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.
3mo ago
How the world would be different if Spielberg hadn't deferred to Lucas and instead had taken the helm he'd been offered! Three fantastic films, the build-up of the chosen one, only to see him fall to the Dark Side in bits and pieces, obsessed by the loss of the attachments in his life which he'd been told to eschew from the start.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
Also, there’s a chance Santa Claus will slap you.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
An intriguing new theological heresy came to me as I was preparing to sleep.
I'm a Trinitarian Christian and a geek, so I can't help getting nerd-sniped by discussions of the Trinity's internal "economy". My Triessentialism philosophy started from praying that God would resolve the apparent logical contradiction of the Trinity, and seeing an answer which has satisfied me for over twenty years. I've listened to the Trinities podcast (which turned out to be run by a blatant unitarian) and discussions of different formulations of understanding God's Trinitarian nature.
Now, I'm a fan of the Lutheran Satire channel's videos because of the hilarious and interesting ways they puncture heresies. Their most famous video, St. Patrick's Bad Analogies, source of the "That's modalism, Patrick!" meme, is a must-watch on or around St. Patrick's Day.
So this is the thought which came to me at bedtime and put a wide grin on my face. What if each Person of the Trinity is the only One Who exists, truly God before all and above all, but each in a different one of the three overlapping realms of the Physical, Logical, and Emotional? What if none of the Persons of the Trinity has ever met the others, but would have had to infer their existence through their effects on humans were He not omniscient?
It would make a fun and fascinating cosmological foundation for a fictional work of high fantasy, but here in our universe it's an obvious heresy, and I don't believe it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
For grognards, any impressive use of the venerable Commodore 64 is worth watching. Take this demo, Nine, for example.
To someone unaware of the hardware limitations of the device, it’s a fun little animation suitable for kids. But show it to someone who’s tried to code on the beige beastie, and you’ll hear “but that’s impossible!” and “How?” several times. For starters, the C64 can only display eight “sprite” graphics at once, and they can’t go beyond the border.
It turns out the author is a coding magician using multiple very subtle and invisible tricks to make it all work out. This is the C64 equivalent of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us, and a fantastic job it is.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
If thousands of Ukrainians are deported to Ukraine, especially if fighting is still ongoing or resumes in the near future (more likely than not given Russia's stated territorial ambitions), I wonder if this event will be remembered in the same way turning Jewish arrivals by boat prior and during WW2 is remembered.
Why (outside of naked partisan historical shaping) would turning over refugees to be press-ganged to the Eastern Front be remembered this way, but not paying for there to be an Eastern Front in the first place?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
Does a section of the city commonly called “the warzone” and officially termed “The International District” count as “an area of effect anti-regeneration ward”?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
I gknew I was right!
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
The word "random" should not be used as a synonym for "arbitrary." In particular, it should only be used when there is a corresponding distribution that is being sampled from.
But then RAM would be harder to say: AAM.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
I’ve started using the buzzing G sound from “menagerie”.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
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.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
My darkest conspiracy theory is:
- those were the vaccinated
- they’d developed the vaccine with the virus
- the heart attacks were a known side effect
- the big delay in getting the already-existing vaccine out was twofold: to tweak the formula to reduce the vax heart attacks to a level less than the worst strain of the bioweapon, and to have lockdowns until Trump “lost.”
I put my pattern recognition at 10% likelihood because I’ve lost most trust in the fed gov being able to pull off a scheme like that.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
40’s, American. Nissan has motors that last as long as Toyota’s but cabins which feel spacious on even their smallest cars. The Versa is going away soon, but if you can get a late model Versa internal combustion with a manual transmission, you’ll have a dependable, affordable 4-banger equivalent to that Corolla.
Just be careful with the temperature dial; if the strings snap, it’ll be $2k to pull the dash and replace the heater core.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
Sorry, I mean we expect most nonhumans we meet to have some variation of a snout, and we generally believe we can understand their emotions by their facial expressions and eye gaze.
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.
4mo ago
Another piece of the puzzle: humans and wolves domesticated each other so much that our neurologies meshed and matched. We humans expect snouted faces.
Being autistic means a statistically higher chance of being furry or faceblind or both. I theorize being faceblind to humans leaves the expectation of snouted faces intact, leading to a default mapping of lemurian preprioception onto canine heads and humanoid bodies.
Evidence: Many pieces of furry art of anthropomorphic felids are actually a dog with feline features. Having lived with a cat, they’re far more alien than all the dogs I ever had. Even My Little Ponies have evolved from cutesified dwarf horses to basically dogs with hooves. (The gallery at the top is what I’m referencing. For Generation 5, they deliberately reduced the horse-like haunches of G4 to dog proportions to reduce the “male gaze” appeal.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Perhaps a new phrase is needed: "indulgentia pro abstinendo" "Indulgence for abstaining".
Trump is the chief law enforcement official in the country, and also the top immigration enforcer per the Constitution, which gives the President the power to control immigration and repel invasions, including the power to limit or suspend entry of noncitizens. It's his purview to drop charges when Adams is flipping/informing on a colleague in corruption.
EDIT: The case against Adams is fascinating. I listened to this Lawfare Daily podcast on the case, and it sounds like the FARA law is one of those broad laws designed to cast a wide net with a miasma of interpretations. I'd like to see a huge crackdown on straw donors, but this case is obvious lawfare from the start.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
How does Georgism avoid the nightmare scenario of giving no rest and pushing everyone to a higher and higher level of efficiency which results in a Malthusian state for all who cannot keep up?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
If I go into Walmart and text someone to come buy something from me there, Walmart is within its rights to have me ejected, and my customer. Why? Because it's their space. Similarly, if I arrange with a barber to meet her at the local Supercuts where he isn't one of their barbers, they'd tell both of us to leave, and if we didn't, call the police. This is a "threat of violence" which is fully justified by the property rights of the business. I assume you consider these "the collective coercion of justice" too, along with the very idea of property rights?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
It does end up approx. the same monetarily, which is why the FairTax people call it “revenue neutral,” but Alice’s product’s final price includes the sum of all the income taxes of all the producers who made it a product Alice could sell to Bob.
Bob’s paying the income tax of the materials manufacturing laborers for the time-slices during its manufacturing in addition to paying for their work-product. He pays for the income taxes of all the delivery workers moving materials around countries and continents until it gets to Alice’s store. And he’s paying for a tiny chunk of Alice’s income tax.
The huge savings of the FairTax come in enforcement reduction and compliance reduction. Right now, Alice has to spend some time doing her business and personal income taxes, Bob has personal income tax, so does Caleb the miner, Dan the driver, Edward the shelf-stocker, and so on. And if any one of them gets it wrong by fraud or mistake, they get a penalty up to jail time.
Instead of the IRS paying agents to hunt down three hundred million potential tax criminals, the FairTax would lay off the IRS as its backlog gets cleared, sunset the income tax amendment, and introduce a revenue service which would only investigate the tens of millions of businesses. Nobody who isn’t an independent service provider or retail manager would ever have to worry about the tax man again, and the FairTax would be automatically calculated at point of sale (the cash register), listed on the receipt, and sent to Washington DC each day or week.
The FairTax is actually set lower than the current revenue collection by the IRS, but the automation and reduced enforcement will result in the same net revenue for the federal government despite lower taxes.
Since it directly taxes the economic trade of value for value, instead of income or wealth which are both proxies for economic activity, the wealthy have no legal way to save a chunk of their profits before the government takes their cut.
It would even decouple revenue from labor, which will become a bigger and bigger problem as more of the income-taxed economy becomes automated.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
There's no fundamental difference between taxes and theft, unless it’s designed from the ground up not to be theft. And that’s what the FairTax proposal would do: remove the famous libertarian / anarchist-capitalist moral complaint against taxes. Don’t want to pay taxes? Don’t be a business owner in the great market of America.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Did you know that modern supermarkets often have the company delivery workers stock and face their product? The wide world of markets is so much larger and fuzzier than simple selling platforms.
I had many of these philosophical realizations when I saw how a flea market operates. There's an entry fee for the customers, and a booth rental fee for the vendor. At the Expo New Mexico (nee NM State Fairgrounds) flea market for example, there's a flat $25/day fee for the vendors. This, and the membership fee at Costco, helped me realize a market can charge both the customers and the vendors, getting some revenue from either the expectation of economic activity or the consummation of same.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
Yes, good points.
Defining differentiating lines between independent contractor, commissioned producer, employee, slave, etc., is vitally important to labor relations. Often it comes down to pay structure. Are they only paid room and board (food) in exchange for labor? Slave. Are they paid a sum, part up front and part upon completion, for an artwork? Commissioned producer. Are they paid wages with 1.5x for working more than 40 hours in a week? Employee.
In a perfectly free market, or in a criminal "black market", power dynamics are more likely than negotiations between peers. The meta-market of government can, by dint of owning the market (both jurisdiction and coin), restrict the types of allowable employment, business categories, products, services, etc. This is similar to how a salon can choose to restrict its hairdresser contracts to those with certain qualifications and manners, require they follow a dress code, and kick out unruly trespassers who aren't planning on being customers.
Interestingly, the "insurance" rackets of mobs are criminal meta-markets: they keep away the rabble and the other gangs' toughs for a cut of the profits, occasional access to the shop's environs for criminal dealings, favors unspecified, etc. (As a minarchist, I prefer a republic that prevents criminal meta-markets, of course.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
Yes, assuming neither salon has an exclusivity clause in their contract.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
Thanks for the good catch. I was thinking more of tribal kings ruling city-states in the Bronze Age, or their sword & sorcery fantasy equivalents. How it worked historically after Rome pretty much had to be different from my thumbnail sketches.
The parts about armies were merely add-on justifications for the most recognizable and widely agreed-upon expense toward which taxes go.
I never fold laundry. ADHD makes it interminable.
I have a "clean" basket and a "dirty" basket, and one type of socks which get turned inside-out when I take them off for washing and turned right-side-in just before putting them on. The easy life.
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