Musk Secretly Used Starlink to Foil Ukrainian Drone Attack on Russian Ships
The billlionaire allegedly feared the strike on Crimea could trigger nuclear war.
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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.
I agree with your assessment.
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.
Because people are lazy and want a singular solution every time and if they don't get it most quit.
Laziness is honestly our largest inspirational force and it should be celebrated to let us do more interesting and fulfilling work but instead instant gratification has ruined us and made people lazy and shitty.
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.
Yet he’s taking DoD money for Starlink in Ukraine.
He is now but at the time this supposedly happened he wasn't.
Wrong, if you read the article you would know he footed the bill bring starlink to Ukraine and volunteered to keep it running self-funded. The new leader of SpaceX negotiated government funding for starlink.
