I tried playing the monster mash on YouTube tonight. It played two ads then started the song but the video had a weird ai avatar performing. It played for five seconds then started playing another ad.
Haha, making better compression algorithms is a detriment to society, I love it. Finally. Getting those bastard HEVC devs behind bars is a lifelong dream of mine.
Came here to say this. The forum post is factually incorrect, it would be good to add a note.
With the state of French politics lately, it's very unlikely any budget will be passed any time soon. My take is the proposal is a stunt aimed at generating some attention.
Right, this should be flagged. It's blatant misinformation and rage bait. How is a random post on a random message board even considered a valid source. OP here should take the advice of the mod on the board they linked to, where the thread was locked:
>it's a good idea to just not post things we don't understand. Let's not be so in a rush to break news that it becomes misinformation.
I think it will just cause France to be siloed. Imagine what a child downloads in 5-6 hours a day of mindless garbage, now that is a €20/month habit why would YouTube or TikTok want them anymore. Bingers on streaming services are also putting the providers in an awkward position. In the linked article VLC estimates this will cost them €1m/year so they won't be viable. Steam is on the hook for €3.25m/week that is the equivalent of them losing €11m/week in sales so even they will be lucky to still be profitable in France.
I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?
I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do this instead of saving.
That’s the reason they do it in the first place.
I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.
Warren Buffett, I believe, suggested passing a law making every sitting member of Congress ineligible for reelection whenever the federal deficit exceeds 3%
I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.
Putting deficits below GDP growth can also be a roundabout way of slightly impoverishing future generations. A country that engages in countercyclical spending and growth via (less-than-GDP) deficits outperforms one that runs zero debt, and future generations end up wealthier.
What if people end up becoming increasingly dependent on their government spending beyond its means, end up suffering more harm when the deficit is reduced than if it were never raised in the first place, and the debt surges up until the state collapses?
What if people become increasingly dependent on their government’s spending beyond its means, so that they suffer more harm once the deficit is reduced than had it never been raised in the first place, leading to the debt surging until sufficient money can no longer be raised?
Also, you can't guarantee that you'll be able to make future payments.
> how do you get politicians that actually want to save money
What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.
Somehow I'm paying more tax and getting worse services. I'm getting pretty sick of it, and the only way it's going to change is a reform of the public service.
I'd want to see quarterly budgets and funding vs yearly, penalties for any department executives that spend just so they use their entire budgets, and efficiency dividends implemented for any department that has been caught spending on pointless crap. We have the tech to move fast in ensuring funds are being used responsibly.
"The effective tax rate of U.S. billionaires (measured by the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers) fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 23.8% (or roughly 24%) in 2018–2020" [1]
Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.
Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment
The problem is they tax and save upon the wrong people which leads to wealthy transfer to the upper 1% which leads to economic problems.
They try to fix that by taxing and saving upon the wrong people even more.
Under Clinton the "PAYGO" rules enforced that all spending had to be covered by cuts or new taxes. This caused a lot of aggressive review and limited eagerness to spend.
The easiest place to save is in entitlements. Saving there is unfortunately a really good way to avoid reelection. If you want to save money, get a better demography. That's impossible, but not more impossible than cutting benefits.
I shared this mental model until I read "The Almighty Dollar" by Brendan Greeley. Highly recommend! It shows how we moved through a few different monetary regimes in the 19th century, including regional variations and private banknotes. Spanish silver dollars were also widely circulated until 1857. The greenback wasn't introduced until the Civil War. Reliable convertibility of federal notes to gold was the exception, not the rule, available c. 1879-1933.
You need to start by making taxes mostly optional, at the discretion of the payer, with the payers having power to choose its spending.
Personally i'm in the camp of:
1 - A minor poll tax on all citizens for basic sovereignty
2 - Local vote based taxes for local things:
- Want a hospital? Roads? Any local infrastructure or collective service? A private entity makes an offer to build/manage a hospital for a 20 year period at a X amount per year. Anyone is able to vote for it by choosing which amount they want to contribute then and there or with the ability to impose a lien on their land to secure ongoing yearly payments for a period of time. Have the vote happen and if enough people offer to pay for it, it gets done. If there are more people willing to pay everyone gets a pro-rata discount
I actually like the idea of this, but with some restrictions (and wouldn't mind seeing it in the US). Yes, I know the costs are passed thru to consumers.
Here's my thinking:
1. Limit who is charged based on how much bandwidth they consume / month. If it's over 1TB, the tax goes into affect. This helps small businesses.
2. If (1) can't work, we can do it based on income from French users above X / month.
3. Tax income must go towards infrastructure projects: Parks & Recs, Fiber buildouts, etc.
If the US were to follow this excellent idea to raise revenue, it could completely solve the federal budget deficit.
A modest download tax of USD $2.07 per GB suffices.
Estimate:
- 134 million households
- approx 80% of households subscribe to home broadband
- approx 750 GB download per month per household
- $2 trillion annual deficit
- assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax
The stated reason is that physical business, when they use the country's infrastructure pay tax to contribute to the upkeep. But presumably, internet businesses, especially those based outside the country use the infrastructure but do not pay for the upkeep. This tax is supposed to address this issue.
While the solution might not be optimal, how valid is the underlying problem? Can someone make genuine steelman arguments?
Not simply EUR 5.5 cents per GB! The tax is limited to 15% of revenue from data sales in France, or 2% of total global revenues.
> « La taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques fait l’objet d’un plafonnement correspondant au maximum à 15 % du chiffre d’affaires réalisé en France par l’émetteur ou à 2 % de son chiffre d’affaires total. [1]
"The tax on digital service producers has a ceiling that corresponds to a maximum of 15% of France-based revenue by the transmitter or 2% of its total revenue (my translation)."
What's to stop Netflix from spinning out a Netflix France for the sole purpose of having all French revenue in a single corporate entity subject to the 2% of total global revenues rule?
Netflix France would be able to pay nearly whatever content licensing and technical access fees it wants to Netflix. It's can make approximately zero profit and need not have any French employees, merely be a container for having a total top-line revenue equal to Netflix's revenues from France.
Who had this idea? This would have the effect that paid services get more expensive and free services get lower quality, stop working, or become illegal.
Putting that aside, I'd be interested in how they'd want to measure this when in practice network traffic is delivered over all kinds of CDNs and rented servers from who knows where. The technicalities of determining who would have to pay seem very non-trivial to me.
It's in incredible how hostile this tax is but I have to give them credit. They just see something that's productive and valuable and they just see money they can extort from people.
No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.
On the subject of gasoline taxes, they are getting increasingly worried about lost revenue from the uptake of electric cars. It is going to be a distance tax I am sure, but what would make sense is to just give the department of transportation the electric tax already existing.
Already coming in in the UK next year. There are all sorts of issues with the approach:
- how does the tax authority know how many miles a car has driven each year? New cars in the UK are exempt from having standard safety testing at garages where mileage is recorded
- how are miles driven outside the UK accounted for? The tax is supposed to replace lost fuel duty, but if someone takes their electric car abroad, they still owe the British government money under the current arrangement
— do drivers pay in advance or arrears? If in advance, how do the government handle people grossly underestimating expected mileage to avoid paying ahead of time?
Neoliberalism 101.. monetize and privatize everything and punish the poor disproportionately. Not for a beneficial purpose, but because "free is communism".
... except ... if there is anything the French government is not it's neoliberalist (yes, the president is, but he has long since lost the ability to change the budget)
> No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology
What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)
Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.
You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).
Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...
76 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 46.3 ms ] threadI'm just bitching....
Just like if you buy something from the store and then return it you get all of your money back even if you actually used the item.
With the state of French politics lately, it's very unlikely any budget will be passed any time soon. My take is the proposal is a stunt aimed at generating some attention.
>it's a good idea to just not post things we don't understand. Let's not be so in a rush to break news that it becomes misinformation.
Welcome to EU!
Stop wasting your time on that, it’s going to get removed next time.
I can post wild nonsense without any backing, too!
I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do this instead of saving.
That’s the reason they do it in the first place.
I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.
I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.
Also, you can't guarantee that you'll be able to make future payments.
What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.
I'd want to see quarterly budgets and funding vs yearly, penalties for any department executives that spend just so they use their entire budgets, and efficiency dividends implemented for any department that has been caught spending on pointless crap. We have the tech to move fast in ensuring funds are being used responsibly.
You're not rich enough.
"The effective tax rate of U.S. billionaires (measured by the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers) fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 23.8% (or roughly 24%) in 2018–2020" [1]
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w34170
Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.
Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment
It worked for France after the invention of the guillotine.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634502/the-almighty...
Personally i'm in the camp of:
1 - A minor poll tax on all citizens for basic sovereignty
2 - Local vote based taxes for local things: - Want a hospital? Roads? Any local infrastructure or collective service? A private entity makes an offer to build/manage a hospital for a 20 year period at a X amount per year. Anyone is able to vote for it by choosing which amount they want to contribute then and there or with the ability to impose a lien on their land to secure ongoing yearly payments for a period of time. Have the vote happen and if enough people offer to pay for it, it gets done. If there are more people willing to pay everyone gets a pro-rata discount
Here's my thinking:
1. Limit who is charged based on how much bandwidth they consume / month. If it's over 1TB, the tax goes into affect. This helps small businesses.
2. If (1) can't work, we can do it based on income from French users above X / month.
3. Tax income must go towards infrastructure projects: Parks & Recs, Fiber buildouts, etc.
A modest download tax of USD $2.07 per GB suffices.
Estimate:
Lol, my behavior would change a lot if I was paying $2 per gig, my god
While the solution might not be optimal, how valid is the underlying problem? Can someone make genuine steelman arguments?
> « La taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques fait l’objet d’un plafonnement correspondant au maximum à 15 % du chiffre d’affaires réalisé en France par l’émetteur ou à 2 % de son chiffre d’affaires total. [1]
"The tax on digital service producers has a ceiling that corresponds to a maximum of 15% of France-based revenue by the transmitter or 2% of its total revenue (my translation)."
[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
Putting that aside, I'd be interested in how they'd want to measure this when in practice network traffic is delivered over all kinds of CDNs and rented servers from who knows where. The technicalities of determining who would have to pay seem very non-trivial to me.
No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.
Just see something people do and tax it.
- how does the tax authority know how many miles a car has driven each year? New cars in the UK are exempt from having standard safety testing at garages where mileage is recorded
- how are miles driven outside the UK accounted for? The tax is supposed to replace lost fuel duty, but if someone takes their electric car abroad, they still owe the British government money under the current arrangement
— do drivers pay in advance or arrears? If in advance, how do the government handle people grossly underestimating expected mileage to avoid paying ahead of time?
In short, it’s a mess.
What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)
Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.
You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).
Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...