The battle over California’s billionaire tax

If you live in California, you will have been inundated with a barrage of ads over several propositions that are on the ballot in the upcoming elections. The main ones are Propositions 40, 41, and 42 and all relate directly or indirectly to a proposed wealth tax on billionaires. While Proposition 40 deals directly with this tax, the other two have been thrown in in an effort to confuse voters and stymie implementation of 40 even if it passes.

To understand the need for a wealth tax, we have to understand that while most people pay taxes on income, the very wealthy pay almost no tax. How do they do it? Because they do not receive any taxable income. For example, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin receive salaries of just one dollar per year. They receive their massive compensation in the form of stock that become taxable only when they sell any of it, and even then they pay only the capital gains rate which is a maximum of 20%, much lower than the top income tax bracket of 37%. But they do not pay even that. What they do is keep their stock intact without selling and take out loans with the stock as collateral. Since these are loans, they are not taxed at all. So these people have access to huge amounts of money to spend lavishly without incurring any tax liability.
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TV review: Scammed (2026)

The investigative TV series Frontline that broadcasts on PBS has released a new documentary on the way that internet scams have exploded in recent years. It is now estimated to have swindled billions of dollars from people all over the world. The major scamming operations are huge with the people behind them creating small cities in the remote jungles of Cambodia and Myanmar where they build massive compounds that house ten of thousands of workers in barracks-like conditions to carry out the frauds.

These workers from all over Asia have been tricked into thinking that they were being hired to work in legitimate jobs, usually in the hospitality industry, but and upon arriving find their passports taken and made to work under horrendous conditions. They are given highly detailed fake profiles and scripts to follow when they contact a target victim, so that they can be induced into parting with their money. The workers often do not speak English but they work off scripts in their own language which are then translated into English. They are severely punished with beatings if they do not perform to expectations. The governments of Cambodia and Myanmar seem to turn a blind eye to these abuses unless there is a global outcry upon which they raid some facilities, release the prisoners, and destroy the compound. But the criminals then simply move to a different location and build new small cities within a short time, usually a couple of months.

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How could AI kill everyone?

Recently we have been inundated with alarming stories based on what Jacob Coxon, a mathematician and software engineer who resigned from his research job at Anthropic last week, said, that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” 

As Tyler Foggett writes, these kinds of warnings are not new.

In 2018, the Anthropic C.E.O. Dario Amodei, then a research scientist at OpenAI, raised the concern that a superintelligence “could destroy humanity,” adding, “I can’t see any reason and principle why that couldn’t happen.” Earlier, in 2015, Sam Altman, just before he co-founded OpenAI, said, “I think A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Elon Musk, in 2014: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”

Those earlier warnings were shrugged off but for some reason, Coxon’s has broken through the public and media consciousness and generated a greater sense of danger. It has also raised the question of exactly how AI could kill all eight billion people within a decade. This article looks at the various possibilities. One is to create a deadly pathogen and release it into the wild. Since researchers are using AI in their work, the AI might be able to trick a human user into doing this. Others argue that AI may not need a human intermediary but could synthesize a virus by itself in an autonomous biological laboratory.
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When a state execution goes wrong

The death penalty is a barbaric practice that no civilized society should countenance. Yet the US is one of the countries that seems to take delight in executing people even though it sometimes botches the process.

The latest case involves the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years but she failed to die even after receiving the two lethal injections. What the observing journalists present described was macabre.

The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.

At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.

They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”

Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
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Great moments in ‘Gotcha!’ questioning

Republicans are furious with special prosecutor Jack Smith over his investigations of Trump after he said that he had found “proof beyond reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had “engaged in serious crimes against our nation.” Trump’s toadies have tried to smear him as a political hack and they brought him before a senate committee to grill him.

Senator Eric Schmitt from Missouri carefully laid what he thought was a trap for Smith, to suggest that he had secretly met Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis who had been doing a separate investigation, thus suggesting collusion between them. Schmitt asked Smith whether he had been in Atlanta in February 2024 and Smith, looking bewildered, said that he could not recall doing so and that he had not been in Atlanta at that time unless he had been in transit at the airport.

Schmitt then smugly produced a poster containing text messages among Smith’s staff about seat numbers for the NBA game between the Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors in February 2024. He quickly put the poster down and declined Smith’s request to take a closer look at it. He then warned Smith that he may be committing perjury and went further, calling him a ‘villain’ and a ‘dirtbag’

Unfortunately for Schmitt, he had got his facts wrong. Smith said that he recalled attending a women’s college basketball game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Maryland Gophers at that time but that was in Maryland. So basically Schmitt had got confused by the similarity of ‘Hawkeyes’ to ‘Hawks’ and rushed to create a gotcha moment that blew up in his face.

Watch.

When questioned later about his humiliating blunder, Schmitt tried to bluff his way out, as is par for these dirtbag Trump fanboys.

China is the big winner in the US-Israel war against Iran

The president of China Xi Jinping came on a state visit to the US that provided little in terms of concrete measures but Trump was effusive in his efforts to show Xi how much he admired him, so much so that one must think that Xi was embarrassed. Being praised may please someone but most people become uncomfortable when someone goes overboard and goes on about how wonderful they are. They are not like Trump who likes nothing more than to have people around them like Natalie Harp who gush over how wonderful he is and he probably thinks that others like it too.

Xi in turn responded with what reads like a Yelp review.

Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”

You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!
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In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”.
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Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake. 

Trump came into power hyperbolically claiming that the US was in a terrible state and that he would restore America’s greatness. But  Andrew O’Hehir writes that Xi must be feeling good about how Trump’s policies and actions are aiding China’s effort to become the dominant power.
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Monday morning comedy

I thought that I would start the week with some laughs before the usual dreary news kicks in.

The Onion News Network reports on a minimum wage bill that Congress might actually pass.

Trump’s BFF Natalie Harp seems to have become a news mainstay.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel having his monologue interrupted by her (played by Kimmel’s wife).

And here is SNL’s cold open that also features Trump’s curious attempt to ingratiate himself with Zohran Mamdani.

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