DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
Samaritan’s Purse is one I’ve known about for a while and in crises actually donate to. Their max admin take is 10%, and there’d be hue and cry in the churches if it were mismanaged. They’re already mobilized for the area.
It’s run by Billy Graham III, the famous evangelist’s son, and the organization has been criticized for requiring volunteers to sign a controversial Statement of Faith which disavows homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, they’re committed to helping everyone they can on a given charity project, regardless of demographic or creed. They also have two helicopters, so they’re ready for the washed-out roads of Appalachia.
I’ll put my non-tax money where my mouth is and donate $50 right after I post this reply.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9mo ago
Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.
I mean, if your god is anti-murderist, you’ve got an obligation to save your enemies from themselves. Save the babies and let God make them Republicans.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
10mo ago
our institutions should require religious belief in a personal diety for high-level positions which require trust, without favoritism toward any one system of belief or denomination.
That’s what the Masons tried… and ended up accused of all sorts of evils.
That’s what the Boy Scouts tried… and ended up a skinsuit for the egregore.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
The inherent disgust reaction is one of the most powerful emotions humans have. For some, it’s triggered by women showing their penises in locker rooms, for others it’s would-be rapists touching women’s bodies with their words.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
But many doctors know that patients don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear the science; they don't want to "follow the science" (i.e., actually do the thing). He also mentions that even though they try to drill this into patients, many of them still just don't do it.
I want to hear the science. I want desperately to do the science. But opportunities keep disappearing. I’ve become quite bitter, actually.
In early 2000, I had a job where I could eat as much salad as I wanted, for free. I got a Torso Track from late night TV and dropped from 210 to 190 in a single summer. I was in the best shape of my life. Then I moved on from the dishwashing job with free salad to custodial at a gym. I wasn’t allowed to use the equipment, and ironically, I got bursitis of the knee while kneeling to wipe the floor mats under the machines and impingement of the shoulder from all the mopping. I could not use my Torso Track anymore. I went over 210, because I now had muscle weight and a bigger frame to hang fat on.
I had a nightmarish two decades of codependency and sedentary jobs, piling on the weight of another small dog, never making 25% more than minimum wage for Albuquerque despite the dollar amount of my wages rising; trapped in the inflation trap.
I joined a gym with a pool in January 2020, free to me because of the ACA’s gym benefit, planning on swimming my way down from my now larger weight. Then COVID LOCKED THE GYM DOORS.
When I got a new job after the lockdowns lifted, my new schedule included time on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work to go to the YMCA, and I started doing so. Then my schedule shifted again, and I couldn’t anymore. My membership has languished.
Then I saw the 2022 film The Whale in theaters, directed by Darren Aronofsky and adapted for screen by Samuel D. Hunter, the original playwright. The film stars Brendan Fraser, an actor I admire, whose struggles I’d read about. It was like a punch in the gut. I joined an anti-obesity twelve step program and started learning why I had spent twenty years making excuses and drowning my sorrows in calories. I was actually doing things differently with my food consumption, and moving away from seeing overeating as an inevitability.
I had developed an eating plan and started to use it. Then I got a medical issue because I was trying to help someone move a cabinet, and I could no longer use that eating plan, nor is it safe for me to exercise much.
Oh, and I could have afforded GLP-1 after I finish paying off my car this autumn, but my living situation is going to change and the cost will rise by the amount I’ve been paying for my car.
I can’t hear the science over the racket of all my spoons being constantly taken.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
NATO was (since the 70’s) a Disneyland vision of Europe propagated by American thinktanks and intelligence, propped up by US aid and USAID. A place for young PMC progressives to take a summer break, as real as Cabo or Cozumel.
The Ukraine war is the culmination of Europeans believing that fantasyland. A million dead with almost no gains and Nordstream 2 gone. Do not believe my country’s military/industrial decisionmakers. We cannot hold your borders locked in their postwar positions forever.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
A 2011 South Korean study with unique methodology for the time suggested autism rates are naturally about 1 per 38, or about three percent, assuming no difference in rates by race. This research came at a time of greater awareness of high functioning autism at nonclinical levels:
The South Korean study probably produced such a high figure because it screened a lot of kids who seemed to be doing OK and included in-person evaluations of any child suspected of having autism, Grinker says. "Two-thirds of the children with autism that we ended up identifying were in mainstream schools, unrecognized, untreated," he says.
American rates have ended up about the same 1/38.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
It’s basically this comic/meme, intending to make conservative women feel gross when men in their lives have opinions about sexual morality.
Jon Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations Theory suggests that grey tribers don’t have instinctive moral judgments except when freedom or coercion are involved. I’m not surprised it’s not hitting here as fighting words like it did over on patriots.win when someone posted it there.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
Scalding hot and boiling hot water are no joke. https://www.google.com/search?q=scalded+to+death+water
Certainly they made bad decisions in the moment, but deadly weapons should never be underestimated, such as a knife, a spear, a club, a thrown stone, a clenched fist, or boiling water.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo 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.
9mo ago
I’ve noted elsewhere the incredible coincidence that Maxwell’s father was the man ostensibly responsible for privatizing science journals, and reddit wunderkind programmer Aaron Swartz killed himself awaiting trial for trying to pirate all of JSTOR. I appear to be the only person who thinks this could be the seed of a conspiracy theory that /u/AaronSw was “convinced” to kill himself by /u/maxwellhill.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
She’d take the office as the first woman President of the US after having dropped out of the 2020 primaries due to bad polling and having been nominated by Biden due to her demographic profile (“Black” woman). She’d be seen as the face of DEI quota hiring, not a woman who succeeded due to her merits like Secretary Clinton would have been. The House will have to vote in her successor as Veep, and she’d be stuck with whoever they chose. None of the optics are good. And the polling says she has a good chance to occupy the office for all of half a year before Trump becomes 48th.
They also want her to earn the office of 47th President with votes, because they can campaign on “if you vote for her, you can show the world a woman can be President!” This boosts the down-ballot races.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
If your system was up when the update rolled out in the afternoon, and you turned off or reset your computer before the rollback patch, you got a BSOD easily fixable by anyone with the admin privilege.
Part of security is a monopoly on force — sorry, on access — so nobody dumb can infect the system, and few people had the privilege. I was one of the clever few who could boot with a Windows installation USB, delete the affected files, and be back up in minutes. Whereupon I was asked to get other PCs up in our building, which I gladly did.
On reddit, someone said they’d been speaking with their crowdstrike security rep the previous week, who said they had a beta for the new version which was getting BSOD on some windows systems, so they weren’t going to push it out until the bug was squashed. It’s assumed in IT the bad update accidentally got into global distrib.
Who is John Galt?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
Climbed a nearby building: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040
And incompetent? Guy just drew blood from outside the Secret Service cordon. The wind is the only thing that saved President Trump.
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.
3mo ago
Breaking Bad is filmed and set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my hometown. In a pivotal episode, “Face Off,” set in July of 2009 but filmed around 2010 and aired in 2011, I saw a vehicle in a parking lot greatly resembling the vehicle I owned in 2009.
It wasn’t that vehicle. I had already sold that vehicle by the time the episode was filmed, to a private buyer who was almost certainly not a Netflix prop purchaser. Upon rewinding and rewatching, it’s not only a slightly different tint, it’s a different year’s model.
Still, it’s fun to see what could have been my vehicle in a parking lot I know I’ve never parked in, at a time when I still had it. Whenever I rewatch the episode with friends or family, I can point it out.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
One of the Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque, NM is) Republican Party’s big talking points is that the Albuquerque Public Schools district’s total budget is poorly spent by government.
Divided by pupil, the cost is a few thousand dollars more per year than tuition at Albuquerque Academy, the swankiest of our two prep high schools and the one with the biggest, showiest campus. At that price, we should be turning out Silicon Valley/Harvard/MIT-level high school grads, but we’re not.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
10mo ago
The system is built to notice and disrupt coordination.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
I disagree. Crowdstrike Falcon Sensor is meant to keep ransomware from happening, especially to (or through) the Internet of Things. Without it, at least some of the dozens of hospital systems which went down today would have already been hit by sophisticated unscrupulous organized criminals.
I feel sorriest for MGM, who got BSOD’d by Crowdstrike after getting ransomwared last year.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo 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.
7mo ago
I’ve been on the IT side of healthcare, helpdesk with a few admin duties, and I do not envy you one bit.
Here are some of Ronald Reagan’s predictions from the 60’s about government-run healthcare:
‘The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They're equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, "You can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors." You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go.’
These concerns seem almost quaint next to the never-ending grind of being at the intersection of public regulation, private underwriting, and technical debt.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
“But but but it’s not gross men like that who transition,” says the intuition of trans rights activists.
The only thing which can resolve warring noncentral fallacy accusations is statistics, and I don’t think anyone will be satisfied by the stats on “actually a gross man”/“actually a pure and innocent woman cruelly given androgens by the wrong genes and forced to age up past puberty by a patriarchal and binary system”.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
You'd rather pay 500 dollars a month for a weight-loss drug when you could just... organize your life better?
Imagine someone saying to a homeless person “you’d rather wait for the city to give you a tiny home in three years when you could just… organize your life better?” We fatties didn’t choose phantom hunger and akrasic mindsets. Obesity is as NP-hard a problem as chronic homelessness, and we probably share some neural miswiring with those unfortunate folks.
CICO works, indisputably, for anyone who can control their arms and legs against the will to consume.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
25d 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.
I do find myself occasionally wondering if the local abandoned Walmart (shoplifting killed it) might be a fine place for a novel nonprofit to set up an indoor tent city for the local homeless, with security guards and nurses on staff, a doctor dropping by every day for prescriptions, and the in-store pharmacy restored to full functionality. The big outdoor parking lot might be additional space for the hardier hobos willing to rough it.
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