ajuuiomml
1yr ago
“Easy to tax” is doing work. A wealth tax requires establishing ownership and appraising value. Neither of those is easy in general for the class of people you’d want to target. Assets exist outside of the US and are illiquid, volatile, and not systematically inventoried. Good luck figuring out who actually owns what when the rest of the world is a mix of actively colluding against you for profit, too incompetent to figure it out in the first place, or legally disbarred from disclosing the information.
To the best of my knowledge, no country has ever successfully implemented a wealth tax. As in some (France) have tried and then shortly given up. Rich people can and will spend 100% of the money you are trying to confiscate on hiding it. If that doesn’t work, they’ll just up and leave. This is an enormous waste of resources for both parties.
As for Georgism proper… I don’t see any path to getting there. If we did, the most likely outcome would be income tax, property taxes, capital gains tax, sales tax, and a land value tax because that’s how all of the others worked and fuck you. I’d probably fight it tooth and nail. Consider the shift in the burden of income tax before claiming fairness and efficiency in victory.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
This makes sense to me - it stands to reason if you spend basically the same on rich students and poor students the former will still do better based on all their other advantages.
I can’t imagine the spending disparity at which that wouldn’t be the case or the upper/middle classes ever allowing us to actually approach it. I maintain the state is an ersatz parent at best and that arguing over the exact allocation of property taxes is barking up the wrong tree.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine. I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
Income is independent of moral fiber, effort, worth, and productivity. Income, as from a job, is a function of supply and demand for labor. The other factors don’t have much play other than making you marginally more attractive as an employee. You don’t make more because your company can just pay someone else to do your job at your current wage (disregarding the real cost of hiring/training).
The rest of the story is that an efficient market ought to have the same yield on all investments on average. In other words, starting a business is really damn risky, so the payout has to be huge or no business are created. The exact extent to which you make business ownership non remunerative is the extent to which businesses will not be created. That looks like eg Britain over the last decade or so (stagnation). People will just park their money in real estate or other unproductive assets instead of creating the Internet.
Startup founders are another good example. They can be billionaires on paper and have literally no income for a decade. Stripping ownership (ie, taxing assets instead of income) is some mix of really really bad and impossible in practice.
You can go after generational wealth - maybe it’s the best answer actually.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
You could try to maximize social utility, but Harvard would stop being Harvard really quickly if it stopped admitting scions and legacies. That strata of society - the connected, the wealthy, the exceptionally bright and motivated, would immediately find some new signal for their status because they have the means and ability to do so. It’s the signal and network that are the value proposition here, not the education.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
The show is miles ahead of the books. The characters are fully realized as are the implications of a world created by fickle gods for their personal entertainment. The show has more humor and depth alike. It feels like the spiritual successor to Buffy and would rate highly under Vonneguts system. Later seasons get progressively more woke which is progressively more distracting with major trouble in season 5.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Different cancers have treatments of varying efficacy. The difference of course is that we don’t have cancer advocacy, cancer pride, cancer parades, cancer lifestyle TV shows, de facto mandatory inclusion quotas for people of cancer in every form of media, constitutional protection at large, and the White House hoisting a Cancer flag in lieu of the American flag as cause celebre.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
A bona fide medical condition implies a cure, which is really hard to imagine the medical community accepting to say nothing of the trans community itself… or the political mess this would cause with insurance. I believe we will be waiting a while.
Thank you for sharing your view on the matter from the other side. I’m sure I don’t notice much of what is going on because it’s not directed at me.
I do see quite a few anti-trans laws being passed in national news but I haven’t seen any anti-homosexual. Are you lumping the one in with the other or perhaps I just haven’t noticed? Would you mind providing an example or two?
Though it almost certainly is no off ramp at this point - when total victory is in sight, there's no reason to settle for anything less than total victory…
The push for total victory is counter productive - it pushed me in the opposite direction and I’d guess I’m not alone. I got off the train when actual friends started unironically talking about literally bashing in the skulls of people with my political beliefs. I know I shouldn’t pin the beliefs of Bay Area radicalists on the movement at large, but I don’t know how to not do that, either.
Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.
More seriously, I can’t quantify how many homophobes exist in the wild and the extent to which they make it known. I’d agree that homophobia remains, but I disagree it’s the cause for the political enmity. Hating across party lines is something new.
It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
The victory I wanted was for everyone else to not care, too. Instead, I got LGBTQ2A+ climbing night at the local gym, corporations under the auspices of straight white women plastering rainbows on every surface, and “we believe love is love and kindness is everything” along with casual discussions on the internet of the moral imperative to punch my face.
We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference. To me, the pride flag feels sorta akin to the confederate flag. Its not exactly a symbol of hate or exclusion for most of the people flying it, but it sure feels that way on this side of things.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
I don’t disagree too much. On the side of agency and moral worth, Buffy embraces her destiny and personal responsibility to her own detriment. She takes on raising her sister, and later fighting a war. I think we should also cut her slack for being a teenager.
Buffy is compelling in the Vonnegut sense of character writing, where the universe continually throws awful stuff at her and she is just going along for the ride.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists
How do you put a female protagonist in a story for men, who occupies a traditional male role? You need a woman who embodies honor/courage/valor/stoicism/risk taking in the face of immediate personal danger and you also need a damn good reason why it’s a woman doing the job.
We don’t see this in modern fiction (targeting men) because the characters are pretty universally terribly written. I imagine it’s at least partially due to the authors being outright inimical to the role and it’s requirements (except as a vehicle for empowerment) and their would be audience alike.
It’s not impressive or engaging when woman does classic man thing better than all of the doubting men, overcoming the inevitably evil male antagonist, but that seems to be the only plot now. I’ll point out it’s the opposite of empowering, too.
Give me more Ripley! She isn’t a paragon of female empowerment who breaks the glass ceiling through a newly learned sense of self worth and boss bitch power. (Disregarding the allegory of the horror of childbirth…) she deliberately faces down a terrifyingly gruesome death to protect a girl from the same because everyone else is already dead.
I’d gladly watch more (T1/2) Sarah Connors, Buffy, Scully, or even Margot Hanson for a contemporary reference.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Regardless of social status, plumbing is not a low IQ gig (for the well paying positions at least).
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
I'm convinced AI research and development is already far ahead of where it needs to be for AGI in the next couple of years
I’m not! Is your contention that AGI is a bigger, better LLM?
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Yes, what an excellent suggestion! Rambo teaches RamboCreed how to kill real hard while looking manly.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
You have the wrong culprit. It isn’t because of the studios or data per se. The problem is international revenue as a percentage of the total. Asia pacific alone is like 2x the domestic market. Big studios make movies that are accessible/salient to China, India, the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, Europe. The largest common denominator is MCU, which doesn’t really have gay people, dialog, romance, or Taiwan. Both the problems and solutions are violence. Why doesn’t Thor solve homelessness or Wakanda fix fentanyl? Because neither exist of course, just like actual injuries from all of that play fighting.
Maybe with the reemergence of revanchist Russia, we can make movies were they are the baddies again. Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Yep yep, the incentives are entirely in the wrong direction. An economist would have us change the incentives to change the behavior.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
No, not by law. Worse still, it requires eschewing recriminations for personal responsibility and community.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Mass shootings are a culture bound
mental disorder/meme in my book - chiefly spread via popular media. To end mass shootings, we must therefore target the meme. We stop them by not talking about them anymore. Stop showcasing people crying on TV. Stop discussing the shooters and their motivations. Stop the endless parade of sadness. Stop talking about common sense gun control and people taking your guns. Stop reporting on twitterers murdering other twitterers by twittering. Stop the X year memorials. Stop the everyone everywhere needs 3000% more mental healthcare or elsing. Stop the victimization porn. Stop the outrage porn. Just stop it all.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
That’s why you hedge against inflation and hedge against forex as routine business practice. Even medium sized businesses do this because it enables financial planning. It’s insurance, but for money.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
The US military is an unexpectedly progressive institution. The hunt for more bodies to throw into the mill means recruiting the underclass. Making a competent fighting force sometimes handles the rest (although not since Vietnam).
In my estimate, veganism is a form of deliberate cultural imperialism, centered in practice on moralizing, whose central claim is the fungibility of food and the elevation of basic necessity over any other concern…
For most of humanity, the meaning of food is culture, tradition, religion, and history. How do we practice those things or engage with external ones as a vegan? How would you break bread without the bread?
Veganism places no value on the personal or the past. It doesn’t particularly care that cuisines have meaning and value in and of themselves. How do I eat the food of my people as a vegan? How do I celebrate with them? What do we do when we gather? Veganism demands I eat foreign crops that can’t possibly be grown here which can only be prepared in ways authentic to no one.
If the ethical treatment of animals is a concern we can now engage, let’s do so. The unhealthy American diet is an eminent problem, so let’s make it better. Homogenizing the strongest component of culture world wide into beans is not a good solution.
I don’t think fentanyl should be legal. I think people using fentanyl are very clearly in the wrong. I’m also not sure that sending addicts to jail is the best way to get them to stop. Are my beliefs consistent? I have no idea, but I also don’t particularly care. I just want people to not use, and especially so in public.
Is abortion murder? It’s at least vaguely murdery. On the flip side, no one is arguing for no fault third trimester abortions under the theory of “my body my choice” which is the logical conclusion of elevating bodily autonomy to sacrosanctity. Does my “body my choice” apply to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, assisted suicide, recreational drug use, medical drug use, the age of consent or the drinking age? Are prochoicers consistent?
More options
Context Copy link