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.
4d ago
I know the guy who developed the gravity bomb concept. Want a miles-wide chunk of Earth gone? I know which book to point you to.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7d ago
Arctic circle is the obvious edge case where it would be worse than useless.
Here in New Mexico, one of the southernmost states, sunrise ranges from 7:13am in winter to 4:53am in summer (without DST), only a 2:20 swing. Sunsets range from 4:55pm to 7:23pm (again without DST). 9am here is about 2 hours post lucem in winter to 3pl in summer with DST. That means three hours of blazing hot summer sunlight before I even get to work, and the A/C is on all day.
DST helps me (other than the sudden transition), but sundial time as hyper-DST with my workplace opening two hours after sunrise would be better for my sanity.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7d ago
The Time Wars Have Begun.
President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.
I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.
Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.
They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.
We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.
The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.
Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?
Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
12d ago
What would count as “weaponizing the DOJ” that the Democrats haven’t already normalized? What “unacceptable directives” wouldn’t be illegal, yet would be beyond the pale?
New York Times columnist David Brooks said the quiet part out loud recently while on left-of-center “PBS Newshour”: “if you look at democracies in decline, then it is a pattern that people in office use their power to indict and criminalize and throw in jail the people who were in office before them of the opposing party. And so we are a nation, democracy in decline.” - The Hill
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
12d ago
How about “Judea”?
When ancient Israel had a civil war, the territory controlled by the tribes of Judah and Benjamin was differentiated by name from the rest of the ten tribes, who kept the name “Israel”. Thereafter the Judeans and Israelites had separate kings, alliances, enemies, and historical run-ins with regional empires.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
13d ago
Avacado, Bacon, Cheese, and the third M, Mushrooms, would make it ABC KLMMMNOP.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
14d ago
De facto - Means "in fact" or "in effect". It describes practices that exist in reality, even if they are not officially recognized by laws. For example, a de facto leader is someone who has authority over a country, but their legitimacy is widely rejected.
De jure - Means "according to the law". It describes practices that are legally recognized, regardless of whether they exist in reality. For example, a de jure leader has a legal right to authority, even if they are unable to exercise it.
I was speaking in a right-wing dialect, with brevity, and with the contrast between the two definitions above in mind. You're right that I was not clear because de facto is probably the worse usage here. I'll restate it: "If every right-wing win is assumed to be evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is declared a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed because WWIII is inevitable."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
14d ago
“Sounds like someone controlled by an oligarch to me…” (sarcasm)
But seriously, this is a major shift in Cthulhu swimming leftwards and making people go insane. If every right-wing win is de facto evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
14d ago
Sounds like the system wanted to make an example of P'Nut.
Like Bill Foster's wife's divorce lawyer made an example of him in "Falling Down".
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
14d ago
Us Americans, who also spell catsup "Ketchup": Lettuce leaves, Mayonnaise and Mustard spreads, and slices of Nightshade, Onion, and Pickle.
A Buddhist walks up to a food truck and says, "Make me one with everything."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15d ago
If tomatoes were called nightshades, the standard hamburger toppings would be abbreviable as KLMMNOP.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
16d ago
I wrote that as a list of individual things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I get the 29 hr/wk thing, assuming it's basically a variation on the minimum wage leads to less jobs argument.
Sorry you read too much into this. The main effect of 29 hr workweeks for low income labor was to shift their healthcare from partial plans (now illegal) to Medicaid, being meta-insured by taxpayers in higher brackets.
Why does skyrocketing healthcare costs drive doctors and nurses to quit?
Again, a list of things the ACA did, not a causal sequence. Medical professionals leave the field for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones is the bureaucracies both public and private (their own business insurance, for one) which turn their days into endless paperwork, and turn the brightest and kindest of humanity into overburdened cogwheels.
How does Big Pharma specifically benefit?
Per Google’s search AI: “the ACA mandates that all health plans cover essential health benefits, including prescription drugs, which means more people can afford to purchase their medications.” It wasn't specifically caused by the lack of personnel.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
The ACA was designed to make private health insurance so onerous a hassle and so hideous an expense that the public would overwhelmingly approve Hillary’s single-payer she’d been working on since the 90’s.
Then Trump won, tried to kill the ACA, and was stopped by McCain’s spiteful deathbed vote. So it endures.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
TriWest was a southwestern US insurer for veterans and their families. Valid claims just sailed through with minimal administrative overhead because their claims system was well automated and optimized.
They were good and not-scummy.
UnitedHealth bid a lower cost for the contract, won it, and promptly started denying most claims on the first pass. Only clinics which sent appeals would get paid, and almost always did.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
Yes to the latter.
Reddit’s “There Was An Attempt” subreddit is for failed attempts at doing simple or easy things. This news article was posted there as “To stay alive as a PoS who made millions off the suffering of others.” As of now, approx 8000 upvotes and 1000+ comments, most of them cheering on the assassin.
It’s culture war because the Democrats forced the country’s insurers via the ACA to stop offering all healthcare except “Cadillac plans,” and to cover all pre-existing conditions, and reduced the employer-provided requirement down to 30 hours.
Then they successfully blamed Republicans and the profit motive for increasing the percentage of 29 hr/wk jobs with no healthcare, making all healthcare costs skyrocket, making doctors and nurses quit and new people not want to go into the field, and making Big Pharma rich.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
Human nostrils take turns being easy and hard to breathe through every 25 minutes to four hours.
The nasal cycle should not be confused with pathological nasal congestion: individuals with normal nasal breathing usually do not realize their breathing is asymmetric unless there is underlying nasal obstruction. In pathological conditions, however, the nasal cycle may influence the symptoms. - the cited Wikipedia article
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.
The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
23d ago
· Edited 23d ago
My ancestors tried to escape organized religion and live a holy life with no private property in a commune on the New World. Their ship, the Mayflower, nearly sank but for a great metal screw, possibly part of a printing press. Half of them died that winter, but they were saved by an Indian who walked into town and asked them for beer. This man negotiated an alliance for agricultural knowledge and trade with the local tribe. Once they got back on their feet, the Pilgrims had a great harvest feast with the Wampanoag before the next winter set in.
Although there was a clash of these civilizations several generations later which set the groundwork for many ethnic conflicts and genocides, what we celebrate is that fragile peace and brief cultural understanding that gave us the harvest we needed to survive.
Whatever your family’s story, I encourage you to celebrate my family’s holiday, giving thanks to your gods and/or economic systems for providing your daily meals and your full bellies through the coming winter. Happy Thanksgiving.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
Thanks! That's a high compliment on a sensemaking forum.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Rules for magic give us an interface for magic.
It’s like teaching arithmetic to the youngest kids, then gradually explaining over the next fifteen years of Masters-track schooling how it works under the hood. Eventually you get top math-wizards inventing new types of numbers and functions named after them, because they need them to make X go widdershins into Y through a tensor, but only if it’s not imaginary otherwise you get a strange attractor set and that’s not ideal at all.
Rowling’s system is about this deeply connected energy flowing through most living things, and where other magical sapients get instinctive and powerful ways to use it, humans have to use tools like wands and words to reach an instinctive level beyond wild flailing. (Like mundane animals having fangs and claws and venom, but mundane humans have to make tools.) But once humans can do wandless wordless magic, they’re basically instinctively programming flows of raw magic and can just blow past boundaries the first year students think are immutable.
Then, some magics were modeled by geniuses after the instinctive magics of beasts and beings and so the restrictions don’t apply for those spells, and other magics are basically like having admin access so certain artificial restrictions interact differently with them, like the Hallows.
The “anything can happen” feel is meant to retain the wonder of high fantasy, while the “you can’t do that spell that way” is meant to retain the utility manipulation of low fantasy. I think she did a great job at letting both levels work together, at least for the genre-redefining work of urban fantasy/Roald Dahl pastiche/bildungsroman/YA fascism dystopia it evolved into.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Malfoy’s mates Crabbe and Goyle - lower class or lower middle class? Servants of House Malfoy? As an American, all I can tell is they’re somewhere between soccer hooligans and Alfred Pennyworth.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya and rereading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for the first time. I was too young to pick up on it the first time, but the pre-incident life experiences of the latter’s protagonist is described from the start in upper middle class terms. It feels like she’d easily become fast friends with Rudy Huxtable from the Cosby Show.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
#Procrastination thoughts:
(As always with Wellness Wednesdays, if you have never suffered from this problem, please don’t proclaim How Easy This Has Always Been For Me, You Just Need To Buckle Down And Do It.)
On ADHD-style time-blindness: Some moments are a destination, others a path to other moments. Learn to differentiate these, not mistaking a path-moment for a destination-moment… or vice versa. Playing with your sister’s kids is a destination moment, not something just to get through. Playing games on your phone with as little depth as Cookie Clicker out of boredom is a path-moment; don’t build a life around it.
On the states of mind of procrastination: I find my personality shifts depending on the state of my distractions, not the state of my work:
- I don’t want this Now to end, because I’m harvesting Fun, even of the worst and most boring sort. Or maybe the best sort, because I’ve got a schedule but yeah, I’ve got time. I am “Not Done” playing. I am in Freud’s id mode, and my name is Not Done.
- I don’t want people to stop me from completing my procrastination activity, because it cost me too much hassle to get to this point and I’ll be damned if I give up the progress, but time is summoning me out of Now-mode, and I know I have responsibilities to get to, and I am “Almost Done” with my distractions. I’m in Freud’s ego mode, and my name is Almost Done.
- I am doing the needful and my distractions are outside the warp bubble of flow mode. Time and I are partners here, I am digesting time as fuel. Whatever I was distracted with, it’s in the past and “I’m Done” with it whether I finished it or not. I’m in Freud’s superego mode, and my name is I’m Done.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
I didn’t bat an eye at the “bloody altar” or “evil [god]” comments, misunderstandings of my faith I expect from unbelievers, but it’s fascinating how much I bristled at the “gnostic” comment.
I’ll return to this thread later, just wanted to post first thoughts.
I remembered an article comparing America’s gun crimes rate as the best among developing nations but high for developed nations. Certainly gave me food for thought.
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