I genuinely don’t know how they plan to make a parody of InfoWars that will not be indistinguishable from the original thing.

You’re missing the fact that a flatscreen TV will still often represent - as a portion of someone’s wealth - a far greater cost than a private jet would to a billionaire. Consider that most low income people are getting their cell phones on payment plans, whereas a multimillionaire can afford to buy a Lamborghini Gellardo out of pocket. On top of that, high end purchases like cars, yachts, houses, fine art, etc, often retain a lot of their resale value, turning them into investments in many cases, often reselling for more than their purchase price. So yes, I absolutely did account for the tax exemptions on “essentials”, and even when you factor those your sales tax only model still ends up being less onerous the more wealthy someone is.

I also want to call out the unspoken implication that is often present with these theories - not accusing you of doing this, but it needs to be said - that items like phones, computers and TVs are extraneous luxuries that no poor person should ever own, as if enjoying a fulfilling life or engaging in relaxation are things that only the wealthy should be allowed to have access to.

No

An investment contract exists if there is an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.”

And just to be absolutely clear, many cryptocurrencies do not qualify as investments, and the government agrees. However there are numerous other regulations that the crypto industry apparently cannot handle, such as “Know Your Client” laws, which all financial institutions have to abide by, and which exist to prevent money laundering (Binance’s internal emails revealed that they knew perfectly well that their clients were using their service to facilitate crime, and they were perfectly happy with that).

These are not bad faith regulations. They exist for good reasons, and there is absolute no good reason why the crypto industry shouldn’t also be subject to them. If these are currencies they should be regulated like currencies. If they are investments they should be regulated like investments.

That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.

There wasn’t a need to “define a new regulatory framework that actually fits” because, funnily enough, the existing regulatory framework already fits. It turns out, inventing new words doesn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the thing you’re describing. Refusing to call something an “investment” doesn’t change the fact that you’re selling an investment, refusing to call something a “security” doesn’t prevent it from being a security if it meets the definition.

Edit: Sorry, let me address that ridiculous point about Coinbase “asking for clarity” directly. Yes, Coinbase repeatedly “asked for clarity” in the same manner as a dude in a girl’s DMs repeatedly asking for nudes while being told in the bluntest of terms to fuck off. They were given perfectly clear answers, they just didn’t like them, so they kept claiming, with zero fucking basis, that these will laid out rules that every financial institution has been following for decades were somehow “unclear” to them. It was a conversation not unlike a Sovereign Citizen trying to get out of a speeding ticket by claiming that they don’t understand where the officer’s authority comes from. The law is prefectly clear. If you don’t understand the law, you hire a lawyer who does. That’s a cost of doing business. Sticking “smart” in front the of the word “contract” doesn’t suddenly invent a whole new field of law. I can’t suddenly get away with murder because I call it “crypto murder”. The law is based on what you do, not what you call it.

Lower income people spend - as a proportion of their income - far more of their income than higher income people. This makes the “nothing but sales taxes” approach much more regressive than it initially seems, despite often being touted by economists as a progressive approach to taxation.

Coiners: “We want to be taken seriously and treated as legitimate businesses!”

Biden Government: “OK. We’ll treat you as legitimate businesses in your respective fields and expect you to comply with the same regulations everyone else has to.”

Coiners: “Oh shit wait no this sucks, our whole business model only works because of crime, quick everyone vote for a fascist conman!”

Companies release free products to bring people into their ecosystem. If your company is already using Workstation Player, and now they’re looking for a Type 1 hypervisor, it makes sense to seriously consider ESXi. The idea especially is that you get smaller companies hooked on your free products early and then as they grow they buy more of your stuff rather than reconfigure their whole setup. You also get IT enthusiasts and home users to adopt, which gets you name recognition and builds familiarity. Then in the workplace those same users look to your brand as one to trust.

For VMware, the problem is that they recently made a huge volley of deeply anti-consumer moves - basically told all their small customers to fuck off, and told their big customers to prepare to get fucked - and it really did not go the way they’d hoped. Turns out when you’re competing in a space where KVM, Hyper-V and XCP all exist, it’s actually not that difficult for customers to leave. So they did.

This won’t directly help their bottom line but it’s presumably a sacrifice play to salvage their brand somewhat. Turns out when you tell people to fuck off, they tend to do just that.

Being compared to Everett True is the greatest compliment I have ever been given, and am honour of which I am in no way worthy.

You know what? Sure, fuck it, why not? I don’t even have a problem with OpenAI getting billions of dollars to do R&D on LLMs. They might actually turn out to have some practical applications, maybe.

My problem is that OpenAI basically stopped doing real R&D the moment ChatGPT became a product, because now all their money goes into their ridiculous backend server costs and putting increasingly silly layers of lipstick on a pig so that they can get one more round of investment funding.

AI is a really important area of technology to study, and I’m all in favour of giving money to the people actually studying it. But that sure as shit ain’t Sam Altman and his band of carnival barkers.

It’s been proven that even small amounts of synthetic data injected into a training set quickly leads to a phenomenon termed “model collapse”, though I prefer the term “Hapsburg AI” (not mine).

Basically, this is the kind of thing you announce you’re doing because it will hopefully get you one more round of investment funding while Sam Altman finishes working out how to fake his death.

Translation: “We told everyone we could turn glorified autocomplete into artificial general intelligence and then they gave us a bunch of money for that, so now we actually have to try to deliver something and we’ve got no idea how.”

Oh yeah, that list is going to be an absolute goldmine for scammers.

And honestly, if crypto people had any self reflection at all, the fact that being overtly a crypto person makes scammers flock to them, because they have hard data showing, statistically, how gullible they are should really make them reconsider being crypto people.