Wave_Entity
1yr ago
Really depends on how we judge what "burning man art" is. A lot of incredibly famous musicians have gone out there and play sets, as attendees. I don't know if they even pay artists to show up, i know they didn't when i was more aware of that scene but i wouldn't hazard a guess anymore. Tons of people that work on movies and videogames and esoteric AI powered VR DMT simulators go. I havent been keeping current, but i watched video of Skrillex playing at a sound camp there from before he won a grammy.
Point being, the cumulative attendees of burningman might be the most wide reaching and impactful group of artists in the world. Like, if you don't think that scene has had a notable impact on culture over the last 20 years i wonder what you would point to as being influential.
In your defense however, i will say that most notable burningman attendees don't really advertise their time there, so not being aware of how many influential people have attended is pretty easy to excuse.
(i don't know why i'm even defending burningman, its a hollowed out husk of a super cool party)
Wave_Entity
1yr ago
"rich" is not a moral category which must be inherently good or bad
Agree, but theres the question of utility. If an economic system tends to concentrate most of the wealth into a small percentage of actors, shouldn't we look at what that money is doing? Obviously a billionaire isn't just burying cash in coffee cans, but the utility of how they made their money isn't tied to how they spend/invest their money. I would argue that it's morally shady, possibly bad, to own over a billion dollars in a world where people are dying in the streets for lack of money.
This gets tricky because a billion dollars is obviously an arbitrary number and if we decrease it, my argument applies to more and more people who get closer to actually seeming like not a big deal. So i guess if i was trying to be the arbiter of morality i would say owning more money than you could ever need is immoral in the same way that eating a bite of a dinner and then throwing it away is. Even if you could hypothetically save the dinner forever, if you aren't going to eat it and other people are currently dying of starvation, i think thats morally objectionable.
Wave_Entity
1yr ago
a few things spring to mind- at the highest end, wealthy people don't care and can just buy a super nice kid seat, at the lower ends people want a vehicle that will last 10+ years. Removability of the child seat is a feature. Secondly, resale value on cars with permanent child seats would plummet, because who wants to buy a car knowing that its had shitty snotty kids in it for the last however long.
Wave_Entity
1yr ago
oh man, i am aware of and annoyed by how alcohol distribution is set up. Idunno if its national or just some states but where i'm at, a brewery HAS to sell to a licensed distributor and not directly to a customer, which prettymuch ruins any comparison to a free market. Anyway, i think the difficulties with alcohol shipping is a pretty good indicator that federal regulation can bring a uniformity that is preferable to each state having bespoke rules. Like, as bad as things are now, without federal regulation that small but thriving compliance sector would become a ubiquitous and heavy player in interstate commerce.
Wave_Entity
1yr ago
The first and biggest boon the federal government brings us is uniform federal laws. In a republic with minimal federation interstate laws could become disparate enough to cause logistical and commercial problems. As a really nonsensical hypothetical, MN, IA, MO, AR, and LA could band together and say "it's illegal to ship goods through our state without paying an interstate transit fee", and theres no way around them on the ground without crossing into Canada. The federal government stops this nonsense from happening.
More realistically in a world without federal regulation state regs would be a giant mess and we would lose tons of efficiency to having a million little x state to y state compliance experts and all the insane bureaucracy that would come with it. It would be way less profitable to sell stuff to americans if shipping stuff had 50 different sets of rules.
I also think that having some uniformity in laws helps keep America from polarizing to an actual national divorce level. If california can make wholistic veganism mandatory and texas can outlaw saying the word vegetarian, we really might start living in our own corners and not seeing eachother as at all similar. National identity is essentially a federal IP.
This is gonna cause a lot of house of Theseus situations. If a new building gets mega taxed and a refurbished old warehouse gets 0 tax, then every extant structure when the law passes will be upcycled forever. Wherever the line gets drawn on what a "new" house is, people will stop just short of it. If the point of refurbishment is where the taxation happens, people will make small incremental improvements that don't warrant a tax audit or what have you. Also what about land? just not taxed anymore? Not much new land being sold in the US.
Also this hugely incentivizes people to just try and fix/improve stuff themselves, when they really shouldn't. If i'm building my own new gazebo would i get taxed on the input materials i buy? What if it's a business gazebo, for hosting business lunches?
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