ajuuiomml
4mo ago
and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process
Coming out to an election near you this winter. If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots? Why would they stop at national elections for that matter? All they need is a governor and a stacked court.
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
What does the tax system have to do with it? US software companies have profit margins of ~100%, at least for SaaSs. I’d go so far as to say that basically 100% of productivity gains between 1990 and today are from computers and that the tech industry itself captured the vast majority of that value. Are theme parks more productive than they were 30 years ago? What have they innovated?
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
That is my understanding as well. I really enjoyed learning sign language but I wouldn’t think twice about curing deafness in all newborns.
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people.
To me, this is nearly a complete non sequitur. Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans? Society is more accepting now for sure, but gay people have always been with us. Trans is something new, and certainly in these numbers. I personally believe there is a strong biological cause. I’ll place my bet on ingesting microwaved plastic daily. Actually looking for the reason would imply that there is something wrong with trans people and that they can be fixed or even prevented so I’m not holding my breath.
I think being trans is about as morally wrong as being deaf. I’d expect the federal government to do something in the case of an unparalleled epidemic of deafness.
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
I have been reading through the international building code which my local city and county defer to, with amendments.
ajuuiomml
6mo ago
Palestinians don’t magically want to kill Israelis as a deeply-held first principle
I’m not so sure nor should we turn your question into a binary. Very clearly killing is a primary goal for many Palestinians. The actual charter of Hamas plainly calls for the destruction of Israel, Jihad of all Muslims, and states the claim that all targets are legitimate. Hamas has repeatedly acted in accordance with that goal.
But even if the links have become distant from each other, and even if the obstacles erected by those who revolve in the Zionist orbit, aiming at obstructing the road before the Jihad fighters, have rendered the pursuance of Jihad impossible; nevertheless, the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said:
The time(16) will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad(17), which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim)(18)
ajuuiomml
6mo ago
Carrots are quite sweet: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/9716612
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
I dunno. I’m pretty far into free speech absolutism, but I’d support firing anyone who openly advocates the ongoing mass murder, rape, and torture of civilians for creating a hostile work environment. At a law firm!? Disregarding morals completely, you’d lose every Jewish client, associated business, and employee.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
Yeah, you can nod along with TK on the alienation of modernity until he arrives at mass murder. Starvation is certainly one way to bring focus to life!
Estimates of the maximum extent of hunter gatherer populations are 1-20 million people total. Even if everyone were down with starving/freezing/baking to death 99.999% of the population in one year, we would have a prisoners dilemma in getting there. Any hunter gatherer society would be trivially conquered/genocided/colonized by any defecting society, of which there would surely be one because I’ll be in it.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot.
This is explicitly illegal in the US and would land you in deep shit.
Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?
That is illegal.
Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
I suspect this is also illegal in Michigan.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
I believe changing the rules of the game while the game is in progress, very much to the benefit of one party, constitutes cheating. I don’t much care if the cheating was sanctioned by Democratic dominated state courts and federal courts refused to weigh in because of standing.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
I’m reminded of the sidebar content or /r/antiwork which was truly shocking when I first read it:
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists—except that I’m not kidding—I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry.
Such a society is incompatible with one that has things like housing, running water, electricity, heating, plumbing, medicine, any form of transportation or sufficient food to keep its population of 300 million from starving. It would also not have any computers or software so turn the dial back to the 40s before your trip to the Middle Ages. It would be incapable of trade to get any of these things. It would be incapable of producing even art, because that too takes a huge amount of work. Committing to the is plan is commitment to genocide in a Great Leap Forward sort of way.
Beyond genocide, and outright impossibility, it strikes me that the author had all the aspirations of a 13 year old. A world of frivolity is not a utopia. A world with no responsibility is a world devoid of purpose.
I remain unclear how anyone engages with this writing seriously.
A government of, by, and for the people is a good standard by me, no special pleading necessary. Strongly disproportionate representation in the government itself (of unelected officials) runs afoul. The composition of our civil servants isn’t encoded into the constitution, or quite possibly anything, and it can easily be changed. This is in essence the same argument, as you wrote, that Democrats make for the police. They say the police aren’t members of our community, geographically or otherwise, they don’t have our values and therefore don’t serve the community. Those concerns are valid however we address them. I would do so for both the police and our federal bureaucracy.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
There are hundreds of applications per tenure track position - departments do not and will not hire out conservatives. Adjuncts are in no position to demand reform and this wouldn’t be it, anyway. The problem goes back to grad school and allowed research topics/positions…
The problem is worsening. We see increasing adoption of actual litmus tests (mandatory diversity statements) in which conservative positions are considered tantamount to hate speech.
How exactly would you have conservatives engage or reform this system?
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
It’s not hard for me to believe that people who think the best government is local do not choose to work for the federal government. Besides, Washington DC votes 95% democrat. Conservatives will self select out of living in a one party town run by their out group. I thought moving the BLM to Grand Junction was excellent policy in this regard. Why in the world should the BLM, which controls 50% of the land out west, be run by Washington bureaucrats as an absentee landlord totally divorced from the land itself?
More generally, what is the meaning of Democracy when some of the people are highly underrepresented in positions of governance? I very much doubt Democrats would be OK with the federal government being located in rural Texas.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
This is currently illegal and would remain so. It doesn’t matter if an inscrutable AI model produces the same model.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
The current limits on government backed loans are frozen for the rest of time. It wouldn’t fuck over current students nor would it allow for continued expansion.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
The fix the public schools dogma is missing the forest for the trees. Poverty, or at least poor people, isn’t why our schools suck. Lots and lots of poor people wildly succeed at educating their children. Whole, impoverished countries even! The state is an inadequate replacement for interested parenting and community. You will hardly ever succeed at forcing worse outcomes on people with means over the long term. This is an un-winnable game. Fixing education in practice more often than not turns into to destroying the social signal that education used to provide because that’s the direct incentive of all the low level players, at which point, society will create a new ones.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
Your experience with your first crush is yet another reminder that in some ways, people are surprisingly different - like not realizing that the color blue is real and distinct, or that smells exist in the same way, or the people who are clinically blind but don’t know it. It has never occurred to me that I, or anyone else, would want to be the person of their interest - the existence of the desire itself is totally foreign.
As for the direction of causality, any stable belief probably has to be self reinforcing.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
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?
ajuuiomml
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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.
I’d be surprised if at least 75% of the difference in outcomes isn’t explained by obesity and related differences in population.
On the topic of child care, SF has the same problem. The buildings and providers alike are highly regulated, with subsidies galore and predictable results.
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