6 ms·

Yanis Varoufakis on the future of capitalism [video]

59 points by xqcgrek2 10mo ago

exabrial 10mo ago
Every time I argue against taxes on HN I'm told that my view is wrong and that if we try it just one more time it'll definitely work this time.
- jcmfernandes 10mo ago
  It worked in the past.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
    It didn't. Or rather it did, but not for the obvious reasons. Taxes are not required for spending. Spending isn't required for spending, because ultimately government money is a proxy for power differentials and collective strategy. Money defines which behaviours and which demographics are rewarded, and which are starved and punished. There are numbers and flow dynamics, but it's primarily a social credit system, not a substance. Taxes are really a way to control the relative power of some groups over others - a form of regulation. So when you have events like the New Deal and high taxes on the super rich, that means the economy is tuned towards diminishing power differentials, expanding infrastructure, and access to opportunity. Low taxes on the super rich means expanding power differentials, more rigid hierarchy, diminishing collective infrastructure, and decreasing access to opportunity. Likewise with provision of public services. If healthcare is cheap, guaranteed, and widely distributed, that increases individual agency and diminishes hierarchy. If it's expensive and rationed by/for corporate monopolies, it increases hierarchy and diminishes agency.
- jjice 10mo ago
  What is your view on taxes?
- thephyber 10mo ago
  Which country doesn’t tax their companies or people? Whether it be tariffs, income taxes, sales taxes, VAT, property taxes, minerals taxes, etc., all countries tax. Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers. You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
  - spwa4 10mo ago
    The UAE. (which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there, which also means they're not counted in the EU's GINI coefficient. Almost no US citizens do the same, because of how the tax system works)
    - secretsatan 10mo ago
      That’s your model country?
    - ares623 10mo ago
      Hard to take you seriously unless the EU rich domiciled there, stayed there permanently, and didn't get the benefits of their home EU countries, benefits that come from taxes they do not pay into.
      - spwa4 10mo ago
        Wait, what? This is about company executives and high-paid consultants who essentially stayed in Dubai just enough to be tax-domiciled there. Or even just their companies with just a mailbox at a lawyer office in Dubai. No, the EU rich very much physically stayed inside the EU, fully enjoying the benefits of those countries without paying tax. Doesn't work for US citizens because global income is taxed in the US.
    - landosaari 10mo ago
- lokar 10mo ago
  How would at tax on HN even work? Does it have revenue?
- whatever1 10mo ago
  Apart from the market (obviously), the companies also enjoy infrastructure, resources (mostly finite) and they also produce byproducts that the society has to deal with (pollution, addiction of population etc). So who pays for these? What you are suggesting is government subsidies of companies. This sounds like communism to me.
- machinationu 10mo ago
  do you have your own private army to protect you in a taxless world?
LaurensBER 10mo ago
America has a hugely succesful tech sector and low taxes and minimal regulations. Europe has a weak tech sector and relatively high taxes and high regulations. As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better. But he, feel free to tax that tech sector into oblivion. If Europe ever gets it's shit together, we would love to take over the crown.
- Apreche 10mo ago
  Who cares how well the businesses do? Only the wealthy in the US benefit from that. I’ll gladly swap and go to Europe where I don’t have to worry about falling into medical debt if I am unlucky.
  - badgersnake 10mo ago
    Europe is increasingly heading in this direction too, at least it is here in the UK. The lobbiests and their stooge populists are increasingly in charge here too.
- Gigachad 10mo ago
  I wonder if the average person in America is feeling the benefits of a huge tech sector.
- thephyber 10mo ago
  As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives. The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world. The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments. And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property. The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person. When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there. This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
JCattheATM 10mo ago
The people that blame capitalism are often wrong...they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation. Capitalism has a ton of advantages that a socialist system would not have, the negatives are easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest. Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.
- badgersnake 10mo ago
  > easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest. Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
  - JCattheATM 10mo ago
    > Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US. > And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system. I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
    - ggoo 10mo ago
      Just a thought but you could probably argue that the US is the largest and most advanced of the capitalist systems in the world, and that makes it somewhat of a bellwether for the future of other capitalist countries.
      - JCattheATM 10mo ago
        I think the US is rather unique from other capitalist countries in having such a large portion of its population being so poorly educated. This simply isn't the case in EU or Commonwealth countries - in the US its led people to vote against their own interests, allowing companies to lobby for things that benefit the companies and hurt people, in an ever increasing trend. I don't think it's to do with the size of the country, but the education level of the population.
logicprog 10mo ago
I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just ~completely false~ misleading and poorly cited, as far as I can tell, and that annoys me, so I'm just going to do my best to respond to them here as a sort of vent LOL. 1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online. Not from Google's official reporting, and not even from him: he himself just states the number, but doesn't explain how or where he got it from. In my search I haven't found a case where he cites it, either. ~All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.~ Edit: At least two commenters below did a quick back of the napkin calculation, multiplying the median salary of a Google employee by the number of Google employees to get something like 36 billion, which is about 10% of the companies overall revenue. So maybe that's what he meant. But it would have been good for him to actually — first of all — not get the number an order of magnitude off, and second of all, to actually explain how he got that number! 2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3]. Edit: Another commenter pointed out that maybe he meant this story where full self-driving got remotely disabled on a car that was bought secondhand[7]. This does match better the part where he mentioned that the car was sold secondhand before it got deactivated. So there's that. But again, it would have been good if he had actually gotten his facts straight. 3. He brings up this idea that Teslas sell your user data Amazon. This is, at least, roundly contradicted by their legally binding privacy policy, and even according to the Mozilla Foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners' forum got freaked out because they saw the car sending data to "Amazon", but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information to AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5], which is what a technically savvy person would assume to begin with anyway. 4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars "don't have access to cloud capital", which he says gives Tesla an advantage because they do, based on point 3. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere, I feel like his entire argument crumbles, because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not. *Especially* since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6]. [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/operating-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/ope... [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deactivated-viral-video-fake https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deact... [4]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesla/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl... [5]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-amazon.162582/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-ama... [6]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volkswagen/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volk... "What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." " [7]: https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-features-from-customer-1841472617/ https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-fe...

59 points by xqcgrek2 10mo ago

Every time I argue against taxes on HN I'm told that my view is wrong and that if we try it just one more time it'll definitely work this time.

jcmfernandes 10mo ago
It worked in the past.
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
  It didn't. Or rather it did, but not for the obvious reasons. Taxes are not required for spending. Spending isn't required for spending, because ultimately government money is a proxy for power differentials and collective strategy. Money defines which behaviours and which demographics are rewarded, and which are starved and punished. There are numbers and flow dynamics, but it's primarily a social credit system, not a substance. Taxes are really a way to control the relative power of some groups over others - a form of regulation. So when you have events like the New Deal and high taxes on the super rich, that means the economy is tuned towards diminishing power differentials, expanding infrastructure, and access to opportunity. Low taxes on the super rich means expanding power differentials, more rigid hierarchy, diminishing collective infrastructure, and decreasing access to opportunity. Likewise with provision of public services. If healthcare is cheap, guaranteed, and widely distributed, that increases individual agency and diminishes hierarchy. If it's expensive and rationed by/for corporate monopolies, it increases hierarchy and diminishes agency.
jjice 10mo ago
What is your view on taxes?
thephyber 10mo ago
Which country doesn’t tax their companies or people? Whether it be tariffs, income taxes, sales taxes, VAT, property taxes, minerals taxes, etc., all countries tax. Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers. You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
- spwa4 10mo ago
  The UAE. (which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there, which also means they're not counted in the EU's GINI coefficient. Almost no US citizens do the same, because of how the tax system works)
  - secretsatan 10mo ago
    That’s your model country?
  - ares623 10mo ago
    Hard to take you seriously unless the EU rich domiciled there, stayed there permanently, and didn't get the benefits of their home EU countries, benefits that come from taxes they do not pay into.
    - spwa4 10mo ago
      Wait, what? This is about company executives and high-paid consultants who essentially stayed in Dubai just enough to be tax-domiciled there. Or even just their companies with just a mailbox at a lawyer office in Dubai. No, the EU rich very much physically stayed inside the EU, fully enjoying the benefits of those countries without paying tax. Doesn't work for US citizens because global income is taxed in the US.
  - landosaari 10mo ago
lokar 10mo ago
How would at tax on HN even work? Does it have revenue?
whatever1 10mo ago
Apart from the market (obviously), the companies also enjoy infrastructure, resources (mostly finite) and they also produce byproducts that the society has to deal with (pollution, addiction of population etc). So who pays for these? What you are suggesting is government subsidies of companies. This sounds like communism to me.
machinationu 10mo ago
do you have your own private army to protect you in a taxless world?

LaurensBER 10mo ago

America has a hugely succesful tech sector and low taxes and minimal regulations. Europe has a weak tech sector and relatively high taxes and high regulations. As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better. But he, feel free to tax that tech sector into oblivion. If Europe ever gets it's shit together, we would love to take over the crown.

Apreche 10mo ago
Who cares how well the businesses do? Only the wealthy in the US benefit from that. I’ll gladly swap and go to Europe where I don’t have to worry about falling into medical debt if I am unlucky.
- badgersnake 10mo ago
  Europe is increasingly heading in this direction too, at least it is here in the UK. The lobbiests and their stooge populists are increasingly in charge here too.
Gigachad 10mo ago
I wonder if the average person in America is feeling the benefits of a huge tech sector.
thephyber 10mo ago
As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives. The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world. The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments. And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property. The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person. When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there. This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.

JCattheATM 10mo ago

The people that blame capitalism are often wrong...they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation. Capitalism has a ton of advantages that a socialist system would not have, the negatives are easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest. Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.

badgersnake 10mo ago
> easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest. Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
- JCattheATM 10mo ago
  > Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US. > And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system. I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
  - ggoo 10mo ago
    Just a thought but you could probably argue that the US is the largest and most advanced of the capitalist systems in the world, and that makes it somewhat of a bellwether for the future of other capitalist countries.
    - JCattheATM 10mo ago
      I think the US is rather unique from other capitalist countries in having such a large portion of its population being so poorly educated. This simply isn't the case in EU or Commonwealth countries - in the US its led people to vote against their own interests, allowing companies to lobby for things that benefit the companies and hurt people, in an ever increasing trend. I don't think it's to do with the size of the country, but the education level of the population.

logicprog 10mo ago

I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just ~completely false~ misleading and poorly cited, as far as I can tell, and that annoys me, so I'm just going to do my best to respond to them here as a sort of vent LOL. 1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online. Not from Google's official reporting, and not even from him: he himself just states the number, but doesn't explain how or where he got it from. In my search I haven't found a case where he cites it, either. ~All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.~ Edit: At least two commenters below did a quick back of the napkin calculation, multiplying the median salary of a Google employee by the number of Google employees to get something like 36 billion, which is about 10% of the companies overall revenue. So maybe that's what he meant. But it would have been good for him to actually — first of all — not get the number an order of magnitude off, and second of all, to actually explain how he got that number! 2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3]. Edit: Another commenter pointed out that maybe he meant this story where full self-driving got remotely disabled on a car that was bought secondhand[7]. This does match better the part where he mentioned that the car was sold secondhand before it got deactivated. So there's that. But again, it would have been good if he had actually gotten his facts straight. 3. He brings up this idea that Teslas sell your user data Amazon. This is, at least, roundly contradicted by their legally binding privacy policy, and even according to the Mozilla Foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners' forum got freaked out because they saw the car sending data to "Amazon", but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information to AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5], which is what a technically savvy person would assume to begin with anyway. 4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars "don't have access to cloud capital", which he says gives Tesla an advantage because they do, based on point 3. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere, I feel like his entire argument crumbles, because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not. *Especially* since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6]. [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/operating-expenses https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/ope... [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deactivated-viral-video-fake https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deact... [4]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesla/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl... [5]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-amazon.162582/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-ama... [6]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volkswagen/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volk... "What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." " [7]: https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-features-from-customer-1841472617/ https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-fe...