Solid agree from me. I love the idea of a wealth/asset tax*.
I’m not sure where the line lies, and I haven’t done the math to see where 3x the global 10% lands, but I think that is likely too small and would impact most of the ‘first world’ citizens who aren’t the problem, but a rolling plan to start higher and move down seems sound. If you start at everyone worth >$10Billion, you’ll have better luck selling this idea than if you start with everyone worth >$10k.
If everyone had all the resources they needed, there would likely be little innovation, but that innovation would be from the passionate. But we’ve seen in the past few years that when all the resources are pooled, the owning class stops innovating and moves into hoarding instead and the motive moves to extracting value instead of creating it.
There is a happy middle ground somewhere, where people can be rewarded for work that adds value to society but not be incentivized to hoard it and others can choose to not add to society but still live a satisfying life.
*Your idea is a little nicer than mine, which is that we identify an absurd personal wealth line, like $10B (tied to some economic indicator), and then anyone over that line is executed and their property is returned to society and not inherited. Build in a grace period, so you have like a year to divest if you pass the threshold. That will heavily disincentivize hoarding.
Ah… see, you two are about a decade too early for the OP issue.
I don’t have a 2026-model car, since those cost as much as a house nowadays, but they also have a water pump; theirs with a microcontroller. Said pump won’t work unless it’s had it’s special flavor of authentication handled so the computer in the pump (which adds non-negligible cost) can talk to the rest of the car. That’s computer’s only job is to tell the pump it’s authentic and can work.
(I’m simplifying, I’m IT secops, not auto) Used to be there was a literal wire that ran from the turn signal stalk to the actual lightbulb. We replaced that with CAN bus, so the stalk just sends a “we’re turning left” signal that the lights are listening for, like a home network where your computer sends a signal to the printer so you can print a document. In a home network, you might have a real threat vector of an attacker trying to intercept your locally-transmitted data, so there’s a mild use case for encrypting everything to remove that risk.
In my car, there’s no man-in-the-middle danger for someone trying to snoop on my turn-on-wipers signal. Other than aggregate data about how you drive, there’s no data there to leak anyway, it’s all operations. These manufacturers devised a system to ‘protect’ your car network, and are now leveraging it to spy on you (by harvesting your usage data in aggregate – this guy likes to accelerate aggressively and turn without signaling) and also lock out third party parts by ensuring they can’t talk over the local network because they are untrusted by the other parts.
There are documented cases where a car has been ‘hacked’, but those are generally… spoliers… cars with “genuine” parts with software vulnerabilities that don’t need to exists in the first place, and maybe we could spend more time on ensuring the bluetooth stack can’t even see the engine instead of ensuring the water pump must be able to prove it’s legit.
(*Side note, While double checking my knowledge, I found this. It has a reference to MOST, and I can’t imagine the self control needed to not name this ‘Media Oriented Inter-Systems Transport’ instead. I would not have made it.)
I think I’m preaching to the choir here, but back in early 2000s-2010s, we were still in a gilded age of car-can-have-computer-and-do-cool-thing, and now we are in car-must-have-computer-to-fuck-consumer. Same thing is happening in your phone, and soon will be happening in your house. "Sorry it’s so hot in there, the non-samsung AC isn’t compatible with your H0-US-3 model.