> there’s nothing inherent to robots that insulates them from [taxation]
If automation really takes off and entire factories can be run by a handful of people it might make sense to move them to whatever low-tax country with a port. Pay the 5 employees running it extra to fly in there for a few months a year each (like oil workers) and if it's in a lawless region add some automatic turrets that shoot at anything unauthorized entering the perimeter. Makes sense as long as extra pay+extra shipping+ammo costs is less than the hypothetical robot taxes.
It might be intentional. I noticed the accent too and it really left the impression that china is a technological leader now and might not need to adapt to the west as much anymore.
To be a leader they’d have to release this and have it be good. There’s not even a release date or price. Having heavily accented English in a promo video might be a sign of confidence but it’s also the very early days of this product.
Xiaomi products are also rarely widely available in the west as it is. So I’m not sure the west is their primary market at this point.
Xiaomi products are pretty popular in India where English is widely spoken. They also have stores and concessions starting to open in the UK and other European markets.
If this turns out to be true I wonder if it'd be practical (given the financial resources) to have pressure sealed rooms that you spend a lot of time in at home (e.g. your office). These could be precisely controlled (O2, CO2 levels, pressure, …) and possibly both increase current and future performance. The main problem seems the time needed to exit because an abrupt loss of pressure would be hazardous. But if you have a well-structured day it might work. This could be very interesting for high earning knowledge workers imo.
Breathing oxygen at a partial pressure over about 0.5 atm causes progressive pulmonary oxygen toxicity (loss of vital capacity). Brief exposures like the treatment protocol described in this paper are fine but it's not something you want to do all day every day. Saturation divers who live under pressure for days are careful to control chamber oxygen pressure below that limit.
Nitrogen is regular air is an anaesthetic. It literally makes you stupid, and the effects increase with pressure. If you want to be smarter you need to replace the nitrogen with helium. The high pitched voices are going to make Zoom meetings hilarious.
So generally working under pressure is totally impractical.
On a more feasible scale, a similar idea could be better air filtration/ventilation. Better ventilation in homes or offices to decrease CO2 levels could be an easier way to achieve a similar effect.
If true this is even bigger, as it indicates new directions to look for cures. No longer stuck on plaques; it may be metabolic, respiratory, or pulmonary. This could be more direct evidence of it.
I read that all mainframe components, even CPUs, were redundant and hot-swappable and that instructions are executed on two separate CPUs to detect faults and correct them on the fly. That would make a lot of sense if your application requires high availability and assurance but isn't designed for it. I haven't heard of any standard server hardware that can give you HA or such assurance with a single machine, probably because you would not build any application dependent on that these days. It's probably cheaper to do in software.
I remember hearing a story (probably apocryphal) about a mainframe that was so redundant that it had to be physically dismantled and moved from one datacentre to another across town, and did so whilst remaining up the entire time.
Case in point, vSphere Fault Tolerance is a software approach that runs your workload in a VM where the CPU instructions are mirrored to another VM on another physical server to deliver redundancy against physical server loss.
There will never be post-scarcity, because we'll never have enough. Using cutting-edge technology always requires people to work hard to build said technology. If it didn't require work and just wishful thinking we'd already have it. The builders and engineers will always want _something_ in exchange or they won't make said tech accessible to you. The curiosity of nerds only gets you so far (see open source UX).
Maybe you won't have to work/pay for food if accounting for it becomes more work than producing it (if sufficiently automated and not resource-constrained). But if you want to live in a hip neighborhood (by definition there is limited availability), have your own flying car, go on vacation on the moon once a year where real people service you etc. you'll have to work for that. Because the ingenuity and work necessary to make this all happen will still be enormous.
Maybe you think you'd be happy with your today's lifestyle, which might be attainable for ~free. But I think the reality for most is that they'd grow jealous of their friends posting selfies from the moon and resent "the evil rich" again.
The small amount of work necessary to _survive_ today would sound marvelous to someone from even 100 years ago (clothes, food, shelter outside major cities). Mowing one lawn for 1-2h every day would probably be enough for that. But surviving isn't the point of being human, it's about stretching the limits of what is possible and that will always take as much work as we are willing to put into it.
To give some technical background: yes, using Lightning (as they seem to do) for affordable BTC payments is challenging for most. As far as I am aware that is why they rely on custodial solutions [1]. People hold their money with someone from their village they trust, which is not ideal but neither is being unbanked. Down the road I could easily see this trust being spread over multiple people using multisig wallets.
The amazing thing about all this is that everyone can become a BTC "bank". You need a bit of capital but orders of magnitude less than a normal bank would require, maybe 2k$ to get started of which you might spend 400$ on hardware and fees to open some channels. The trustless nature of lightning lets you and your users then join the global payment network without asking for permission from anyone and you can engage in commerce internationally.
I think, while we are still early, that this is an awesome experiment. It will highlight the UX problems so we can fix them. Hopefully at some point all this will make sense to the average westerner too, so we can finally have a money not controlled by anyone (states, incumbent banks) again. But that might take a long time.
I've always said that the most productive use of the state in response to bitcoin is by helping make better UX, protocols, optional smart contracts for industries (no different than little stickers on plastic bottles or electronics, but way more useful for builders and consumers alike).
Tax competition is what keeps governments in check. Taxes are just fees for services in the territory of the state (e.g. security, market access, infrastructure, …). If these services don't warrant paying the fee anymore people and companies should of course leave for better-run places! Nothing else will make governments become more competitive than voting with one's feet. We should really become less sentimental about countries, they are just crude constructs to provide services that need coordination which markets can't as easily provide. Choosing the best service provider is something good as it increases overall efficiency as only sufficiently efficient systems survive in the long run.
Wanting a global minimum tax is like one mafia asking the others to increase their protection charges so their clients don't leave. Such collusion is frowned upon for good reasons in free markets as it leads to worse outcomes due to reduced competition.
I'm hopeful that this idea will not work due to the profitability of breaking the deal and the big number of countries that exist. The US also shouldn't overestimate its importance which seems high but ever-declining.
This is a kind of "market will solve all" naivety.
In a functioning market, this might work, but it overlooks the ability of corporations to game the system via one or two self-interested jurisdictions.
The key problem is that corporations can avail themselves of the public goods (infrastructure, public education, public order) and then use accounting maneuvers to shift profits to jurisdictions that will not tax them.
Some jurisdictions don't provide much in the way of public goods (small island states) or see an opportunity to raise some modest taxes on money they would otherwise never see (eg the Netherlands).
So you end up with the (individual) taxpayers of some countries subsidising these corporations, other countries profiting modestly and the corporations keeping most of the tax money.
Is this what an efficient market would deliver? An unfair and unsustainable situation? According to your theory the countries should compete with each other until their taxes are very low and their subsidies are very high, because that would reflect "efficiency". But what is the incentive for countries to do this? A rational country in the this market would set taxes to balance out the public goods provided. But because of profit shifting this is impossible, no matter how efficient they are. Yellen's plan is a rational response to this.
>>The key problem is that corporations can avail themselves of the public goods (infrastructure, public education, public order) and then use accounting maneuvers to shift profits to jurisdictions that will not tax them.
Countries can easily tax income generated by foreign corporations within their jurisdiction.
What you and Yellen are advocating risks imposing on the entire world an economic and tax system that may be far from optimal, to address a risk that can be mitigated through numerous other methods.
Exactly this. Just tax the value added in your country if you are so inclined (or even better the resources used to do so like land, infrastructure use, …). If you find out that's not so much you have deeper problems.
Why would e.g. an integrated software/hardware business pay significant taxes in the US if their value chain isn't strictly bound to it?
Sure, if developers live and work there you can tax their income to a certain degree before they leave and work remotely. Hardware is built abroad anyway (and probably taxed there), you can only levy import taxes at your own detriment. But if the business is successful most of the added value comes from the integration of these aspects and that can happen wherever because it's an idea not bound to a place to be executed. If something doesn't require physical presence taxing it becomes very hard and morally dubious (on what grounds would you tax it all if e.g. only 10% of your profits need physical infrastructure that is funded through these taxes?).
Globalization means that a society's most successful people aren't stuck with it any longer. They can go where they aren't seen as subjects to milk to keep the less productive happy. I don't owe my country of origin anything, they need to be competitive to keep me as I can take my business everywhere. In that sense directly investing in your population's higher education might be misguided to some degree because it creates more people capable enough to leave with the acquired knowledge, increasing the tax burden, making the country less competitive.
> but it overlooks the ability of corporations to game the system via one or two self-interested jurisdictions.
This is a feature of the market system and not a bug.
> Some jurisdictions don't provide much in the way of public goods (small island states) or see an opportunity to raise some modest taxes on money they would otherwise never see (eg the Netherlands).
Again, this is a feature and not a bug.
> So you end up with the (individual) taxpayers of some countries subsidising these corporations, other countries profiting modestly and the corporations keeping most of the tax money.
I do not understand the use of the word "subsidy" here. Corporations are keeping the money they have earned themselves is not a subsidy. Not to mention all the money that corporations earn eventually belongs to the individuals who receive them in the form of dividends or capital gains.
> A rational country in the this market would set taxes to balance out the public goods provided.
There is zero restraint on what is a "public good". Governments like to take over everything and control everything. Without corporations being able to influence policy and be able to move their money abroad we would end up in pretty bad state like California where you spend billions of dollars on a high speed train that goes from nowhere to nowhere and will never really complete to transport anything useful.
I am not sure why leaving more money in hands of people like Joe Biden or Donald Trump should be seen as anything but pure evil at this point.
> Tax competition is what keeps governments in check.
That's true for me, because if I decide US taxes are too high and leave the country, I don't get to keep using US roads. That's not true of Amazon.
Edit to add: more generally, this is a coordination problem[0], and mutual agreements against defection are a well-studied solution to such problems. Comparing such an agreement to mafia extortion is way off base.
I believe the US taxes international income as long as you’re a citizen, even if you live abroad. So maybe the comparison doesn’t quite work, but I do agree with your point!
Tax unification is what keeps companies in check. Companies are just providers for services in the territory of any state. If these services don't warrant paying close-to-zero fees anymore, people and states should of course leave for better-run companies! Nothing else will make companies become more competitive than voting with one's feet. We should really become less sentimental about corporations, they are just crude constructs to provide services. Choosing the best service provider is something good as it increases overall efficiency as only sufficiently efficient systems survive in the long run.
Wanting tax loopholes and government competition is like one mafia asking the others to increase their protection charges so their clients don't leave. Such collusion is frowned upon for good reasons in free markets as it leads to worse outcomes due to reduced competition.
I'm hopeful that this idea will not work due to the profitability of breaking the deal and the big number of companies that exist.
Counterpoint: corporations are creations of the government, and a polity (and its government) ought to do whatever generates the desired outcome they want from these creations, including bringing in more tax revenue, if that's what they want. Ain't no corporation without government. They serve us. Or should.
And that's a problem. Competition is (usually) good for the entities that can shop around. But companies' interests isn't what matters. Citizens' interests are.
The universe of citizens interests includes countries that are overleveraged and can never resolve their budgetary constraints, alongside countries that simply don’t need the additional revenue.
The tax collection expectation is based on hubris, and seems to misunderstand that countries have to figure out their own revenue structures, with national formalized taxes on profits being a new scheme, and international taxes being newer. This obviously brushes up against the capabilities of the nation state concept, as enforcing it even by the wealthiest country is an impractical game of whack-a-mole.
Countries should revisit how they are funded, because they are in competition. Its only a couple of the biggest countries that have egos about it.
Doesn't your train of thought only work if collected corporate taxes accurately reflect activity in a country?
I think the frustration is in part due to a corporation conducting business in one country, and playing games so the profits occur and are taxed in a lower tax one.
Another question is what do jurisdictions do with excess corporate tax revenue they don't need? A lot of "tax havens" have no need for more revenue.
But that said the US has pushed a lot of countries into tax treaties and it sounds like they can effectively embargo countries that don't comply with US tax policies. So I think the US has ways of getting what it wants.
There is a joke about this: some guy goes to the market to buy chickens and he sees a seller that was asking 2 times more than the other sellers, so he is asking why. The sellers says: "I need the money". All the countries need money, it's just that some countries spend it wisely and others go crazy.
> Wanting a global minimum tax is like one mafia asking the others to increase their protection charges so their clients don't leave.
No, it's to ensure that countries with extremely low operating costs thanks to few citizens and not a lot of space (Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland come to my mind) don't run price dumping on everyone else, allowing the rich elites to concentrate and extract profits while the countries that made that profit possible (by, for example, providing an educated workforce or a secure legal framework to solve conflicts) get nothing in return.
Switzerland is not a good example to support your idea, they are not very small, have no high density of population and they provide better services than US to their citizens for a lot less money (lower tax rate). They are more efficient and spend wiser.
Far from nothing, companies allow the government to collect more payroll, property, income, capital gains, and sales taxes. Moreover, corporate taxes are a double taxation of which a sizable portion of the incidence falls on labor
You are correct in your assessment of capitalism, and wrong on your prediction of the outcome. The situation you describe is one where an entity (the government) offers services for a fee. Some of its customers, the citizens, are captive. These customers' switching costs are enormous: they must leave their country and go to another one. Another group of customers, have much lower switching costs, in fact, negligible switching costs compared to their revenue: corporations.
The natural outcome is that the entity makes every effort to meet the needs of the corporations, and zero effort to meet the needs of the citizens. Indeed, it can reduce services to the citizens while increasing their costs, at the same time as doing the opposite for the corporations: reducing their costs while granting them monopolies and regulatory protection, for example.
It's certainly a nice tool if your country is falling apart. Nearly every other asset class is less accessible, transportable or secure against seizure than Bitcoin.
When countries descend into chaos or go full on authoritarian the best option is often to leave, but there might already be capital controls. So what can you take with you? Stocks: good luck if held by a broker in the country. Physical gold or cash: good luck at the border/customs. Foreign accounts: hard to come by for most people even in the first world due to regulations. Any serious amount of money is very hard to move between jurisdictions, especially in times of crisis, through traditional means.
If you believe your host country doesn't own you and you should be able to relocate to wherever you are treated best, Bitcoin can be a good tool if you were unprepared so far (e.g. because you didn't think a crisis could hit _your_ country). This might not be a use case for you today, especially if you are happy with your country and it is stable. But don't discount that the situation of others might differ.
That only really works for stable countries anyway. While shit is hitting the fan there will be enough incentive not to care about some silly rule as long as breaking it is not easily detectable. In the worst case trading moves from centralized exchanges to decentralized OTC trades. I don't think any government can really stop Bitcoin at this point.
Am I the only one who is worried every time such a news drops? Achieving high-tech autarky is a first step towards a war with china becoming viable. Not that the alternative would be much better: a war being nonviable and the west bending to their wishes. But still, I think it shows there are real concerns on the highest levels and it is considered an actual possibility. Scary.
I'm confused as to your assertion that war somehow wouldn't be viable. WW1 was previously thought to be impossible because of the economic interdependence and trade and yet all the same it had happened.
We're talking about a a revisionist, expansionist state that is rising, believes the existing power to be fragile, weak, and on the decline. It isn't a question of "Viability". The CCP sees serious geopolitical benefits to an armed conflict.
> Achieving high-tech autarky is a first step towards a war with china becoming viable.
That's a false dillema. The choice is not between self-sufficiency and war with China, and dependency and ever-lasting peace with China.
The choice is actually between war with China when China controls all the industry, and war with China when it fails to control and restrict access to that resource.
Given the choice, achieving self-sufficiency is more likely to ensure peace/dissuade war than dependency.
It's speculation, but China appears to be building up normalcy bias in Taiwanese defenses, get them used to seeing Chinese aircraft and making them more complacent.
Add the fact that China's national victim mentality is driving it to restore itself to it's perceived state before the "west" messed it up (includes regaining Taiwan), and that objective being one of the socio-political foundations of the CCP's power, and the CCP being well aware that China will start running out of young people in next decade due to one child policy (makes military adventures harder for both manpower and economic reasons), and Xi consolidating more power under himself and his cult of personality than any Chinese ruler since Mao...
Yeah if I was Taiwan I'd be subtly building some extra "tourism infrastructure" on the beaches and quietly stepping up training requirements for reserves; and give the US whatever it wants in exchange for a couple of carrier battle groups if needed.
CCP is highly pragmatic, they're just using everything as a nationalistic smoke screen to get what they want - control of Asia and probably the world.
It's funny because anybody with a brain could look at China in 1970 and look at it now, while asking themselves: "Hmmm, how did China do with that opening up to the US/West?"
It's laughable, but anti-US will say "buh buh buh... IRAQ!" as some sort of blanket example that the US has to stand aside now and let anybody do anything they want.
> US has to stand aside now and let anybody do anything they want.
Reducing three countries to rubble (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) in just the past 20 years means exactly that the US has no place in international politics and should be treated as an extremely dangerous country, sanctioned by the United Nations for warcrimes, made to pay trillions in damages and slowly be re-introduced into the global village once they are demilitarized.
Iraq - I didn't agree with it. But look at the country now versus 20 years ago... it's a democracy in much better shape.
Afghanistan - we needed to take out al-Qaeda after the attacks. The country is broken, and outside actors help the Taliban continue their terrorism. You support the Taliban? Popular opinion supports the democratic government.
Libya - Russia and Turkey are the big players there now, continuing the civil war. I guess it's not as simple as you make it out to be, huh?
And yet you gloss over the countries like Japan, South Korea, Phillipines, Colombia, Eastern Europe and Western, that have all entered our sphere after war and have done amazingly economically while retaining high quality democracies.
Without the US, the world would quickly devolve back to fighting warlord/autocratic ethnostates. Or an autocratic CCP-controlled world.
Ah yes, so the conclusion is that the US will start all wars and poor China will start 0 wars and do 0 aggressive things. So glad we have such a critical geopolitical mind here to show us the way.
Or... it's much more complicated and China has been slowly angling to usurp control (unjustly) for decades.
ASML builds the machines that Intel, TSMC and every other fab relies on. You never hear much about them. They are based in the Netherlands- a country that prefers to operate below the radar.
Thx for the pointer, nice to know the name of the theory. Although it only covers a part of my argument. My concern was also in regards to how much military tech could be built on short notice inside the US if it came to a prolonged war and most of the existing toys were destroyed after some months. That was what I meant with a war being nonviable (would end in a nuclear MAD scenario imo without the capacity to rebuild conventional weapons).
The US's current dependency on China is one-way. China is not co-dependent on the US. The existing dependency structure does not incentivize China to avoid war.
Besides, most of the US wars in the last half century have been started because the US was dependent on another nation. It seems a self-sufficient US may actually be less likely to go to war.
> Achieving high-tech autarky is a first step towards a war with china becoming viable.
Definitely, but it's also a sensible precaution against natural disaster (earthquakes, tsunamis), madman-going-mad (especially Kim Jong Un, whose missiles have more than enough capability to reach Taiwan) and other (like the Suez Canal fuck-up) risk.
It simply is too much risk when too many companies depend on one single other company's (TSMC) products... Apple, AMD/ATI, almost all automobile supply chains...
The correct way to do this would be using OP_RETURN imo. This special opcode is meant for committing to data like this. So for example one could commit to 4 bytes representing the IP address. To ensure that only authorized parties can update the IP the client should only accept transactions that were sent from a certain address, meaning they are automatically signed with the authorized-party's key.
Definitely an interesting use case for BTC to route around such censorship.
If automation really takes off and entire factories can be run by a handful of people it might make sense to move them to whatever low-tax country with a port. Pay the 5 employees running it extra to fly in there for a few months a year each (like oil workers) and if it's in a lawless region add some automatic turrets that shoot at anything unauthorized entering the perimeter. Makes sense as long as extra pay+extra shipping+ammo costs is less than the hypothetical robot taxes.