To use Bezos as an example, how would you work that out? Take away his ownership of Amazon as it increases above 100MM? Who would you give it to? Would you nationalize it?
> No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.
> Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?
Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
> They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.
The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better.
> Better than what we have now, hopefully.
We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse.
> I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right?
Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor.
Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason.
There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations.
In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.
> a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M
This is just a power transfer to Wall Street and CEOs.
We live in a wealthy society. Folks will be wealthy. The problem isn’t the wealth per se but the distribution, in particular, the pain at the bottom; the channels between wealth and politics; and the connection between wealth and morality in fascistic-Christian circles.
I'm sure there are plenty of creative ways to have the general public reclaim the excess wealth. How about a public mutual fund where every citizen owns 1 share. Every year on tax day, all personal holdings over $100M (or whatever the threshold is) are seized and ownership is transferred to that fund.
I think the OP’s proposal is great but impossible to implement right away. Some steps have to be taken towards that direction though. First, eliminate borrowing using their stocks as collateral, thus avoiding capital gains tax. That would immediately reduce the number of new mega yachts.
But the biggest boon for society would be progressive taxes on inheritance. It wouldn’t be government’s problem to figure out how it would work. It would be on inheritor to figure out how to pay the taxes on their newly inherited wealth.
>I have an even simpler step one: increase the IRS budget significantly so that they actually have enough resources to go after the big guys.
>It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
Has it been on a downward spiral?
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022[0] added $80 billion over ten years to the IRS budget[1] (a good step in the right direction, IMHO), but which has now been withdrawn. Gee, I wonder why?
Fun fact: Elon stopped fighting his Twitter purchase around the same time the Inflation Reduction Act was signed. In fact, the purchase was finally completed mere 2 months later.
Hm, I wonder why those two dates happen to be so close. It's truly a mystery.
Billionaires are allowed to have their cake and eat it too in the form of loans backed by their stock holdings. This is how they get to have $500MM yachts without having to actually sell their stock and lose control of their companies. It's how they pay themselves without having to pay taxes, because it's treated like debt and not income. Treating these like capital gains would be a start.
It seems to me that the only mainstream newspaper to figure out a workable solution so far is NYT. And their solution was games. One of these days that will be all that remains and people will forget what the NYT acronym stands for aside from Wordle.
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
> Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup
I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.
Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases
Yes, Chomsky, the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.
I agree regarding the audience, but for those on a more modest budget it is possible to get an affordable FT subscription to their digital version of the print newspaper.
Yeah I actually get a subscription as a part of my eBank membership. Although a couple years ago I paid full price for an annual paper delivery; that was nice to have a physical newspaper, but it was too expensive in the end.
How so? Growing up most of the time my family didn’t have a television. What are you saying I do read the NYT? I have no idea what point you are trying to make. My comment was in response to the comment about how the NYT had to resort to games for sustainability.
The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT. I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
That is a REALLY wild take considering what the NYT functionally is.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news? Do you believe everyone should read the NYTs. What is this Soviet Russia? Who said the alternative to reading the NYTs is getting news from social media?
> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
> Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
This is how my mom taught me to cook, and she decided (unilaterally I assume) that it was the definition of gourmet cooking. I went a lot of years thinking that was the literal definition, ha. Though in retrospect, it is not 100% wrong, and I don't think she was joking when she said it.
Yeah I'm hooked on it for the moment. The previous games are entertaining once a day, and we share results amongst our family for fun, but the Crossplay game is a lot of fun head-to-head.
Frequent flyer points are where they make their money. So much so that many airlines would run at a loss just flying passengers.
All their partners hand over real cash for points to give their customers, that often either expire or are never redeemed. I think it was the Economist that stated that airlines operate as unregulated banks. Flying people around is a secondary thing they do.
The Atlantic, WSJ, The Economist, Politico all come to mind as profitable.
I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.
> They historically had the best political coverage of DC
And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.
Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?
There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
If your claim is that the Post had a viable business available to it as a sort of GoFundMe project for the political opposition, this makes sense. Otherwise, it's hard to see how an org with 2500 employees but without much more national appeal than Politico or the Atlantic was going to compete long term.
I don't know how to quantify "national appeal", but the Post had about 2.5 million paid subscribers in 2023 and ~800 newsroom staff, while The Atlantic had about 1.1 million paid subscribers and ~200 newsroom staff.
Now the Post is down to ~2 million paid subscribers and 500 newsroom staff.
I don't think the Post was known as a slanted project for "the political opposition" during red or blue administrations, but it's got that reputation now.
My claim is that this new slant is responsible for the bulk of the paper's loss of paid subscribers. There's a market for rigorous, fact-checked reporting. Degrading that makes the business worse, not better.
What's the other national American newspaper --- not newsmagazine, 95% of what the Atlantic runs isn't reported --- besides the WSJ that's doing well right now?
Other than the NYT and WSJ, the only national example I can think of is The Guardian's US operation, but that one is supported by a trust plus recurring donations from readers.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
Seems false. The Atlantic Monthly, to take an example --- another publication I subscribe to --- is an order of magnitude smaller than the Post. If the Post wanted to run the Atlantic's business successfully, they could; they'd just have to lay almost everybody else in the company off.
That the Post's predicament is a consequence of Bezos partisan editorial decisions. I don't like those decisions either, but I don't think they get close to the core problem the Post faces.
Indeed. It's really, really something when I can even entertain the idea of 'I'll go to Wal-Mart, it's awful but at least it's a lot morally better than supporting Amazon'. Yikes!
The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.
Which is, in and of itself, a problem: I feel like we're trending towards a US news landscape where the NYT and their editorial board are the only ones setting the tone and discourse of print media.
> While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.
Has there been a non-Trump lunatic president? Or one that turned the government sharply left? I hear this kind of claim pretty often and I have trouble squaring it with reality.
Right, it’s pretty silly. None of the past three Democrats have been particularly to the left.
Even a true centrist would have built a public option along with the Affordable Care Act. Obama didn’t even support gay marriage when running in 2008! Clinton’s NAFTA accelerated American manufacturing shifting outside of the country. The craziest thing Gore would have done is combat global warming.
America is at best center-right. Our last leftist president was LBJ.
Except that the US right is not libertarian. If you ask them to describe themselves they often give that impression, but if you look at how they actually govern, libertarian is definitely not it.
> Who opposes switching back to phonics? Oddly the teacher's unions. Guess who is the biggest contributor to the Dems? Weirdly it makes sense when you frame it this way.
I think you phrased that incorrectly, hopefully not intentionally in bad faith. What you mean is that something like 94% of teacher's unions political contributions go to democratic politicians. It is certainly untrue that the biggest contributions to democrats come from teachers, and it is trivial to find that out.
I am also skeptical that phonics is why teachers prefer democrats. It probably has a much stronger association with how villainized educators are by republicans.
Yes, and I would have been perfectly happy with that. The status quo was very much preferred to the chaos we are now experiencing. Just because I wanted different changes does not mean voting to burn it all down is the best alternative to no changes.
Voting for a 3rd candidate isn't a vote against one of the other two, or does your logic work both ways? so 51.66% of people voted against Harris?
You know what, I don't even care if you respond. The election is over, and we can twist these numbers until the next election.
The logical leaps taken about voting for/against someone are troubling. The tropes around this are disturbing. The emotional vitriol around all of those are even worse.
The dude is the sitting POTUS. He stinks. Bitching about meaningless percentages isn't productive... at all.
There is no question that he won the presidential election in 2024.
However, when people say things like "this is what Americans voted for" ... there's a bit more nuance required. His election win is what our electoral process produced. But to conclude from that that an actual majority of Americans preferred his policies to anyone else's ... that's a mistake.
And yes, 51.66% of people voted against Harris - they could have voted for her, but chose to vote for someone else.
> The logical leaps taken about voting for/against someone are troubling. The tropes around this are disturbing. The emotional vitriol around all of those are even worse.
Alright, the next step is to accuse everyone who might try to ground the discussion in truth that they must have TDS. I am not a huge fan of accusing one's opponents of projection, but man, sometimes it really does seem to be the most plausible answer.
> Alright, the next step is to accuse everyone who might try to ground the discussion in truth that they must have TDS. I am not a huge fan of accusing one's opponents of projection, but man, sometimes it really does seem to be the most plausible answer.
> Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism
Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.
> It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms
He got less than 50% of the vote, if the Dems are pushing so many people to Trump they are doing a crappy job of it.
Though I do agree that the Dems suck on messaging, it is not because they villainize Republican voters. It's because they don't focus their efforts on bread-and-button progressive priorities like labor and healthcare. They blew their wad on trans rights, which just isn't a great strategy to move a lot of voters to the polls.
> Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.
I don't think anyone ever embraces being called deplorable, that seems like a strange take. If anything, being called deplorable would just make someone dislike the name-caller. Don't take my word for it, this is behavior exhibited by children and adults every day.
Or are you twisting up a reference where HRC called the right "a basket of deplorables" ?
I've got a number of right wing acquaintances, they 100% call themselves deplorable. And yes, in response to Hillary's use of the term. Even though she didn't call everyone on the right a deplorable, this did not stop them from running with it.
And they do embrace it. To the point where they say 'dirka dirka' when the topic of our Indian managers comes up (never mind that the original movie reference was about Arabs, but whatever), and making comments about women in positions of authority at the company. That's in addition to the comments about trans people.
Hard to say whether that attitude came first or second. And while I can definitely appreciate that nobody wants to be looked down on, there is no requirement that you respond to that by doing that which you are accused of.
I don't love it, but I don't have many of the problems other people seem to have. And I've used everything from IRC in the 80s to Slack more recently. The only thing I can think of is that I don't run it on Windows, but rather a fairly new MacBook Pro M4. Maybe in this case it actually runs better on Mac, which is kind of ironic.
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