The racist reactionaries are gonna do all that stuff anyway, with or without opposition. The racists will fan their own flames; it is useless to consider what will or will not set them off. See Obama wearing a tan suit or Mandani handing someone who handed someone else a pen.

Societal pressure should be used to let these kinds of people know they are unwelcome and a fringe minority. People are social creatures and less likely to join widely unpopular groups.

The minds that need to be changed aren’t the already racist bigoted people, but instead the people sliding down the pipeline. Consistent opposition is great for that because it can give pause to those on the pipeline and make joining the racists unappealing.

These folks don’t actually wanna leave. Peter Thiel will blow a lot of smoke about how he’s totally gonna leave California because of Communisim or whatever, but there’s a couple things to keep in mind.

1. The billionaires are spending mad money to fight this tax. This is not the action of someone who plans to leave the state.

2. The infrastructure that makes the billionaires rich cannot be moved from California easily. A person is easy to move, a warehouse less so. Those assets can be taxed, even if the owner leaves the state.

3. Fuck these guys. Billionaires do not contribute to the economy; they suck out the wealth and hoard it. Even in the worst case scenario of rich folks leaving the state with their ill gotten gains, the state wasn’t gonna get that money anyways The worst case scenario for California of the mythical “Wealth Flight” is a bunch of parasites moving elsewhere.

These parasites have had it too good for too long. A measly little one time tax is a step in the right direction that I hope opens the door to more aggressive taxation on these dregs of society.

Financial Times reported that Anthropic is telling investors “gross margins are above 80% before revenue it shares with distribution partners and before the cost of training models.”

This is like saying, “I got $500 at the casino, but don’t ask me how much I spent on the slot machines”. All the AI corpos are in the same boat, so this “fear of danger” is likely a smokescreen for, “we’re hemorrhaging cash”.

There is no solution that will prevent a minority of greedy people from trying to take from others. We fight the same battles our parents fought and our children will have to fight those same battles as will their children. The only hope is to make sure enough people are educated as to why publicly regulated institutions are important to protect and pass those lessons down to the next generation.