn’t wife beaters just beat places you can’t see or use sexual assault? ), or speeders (won’t people just speed when no law enforcement are around?), or regular joe tax evaders? I’m going to assume not. It would be absurd to just thow up our hands and say “you know what? We’re never going to stop pedophilia, so lets put no laws or regulations in place to punish pedophiles.”
I’m not going to claim that the original commenter’s solution is perfect or even very effective, but if we do nothing (and comments like yours are encouraging doing nothing) then the percieved problem will gwt worse. We reward the bad behavior and the bad behavior continues and gets worse. Something needs to be done whether it’s perfect or not. If you’ve ever created anything, especially something to be used or enjoyed by others, you know your first draft of it is shit. There are so many things that you couldn’t see until you put the work into it or release it to others and that’s okay. You learn, you revise, you plug the holes, you scrap and implement something new, you continue the process. The “rule of thumb” didn’t stop abuse, but it was a step. We still haven’t stopped abuse, but a lot of us keep plugging along, trying to stop it in our own ways (at individual, local, national, and international levels).
If you do care about this and want to contribute, but don’t like the presented solution, offer up your own or maybe point to resources of those advancing a cause from a different angle. If you’re here to shit on ideas because you don’t care or are trolling and want to actively hinder discussion, you can fuck right off. If you are trolling I’m okay with the offchance the overall message is recieved by someone else who needs it.
I provide no solutions that haven’t already been tried and continue to be tried. Have you tried actions outside of lemmy like actually voting and promoting people who want to fix this? I love that a glib comment on lemmy has drawn a novel of a response when everything we say here means jack shit. I’m in the real world doing what I can to change it for the better.
Then GET OFF LEMMY if nothing anyone says here matters then stop saying shit here
It’s fitting that someone who’s idea of a novel is 3 barely paragraphs would make an incredible amount of baseless assumption.
Although you’re right, that sounds like an excuse to not do anything.
We really need to rethink how ownership itself works. All assets should be in a public registry, and no country’s laws should recognize any claim of ownership not backed by the registry. For the sake of privacy, I’d make an exception for up to like $1 million in personal assets owned by an individual, but never for business assets and never for ownership of a company or shares of a company.
Wealth taxes are fantastic in theory, but in practice have never worked. They’re too hard to implement. I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I just don’t think a wealth tax is the answer.
I mean, the truth is that we’ve never found a way to prevent some people from hoarding huge amounts of wealth. Probably not a great sign for the future of our species.
Guillotine was pretty effective in France for a bit…
There’s more good people than bad people. The only way the bad people win is by convincing the good people to give up.
Yes shitty people will always be fucking up things for everyone else. But that doesn’t mean working to stop that is pointless. It’s more the opposite, it means we have to be continually working to stop the assholes from fucking things up for everyone.
It’s a seriously hard problem. The IRS already can’t keep up. In order to implement a wealth tax they would not only have to do what they do now, but also assess the value of every estate of every wealthy person. They would need experts in all sorts of things to even attempt to pull that off. Experts in fashion, jewelry, cars, planes, boats, art, etc… as soon as you let even one of those things slip through, that’s what becomes the new wealth sync. Previously it’s been attempted by they excluded art because that’s notoriously hard to assess the value of. So the wealthy bought and traded a bunch of art to hide their wealth.
I got down voted for my previous comment, but it’s the truth. The concept is simple and if it worked I would be all on board. It’s the process for implementing it that is the hard part and has historically always caused a wealth tax to fail. It’s not a new concept, but there is a reason it isn’t used. I’m not saying we should do nothing, but that we should do something different. We could start with adding back some income tax brackets.
Maybe but we were doing better at it before Reagan came along.
But it isn’t a silver bullet. If we want to deal with the root of today’s problems we need to focus on a number of solutions around anti-trust, pro-labor, wealth tax, lobbying, campaign finance, etc.
We agree on all of those points.
Imagine if Lockheed martin “shut off” a jet because it was “getting too close to China”
What would be the response by the DOJ?
I would think the military would call that an act of treason and imprison or disappear any executives they thought were involved
no he’s in some SERIOUS shit for this, and it was just a given he was gonna stick his little dick in there
It would be hilarious for the US and/or the EU freeze his assets and punch his market influence to the ground if they accuse him of espionage.
Nationalizing the satellites that we paid for as a national security asset sure seems reasonable here, seeing as he likely broke a contract when he disabled them.
Imagine if Lockheed disabled an allied F16’s targeting computer during a mission; there would be hell to pay.
it’s more like a violation of War Powers Act or something, but yeah… he’s probably fucked…
I’ve said in the past that something was clearly wrong when he bought Twitter. His behavior was far too targeted. It’s all way too obvious.
He’s my fun little conspiracy theory. If I could send the CIA to do my bidding, I would have punished him by manipulating him into buying twitter. You can’t nationalize SpaceX because it would signal the failure of privatized space exploration, but you can’t have that idiot out there as a walking national security disaster looking for a place to happen. The only option if he can’t be controlled is to get him out of the way until he retires or another private competitor can become the favorite. Twitter cost him a ton of money and his reputation, exposed him as a fool, and keeps him busy with unimportant bullshit. Everyone just shrugs it off as Elon being Elon. It’s really perfect.
Russian asset
How dare you? This is libelous! He’s a Saudi asset.
The asset of all his sponsors
How dare you! He’s not monogamous! He’s an asset to all the fascists.
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The spin at the end is just fluffy bullshit. Starlink, from the get go, has had bandwidth reserved for military operations albeit US military operation but military operations nonetheless. The real question here is how and why did he know that operation was happening and what other operations has he known about/thwarted/or knowingly or unknowingly passed along information about.
Maybe the same FSB agents that were driving his paranoia. Assuming they knew about the attack, they could get a bigger win by stopping it and removing Starlink from the equation at the same time, than by stopping the attack with military means.
Definitely. He used terms such as “Lenin’s mistake” when talking about Ukraine which is rather specific to Russian nationalist ideology. You don’t stumble across such a thing by accident.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter that he owns. Sevastopol is a port city in Crimea. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
So another traitor, we’re becoming too used to this.
“How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
Musk, transparent as ever, makes sure to tell his biographer that it’s about peace, man, and has nothing to do with his love of authoritarian regimes.
“How am I in this war?”
Bitch, you put yourself there!
And a shit eating little shoe-horn of the phrase “Netflix and chill”.
Didn’t his company supply a bunch of Starlinks because of the war? Was he expecting Ukranians needed to watch more Netflix and do more school stuff while getting bombed out by the Ruzzians? What a crock
Yeah, that was when he expected Russia to win easily. Probably figured he’d get a little bit of good PR, then Russia wins and then he could say “I tried to help, but I guess it just didn’t work out for Ukraine.” Just didn’t go the way he expected I guess.
That and I don’t think he was quite so far down the fascist rabbit hole back then.
Once the killers have done all the killing they want, peace becomes paramount. Once they’ve stolen everything they can steal, then theft becomes a crime. A man with a gun kicks in your door, starts eating the food from your fridge and fucks your wife. He’s doing good peaceful things and if you resist you’re a warmonger.
Maybe if he had any actual knowledge instead of just buying shit and slapping his name on it, he would know that the Internet was originally DARPAnet and was designed for expressly military purposes prior to being co-opted by capitalists.
Musk was reportedly motivated to foil the attack out of concern that a strike on Crimea would constitute a “mini-Pearl Harbor” and lead to Russia retaliating with nuclear weapons
So glad the blue-checks get to dictate our foreign policy now.
What was all that DoD money for? A suggestion box?
Not like Russia invading Ukraine was a mini pearl harbor, nooooooo not that.
TBF Russia invading Ukraine has turned out to be like Pearl Harbor (the Ben Affleck movie).
Michael Bay making a movie that he thought would gain him prestige but it ended up it was way longer than it should’ve been and no one liked it.
Yup that analogy checks out.
Euronam
Why are enemies of the United States allowed to own national security infrastructure?
They are allowed to be president and run for re-election too so I wouldn’t hold my breath
I don’t think Musk qualifies, being South African though.
They were talking about Trump.
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Net neutrality is about not favoring (or disfavoring) one type of traffic over another. Turning off the internet entirely doesn’t fit that definition. If he had specifically blocked traffic from the Ukrainian drones, that would be a net neutrality violation. It’s still bad for other reasons though.
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I don’t know if this is the same, but it’s been previously acknowledged that they shut off service at the contested borders.
So Russia says they own this region now, all starlink would be down there.
Not sure if that’s still the case
Hm, I don’t think I’d agree. He chose to block this specific traffic. Even if he did it by turning off the internet in the region.
As far as I know Ukraine doesn’t have any net neutrality regulations. Since net neutrality is per country then I think it’s sort of a moot point. I also think you’d have a hard time arguing that pulling the plug violates net neutrality. You’re effectively treating all traffic the same in that there is no more traffic. I do think it would be interesting to see how that would play out though.
Aside from that Ukraine would have to go after Musk for it. Which seems like a really bad idea if you want to remain in favor with the increasingly unstable power broker that controls the infrastructure you need.
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I for sure agree that it goes against the spirit of Net Neutrality. I also think it would be interesting to hear what a court would say. I don’t think you’re outright wrong or anything. I just think it’s sitting on the knifes edge. The fact that Ukraine doesn’t have net neutrality means we’ll never really know (At least I hope something like this doesn’t happen again in our lifetimes or ever!)
And yeah, I certainly think the Ukrainian people have every right to want to see keel hauled for this, but I also don’t think they have the luxury of makinng enemies at the current juncture. Musk is a giant piece of shit for cutting Star Link during a critical operation. He’s a giant piece of shit for a lot of other reasons too, but this one kind of takes a giant piece of the shit cake…
I just think Ukraine is in a very tough spot with him. Even more awkward given that he’s a single crackpot that has shown to be ready and willing to throw a monkey wrench in their operations because he felt like it.
You think Elon gives a rats ass about net neutrality?
Net Neutrality is a dead concept and has been for years, there’s no walking it back
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To be fair the Ukrainian army knew that they were not supposed to use Starlink for military purposes. The company entered into a contract with the Ukranian government particularily for civilian use.
But yeah, I still agree with you.
He’s regurgitating a Russian talking point. That’s not him being stupid, it’s him spouting propaganda.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Musk is the personification of that saying.
Isn’t it illegal to screw with the military actions of the U.S. … and its allies?!!?
I don’t think what he did was illegal per se, but he is definitely positioning himself against US geopolitical interests, which is a really bad idea if you are a US citizen, living in the United States. If he were to give away any military secrets that pass through star link, which I’m sure Russia will inevitably ask him to do, he will get arrested for espionage. He should tread very carefully.
this is starting to give comic book villan
Yeah for real, this straight up sounds like the setup for an Iron Man villain or something
Agreed I read the title as something you’d see a villain nonchalantly do in a comic book/movie series.
Arrest this treasonous scumbag. Slava Ukraini!
As much as I despise Musk for being a total piece of shit, this isn’t treason. Technically, we aren’t even allies with Ukraine. The argument could certainly be made that this works against the interests of the United States, but that alone isn’t treason because it isn’t a crime for citizens to oppose the US, especially when it’s private property the US is being lent. Because at that time, the US hadn’t signed a contract with Musk yet.
If he did this again, then it would be a breach of contract, but still wouldn’t be treason. People being charged with treason is very rare, because it’s a such a high bar to meet.
This guy aided the Kremlin. He’s helping russians in their genocide of Ukrainian children. Fuck that pile of shit and lock him up.
I agree. I’m just saying, he’s not guilty of treason.
This scenario happens to me all the time. People usually just assume that someone else adding details or pedantic corrections means they’re invalidating your whole argument rather than trying to strengthen it (ultimately, I assume)
That would be up to a court to decide that.
I never claimed he was. But he’s guilty of being an ally of russia
arrest this treasonous scumbag
You literally just did
I accused him of being treasonous – which he ABSOLUTELY IS. End of discussion.
No he’s not by definition. He isn’t Ukrainian so he can’t commit treason against the Ukrainian people. He didn’t commit any treasonous acts against the US or our allies here either (Ukraine is not an US ally last I checked).
I despise Musk and pretty much everything he stands for. I think it’s borderline societal insanity to allow private industry to put satellites in space and think it takes a certain kind of awful megalomaniac to think they can control that infrastructure single handedly. But saying he’s treasonous for this? That cheapens the word when you use it against people that ARE treasonous. For instance when certain ex-Presidents decide to steal classified documents despite numerous warnings…
This still makes him an enemy of Ukraine though
This is the very definition of treason. What you’re talking about is messing with words. The bare fact is that musk betrayed the trust you could have with him or any business he has any power into.
In brief, it may not be a legal crime in your country, but it is the very definition of betrayal. He acted against the interests of nato and in favour of an enemy of nato. You can hardly deny that, but the law and this scumbag are about technicalities, not morale or justice.
Treason =/= betrayal.
You can only commit treason against your own country, or at most against a coalition of allied forces. Since Ukraine is not a NATO member, he couldn’t commit an act of treason against the NATO either (if that’s even a thing), since the NATO has not formally allied with Ukraine either. They have sanctioned Russia and condemned the war, but have not openly declared Russia an enemy.
You see, that’s exactly the technicalities I’m talking about. Nato is allied to Ukraine. They sent so much stuff, they are training their soldiers, they are providing real time intelligence and secret services are all in on this. They’re not participating directly in the war, but they definitely are allies and it’s hypocritical to deny it.
I don’t know the difference in English between betrayal and treason though. But I’m pretty sure it’ll be technicalities too.
I mean, the differences between most words are “technicalities,” but that doesn’t make them meaningless. It is the technicalities and nuance that makes them useful. Treason is an act of betraying or undermining a state that you belong to, and is not necessarily morally right nor wrong- but obviously extremely negative from the states perspective.
You just wrote that treason is betrayal in a specific case.
Of course it is. Treason is a specific type of betrayal- a subset of betrayals if you will. That’s why there is nuance- they aren’t the same thing, because treason is more specific and doesn’t apply in this case
Arrest when?
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This fucking carbuncle.
Hope he eats himself.
Took longer than I thought it would for Musk to do this. Been waiting for it since he threw his little fit about starlink in Ukraine was costing him money.
Then he said he’s talked to Putin directly.
Seriously someone reign this dude in, somehow, before he really fucks shit up.
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I agree with this idea quite vehemently. Honestly, all ISPs should be seized as public utilities and all necessary utilities should be state or locally run with federal oversight. That includes water, power, gas, garbage/recycling, internet, and potentially even cell phone service. There could be room to argue for premium versions being available should people want to pay for them, but regular access to water, power, high speed internet, and cell connectivity are basic necessities these days. For example, the government run version will get you up to 500mbps reliably, but you have the option to pay a private company for fiber gigabit if you really want to.
100% agree.
Yeah, because the Federal Government is so good at efficiently running things
The regulatory parts of the government that don’t get gutted by the conservatives every couple years do better than the corporations. If the FDA and EPA were allowed to have their teeth back, things would be in a much better place overall. The trick is to strip out corporate interest and influence from government.
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Turns out, people get quite angry when the person they voted for doesn’t win.
Then, you end up with people wanting to change how democracy works.
people get angry when the person with the most votes doesn’t win (which has happened 3 times in living memory) and then want to change how it works.
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Compared to capitalist corporations, unironically yes. It also has the distinct advantage of not being explicitly profit driven by design.
The government might not be able to build Estonia-level broadband infrastructure to the whole country overnight, but put it in the hands of capitalists and you get Comcast, and I think I speak for all of us when I say fuck Comcast. Put it in the hands of government, even a local city government, and you get Chattanooga municipal gigabit on a publicly owned fiber network that’s faster and cheaper than pretty much anything you can get anywhere else in the country. Imagine what the USPS could be if we’d given it an ISP division in 2006 instead of doing the IRL Postal Act of 2006.
well spoken.
A friend who used to work at DOE said there were 3 phases of power plant production. First, a government entity takes over the construction, and builds a system that will meet demand for 30 years, at the expense of the tax payers. Then, the infrastructure is sold to private corporations, who promise cheaper rates. The corporations ride the robust design for the full remainder of the 30 years, doing as little maintenance as possible. They then take the earnings and leave the debilitated system, which is picked up by a government entity, who begins doing the work necessary to build a system that will meet demand for 30 years, at the expense of tax payers…
Notice that your example is local government and not federal. Once the Feds get involved, regulatory capture takes over.
Fair with regards to Chattanooga, and regulatory capture is certainly a problem to account for. But I also mentioned the United States Postal Service, whose existence demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be that way.
E: Also, I shouldn’t neglect to mention that the entities that would carry out regulatory capture on the US government also tried and continue to try it with Chattanooga, and have been unsuccessful, which also demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be that way.
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oh yeah privatized healthcare is so cheap and effective
