RetroFedA Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry
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VetOfTheSeashttps://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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What “wealth”? They’re all losing money.
They’re losing borrowed money
They borrowed our real money from banks without us having any say in it, based on imaginary valuations of what someone would hypothetically spend for their mountain of shares based on the price the tiny slice for sale is worth…
A complete and utter disregard for supply side economics.
If any of them actually have to sell to pay back the loan, they go bankrupt and the bank can’t collect.
That makes every other bank individually panic and call all their loans in to try and get what they can.
Banks doing a run on banks. Then everyone’s going to try and pull their money out when banks starting going bust.
I’m just waiting for when they have to sell off all that depreciating silicone (SSD/HDD/RAM). Just hope they don’t throw it all in a landfill with the ET Atari carts out of spite.
Nope, that shit will flood the market, but it’s all been run hot for as long as possible, well, the stuff that actually went into data centers. Some of the shit that’s been “sold” hasn’t been made yet, because the data centers are still being built, on land that’s still being stolen through eminent domain.
Except, some of those data centers will be given over to government and corporate surveillance of, well, everyone. Surveillance that will then be used to enact violence on people. It already is.
High time we started taxing loans anyway to be honest.
RAM.
ALAMADINGDONG
Wanted to say that. They don’t have money and i’ll bet they never will have money, at least not anyone on the market today. In the future there might be hyperspecialized AI companies in market areas where they can raise the prices far enough to be cash flow positive on inference, but none of the current players will reach that point.
Why stop at the AI industry?
I was just thinking the same. Most of what’s bad about AI just leads back to the wealthy elite being greedy hoarders.
Yup. AI is just the logical conclusion of unregulated capitalism. When you can’t exploit the workers any further, you replace them with machines.
A majority of Americans discover the concept of taxation.
“Seizing” just means “not giving copius amounts of tax cuts” nowadays.
The specific text of the survey:
Oh that’s actually REALLY cool news.
No it’s not.
Public will be left holding the bag.
Those companies are bleeding money everywhere, as soon as it hits open market they will crash and burn.
Let the rich keep those ‘’’’assets’’’’. It’s all stolen anyway.
The text doesn’t read buy, it reads transfer. Basically force all AI companies to issue one extra share per share currently held and handed over to the fund.
Assume they could be non voting shares, but have them be paid the same dividends as other shareholders
But I don’t get why this would be preferred to increasing capital tax or company taxes
Nah, they need bag-holders too.
I support seizing the wealth from more industries than just AI
The US has already started with Tiktok.
Trump is in fact our most communist president.
I think “nationalist” is the word you’re looking for.
The Nazis did the same shit, and despite the name, they were not socialist.
Yea and no?
I just know it’s being handled by Oracle, does any money go to the state?
Looking it up, Bytedance still gets half the profit from TikTok and the rest is distributed to Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX, so, no, no profits are going into the US treasury.
And it’s also observed, capturing TikTok may just be the same move as the German Reich to turn media into a state-sanctioned mouthpiece. But I don’t know who determines the parameters of the TikTok algo.
I remember vaguely that algo was supposed to be in the hands of Oracle, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t think there is any wealth there, just undeserved trust that allows them to raise money through debt.
If you seize that, then the debtors will come calling for higher risk premium and the venture implodes - sooner than they otherwise would.
So maybe it is a good idea anyway.
“5 more years, bro. I know I know, just 5 MORE years bro and we’ll have AGI on the moon bro, no idea how to monetize it but just 5 additional years bro!”
How the heck does this keep generating cash flow? Are investors really this stupid?
What wealth? The AI industry is probably the most debt-laden venture in the entire history of currency, and has failed spectacularly and repeatedly to demonstrate any viable path to profitability. There’s no wealth to take, and there never will be.
Scrap the shit for parts or raw materials then. I’ll take $5 and the death of AI data centers any day.
I want the billionaires involved to be disgraced and stripped of their ill-gotten gains as well. Id est, accountability and justice.
If not that, 🪟🔪⚜️ and seizure of the assets, placed in the national treasury and used to fund social programs.
Should probably just license them. They can pay for the license. $100 million/month, $1.19 billion if they get the whole year.
So our currency is working exactly as intended! :-P
The problem is they over borrowed and dont make any money.
they have a bunch of assets. Doesn’t need to be cash
Deleted by author
They get tax write offs from the government, as well as cities and states PAYING THEM to expand their empire.
They’re the biggest welfare queens.
I support seizing the health from billionaires.
itsa me, mario
Green Mario?
Why stop at AI?
Yeah, America needs a wealth tax desperately.
It has to start somewhere.
What wealth?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-openai-bubble/
They can’t do anything if they aren’t spending VC money. LLMs are the most money burning corporate misadventure of all time.
I support seizing the wealth of all the wealthy.
Doesn’t this just ensure they’re all “too big to fail” and we use tax dollars to jeep them afloat forever?
See an extended version of this take from Bruce Schneier. (He’s also going to spend awhile arguing for a public option on AI; something using the technology in an open way, respecting IP, and distributing the benefits.)
They seize wealth from us
Trump accounts are now mandatory for all children born after 1/1/25. They were briefly optional and you chose if you wanted them while filing taxes
Trump accounts give the kid $1000 no strings attached and it’s loaded into an index (SPYM) made up of nvidia, apple, amazon, Microsoft, meta, tesla, micron, and alphabet class a (google).
On a surface read this is great, trump is giving free money to children for education planning.
But realistically it’s money laundering to fund their pump and dump. About 3.6-3.7 million children are born in the USA each year over the past few years (declining from a 2007 peak of 4.1). About 9% of those are undocumented, leaving about 3.25-3.3 million. This money isn’t free and doesn’t come from nowhere, it’s about 3.3 billion dollars of taxpayer money (yearly) to pump directly into AI companies and other grossly overvalued tech that’s propped up by making the overwhelming majority of retirement accounts contingent on its value (eg tesla)
In a typical 529 you have much more say in how investments are spread (with notable limitations) but the trump account is spym only.
Further, while 3.3 billion is barely anything in the scheme of the economy or even openais apparent (bloated) value, it’s to prime the pump to get more working class dollars in these companies. The 529 your child is given is essentially worthless if you make no contributions (at least in the context of education). Even maxing yearly contributions (5k/yr) from 0-18 with a prediction based on somewhat idealized returns would make the account worth ~$170,000 at 18, which is often not nearly enough to pay for college now, let alone in almost 2 decades. But it means a decent portion of Americans with children are pumping more of their cash into this bubble for their children’s education.
This is not even touching on the other gross things, like robinhood being the default and only servicer of these plans, which almost certainly is because of a fat bribe as they are the scummiest brokerage that preys on wallstreetbets gambler type retail investors.
Despite this it’s better than sending another 3 billion dollars of bombs for Israel to do genocide with, I guess
Where are you getting the information that they’re mandatory? Everything I can find shows them to be voluntary.
No way would someone just make things up on the internet would they?
From the Trump Account website:
Nor can I find anything making them mandatory.
You’re correct, I had that wrong. I misread an article about https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2026-07-03.html lwhich implied automatic enrollment when applying for a newborns ssn, but technically you can still opt out. There is heavy pressure to make enrollment automatic though
It’s a trap. Open source / weight models will become mandated to pay for use locally. So we won’t be able to use local models for our own purposes and gain, while the big corporations simply pay a small percentage.
Hardware and software breakthroughs will make it possible to run LLM models and advanced AI on local, solar powered hardware. For example you can pack a ternary 27b model on a smartphone now.
In the best case, 50% will belong to the US empire. Which is controlled by the worst of the worst people on earth.
Too late guys, the majority doesn’t get to make decisions anymore
Never did.
Forgive the old internet phrase, but
inb4 “It was never meant to. We’re a Republic, not a direct democracy.”
A Republic implies that the elected officials endeavor to represent the will of the people. If you think that’s going on in America, you may need to schedule a trepanning procedure or something because some shit’s wrong with your brain.
Sure, but that’s like saying “communism definitely works, we just haven’t seen it done right yet” when it’s clear to outsiders that it’s meant to not work, in the exact way it’s not working, for the benefit of powerful elites as has been the purpose and product of nearly every human government to date. This whole “having a government” experiment is the longest running, most repeated, and frankly easiest scam mankind ever invented.
…I don’t think you know what “inb4” means because I feel like we’re making the same argument in a lot of ways.
but since we’re here anyway, I’m not an anarchist because a large, unorganized mass of well-intentioned people is easily wrecked by a smaller, organized mass of poorly-intentioned people. Creating an organized mass of well-intentioned people seems to be the ideal in that case. People are just flawed and we have to figure out how to work around that. We’re also still evolving (in this case, socially more than biologically, but that’s a really superior form of evolution in many cases). We’ve been living in societies of this scale for a very short period compared to our entire evolutionary history.
I wouldn’t really describe myself as a communist either, I haven’t read enough THEORY for that lol, but I think it’s more likely to work than anarchism. And we’re obviously watching capitalism fail for literally all life on Earth so that’s a foregone conclusion.
Organization is one thing. Hierarchy is another. Try doing the former without someone emerging to ensure the latter to their own benefit. I’m an anarchist, not an anorganist.
How do we organize millions-if-not-billions of people in a cooperative structure without having a system to it and recognizing that some people have skills that others do not? A really big, really lengthy conversation?
Maybe electing people to have power over you isn’t really democracy? Like ever? Maybe democracy means you don’t need other people making decisions, but to work them the fuck out among yourselves?
Or maybe that’s the exact opposite of democracy, and by not voting blue no matter who I’m the worst kind of fascist. Who can say?
I think there are historians and such who have dedicated their lives to studying this shit that can say.
And they say you’re wrong.
You’re right. I was being ridiculous. VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO
Ah it looks like you’ve failed the “make an argument and attempt to defend it without strawmanning” challenge.
Sorry, better luck next time.
I know this isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but are other countries like China also dealing with unemployment due to AI development, or are they supporting their workforce?
I believe their current solution is prohibiting the firing of workers only to replace them with AI to reduce cost. It’s eh; much better than anything we have, but the scope is so narrow it seeks like something the US would conjure up. Having said that, China usually enforces their stuff with teeth.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/13/china-court-awards-compensation-sacked-worker-replaced-by-ai
If the RIAA could get millions from kids downloading songs on Napster, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that AI companies pay for the intellectual property that they have stolen from anyone who has ever posted anything on the internet?
Maybe AI companies can exist as long as they fund universal basic income.
That means they would need actually make money instead of just shuffling loans around. It’s a shell game, and the public is going to be left with empty pockets.
Lol
lol who’s gonna seize it? Trump government? America is cooked. I’m starting to think America’s future is either going to be a very isolated authoritarian dystopia or state separation. No one likes each other and everyone argues over a the most simple things. Human rights, work rights doesn’t exist if you’re not filthy rich. Manipulation is so bad that if trump says the sky is green, tomorrow idiots are going to believe it’s actually green.
Idk man. I really wish they’d take billionaires monies and build houses hospitals but never going to happen.
What wealth? These companies are hemorrhaging money, there wobybbe anything left to seize
The wealthy will turn it into a bailout. The US government isn’t gonna ‘seize’ anything. They’ll “compromise” by buying the companies directly from the wealthy, and when it all comes crashing down the tax payers will be left holding the bag.
They seize our water and energy, so fuck em. They can explode for all I care, as can all the sell outs who work in them.
Also, please tell everyone you see that there is lots of copper in those data centers.
Being too rich should be an actual crime to the international community. Maybe after the oligarchs try to buy up Europe it will be.
In the classic days, hoarding wealth in excess was frowned upon. Then Spain got rich in the name of the Church ravaging and enslaving the new world. And in the US the California Gold Rush sold Americans the notion that anyone could strike it rich, and as Steinbeck observed, from then on we were temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
And with time, each new iteration of the ultrawealthy, from the oil and steel magnates to the railroad barons to the automotive industrialists and tobacco tycoons to the tech bros and private equity buyout financiers, all made their riches faster and in greater quantity than the prior one.
Curiously, recent news tells us that SpaceX valuation is crashing, OpenAI and Anthropic are way, way in debt and vastly raising token prices, and Chinese offerings like Deepseek are catching up and offering cheaper service.
Many companies who have gone all in for AI to replace or reduce their human workforce are finding that AI does a worse job for way more cost.
The bubble may be slow-leaking and slow tearing like a weather balloon, but it is coming apart.
Huh. In the aughts, Enron tried to work legitimately as an electrical power broker, but then it got way overvalued and then started engaging in shenanigans to preserve its high rating and the illusion of growth. I’d say expect more market manipulation and lobbying government from big AI, but I guess they already crossed that line a while ago – I think it’s time to regard that move as in indication they don’t really have any confidence in their product.
Sadly, there is no policing body that would not end up corrupt by trying to restrict wealth accumulation.
It’s human behaviour since the time we figured out its easier to store surplus food away then hunt every day. People ‘like’ big numbers or big counting in the context of hoarding because it provides assurance that we are safe, in a sense.
The real question is how does one guide the human mentality such that it incentivises hoarding or expenditure that returns to the larger group than a few. Really, if you can convince a rich man that improving other people’s livelihoods is a sign of wealth extravagance, we’d be on the path to the stars.
The poorest folk are the ones who never figure out when is enough.
During the enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes discusses the Social Contract, which is the agreement between ruling bodies and the public. It’s to say that as long as live in the working class is tolerable, we’ll continue to let the leadership lead (instead of overthrowing them for someone else, or even to establish self-governance).
There have since been data driven studies that development of a society: roads, schools, bridges, libraries, hospitals, etc. that increase general quality of life also increase productivity which increases profits, and this is the foundation of a free, liberal society with heavily regulated market capitalism. (The regulations assure that enterprises don’t cause harm, such as polluting rivers or underpaying their workforce or selling a false product, and don’t engage in anti-competitive practices such as underselling the competition or lobbying officials to legislate in their favor.)
Sadly, the ownership class did exactly what Marx predicted in Das Kapital, manipulated elections, bribed officials and was able to open the US federal government to lobbies and special interest groups. Reagan happened, and what followed was deregulation, the disenfranchisement of labor unions, and the capture of institutions. The US and EU became neoliberal, and has been in the process of collapse ever since.
During the aughts and 2010s, I got curious why game development companies would crunch to meet deadlines even though this didn’t work. Productivity would decline thanks to the crunch, and the development team’s health and morale would get wrecked. Studies came out that crunching does not work, and in fact has results the opposite of what are intended, but game development companies still crunch to this day in 2026.
We’ve seen a similar effect with RTO mandates, even after we’ve seen widespread increases of worker productivity through telecommuting. There have been some suggested causes for RTO orders: Companies are stuck leasing large office spaces and management doesn’t like the appearance of unused empty offices; Upper management narcissistically needs to have an entourage of busybodies around them doing the appearance of work. (This hypothesis is consistent with the existence of bullshit jobs.) Upper management distrusts the workforce, expecting that they are intrinsically lazy and prone to freeloading, and hence need to be micromanaged.¹ Essentially, our C-suite can’t get past themselves to keep their workforce happy to maximize production and then just let them work.
So the conclusion that I’ve come to is that our upper management is mostly incompetent, and enacts policy not based on data-driven best business practices but what feeds their own respective egos. When one is wealthy enough it’s very easy to fail upwards, and they all are that wealthy. The businesses that are still growing are the ones that have market advantage and engage in shenanigans to undermine and eliminate competition. This is how ISP services mostly have regional monopolies across the nation, and how all the big box stores now have their prices set by Amazon, making them essentially an oligopoly or a cartel.
That is to say our businesses don’t have to run themselves well, and the same culture is informing the capture and corruption of government. It’s also now I can predict that the EU, also trapped in neoliberal policymaking is not far behind the US in being captured by the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations, and are facing the rise of right-wing movements and Overton window shifts towards fascism.
¹ This is consistent with conditions in Meta offices and Amazon warehouses under the direction of Zuckerberg and Bezos, respectively. This is also consistent with the market of products and services to combat time theft, even though most instances of alleged time theft are human beings doing human stuff like pooping or talking to loved ones, and wage theft by comparison is a crisis greater than all the petty property crime combined. (Generally, white collar crime causes more lost of life, property damage and cost than all other crime by orders of magnitude. Law enforcement is totally focused on the wrong criminals.)
I like how you bring up the gaming industry because it’s always, to me, been a very good indicator for what sort of practices are engaged in other industries.
The little hats that run the gaming industry are just more shameless about it because they know this industry is a lot less likely to agitate the masses compared to a failure made public in say, the automobile or airline industry. Hence, any bad practice brought to light in games, is often preceding or revealing an even worse synonym elsewhere.
“from Ai industry”
Really? Like you either leave capitalism or you don’t sweetheart 😂
Yeah, no nation has ever just nationalized one or two industries… Oh wait.
Maybe hold off on the “I’m laughing at how stupid you are” emojis unless you say something correct.
This is capitalism. We aren’t in control of this government, the rich are.
If there ever were free markets in America, then they were gone before most of us were born.
The “majority of Americans” are fucking idiots. “If only we owned more of their stock we could direct how the tech is used!”, they decry, completely oblivious to the scam being perpetrating upon them to shift the downside risk to the “majority of Americans”. Never has more blatant propaganda hit my eyes.
You know how I know? Because we already have a mechanism for directing the actions of our institutions, forged in two centuries of nation building. It is called legislation and regulation, mother fuckers.
Now, I’d forgive you for recognizing that the power of the law is at an all time low, at least in living memory. So maybe the “majority of Americans” “seizing wealth” by their corrupt government owning more of the company stock seems more tangible and maybe the “majority of Americans” believe there is a future upside to owning all that yummy stock that will eventually make gas cheaper and lettuce not cause explosive diarrhea. But, see my first sentence.
sigh And now I am off to my job to keep my healthcare and keep a house over my family, and to pretend we’re not sliding into a fascist, racist, mysoginist, elitist hellscape of our own making.
Isn’t US AI already funded by tax deduct ?
and immediately shutting down on AI DCs.
“stealing”
If it HAS to be a robbery, then that’s fine. I really don’t mind. We could even make sure to shoot them while we do it so there aren’t any witnesses.
Where were you when they took the land in the first place‽