YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I don’t even use ad Block to watch the videos anymore. I simply have a frontier AI download the video to a jellyfin server first for me.

Avoidance, not evasion.

That's not it, it's tax optimization, it's sibling with friends in a political parties. Easy to confuse them, looking almost the same, but it's in fact two separate concepts!

Haha, making better compression algorithms is a detriment to society, I love it. Finally. Getting those bastard HEVC devs behind bars is a lifelong dream of mine.

Maybe it should be argued that it’s a net tax. You download the video to watch it and then you re-upload it so the tax is zero.

Just like if you buy something from the store and then return it you get all of your money back even if you actually used the item.

GTA6 will have a special 8-bit pixel art edition for France.

Refused a while ago, voted into the 2027 budget (which itself isn't set in stone yet) yesterday: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

This is what all the recent articles are about. It passed 11 against 10 out of 577 potential votes. The chances this makes it into the actual budget are quite slim and it would be insane if it happened.

Came here to say this. The forum post is factually incorrect, it would be good to add a note.

With the state of French politics lately, it's very unlikely any budget will be passed any time soon. My take is the proposal is a stunt aimed at generating some attention.

Right, this should be flagged. It's blatant misinformation and rage bait. How is a random post on a random message board even considered a valid source. OP here should take the advice of the mod on the board they linked to, where the thread was locked:

>it's a good idea to just not post things we don't understand. Let's not be so in a rush to break news that it becomes misinformation.

Not if you are using enterprise ssds... but this is some insane profit seeking. I think they should just ask for service providers to pay a share of the local revenues that would be easier to digest than this insanity.

I feel like torrenting is tax evasion now as well in France.

Are you familiar with their debt situation?

> group of bureaucrats who are capable of nothing but taxing people

Welcome to EU!

I think it will just cause France to be siloed. Imagine what a child downloads in 5-6 hours a day of mindless garbage, now that is a €20/month habit why would YouTube or TikTok want them anymore. Bingers on streaming services are also putting the providers in an awkward position. In the linked article VLC estimates this will cost them €1m/year so they won't be viable. Steam is on the hook for €3.25m/week that is the equivalent of them losing €11m/week in sales so even they will be lucky to still be profitable in France.

Evading taxes is criminal in most places I can’t imagine France allows it

Taxation is theft. You're morally obligated to evade taxation.

>I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

???

"I'll lower/won't raise your taxes" is politics 101. The bigger issue is how you prevent politicians from promising goodies and/or lower taxes, funding them both by borrowing.

In France they don't exist.

Warren Buffett, I believe, suggested passing a law making every sitting member of Congress ineligible for reelection whenever the federal deficit exceeds 3%

I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.

> how do you get politicians that actually want to save money

What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Budgets for education, justice, police, healthcare often decrease too. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.

Yes but you're not going to like the solution.

Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.

Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment

The problem is they tax and save upon the wrong people which leads to wealthy transfer to the upper 1% which leads to economic problems. They try to fix that by taxing and saving upon the wrong people even more.

Under Clinton the "PAYGO" rules enforced that all spending had to be covered by cuts or new taxes. This caused a lot of aggressive review and limited eagerness to spend.

> Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.

It worked for France after the invention of the guillotine.

The easiest place to save is in entitlements. Saving there is unfortunately a really good way to avoid reelection. If you want to save money, get a better demography. That's impossible, but not more impossible than cutting benefits.

We could return to a sound money system, which is what the US had before 1914. (The Federal Reserve Act in 1914 switched us to a fiat money system.)

Maybe also prohibit legislation that protects excess/longterm promises too? Promises are cheap enforcement of promises cost money too.

You need to start by making taxes mostly optional, at the discretion of the payer, with the payers having power to choose its spending.

Personally i'm in the camp of:

1 - A minor poll tax on all citizens for basic sovereignty

2 - Local vote based taxes for local things: - Want a hospital? Roads? Any local infrastructure or collective service? A private entity makes an offer to build/manage a hospital for a 20 year period at a X amount per year. Anyone is able to vote for it by choosing which amount they want to contribute then and there or with the ability to impose a lien on their land to secure ongoing yearly payments for a period of time. Have the vote happen and if enough people offer to pay for it, it gets done. If there are more people willing to pay everyone gets a pro-rata discount

It's not actually about reducing spending vs increasing taxes, it's about regressive tax policies vs progressive tax policies. Inequalities are rising, because progressive forms of taxation (wealth tax...) are being removed in favor of regressive ones (such as this ridiculous internet tax), while the redistributive apparatus (social security, benefits...) shrinks year after year. The reason is simple: the rich basically own the government, evidenced by the fact that they are the only winners of the past decades.

We've been doing austerity and tax cuts for the rich for 50 years now, under neoliberalism. We have to stop and focus our attention on reducing the wealth inequality that are destroying our nations, before it's too late.

instead of taxing some people to cover bad behaviour of others, may be should just allow musk doge?

>assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax

Lol, my behavior would change a lot if I was paying $2 per gig, my god

AFAIK the Internet in France is private infrastructure that has already been paid for by its customers.

What's to stop Netflix from spinning out a Netflix France for the sole purpose of having all French revenue in a single corporate entity subject to the 2% of total global revenues rule?

On the subject of gasoline taxes, they are getting increasingly worried about lost revenue from the uptake of electric cars. It is going to be a distance tax I am sure, but what would make sense is to just give the department of transportation the electric tax already existing.

Neoliberalism 101.. monetize and privatize everything and punish the poor disproportionately. Not for a beneficial purpose, but because "free is communism".

> No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology

What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)

Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.

You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).

Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...