In Silicon Valley, the software industry is being disrupted, as people with zero experience now vibe code from the comfort of their own homes.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t appear to be partaking in this revolution. He’s still “at Best Buy often,” he said at a press conference Thursday about a new digital software tax. “I’m paying sales tax on a lot of this prewritten software. And then I find out that all my friends that aren’t near a Best Buy, they’re downloading and they are not paying sales tax. How is that fair?”
Yes, this is a big problem. All those lucky software downloaders who don’t have Best Buys nearby, tempting them to hop in their cars and burn $7/gallon in gas so they can get their software on a CD-ROM.
Why can’t politicians just say what they actually think? To me, it seems that California’s government has become so inefficient that its main function these days is incinerating cash, and there’s nobody who can pay for it except tech companies and the billionaires who found them.
I’m told by someone at a frontier AI lab that the proposed 7.25% sales tax on software sold over this newfangled thing called “the internet” does not apply to AI tokens. But it could add some difficulty to the tech companies that sell software out of the state.
The good news is that AI tokens might just replace a lot of the software Newsom wants to start taxing. Now we just have to get Best Buy to sell AI tokens at its retail stores.