Yanis Varoufakis on the Future of Capitalism [video]

Taxes are not required for spending. Spending isn't required for spending, because ultimately government money is a proxy for power differentials and collective strategy.

Money defines which behaviours and which demographics are rewarded, and which are starved and punished. There are numbers and flow dynamics, but it's primarily a social credit system, not a substance.

Taxes are really a way to control the relative power of some groups over others - a form of regulation.

So when you have events like the New Deal and high taxes on the super rich, that means the economy is tuned towards diminishing power differentials, expanding infrastructure, and access to opportunity.

Low taxes on the super rich means expanding power differentials, more rigid hierarchy, diminishing collective infrastructure, and decreasing access to opportunity.

Likewise with provision of public services. If healthcare is cheap, guaranteed, and widely distributed, that increases individual agency and diminishes hierarchy.

If it's expensive and rationed by/for corporate monopolies, it increases hierarchy and diminishes agency.

(which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there)

Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.

And yes, because of the tax situation these people are often not resident in the EU. London, Paris and Geneva have small neighborhoods of oil sheik families, for example. Brussels has entire neighborhoods effectively only accessible to EU appointees. Amsterdam ... and so on and so forth.

Are you finding the EU to be even remotely greed-free?

I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US.

> And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.

I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.

The problem is not inequality itself, is that an entity that grows without a ceiling will eventually reach a size such that rules can’t be enforced on it. From that point on, laws are wet paper.

There's often some bait-and-switch semantic games employed to sell people on the latter.

A lack of regulation.

> We are living in a world where corporations are people and it’s ok to lobby

Corporate personhood is not the same thing as "corporations are people". Lobbying wouldn't inherently be an issue with an education and caring voting population.

The first link contradicts the cited, and much more trustworthy, analysis from the Mozilla Foundation:

"Here's the good news with Tesla when it comes to privacy -- they very clearly state in their privacy documentation that they don't sell or rent your personal information to third parties ... Tesla makes other promises in their privacy that sound quite good. They say they won't share your personal information with third parties for their own use unless you opt-in (don't opt-in!). They say they don't "associate the vehicle data generated by your driving with your identity or account by default.""

For the second, there's no reliable (not obviously AI generated slop) evidence I've been able to find outside of offroading.com, at all, that there's any remote shutdown feature in Teslas, user accessible or no. They have PIN to drive, Sentry mode, etc, and they can remotely limit the speed to 50mph, but afaict, there's no remote disable feature.

As you say, this is something they have he technical capability to implement, but (1) it would have to be a brand new feature they add, they don't have it yet and haven't done it, and (2) at that point basically any car company from Volkswagen to Toyota could equally also do it, since all modern cars are internet connected and controlled by computers now. So this introduced a parity that completely undercuts this guy's point about Tesla's being uniquely bad