I’ve been reading articles about California wealth tax being proposed presently Assembly Bill 2088. At first reading this tax is ludicrous. Anybody who spends 60 days in any calendar year is liable to pay 40‱ annually for the following 10 years! (So without wealth change, compounding and inflation it’s 4% of your money for a 60 day stay.

Preposterous! What insane mania has driven our politicians to do such a thing?

Well, actually, it kind of fits the zeitgeist of liberal politics. It is very extreme by all standards. But the believe is that wealth inequality fundamentally destabilizes our economic future and kills the environment. So we need to take organized and radical action to overcome this thing that no one poor individual can overcome.

I think nobody can deny that there is great benefit to having smart and rich people around. Even if they’re just here to spread their genes, it’s good for humanity. But wealth inequality could potentially impede spread of others genes that may in the future be of great benefit to us. And plus, in addition to humanity’s prosperity, we do kind of want people at the present to be happy and healthy, and last but certainly not more and less important than all a priori, creatively productive.

So, why don’t we have both. Let’s have our wealth tax. But let’s also create an open forum, the Pnyx of silicone valley. We shall invite all that are willing to abide by the rules of the venue to come and pitch in public. No streaming allowed. You must be present here to present, learn and understand and invest. The state shall invest from wealth tax into these ventures in addition tom private investors. The venue is to be fixed and the conventions take place in the open, regularly, rain or shine. (A great benefit of California location is climate will allow us this latitude of venue year round.) This will be the Globe Theatre of next millennium, always imitated but never fully replicable.

Such a proposal seems silly in the day and age of traveling conferences like TechCrunch disrupt and a myriad of crowdfunding services. But if we want to have a wealth tax, and we don’t want to legalize prostitution (I’m not firmly against it), gambling (again, not voting against it), dangerous drugs (against), polygamy (mu?), and the likes, the only way is to emphasize physical proximate and in-person intimate presentations. It isn’t especially bad considering we are in danger of losing touch with real human to human interactions.

Anyone who follow the rules can come onto the stage physically at their allotted time and make a pitch and ask for money or other forms of support in this public forum. Spectators may cheer or jeer or throw cash at presenters. They may even join presenters on stage in support. We can build the greatest physical venture society on the planet.

We can make California greater by innovating in synchrony in our society, climate and economy.

Disclaimer: yes I own real estate in California. No I will not be affected by wealth tax if it comes to pass this moment.

An extension of permission function from action space is the decision theoretic preference function. The preference function maps one of each prospects (in our case an action from an action subspace) into a preference value that come from a totally ordered set of possible preference values. In the case of action space, it would appear that each preference function must be invoked with two parameters. v is the value function, is the action and gives us a context of all actions being compared(the action subspace of consideration). This will make it easier to define the value function so that it can calibrate its outputs to give meaningful values that are ordered correctly according to true preference.

It is somewhat difficult to come up with an instantaneous decision that alters ordinal utility due to availability of another prospect, with everything else held equal. However one can certainly construct a situation where sequential decision making is available:

1. Dig for gold
2. Buy a shovel
3. Buy a sandwich

If contained only choices 2 and 3, one is hard pressed to chose 2 over 3. However when contain all three available actions (for the foreseeable future), suddenly 2 is preferred over 2, and over 1. One would certainly rather buy the shovel, then dig for gold over digging for gold barehand before or after eating a sandwich.

Holding all else equal is important. Some purported change in ordinal preference due to addition of choice is hidden behind other information changes

1. Eat apple
2. Don’t eat apple
3. Eat just worm in the apple

Clearly if contains all three possibilities, . But without option 3, . The truth is that 3 should not affect the ordinal preference between 1 and 2. The knowledge of whether there is a worm in the apple or not is part of all else that we hold equal. Erroneous addition of 3 not only added an action prospect, but also added the knowledge that there is a worm in the apple. So when all else is really held equal, an addition of an action prospect should not affect ordinal preference between existing actions.

Cardinal preference is a different matter. A simple requirement we may impose is: utility value function always return non-negative reals and that sum of value among all choices add to 1. In this case additional prospect changes cardinal value of all actions due to the requirement that values sum to 1.