domain:mattlakeman.org
Markass
23m ago
The blacks don't help, but this isn't fully true. People prefer living in suburbs and driving cars because it's just better for them. Even if all black people were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be suburbs and cars. At most it would add a marginal amount to the populations of dense cities.
TitaniumButterfly
27m ago
You're clearly grappling with the way his (uninhibited by resource scarcity) gayness makes you feel. I don't disagree, but if that's how it is we should probably be more willing to generalize.
cjet79
31m ago
Some Benefits:
- People can be guilty of two crimes when they don't pay taxes: not paying the taxes, and lying about the amount of taxes owed. Which also makes it easier to catch criminals who are making lots of money illegally. (Al Capone Argument)
- Its only hard to pay taxes if you are trying to maximize the amount you are not paying. You can very easily give the maximum amount you suspect you owe, and if you are wrong the government will send you a reimbursement for taxes you overpaid. (Kennedy, do your part argument)
- Special interests can be given special and hard to follow exemptions that are only meant for them, and require a bunch of hoops to claim. You can then write off those estimated tax costs as something you did for the consumer while not having those full costs get reflected in the actual budget. (Cynical jack ass argument)
There are more special interests that benefit from complex tax systems than just H&R block.
OliveTapenade
36m ago
For what it's worth, I can't imagine the idea of watching a film on a phone or even on a computer monitor. It's practically the only thing I use my television for these days, but I still insist on watching films on a television.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
37m ago
When someone dies, you don't blame the executor of their will.
If somebody gets murdered, with intent, then you actually do start looking extremely closely at the people who get to profit massively from their death. When the executor of a murder victim's will stands to gain vast sums of money from their will, people will absolutely and instinctively blame said executor - and in this specific case they're actually correct to do so given that the company was driven to the ground on purpose.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
45m ago
He already has the downside risk of losing his job.
This isn't actually a downside risk - a lot of CEOs have incredibly lavish golden parachute pay clauses. If the company goes to shit and disintegrates because he outsourced the management to CEOgpt while fucking his secretaries and writing racist screeds on the internet he will be rewarded for causing immense damage to the lives of the people working there with financial compensation far in excess of what the average employee earns.
Pigeon
coo coo
53m ago
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
Surely even if this is true, predicting when this will happen is still incredibly difficult?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
53m ago
In any case, I don’t understand why they should help. Help me or I’ll envy you and make things difficult sounds like extortion.
Because the obscene concentration of wealth that allows those elites to exist requires the existence of a coherent and functioning society. You can't have millionaire layabouts and the idle rich without somebody to actually do the work, and if those people believe that current social arrangements have lost their legitimacy then things can change very, very fast. The French aristocracy didn't give a shit about the concerns of smelly peasants and didn't want to help them out at all, but that famously did not end particularly well for the aristocracy.
Eetan
1hr ago
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes
MODE OF STEEL ON
In a free democratic republic, citizens should be aware about the true cost of state, and if they think it is too high, they should organize and vote for smaller and leaner government.
MODE OF STEEL OFF
Yea, it looks, walks and talks like mob extortion, but, unlike most parts of the system, can be steel manned. Not that it was ever deliberately designed for this reason.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
This is in no way a barrier to a competently written tax code. How, exactly, does the money get to said foreign subsidiary? There is always going to be a point at which the financial resources leave the country and that's where enforcement can happen.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It's just a question of higher familiarity then.
anon_
2hr ago
My city permitting department will inspect the work done according to code. YMMV.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
You can't have a wrong opinion, that's not how it works. You can only be wrong about facts like 'X is richer than Y', not opinions like 'I don't like X'.
the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy
White Americans are British and European in ethnic background. There is no 'native urge' in Europe that does not also exist in America, only social, economic and political differences. Going on a boat did not create a new people.
bonsaii
2hr ago
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes in a hopelessly complex tax code, then punishing them for making mistakes? From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
Yes, I'm sure there are techniques for reducing noise between dwellings, or even between dwellings and commercial units.
Chance of them being used and/or holding up are pretty low, except in luxury buildings (and sometimes not even then). And I wouldn't trust anything but concrete for between-floors. Nothing converts a person to single-family detached living like having someone noisy living above them -- there's been shootings over failure to install carpeting.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
To attempt an actual answer, I think it's because cycling is an individual sport with clear rules and an adjudicative body. Armstrong not only broke the rules, but took active measures to conceal his rulebreaking. And there was no question about what he did. Contrast this with the MLB, where no one is discussing whether or not the wins were legitimate, rather whether the records should have an asterisk. And the only case where anyone is really talking about that is with respect to the Barry Bonds home run records, which already have their own problems. The Aaron record is the most defensible one to revert back to, but the McGwire one can't be done because he was juicing too, which takes us back to Maris, who had his own asterisk discussion because he had a longer season to work with than Babe Ruth did. Plus there's the issue that if you officially strip Bonds and others of home runs for record purposes, then shouldn't you make them not count for games, either? It gets complicated real fast.
And add to that the much thinner evidence that Bonds was juicing. It's one of those things where people who were sort of paying attention to the scandal at the time are aware of the broad strokes, but no one remembers the actual evidence. Bonds never admitted doing anything illegal, and it basically comes down to a crooked doctor and that his head got bigger (which is an effect of HGH, which wasn't banned at the time). It isn't a 1–1 comparison but they do this all the time in auto racing for cars that don't pass post-race inspection. A few years back they disqualified the winner and the runner up of the Pocono race because they had an illegal piece of tape on the front of their cars. One can make the argument that this had real-world implications rather than merely historical ones because they lost the points they would have earned for the season and got zeroes instead, but that seems to be more severe than not being recognized on Wikipedia (which they aren't). And for what it's worth, the official NCAA coaching wins lists don't include wins that were stripped by the NCAA. For the 2004 USC team, it merely gives an asterisk, but that's understandable since the BCS wasn't run by the NCAA and the NCAA does not award a championship.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
Americans don't seem to believe this today but there are many outsiders who visit America and really dislike the country, not out of jealousy or poverty but genuine dislike for how society works.
Of course there are. They're just wrong.
Europe is stagnating. Why is this? In large part its due to US influence, US NGOs, US foreign policy.
No, Europe has agency of its own. Its stagnation is of its own device. Unless the Law of Jante was a CIA invention and the EU a State Department plot... but really, not even then, as the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
iprayiam3
3hr ago
But that aside, it seems to me like "have you asked AI" is the 2025 equivalent of "let me Google that for you", and is just as annoying as that was.
At one of my first professional jobs, I had a very knowledgeable teammate who I relied on for a lot of advice and information. Constantly asking, have you tried googling it, what actually one of the most helpful pieces of mentorship I ever received.
On the other hand, your boss doesn’t realize it, but he’s digging his own grave. You respect him now, but you won’t still when you realize he’s outsourced his job to ChatGPT, while getting paid more than 20$/mo.
I’ve had this with several of my senior leadership, including a C-level or two. The folks who are doing their jobs, specifically the leadership parts and insight-providing parts, withAI have lost the troops.
While I use AI constantly behind the scenes, I absolutely never let it mediate communication with my team or peers.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...
Larry Ellison is at least 4 of the top 10, right?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.
Yeah, her dungeon would be extremely inauthentic.
teleoplexy
4hr ago
Not the OP, but it's insane to me in a way that I can understand, unlike The Reptile, whom I don't understand.
Obesity is a complicated subject. To claim that this is even half the reason is a high level of hubris.
More options
Context Copy link