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points by freecodeio 16 hours ago | 0 comments

only the 2 founders, which seems have become quite out of touch lately

[–] nervai 16 hours ago

"The United Nations is a transparently antisemitic organisation" - Google Co Founder

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-...

[–] flir 15 hours ago

He's a peach

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/29/politics/sergey-brin-cali...

[–] vigilantpuma 12 hours ago

Trying to defeat a badly designed tax that even the Democrats aren’t aligned is evidence of him being a bad person? I think you can probably do better.

[–] embedding-shape 11 hours ago

Yes, actively working against "wealth tax" while you're wealthy, does indeed make you a bad person. A good person realize they're ahead of others, and try to help them rise as well, even if it means less wealth for them. It's called "greed" if you're looking for a specific name of this concept.

[–] WarmWash 10 hours ago

It took me a while to learn that giving money to the government isn't the highest form of good, despite also being a necessity to some degree. In fact I'm not even sure if it could make the top 10 of best ways to give money. But trust me when I was younger I definitely acted in that belief.

Like greedy Brin here has donated around $4B to charity that has gone to all manner of public good. Philanthropic organizations like his tend to be pretty efficient with getting good bang for their buck.

Had he given it to the government, which I'm sure you would call reason for celebration, well some of it would have gone to helping people directly, but most would have gone into protracted bureaucracy where just the rind ends up at the final objective. I'm actually pretty sure you yourself could write a decent list of government expenses that you would not want that money to go to.

In fact if you wrote a list of things that you would like it to go to, I'm pretty confident it would have very high overlap with what Brin does give to.

So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?

[–] ethbr1 5 hours ago

> Like greedy Brin here has donated around $4B to charity that has gone to all manner of public good.

$4B out of $250B = +1.6% tax rate

And total over all years, not annual.

So no, charity fig leaf doesn't cover being a dick and fighting a meaningful wealth tax.

[–] embedding-shape 10 hours ago

> In fact if you wrote a list of things that you would like it to go to, I'm pretty confident it would have very high overlap with what Brin does give to.

Alright, lets give it a try:

- Wealth Tax

- Taxes of all sorts and kinds

What percentage of overlap do we have? I have a feeling it's zero.

> So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?

We're trying to call out that working against a wealth tax because it'd impact you personally (since you're wealthy), is greedy behavior and greed is generally something most humans want to reduce, just like most of us wants less violence. We call people who favor greed and violence "bad people".

[–] vigilantpuma 5 hours ago

Again, it’s a bad tax. Judge this on the merits, not merely on the fact that it’s a wealth tax and therefore good prima facie.

[–] embedding-shape 5 hours ago

Ok, so it might need iterations. Lets implement it, then fix it once live? Nothing is ever set completely in stone.

Out of ~40 million people in California, the impact of this tax seems to be about ~250 individuals. If they were considering users of their products and services, wouldn't that amount of users compared to the entire user base, be considered almost a rounding error?

[–] vigilantpuma 1 hour ago

It’s a tax, not a casual game app.

The quality of argumentation here. “Wealth tax therefore good” “just pass it even though it’s shitty, who cares.”

How many bad laws are on the books and now it’s nearly impossible to claw them back?

[–] JuniperMesos 8 hours ago

Nah the actual bad people are the people calling for the tax, who are primarily motivated by populist resentment of the visibly successful, and who don't have a good sense of what the actual problems in society are or how to actually fix them.

[–] murderfs 7 hours ago

The worse part is that it wasn't driven by populist resentment, it was cynical utilization of populist resentment as a cudgel to extort the governor: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seiu-delenda-est

[–] freecodeio 11 hours ago

what's your rank on forbes top billionaires?

[–] Teever 8 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44521137

It was dismaying to see this flagged so fast. When I reached out to the moderators about it they felt that it should remain flagged for reasons that seemed dubious and inconsistent imho.

[–] hparadiz 12 hours ago

He's right.

[–] hn_throwaway_99 14 hours ago

Not just out of touch, but downright psychopathic in my opinion. I used to greatly admire Larry Page. He seemed like a really smart, driven, level-headed guy. When the news came out that he was basically fine with AI wiping out humanity, as it would just be the natural evolution of intelligence, and to fight against that would be "speciesist", all I good think was "what a psycho".

And I really don't think I'm exaggerating Page's opinion on this, though I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.

[–] nextaccountic 12 hours ago

I'm willing to bet he's speciesist in relation to actual, existing species of other animals

[–] ctmlr 12 hours ago

Extreme wealth seems to cook people's brains.

[–] munk-a 10 hours ago

Counter point - accumulating extreme wealth seems to require a cooked brain. I genuinely believe that level headed people are unable to reach more than a few million in accumulated wealth as they'll clearly see how much more that money would benefit others compared to themselves.

[–] ethbr1 4 hours ago

Counter counter point - we've constructed a society that provides excess rewards to people with cooked brains and antisocial behavior

[–] redwood 13 hours ago

Incredible back story here if I can trust Gemini on this as that dates back to over 10 years ago when Musk accused Larry Page of being too obsessed with bringing about AI and hence co-founds OpenAI... the irony of course being that OpenAI raced ahead while Google has been conservative