More seriously, his main function is dealing with executive work, and it is what he is really good at - but SpaceX turned a profit once the government took a dump on NASA and Tesla is a house of cards that could tank any minute that is propped up by a continuing promise to shareholders that they will be profitable next year.
Tesla is 15 years old and has yet to be sustainable on its own. If investors pull out of it (which they will eventually), it will cease to exist without government intervention. It cannot be expressed enough that Musk has been lucky for an unreasonably long period of time, and that his enterprise is very much on a bubble that will ruin a lot of lives. That’s also why just a whiff of talk of going private was such a big deal, because his investors want it so very badly.
Well, no. What I mean is that he’s not even part of a corporation really trying to develop Hyperloop. I’m sure he wants to see it succeed, but unlike Tesla or SpaceX, he has almost no skin in the game.
Part of the problem, according to Callahan, lies in the broad way that philanthropy has been defined. Under the federal tax code, an organization that feeds the hungry can count as a philanthropy, and so can a university where students study the problem of hunger, and so, too, can a think tank devoted to downplaying hunger as a problem.
Yeah, I’m pretty much convinced that tax deductions for charitable donations need to go.
Charities are used as excuses by libertarians for why governments shouldn’t have to look after the well-being of their citizens
Much of the money to support these charities is, practically, coming from government coffers anyhow (in the form of lost tax revenue), so the government should be the one in control of the funds.
As the article states, it’s generally the rich people getting tax refunds for their charitable contributions anyway, so it’s a regressive tax measure.
Allowing IP to be locked up is slowing economic development:
…And the lock on IP centralizes so much market and political power in firms that the word monopsony is no longer banned from everywhere but the classroom:
BTW, I appreciate Catapult not including a bunch of URL tracking garbage I then have to strip out. Yes, I do strip the trackers. The ones that I recognise, anyway.
The article still contains an insertion or three of passive language pushing the idea that raising the minimum wage substantially would cause undetermined reduction of employment. Basic FUD. I hate the lazyness of that argument.
Maybe a tool that people find valuable becomes significantly less so when it’s covered in ad garbage.
Growth picked up again after they went global, but it turns out that they’ve only just started doing non-English language ads. Advertising is the laziest way to get a revenue stream because at that point, making the tool or program or whatever better has a much higher opportunity cost.