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.
1d ago
No. The principles involved might include numbers, which would require a measurement of some sort to have a min and a max, but there are a few other qualifications which should be considered. For example, is it known that this person was freed from prison in their home country to get a visa to the USA? No visa.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1d ago
If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.
Issuing visas would, at the very least, include an enforcement mechanism for finding and deporting people who don't meet their visa conditions. This would put the lie to either "Republicans don't like immigrants, 'illegal' is just a fig leaf for hate" or "Democrats don't want any border security, they just want new voters, either this generation or the next."
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
19d ago
I’ve heard it said that Rust is the new C++ but Zig is the new C.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
22d ago
have you tried taking vitamin D in the morning? I would really love a bigger sample size than just me suggesting that vitamin D has positive mood effects.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
Terminology: Natural Selection is an emergent effect, like traffic patterns or centrifugal force. It is the name we give to an orderly effect which seems directed, though we can find no such concrete thing in the system from which it emerges.
The survival instinct is, similarly, borne of a system which contains both the drive to escape pain and the desire to feel pleasure/esteem/accomplishment. Lack of fulfillment of the latter leads to misery; of the former, suicide. Where both can be fulfilled, thriving happens.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
20d ago
Definitely a poignant rule of thumb. I’d expand it to a general principle. For instance, “If your ecology says your opposition’s economic industrial activity is what threatens the survival of the Earth’s biosphere, you don’t have a science, you just have a political sci-fi novel.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
29d ago
I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom.
That’s the good intention which paved the road to Hell, the road we call the anti-trust laws. Alan Greenspan wrote a detailed yet eminently readable paper, later published by Rand, about the US government’s efforts to stop “monopolies” and the resulting unbridled growth of the bully state.
Outlaw unequivocally evil externalities, to be sure! But don’t let the law become non-objective, subject to whim or pull. If you give a man a gun and tell him he’s the defender of justice, pretty quickly he’ll think his job is to find the right time to pull the trigger. Find the proper size and role of government, and provide better incentives for it to protect the individual even at the cost of outcomes for pressure groups with sob stories or crocodile tears.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
22d ago
I started taking 2000-10,000k IU at the start of the pandemic, and my lifelong subclinical depression has lifted. It’s the only consistent thing I can credit.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4d ago
Lying prone, belly down on my bed, as I have since I was a kid.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8d ago
Are the Irish the indigenous people of their ancestral lands? I’ve heard that the Scots are Scotland’s.
I ask as a neighbor of several Native American tribes, between which my city sits.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
23d ago
Finder by Carla Speed McNeil is a distant-future graphic novel series. It features gorgeous black and white line art, transhumanism, and cultural commentary on a possible future of race, gender, and wealth. It has a focus on personal relationships within a society, and comes at anything political from oblique angles. The character art would make Walt Disney swoon with McNeil’s action lines and liveliness.
The eponymous Finder is a young man named Jaeger, of a lower caste ethnicity whose tribe has become involved with a lower upper-class household in one of the domed cities. He has a talent for finding what’s needed, but whether that’s a gift or a curse is left grey.
Cerebus the Aardvark by Dave Sim was a monumental undertaking, one of the first independent comics to hit 300 issues, contemporary in the 80’s with the TMNT and The Tick. It features insanely amazing black and white crosshatched backgrounds by Gerhard, and the character work by Sim is top notch with a caricaturist’s eye. His comic lettering is a phenomenon.
Cerebus himself starts as a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian in the lost civilizations of ancient Europe, but things shift into a high gear when Cerebus gets involved with a mayor who looks a lot like Groucho Marx. It evolves into a poignant and piercing examination of second-wave feminism, the effects of church on society and vice versa, the nature of civilization, the ephemerality of sober and drugged spiritual experiences, alcoholism, masculinity, rapey incels before we had a name for it, being bros, and failed dreams. By the end we’ve met caricatures of dozens of twentieth-century celebrities and parodies of superheroes and sword-and-sorcery fantasy heroes, each one shaping how Cerebus is (or plays) the hero. Skip the text sections from issues 200-300 if you find them weird or boring, the author has something to say in them but most people won’t grok it.
In many ways, these series are diametric opposites, and visions of the future and the past respectively which will haunt you. To see if you want to read the whole series, read volume 3 of each: Finder, King of the Cats, and Cerebus, Church and State.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
27d ago
Arthur C. Clarke was too autistic to write good three-dimensional characters. You know what he did? Got a co-author.
Written primarily by [Gentry] Lee, Rama II has a distinctly different writing style than the original, with a more character-driven narrative and a closer-to-contemporary mindset, ambience and human relations than the first novel's more futuristic tones.
Fantastic ideas require fantastic execution, but most comic books have separate writers and artists. Many of them have separate pencillers, inkers, and colorists.
I myself can write a good scene with decent characterization, but I can count on one hand the number of completed stories I’ve written.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
28d ago
To make explicit the mechanism.
It’s like saying “every red car absorbs most wavelengths of light, but reflects light wavelengths around 620 to 750 nm. When the reflected waves hit our retinas, exciting the red-absorbing cones and transmitting a sensation into our brains we identify as vision of a red thing.”
This explication of a system furnishes us with utility: if a given person cannot differentiate a red thing from a black thing (as a colorblind friend once told me), we can now troubleshoot and find which piece of the mechanism is faulty and the devise a way to adjust it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17d ago
I remember it as Mr. Mot the hardworking barber from Star Trek TNG, versus Beetle Bailey the lazy layabout private from the comic strip.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9d ago
I have yet to read I, Claudius, but I did see the TV series in Latin class. I recommend Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy, it’s a phenomenal series of historical novels which cover Rome in the waning days of the Republic. It’s from the perspective of Cicero’s head of IT scribe/slave.
My life’s savings were all earned and invested during the Trump years, and they were substantial and thriving. Then, despite my wage actually rising slightly during the Biden years, I haven’t seen my more recent retirement investments do any better than a local credit union savings account.
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