DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
21hr ago
Mine had almost no sensory issues; primarily social blindness, dyspraxia (clumsiness, stereotypically picked last in gym class or on the playground), and a touch of faceblindness.
I couldn’t understand emotions until I discovered a philosophical ontology in early 2001, which made me aware of emotions and how pervasive they are, but not how to use them right. I spent five years becoming codependent best friends with mood disordered people, then cut them out of my life, and then five years blindly trying to extract myself from their mind games and mind mazes.
Then in November 2010, in my darkest depths, I discovered My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. The show modeled good friendships, but also taught me the hidden mechanics of friendship through the framing device of small-town businessmares befriending an autistic grad student learning magical sociology. Just the first season reduced my blindness to emotions and good relationships to nearly none. The third season finale helped me understand even more.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
- Accurate philosophy, primarily ontology (lists of categories of things) can act as medication to us with autistic traits.
- Emotions are a third of human reality when viewed one way, four sevenths when viewed another, so understanding their hidden rules is important for living in this world. My emotional instincts may be impaired, but I excel at understanding systems, functions, and rules, so I set my mind to understanding.
- From Triessentialism: There are three types of emotions: identities, relationships, and imperatives. They can be caused by any experience, and need not correspond to the reality they model. Identity emotions are positive and negative valuations of (thing) that is (type), and can be in first, second, or third person, singular or plural. Relationship emotions are in the form of paired roles and distributed duties which one believes of oneself and the other person or people in the relationship. Imperatives are wants and needs which drive people toward or away from things, experiences, etc.
- From My Little Pony: the five Elements of Harmony are essential virtues underlying all mammalian relationships, from married lovers all the way to pets and their masters: Kindness, Honesty, Loyalty, Generosity, and Laughter. If they are in balance, supplied by all members of the relationship according to their ability, it will be harmonious. If one party goes against these virtues, leaving the other to supply them, it’s codependent. If two or more Elements are constantly betrayed, it’s toxic.
- Inspired by My Little Pony: the closeness of relationships is not just quantitative based on how long people are friends. There are three qualitative levels of friendship. Acquaintances share attributes, such as being neighbors, attending the same school, being in the same trade, or sharing an identity emotion such as being LGBTQ, furry, Christian, Chinese, etc. Friends share experiences, their nervous systems humming in tune at similar stimuli and offering similar responses, possibly working together for similar goals. Ohana share purpose, such as lovers looking to build a life, brothers at arms protecting each other sacrificially, parents giving up their entertainments to raise children, found family holding and healing each others’ griefs, and so on. Another way to see it is to think of who you invite into each room of a house: acquaintances in the living room, restroom, and dining room, friends in the kitchen and den, and ohana in the bedroom.
- The Fourth Step Moral Inventory of twelve step groups like CoDependents Anonymous can be performed with awareness of the Elements of Harmony, Levels of Friendship, and Ontology of Emotions. Doing so can help people understand the unconscious emotions they’ve built their successes and failures upon, the reasons behind their addictions, habits, hurts, and hang-ups.
This is enough material for a two hundred page book, but this summary is my answer to you.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3d ago
The diagnostic criteria specify a level of impairment, which is clinical and in need of services. Thus subclinical autism is a real thing, but by definition cannot be diagnosed. I wouldn’t be eligible for diagnosis today, but up through about age 35 my impairment was significant and obvious.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3d ago
Conspiracists who can see past the “controlled demolition” of 1 and 2 to the truth of the floor truss narrative nevertheless tend to get one-shotted by talk of building 7. They don’t know NIST also has a report on why that building collapsed.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4d ago
Ooh, the unpleasantness jittery fuzz of felt versus the soothingly orderly corrugation of corduroy. Tags have never bothered me, but I used to have to cover my ears at basketball games. (To be fair, UNM’s B-ball arena “The Pit” is famously loud.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
13d ago
It turns out I’d already read Just An Assistant (which explicitly defends bondservanthood, not chattel slavery) and up-thumbed it a while back.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
My parents visited China where stop lights are all yields. They were happy to return to Albuquerque driving.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
No only to 3, it’s safest to flow with traffic and not be a rock in the stream, 5, I can always brake, and 6, I expect the rules I live by to be an agreement with other drivers, not a tool for me policing them.
As for additional driving scissor statements, I prefer to back into a parking spot, or pull through a double spot to be facing out. Some people call it “getaway parking,” others deride it as “ghetto.”
First, because my brain has been fully engaged in estimating my car’s size and position relative to other vehicles and the stationary world for at least five minutes, and I’m less likely to be in an accident in that altered state.
Second, because when I depart that spot, I can see somewhere between 3 and pi radians without obstruction, and can easily see pedestrians, shopping carts, and other vehicles.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
This kind of thing is why I miss the low effort thread. News gets quick takes, “olds” get analysis, and bundling the twain gets a mad muddle.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
18d ago
What drew me into the FairTax at first were the end to FICA and the concept of permanent untaxed ownership. Since then, the more I compare it with other revenue collection methods, I haven’t found anything I’d characterize as a poison pill, or even anything I’m having to hold my nose over. I’ve only found more to love about it, practically and philosophically.
I personally haven’t run the numbers, but my parents sold the family home my dad spent his working years buying, and moved into a home they inherited. The math for making the former a rental in walking distance from the University of New Mexico campus, one of the highest occupancy areas of town, wouldn’t work out considering upkeep and repairs, a property management company, property taxes, income taxes, and the accountant they’d have to hire at least the first year to add rent to their income taxes. If the FairTax were enacted, they’d pay a simple 23% out of their renters’ check each month. It would be clean income after that, no profit/loss calculations messing up their Social Security, and no worrying about the next administration making their lives hell for 3% in the polls.
Your question 1, “am I [to assume] this tax policy will make people tilt even harder towards ownership vs rental?” I have a feeling this is so. I’ve always understood home ownership to be a part of the American Dream which (question 2) society is invested in encouraging. In America, every citizen is a nobleman, and his home should be his estate.
The most disordered people I know have been lifelong renters. An “efficiency” apartment is an abomination, a box built to impart pain and despair, but even the townhome apartment one of my best friends had stank of fear and giving up. And with vulture capital buying up complexes, it’s an even worse situation.
But aside from philosophical and psychological ideals, I’m sensitive to structural inequality. There’s a point to be made about giving everyone slack at once, not just one class. My gut says the slack is to be found in ensuring owners of second homes are renting them long-term to families that want to escape apartment life instead of renting them as Vrbos and Airbnbs. It seems abominable to me that hotels are long-stay while houses sit empty three out of seven days a week.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Let me add a thought experiment: what would be the effect on the housing market were all rental property owners exempted from the portion of income tax derived from renting? Grok suggests three outcomes:
- Grey Tribe: Tax exemptions for rental property owners would incentivize investment, increasing rental supply and potentially lowering rents. However, it might inflate property prices as demand for investment properties rises.
- Blue Tribe: The policy could exacerbate inequality, favoring wealthy landlords while offering no relief to renters or low-income homeowners, potentially widening the wealth gap.
- Red Tribe: Exempting landlords from income tax might destabilize public finances, reducing funds for community services like infrastructure, which could harm housing market stability and neighborhood quality.
Distorting the market in favor of “necessary” goods usually ends up with those goods costing just as much, other goods costing more, and inequality rising. That’s the primary reason the FairTax has no loopholes for housing, food, or medicine, just a flat pre-calculated rebate that makes governance effectively free for people at or below the poverty line.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
19d ago
they really ought to be throwing themselves at the much easier problem of verifying prayer. It would be super cheap and testable anywhere
All that tells you is whether the prayer answerer is a deterministic system, or imitating one, or something which isn’t either, and whether the person praying “has the password” for getting the result they want.
(One problem often pointed out in schools is how much of schooling is essentially guessing what the teacher wants to hear.)
Biblical Christianity on the other hand is about being so different after being saved from sin that one might as well be a new person, “born again” as a new creation with God’s law written on one’s heart and the Holy Spirit urging loving choices toward any and all, even one’s enemies.
People with autism, like me, often have trouble understanding non-transactional relationships, as well as where duty and authority come into play without resentment in a loving relationship between unequals. God is not a system or a tricky genie.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
19d ago
Second buyer doesn't get taxed on the appreciation; the developer pays FairTax out of the first “retail” sale if the first sale occurs after the FairTax is legislated into existence, otherwise the govt. already got embedded taxes a myriad of ways. Sell at a loss, the govt. doesn’t pay anything.
As a renter, you’re already paying the income taxes of your landlord and property mgmt company’s hirelings, embedded in the price of your rent, similar to “utilities included”. This is a market distortion which is expected to be compensated for by rentals dropping 23% and then having the 23% added back in (30% exclusive) on the receipt as FairTax.
Used homes not being FairTaxed (except renovation/remodel costs) is a philosophical reward similar to owning DVDs costing less than renting them a dozen times or paying streaming and rarely watching. Besides, the homeowner will be paying FairTax on everything they’ll use for upkeep in the future.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
23d ago
TANSTAAFL, no matter how rich.
If they’re financing businesses through loans, the businesses will be buying services and goods on the open market using the loan money, and those will be FairTaxed. The goods or services those businesses sell will be FairTaxed. That’s less money returning to the investor.
If someone rich buys a used mansion, either they’ll refurbish/remodel it to their own standards using FairTaxed services and goods, or the seller will refurbish/remodel it before putting it on the market and raise the purchase price from “fixer-upper” to “like new”. And if they try to work around the FairTax to refurb it, the contractors will get caught and charged with tax evasion, so the contractors will be sure to include FairTax in their receipts. Trickle-up taxation.
According to Google search summary by AI, “New home sales and improvements, which would include land, would be subject to the tax. Sales of existing homes and, presumably, existing land, would not be taxed. This is consistent with the FairTax's exemption of ‘used items’ to prevent double taxation.”
If the rich are buying used stocks (not IPO), why should they pay FairTax? If they’re buying new IPO stock, they’re transferring ownership of a used company from the private proprietors, who built it by buying and selling FairTaxed goods or services. If they’re buying and merging companies, same deal. The difference is they can’t just sell it at a loss to cut their tax liability. (I’m looking at you, Hollywood Accounting!)
If the rich buy a big, big boat worth a bunch of bucks in Bahrain and keep it in the Bahamas, why should the federal government of the USA get a single dime of that purchase?
As to the fairness of power, prestige, reputation, value speculation, and all the other ancillary benefits of capitalism, the existing income and investment tax system has no ability to curb them, so the FairTax doesn’t even try. The tax system should be focused primarily on efficiently collecting necessary revenue for the government, not solving all the social ills caused by the 1% of the 1%. That’s what antitrust is for.
Thank you for engaging with me on this, there’s little I love as much as talking FairTax.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
24d ago
The FairTax would make it so the truly rich couldn’t spend money without the government getting a quarter of it. Anything else either has loopholes or drives them out of the country.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
It’s more along the general theme of Galt’s pirate radio speech in Atlas Shrugged.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Happy May the Fourth! Here’s a scene Grok wrote for me from Galen Erso, architect of the Death Star, in the style of (and with the morals of) Ayn Rand. I made a few tweaks here and there for accuracy and to emphasize certain points. May the Force be with you.
My mind is my own, and no force in the galaxy can claim it. The Empire, with its blasters and its threats, its bureaucrats and its banners, believes it can chain a man’s reason to its will. They took my body, dragged me from Lah’mu’s quiet fields, murdered Lyra, and held Jyn’s shadow over me like a blade. They thought they could seize my intellect, bend it to their machine of death. Fools. They do not understand the nature of a mind that creates. They cannot fathom the fire that burns in a man who knows his own worth. I am Galen Erso, and my mind is not theirs to command—it is mine, inviolate, eternal.
In the sterile halls of Eadu, surrounded by the timid and the compromised, I labored under their gaze. They demanded a weapon, a Death Star, a monument to their collectivist nightmare—a machine to crush the individual beneath the weight of fear. They could have built it without me eventually, with blood-thirsty sycophants managing the output of scientific minds cowed by fear. They thought my equations, my crystals, my genius would serve their purpose more quickly, and they were right.
But purpose is not theirs to dictate. Purpose is the province of the creator, the man who thinks, who dares to see beyond the violent herd’s clamor. They gave me kyber, the heart of the stars, and expected me to forge a club for their brutality. Instead, I wove a trap. In the reactor’s core, I hid my truth: a single exhaust port, unshielded, able to cause reactor overpressure; a whisper of defiance that could bring their monstrosity crashing down. This was not sabotage—it was justice. It was the assertion of my right to create, to define the terms of my work, to refuse their perversion of my mind’s fire.
Let them parade their TIE fighters and their Moffs. Let Krennic strut with his cape and his lies. They are nothing—parasites who produce no value, who exist only to steal the creations of better men. I saw their world, a galaxy of gray submission, where the individual is ground to dust for the sake of their “order.”
I will not kneel. I will not let my work, my reason, my life’s essence, be twisted into their instrument of enslavement. The flaw I built is my signature, my declaration that no man’s mind can be forced to betray itself. If the Rebellion finds it, if Jyn carries my spark, they will strike the blow I could not. And when the Death Star burns, it will be my mind—free, unbowed, triumphant—that lights the flame.
They thought they could break me with threats, with loss. But a man who knows his own value cannot be broken. My love for Lyra, for Jyn, is not their weapon—it is my strength, my reason to fight. I am no martyr, no sacrificial lamb for their altar. I am a creator, and I have chosen my stand. The Empire may take my life, but they will never take my soul. In that reactor flaw, I have carved my freedom, my truth, my self. Let them build their empires on the ashes of others. I have built my own monument, and it will outlast them all.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Being confusing on accident isn’t a reason to kick you off.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
America thrived on a whale fall after WWII, but the bones are picked dry and the Baby Boomers were the ecosystem which thrived upon it. That’s my new metaphor.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
Cardinal Pierbatista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem? Let's go full DBZ naming with Pope Basil as his pope name. The meme pope.
But seriously, his appointment in Jerusalem as the first Gulf War loomed, and his living through all the terrible things of the past thirty years, have given him a perspective I think the church should be willing to embrace with the highest regard, given the situation in the Holy Land.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
As a fanatic for stories, a fan of the best SF stories, this resonates heavily with me.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
He could be renamed Pope Basil, to keep the theme. St. Basil was an influential theologian and bishop.
Most major and minor characters in the Dragonball saga are named for food (or rarely, clothing or musical instruments). Pizzaballa vs. Zuppi is therefore weak metafictional evidence we’re living in a Dragonball fanfiction.
Time to start chi-building exercises.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
In my attempts to turn Triessentialism from "noticing an interesting pattern" into "a viable philosophy for life and business," I've recognized possession of things and territory as part of the vertebrate brain's instinctual ontology. It's so powerful and human an instinct that the only thing which does more damage than following it is trying to squash it entirely. (See the history of socialism.)
Possession, linguistically, indicates a relationship, not specifically ownership. Its default use as an indication of ownership is a sign of the power of the proprietary instinct. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters about demonic tempters who are quite keen psychologists and studiers of the human condition in their quest to gain souls for their "Father Below." One passage on linguistics has always stuck with me and has shaped my view on ownership:
We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the difference sense of the possessive pronoun - the finely grade differences that run from 'my boots' through 'my dog', 'my servant', 'my wife', 'my father', 'my master' and 'my country', to 'my God'. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of 'my boots', the 'my' of ownership.
I've written elsewhere about my ontology of values: utility, experiences, status, and agency. Everything someone values as a possession (or makes an object of commerce) conveys at least one of these four values. Possession of land conveys the status of landowner which fulfills the deep-seated mammalian need for territory, makes experiences on that land relatively controllable, and enables both utility (toward goals) and agency (control). It is seen as something to pass down to one's heirs. Ownership of land (as with any owned thing) can also convey the four debts: hassle, bad experiences, negative status, and loss of other choices.
I have concluded that legally recognizing this instinctual reality is a societal good.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
This makes me wonder if “Shakespeare’s women roles were always played by men in theatrical drag” was solely due to the oft-claimed patriarchal misogyny caused by rigid religious sensitivities about putting women on display, or if transwomen and/or crossdressing gay men convinced society to let them monopolize the parts. I’m guessing some mix.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
My conspiracy mind wonders if there’s some secret switch in Signal which only gets enabled (by who?) for journalists, so they can view chats unseen in “spectator mode” for reporting purposes. This would explain why nobody saw JG in the chat. If true, Signal would need to be dumped ASAP by everyone.
Less sensationally, there may be another Jeffrey Goldberg [or (JG) generic user icon] who Waltz meant to invite, perhaps someone with top secret clearance in an intel agency who wasn’t expected to weigh in, but was supposed to stay informed. J is the most common first initial in America, and G is in the top ten last initials: https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2011/01/14/two-letter-initials-which-are-the-most-common.html
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