Brin now actively interfering with elections to avoid being taxed. You are the face of evil, Sergie.
Spending over a hundred million to avoid chipping in to the public purse
A single greedy man pissing away 5% of the total tax revenue of Wyoming into lobbyist pockets just to not pay for public education, health & infrastructure that would benefit people
They don’t only not pay taxes, they get money from the taxpayers in the form of subsidies.
It looks like he underestimated the power of the dark side
Bros saw those profits and changed their tune.
Throw potentially $100,000,000 at me and I would be a wholly different person. Humans aren’t meant to have that much power and systems that allow it are inherently psychologically poisonous.
This isn’t universally true. There are plenty of people with that amount of money that aren’t psychologically poisoned, but they stop trying to double their weathly and many go philanthropist but you rarely hear those stories because they don’t make a big deal about it.
If you have that kind of money and choose to keep it, you’re evil. Full stop.
To play Devil’s Advocate, that kind of money gets you connections you’d never have access to otherwise. If your goal is to improve the world, having a direct line to the people in charge could let you do more good, and nothing is stopping you from donating it all posthumously anyway.
If we don’t let anybody accumulate that kind of wealth, then that wealth can’t be used to buy access.
Where do you draw the line?
A retiree that invests well and owns a home can easily end up with well over 10 million.
I’m fine with a billion but I find it gets tricky below that. Since a billiion is a very large magnitude above the mean.
I’d rather push for philanthropic efforts rather than force people to do weird things like setup trusts for every heir that sits just below some limit but remain funds they still directly control by being the trustee.
If the goal is truely to prevent being able to possible accumulate those amounts then we’re looking for a different economic system which is fine but then just say that.
No human being can own more than the average insurance value of a human life. Raise the average value of a human life if you want more money. That’s my solution.
We should in some way couple the amount of money retirees receive (don’t know how it is calculated in the US, here it is dependent of how much you earned in life and how many years you were working, with a minimum and maximum value) to the maximum amount a single person can directly and indirectly own. If your investments get over the limit, you can only spend, but not earn more money - in some cases this might result in you having to sell off something you own and donating what you get for it (and you can’t use your investments as collaterals for a credit line when over) until you are back below the max.
Like MacKenzie Scott (Bezos ex-wive). The amount of money she is funneling to struggling NGOs is insane.
I would probably break mentally if you gave me that much money. After a short shopping spree to buy the things i always wanted but never was able to finance (nothing major - mostly high end PC hardware and around 100 TB redundant storage, a phone without a huge amount of scratches, a nice e-bike and some home renovations) I would give most of it away with minimal involvement from my side and just keep a small nest egg because i never had one.
Advertising is the most prolific form of environmental pollution wrought by commerce.
It needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking, and every instance of it must be exhaustively scrutinised and required to be justified.
I’m old enough to remember them having “don’t be evil” written in big letters on their campus…
Then they got money. That changed everthing.
Google is THE success story of the end of the dot com bubble.
I hear it does that
Money poisons everything.
Just want to suggest Kagi, because their ethos is essentially this, and I would say their search results are considerably better than any other engine I’ve tried. It’s been well worth the money so far.
Been a long standing Kagi user and have never had to go past the first page for something I need.
Model access is also useful.
Customization rules and other things, useful.
I realize lemmy loves its searxng, but I am happy with my purchase.
I am so conflicted about them paying Yandex. Kagi sounds awesome with their small web search, filtering of AI or SEO slop, etc.
Yandex is solid too for searching torrents and piracy websites, that’s something that is really lacking in other search engines.
But I wouldn’t knowingly pay money for anything if it goes to Russia, and isn’t essential for me.
Some alternatives:
- Duckduckgo (Bing with privacy)
- Qwant (Bing with privacy, but building their own index)
- Mojeek (pet favorite of the privacy community but small index, search often unsatisfying for me)
- Kagi (apparently really good but paid)
Shouldn’t “paid” be a a huge advantage, if we are complaining about advertising?
Oh, they it now.
Lived long enough to become the thing they hated.
They didn’t say they hated it, just that they knew it would be a bad thing
I’m not quite convinced that this wasn’t just them doing PR.
2011, the removed the “don’t be evil” from their mission statement. they’ve only been evil for 15 years. /s
