Pavlo Penenko @ppenenko

“Billionaires already pay more taxes than you ever will” is one of the most financially illiterate arguments on this app because it confuses nominal dollars with effective burden. A billionaire paying $500M in taxes sounds enormous until you remember they gained $20B in asset value while doing it. The relevant metric is percentage, not raw dollars. A teacher paying 22% of a $60k salary is carrying a heavier proportional burden than someone paying 8% while their wealth compounds tax-deferred through stock appreciation. And this “their money was already taxed” line is mostly fiction at billionaire scale. Middle-class wealth is usually income that got taxed, then saved. Billionaire wealth is overwhelmingly unrealized appreciation. Tesla stock going vertical did not mean Elon “earned” $100B in taxable salary. The shares appreciated. Under current law, that appreciation can sit untaxed for decades, get borrowed against for liquidity, then receive stepped-up basis treatment at death that can erase the embedded gains entirely. That is not “double taxation.” In many cases it is functionally zero taxation on the primary mechanism of wealth accumulation. People also weirdly talk about billionaires like they emerged from the forest carrying capitalism on their backs with no public inputs involved. Their companies rely on: public roads public courts public contract enforcement public utilities public universities public research grants public internet infrastructure public IP law public military-protected trade routes public education systems producing labor The modern corporation is not built in isolation. It operates inside an enormous state-supported framework. And no, asking whether someone should contribute proportionally to maintaining the system that enabled $100B fortunes is not “greed.” That framing is emotional theater designed to avoid discussing the actual structure of tax law. The real debate is simple: Should labor income be taxed continuously while massive asset appreciation can compound largely untouched for generations? That’s the argument. Everything else is distraction.

TNizzle @TNizzle621

2 months ago

@txgermanbre @jdcmedlock Pick any billionaire you want,they pay more in taxes in one yr than you will in a lifetime. The argument here is not whether or not to pay taxes. Its whether rich people should be taxed AGAIN, on assets they've already paid taxes on. If you think they should YOURE the greedy one.

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JD Vance is lecturing the Pope on Catholicism and Pierre Poilievre is lecturing Mark Carney on economics and RFK Jr is lecturing scientists about vaccines and Donald Trump is lecturing the world on tariffs and Pete Hegseth is quoting Pulp Fiction and thinking it’s the Bible

On the way to and from school every day, my son updates me on the "war" being waged in his class. He's six and starts 1st-grade in September. "War" in this case is between him and his classmates with planes and ships built of Lego. He tells me how he's divided his friends into groups, assigned them numbers, assigned their ships and planes numbers based on the group numbers (Ship 205, Plane 302, etc). And then talks about training his fighters to have better aim, to shoot down more of the enemy planes, and so on. This has been going on for weeks. Every day, I get updates as we drive to and fro. Then I come home and listen to updates on the various things being done by the US in relation to the war in Iran and the posts being made by the guy in the Whitehouse. Guys, my kid is waging a smarter, more rational, and sensible "war" - and also NOT posting AI pictures of himself as Jesus online while fighting with The Pope. Hello?

Excited to speak at @PyConDE & PyData on April 15 about the Python hacks under the hood of @MetashadeEDSL - my open-source shader EDSL. 🐍✨ 2026.pycon.de/talks/B8GQ9Z/ #Python #PyConDE #Shaders

I know there is some overlap between open source and anti-AI activists, but I have a hard time reconciling it. My million+ open source LOC were always intended as a gift to the world. Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift. AI training on the code magnifies the value of the gift. I am enthusiastic about it! Some people do look at open source as a tool for social change, career advancement, or reputation building, but those are all downstream of the gift.

Rich Whitehouse @DickWhitehouse

4 months ago

Genuinely devastating take to see from someone who popularized the GPL across so many communities. Fails to appreciate the social and cultural importance of the license.

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Our lying Ontario premier has just stolen $50 from every single person in Ontario. The estimated cost of repairing our beloved Science Center was 200 million dollars. The firm that made the estimate was told to multiply it by 1.85 to make it bigger. We were then told it would be better to build a new science center. Now we learn the new center will be smaller and will cost a billon dollars before the cost overruns. The only win is that the extensive parking lots of the old Science Center will be available for his developer friends.

@americanmcgee Carney is just being diplomatic here, in an impossible situation created by Trump. What was he supposed to say? "Who cares about Greenland, Denmark and NATO, I only hope not to upset our dear friend Donald"? Now that's a way to encourage an actual invasion.

@americanmcgee Also, it's ridiculous to be concerned about Carney's stance and not Trump's. It's Trump and only Trump who's literally threatening a NATO ally with war. There's no place for bothsidism here.

This has been one of the most exhausting topics I’ve covered in a long time. Not only because the content is so heartbreaking, but also because the only debate is so insane. We’re not even debating if the events took place. Just things like what do words mean and who has rights. You know - things that should be table stakes. But MAGA apparently don’t know who has the right to arrest you or what detain means, and they don’t care as long as it was a loud woke woman, then breaking the law is fine with them. And that is an exhausting record to have to correct many times a day. So thank you to all of you who have helped to amplify fact these past few days, and to dive into the comments against the sea of endless daftness. I appreciate you raising your voice! 🫡

As a person who runs a "doll" company, I can't help but reply to these weird calls for American austerity. And as an American living in China, I'll tell you, if you went on TV here and made this speech, it would be a clear sign that the government in Beijing had failed their mission to the people of China. We're in an age of flying cars, bullet trains, AI robots, abundant energy, advanced manufacturing, and other miracles... And you're on TV telling people to limit how many DOLLS your daughter is allowed to own? Talking about purchase quotas dictacted by the head of state? Guys, this is The Great Inversion. America becoming a parody reflection of everything they ever told you was wrong about the countries you were taught to fear and hate. All while the rest of the world exits the Idiocracy ride and throws away their season passes. We'll continue to make as many dolls as we please. And free people of the world will have as many as they like, thank you very much!

Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump

7 months ago

Trump’s message to Americans struggling with rising prices: “You don't need 37 dolls for your daughter. 2 or 3 is nice…So, we're doing things right."

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TRUMP: Water is dry. Fire is cold. Up is down. Person, woman, man, camera, TV, I’m an idiot. Covfefe.

NewsWire @NewsWire_US

8 months ago

Trump: Grocery prices are way down

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The essence of great software is the quality of its abstractions. Great abstractions are indefinitely composable and stackable. They become a dependable foundation for future work, future thought. The best ones are so robust you never have to revisit them -- you can forget them and build forward without ever looking back. Achieving this is the greatest productivity hack in software engineering. Because the greatest productivity drain is backtracking.

If you’re more upset about an old video of Ronald Reagan speaking about tariffs than you are about a new video of Donald Trump shitting on the American people, then congratulations, because that means that you are an idiot, and an asshole, and you’re in, a motherfucking cult.

I remember I was visiting Moscow in April 2014, just after Putin had annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas. I was doing training for regional broadcast media organizations. I remember walking accidentally into a meeting of media owners that wasn't meant for me. They were talking about how to survive the clampdown on media's reporting and navigate thr meteorically rising censorship without losing their licenses. I still remember the hushed voices in which these media owners from around the country agreed that "this is insane" and "the whole Crimea thing is crazy" BUT "for now it's better not to rock the boat". I visited the next year too. The owners looked depressed, having lost 1/3 of their revenue in one year. But they still agreed "better not to rock the boat" and "it's a price worth paying to preserve our independent media". 10 years later there's zero independent media in Russia. I just can't not see the parallels with what's happening with US media now. Seems reversible now. But is it.

Software engineers shouldn't fear being replaced by AI. They should fear being asked to maintain the sprawling mess of AI-generated legacy code their employer's systems will soon run on. Because that one will actually happen.

My grandfather used to say “and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel” and I never knew what it meant until after he died my grandmother explained some magazine did a fluff interview with Magda Goebbels a few years before WW2 that included her strudel recipe and my grandfather, who hated the Nazis with the passion of 10,000 suns, thought it was an example of the media sanitizing evil people and he would use the phrase when someone asked him to overlook a bad person doing bad things and focus on the good.

@RpsAgainstTrump Omfg. Give it a rest, will you? You're getting me all misty-eyed. Let me know when you want to adapt the same rallying cry when it comes to your school kids being butchered in their own classrooms, as opposed to a neo-Nazi pos that few give a shit about.

Musk’s Wealth 2012: $2 billion 2025: $436.3 billion Bezos’ Wealth 2012: $18.4 billion 2025: $244.2 billion Zuckerberg’s Wealth 2012: $17.5 billion 2025: $257.8 billion Federal Minimum Wage 2012: $7.25 2025: $7.25 It’s not the start of an oligarchy. — We’re in the thick of it.