spwa4

The actual control is with the "Board of Governors" which is a government agency (ie. the president controls them, subject to approval by the US senate). The banks structure is to make banks cooperate, it does not give them any kind of control over anything.

> They should tax ads then

That's what they're trying to do. The problem is that the person paying for the ads is not in France (and has no presence in the EU at all), and the person in France isn't paying for the service (like Google search, or ChatGPT), so there "is nothing to tax".

And then there's the Irish problem ...

That doesn't matter since they committed their copyright crimes BEFORE the law was changed to allow it. Congress cannot change the law retroactively, so what happens afterwards does not matter.

Strange how you complain about this for circular flows when of course the GOAT of circular flows is the money system itself

govt prints money (FED) -> government -> banks -> (economy) -> tax -> government

And the second "great circle"

govt loans money (FED) (money that doesn't exist, which isn't a problem if you can print money) -> banks -> (economy) -> loan repayment -> money gets "unprinted"/destroyed

Everything about the economy is a great circle. You will also understand after a while, if you wish for the economy to remain stable, this must be the case. You can't change it without either hyperinflation and extreme "capital flight" (between quotes because of course in that circumstances capital will run into gold or other physical resources), by either vastly overheating or stopping the economy.

And yes, most instances are of the overheating kind. The only case of stopping the economy was accidental (despite many warnings), in other words, yes, it was Republicans. But last time that happened, even republicans could decide to change course. Of course, only once huge damage was done.

Most of what you say is called tax evasion. The rest of your questions are far too complicated legally to answer, but many governments cooperate to prevent it. I might also mention it's criminal (meaning you get locked up if you get caught, you don't just have to pay). So I'd say you run a pretty big risk.

But in general, I must say that's something I really wonder about. Because what Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) did was also very large scale violation of copyright law, with technically even also includes tax evasion (they didn't pay authors, and had they paid them, they would have had to registers VAT on that amount). And they did it before that became legal, so they took a risk that could have resulted in very very large criminal sentences. And now we're of course seeing that the justice system isn't fair and won't destroy billionnaires just because they commit large scale violation of the law. But I do wonder: how do you decide to do this. Copyright violations have gotten sentences of up to 2 months plus 50,000 in damages PER INFRACTION. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates all had their companies commit literally hundreds of millions of infractions against these laws to get their models started, knowing full well it was illegal ... AFTERWARDS congress has declared it's kind-of allowed (yes, really via a specific organization so that congress can claim they didn't do anything, but it was congress power being used to do it) ... but ... 50000 times hundreds of millions ... if congress had acted differently the punishments would have destroyed any billionnaire's fortune. How do you take such a risk? I don't understand.

Clearly: billionnaires get protected and small authors (frankly even quite big ones) got universally fucked. That's the net effect and 100% intentional. What I can't understand is WHY. If this had been put up to a democratic vote, it seems to me guaranteed billionnaires would have been convicted.

Btw: BOTH US AND EU have declared it legal, which I also wonder how that happens. But please don't start with "that's how the US works", or "of course Trump". I mean I see that too, but every important country leader could have stopped that change, including pretty far leftist figures like Pedro Sanchez could have stopped the EU from accepting this. They didn't.

> No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology

What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)

Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.

You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).

Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...

... except ... if there is anything the French government is not it's neoliberalist (yes, the president is, but he has long since lost the ability to change the budget)

I mean they're desperate to tax:

1) fully not-in-France remote businesses like SAAS companies

2) ad-supported business (e.g. tax Google, but not the ads they sell in France, but all the impressions they get (and pay out to someone else or to themselves) due to French people)

You see what I mean. Tax both sides, like they already do for French companies in France.

France, like every EU country, is desperate to tax internet companies, because they can't currently. But, internet is largely ad-sponsored and even tiny taxes would destroy the business model.

The way this tax looks it just means you have to exclude French people from the internet. This won't work.

Because it's the actual generator of the bits that is supposed to pay. Which means you let a French person download anything at all, you're supposed to pay. If someone downloads your software from a mirror, the mirror can "identify you", and you'll be charged. No matter where you are.

This is supposed to let the French tax authorities collect 20B in additional tax revenue.

And yes, I don't see how Youtube (or Facebook, or Tiktok, or Netflix, or even something like Steam ...) can operate with such a tax in France.

If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting (just stealing the public debt) the problem with that is

1) paying money to billionnaires cost 67B euros, let's say 10% more this year, to 73B (interest on debt so France can keep lending 170B more every year)

2) not paying money to billionnaires costs 170B euros (france needs 170B euros in new debt every year to balance the books)

Oh and of course when it does become worth doing, stealing the public debt, there is still the little matter of needing to get French people to do 250B worth of extra labor without paying them 1 cent extra (if they kick the can down the road, which they will, it should settle on about that amount per year). Essentially French people will have to work 1/6th harder one way or the other. But by paying billionnaires they can wait with that another 4 years.

Or, you know, they could work 1/30th extra now. 11 days per year. But that means not kicking the can down the road.

Similar figures for all EU countries (except Germany, for the moment at least), but they get to watch France solve it first because they're not the worst offender.

Nothing real has happened yet. Let's all just step back and give Trump a chance to wake up. I mean, the guy is over 80 years old, can't expect much action before 2pm at the earliest.

Later this afternoon he'll probably ride a nuke down ... gIRANimooooooo!

Is it?

INTC: -30.5% RDDT: -29–31% NBIS: -14.2% CRWV: -13.6% GOOGL: -13.3% GOOG: -13.0% AMD: -11.4% AMZN: -11.1% MU: -9.3% AVGO: -7.1%

Only AAPL "and META" are unscathed, and only if for META you don't look too far back.

Then, there's international. In the last few months. China tech: 50% down from ATH (all of them combined, just don't look), South Korea: -40% ATH, Japan: -15% (all the stock market combined), Taiwan -10% (entire stock market).

Not that I mean to imply everything detonated at the same time. Even within the US stock market. GOOG had a large drop (arguably META was first, but that was 2 weeks ago). It's more like a slow motion disaster, one stock market blowing up after another, and it just keeps going.

It's actually "getting better" too, the US drop isn't nearly as large as the one in China from a few days ago. In fact, if you look at the S&P 500 as a whole, nothing much happened, really.

No they didn't. In castles meat wasn't very fresh at all, and food poisoning was both common and a common cause of death especially in medieval times. Which is why we have so many traditional dishes that are effectively just ways to keep food fresh and especially safe for longer. How many stew recipes did people invent worldwide, for example? Slow cooking will keep food edible for a week if you do it right. And if you really push it, for months (ie. add animal gelatin as a last step and keep cooking for 2 hours after that, at some point it will solidify and you get something that can be considered "instant soup" by extremely flexible interpretation). If you look back 100 years there are books with year-round menus, and bits of that survive. Why? To give you specific dishes when the ingredients are available according to the "agricultural calendar" as it's called in France. Christmas is great. October sucks.

The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.

And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.