domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
"Tax Fairness for Every Generation"
Proceeds to increase how much money they'll siphon off the upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer
I'm quite pissed at this. And to add to the annoyance, since this is a budget change, it is unlikely an incoming Conservative government can realistically reverse it, as the assumption of the income this represents for the government will baked in to expenses. Cutting any spending here ends up being a battle, so it reprends more energy and focus the incoming administration will have to expend, and if they just reverse the change without cuts the Liberals will smugly say "but I thought we needed to get the deficit under control?"
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
For me, this highlights what a terrible idea it was to accept Muslim immigrants to Western nations in large numbers. Resolving the irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Christians is much, much harder than agreeing that they're actually quite different and would be happier living separately. I don't care if Muslims want to pray five times a day and refuse to eat pork, more power to them, but I want English kids to just be able to eat normal English meals without someone from an alien culture taking offense. If you want to move to England, learn to be English rather than demanding accomodations.
cjet79
29d ago
There have been blocking protests sort of like this with regards to oil pipelines. But yeah its not like they can block a significant amount of traffic.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
29d ago
I'm the same in living on the outskirts of a city. I'm just done with congested inner city living. I recently lived in a secure central city apartment (through COVID) and I will never go back. I was so sick of walking out my apartment door and having to talk to people while all I wanted to do was have a walk in solitude in a natural environment. I couldn't have it. Everything from the overly polite suit wear concierge to service people, or people from all over the world talking incessantly over the din of city vehicles. I just couldn't stand it any more and moved out and will not go back.
I think city outskirts (or an hour away from a city) is probably the best of both worlds. Enough access to peace and quiet, with proximity to all the amenities you could want (at least if you were willing to make the trip).
2D3D
29d ago
The IDW are largely asocial introverts like most academics who recuse themselves from transitioning to administration. Socially competent introverts still prefer to avoid dealing with people, and they thus have ceded the communicative tasks to their more socially extroverted fellow travellers... who for the IDW are largely insane blowhards.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
I'm in the middle - I think megacities (e.g. New York, Tokyo, even Chicago) are terrible places to live, but nice places to visit. Likewise, I enjoy visiting isolated, rural areas, but have zero desire to actually live in one. The sweet spot is a decent-sized city that has all of the amenities that I want, but also has plenty of space for parks, not too much traffic, and that is easy to get outside of either by car or bike ride. In Australia, I'd be thinking of a place like Cairns.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
29d ago
You heat it up by a degree, you cool it down by a degree. I don't see the problem here. We were doing it with bunker fuel on cargo ships for decades, some papers suggest it was keeping the temp down by quite a bit. We just switched over to cleaner fuels and now have the hottest years on record. Again, it doesn't happen all at once, we can fine tune as much as we want. It is literally like pumping water or adding sand, the amount of control is high.
2D3D
29d ago
If NATO turn out to be such pussies that they're afraid of shitkicking a platoon of vatniks salami slicing into an ally then honestly kudos to Russia, they deserve the win. NATO doesn't get to pretend they're the biggest boys on the block if Putin can just say 'I DECLARE NUKE' and the NATO cowards roll over to sacrifice their smaller members.
2D3D
29d ago
Honestly as much as Russia waving the nuclear saber is a visible prospect in light of current stated and anticipated hostilities, we all seem to forget the most likely course of nuclear apocalypse: nuclear armed retards. India and Pakistan could have absolutely nuked the shit out of each other back in 2022 when India accidentally launched a Brahmos at Pakistan and the Pakistanis were too asleep at the wheel to respond. If the Pakistanis were more on the ball, we really would have seen the first nuclear incident since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, all thanks to fucktards inheriting toys from their forebears
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
29d ago
I experienced transcendence the other day watching SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All
The meticulousness, the detail of the tooling, the sheer effort put into breaking down every type of wall into something imminently understandable, the ineffable beauty of a person who watches a man die to an inviswall at world record pace and then decides to spend 10 months bring such trivial suffering to an end "Once and for all." And the feeling of seeing those invisible lines, now, even when they are no longer shown, the simple bliss of knowing. Of this world never feeling the same again.
The epic journey through each piece, culminating in the final victory lap- a reimagining of the SM64 ending cutscene, but here playing that welling music over each and every conquered inviswall.
Alternatively. This is a 3 hour video about polygons. What you take out depends on what you bring in.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
29d ago
On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Precisely. This is just an attempt by Rufo to (as Alinsky put it) “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” It won't work, probably, because NPR is not just OK with those tweets but finds them an absolute positive.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
29d ago
I sincerely hope this leads to a wave of resignations within NPR, with everyone saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” as their parting words.
I think this is the wrong end of things. Berliner was the last jelly donut to leave, not the start.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
Of course, this brings us full circle to whether it was a good idea to add a country like Estonia to NATO when they offer almost nothing in return. The reason to add Estonia isn't to improve the alliance, it's to put a thumb in Russia's eye and attempt to create a definitive anti-Russian border rather than keeping the buffer-state model in place. Is that a good idea? I don't know, that's above my pay grade, but it's definitely a stupid idea if you're not actually willing to bleed for Estonians. Any time you lack the resolve to keep a commitment, you should not make that commitment.
zen_brassica
29d ago
Right, because the activists (the people who matter) have more important goals than cutting emissions.
As a counterpoint, one of the biggest, most effective climate change activism groups (Citizens Climate Lobby) focuses almost exclusively on practical policy to cut emissions, mainly a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Going back to the root though, with things like geoengineering -- I'm not 100% against it, but I'm much more in favor of addressing the root cause, rather than trying to put a band-aid on it. First issue, and maybe the biggest, is the moral hazard -- if you start geoengineering, that means countries won't try as hard to reduce emissions, immediately negating some of the benefit of geoengineering. Second, specifically for putting sulfur into the atmosphere to reduce solar irradiance, you don't get to control where that goes. It wanders all over the place, changing weather patterns, possibly causing storms or droughts. Third, cooling the earth but leaving CO2 levels higher doesn't solve ocean acidification.
I suspect that we'll need to do it at some point, but I think it is best to push hard on reducing emissions first and foremost. And maybe I partly believe this because I think that practically speaking, we can do it without a substantial reduction in living standards, if we start using carbon taxes effectively, and streamline nuclear regulations to the point where it's actually viable again.
2D3D
29d ago
Any time you lack the resolve to keep a commitment, you should not make that commitment
Charitably, the acceptance of Estonias request to join NATO is itself a signal that NATO would resolve to make the commitment to defend Estonia or any other invoker of Article 5. Estonia asked to join NATO because Russia has attacked the Baltics and subjugated them, not because the Baltics really just want to stick it to the poor innocent Russians.
Others here have pointed out that if not NATO we would likely see the Baltics aggressively attempt to form a different form of defensive alliance, like a new Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth with Karelia DLC. Again, it really must be pointed out that most of these states were aggressively TRYING to join NATO, not coerced into it by shady DGSE agents. The amount of charity extended to Russian intentions strains the boundaries of good faith presumptions, much less credibility.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
29d ago
Zendaya
Google her. Or don't. All you need to know is she's an actress who could definitely win a keynesian beauty contest or ten.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
Oh, sure, I completely understand why it's an excellent move for Estonia to join NATO. If I were running Estonia, that would have been my absolute top security priority, a dream almost too good to be true. Even in the event that NATO didn't have the resolve to actually provide for my full defense, the strategic ambiguity could easily be enough to make Russia look for an easier target. The situation that NATO finds itself in now is that it must fulfill that commitment or it loses strategic credibility.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
29d ago
Kurt Caz: The Physiognomy of Colonization
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
I don't follow travel vloggers in general, but there's one who is more anthropologist than tourist, documenting a phenomenon that no modern academics would dare acknowledge in this day in age. Kurt Caz, the Aryan Wanderer, mostly travels alone, sometimes accompanied by a beautiful woman of the local variety. He only visits non-tourist locations, strides the peasant countryside like a colossus, shows up uninvited and unannounced where the locals have likely never seen a tourist, and is instantly treated with respect by the men and admiration by the women. This is a pattern which is perfectly consistent in his videos across all continents and villages he has traveled through.
Once he visited a village in Papua New Guinea, and I'm not sure how to describe what happened other than they started worshipping him, declaring his visit as the fulfillment of some local prophecy of a white man coming to the village.
Kurt is clearly aware of the racial dynamics at play (and drops hints that he's secretly Based), but he leans into them in the best way. He uses his physical presence and charisma to engage with the locals, who immediately show admiration and respect, and Kurt reciprocates with a genuine racial tolerance that is more real, but completely unlike, what passes for it today.
You see, today "racial tolerance" means fixing the dynamics which are obviously at play in Kurt's content. Don't believe your lying eyes, beauty is relative and the engrained reactions we seem to have is a conspiracy of White Supremacy. Body physique is just a trait with an attractiveness that is brainwashed into us by an intolerant culture; the indigenous reaction to a White Man showing up uninvited and unannounced is just an artifact the legacy of colonization.
And to be sure, there are many factors at play here. Conventional wisdom would likely point to these factors exclusively:
- Kurt's content is just a demonstration of rule #1: Be attractive, and rule #2: Don't be unattractive. He would have a similar reception if he were on the equally "attractive" point of the Belle Curve as an Africa, Asian, or Indian.
- The local women are attracted in particular because they associate him with Western wealth.
- The locals have consumed Western media so they are primed to welcome such a person into their homes.
- The locals are aware of Western cultural customs, so even if Kurt is this physically large stranger they have no fear inviting him into their homes or granting a baseline level of trust.
These factors surely come into play, but they also beg the question. White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool. Much ado is made about technological supremacy and the violence of colonization, again there's a lot of truth there, but the uglier reality is that the colonization was in many cases more peaceful than existing cultural practices and conflicts if the locals had been left to their own devices.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods. That dynamic can be seen as a microcosm in Kurt's interactions throughout his travels. In general, the phenomenon of a race of people regarding another race as divine is much more common than we would expect at first glance. Many people who would laugh at the idea of the Aztecs believing the conquistadores to be emissaries of the Aztec gods also themselves believe in the literal truth of the Jewish covenant, that Jews are a people Chosen by god and they are a race of god-creators vis-a-vis the ancestry of Jesus Christ.
This dynamic also serves an important counterpoint to IQ supremacy. Imagine being a short, weak, ugly nerd with somewhat higher IQ than Kurt. The Rationalists would tend to regard that person as the Superior Being, taking for granted the relativity of Beauty and dismissing the importance of a Noble physiognomy and charisma to civilizational achievement.
This dovetails with @naraburn's post about the Pokemon Go avatar changes being designed, apparently, to challenge conventional beauty standards- especially the sub-question in that thread regarding a conspiracy to promote ugliness. That conspiracy exists, in its declaration that there is no Noble Physiognomy, and our attractions are just manipulated by White Supremacy. Whereas Kurt can just show up and use his physical presence and charisma to exert command, they are trying very hard to engrain - "don't believe your lying eyes, ugliness is beautiful." But in the same way educational interventions constantly fail to close the IQ gaps, these cultural initiatives will also fail because our brains have been tuned to perceive a person's physical attractiveness as a proxy for genetic fitness.
While they will never make Ugly become Beautiful, they absolutely can and will destroy Beauty through Ressentiment. Culture War has fomented a large amount of hostility towards White People from non-white people in the West, but it will never be able to reproduce the racial dynamic that Kurt is able to tap into in his content.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Compare it to the people who oppose immigration or the sense of "being replaced". One could sneer at them, say they should just buckle up and accept changing racial demographics without complaint, that their sense of being a "stranger in their own land" is stupid and dumb, and that giving into their demands is defacto giving in to racism. Indeed, many coastal leftist elites do some version of this, but we'd generally regard them as pompous and out-of-touch.
So it goes with inequality. We could say to a poor secretary "no, no, your rich billionaire boss needs to have a lower tax rate than you, because the way he makes his money is special and taxing it too highly would be unfair". Somehow I doubt they would be convinced.
zen_brassica
29d ago
Sure. The grand canyon is a good starting point. The temperature at the bottom of the canyon is hotter than at the top. Why is that? It's not due to the greenhouse effect. It's due to earth's adiabatic lapse rate.
Essentially, gravity pulls air in the atmosphere downwards, doing work to compress it, which increases its pressure and temperature. The hotter air then starts expanding and rising (being displaced by the cooler air being brought down), which causes it to cool and decrease in pressure. This is an ongoing process. Notably, it has nothing to do with any radiative properties of the atmosphere (i.e. the greenhouse effect). It can be calculated from basic values of the mass of air and gravity:
This doesn't make any sense to me. The adiabatic lapse rate describes how the temperature would change if you took a parcel of air, did not allow it to exchange heat (that's the adiabatic part, right?) and moved it up or down so it expands or contracts. As pressure increases or decreases, so does temperature.
But in the Grand Canyon, if gravity is pulling cooler, denser air down, and letting warmer, less dense air rise (as must happen), that's going to result in a cooling effect, not a warming effect. Yes, the cooler air may get a bit more compressed as it falls, and thus rise a little in temperature, but you're also losing warm air that was even warmer when it was at the same altitude, so air circulation would result in a net loss of heat. If you have two regions of air at the same altitude and one is warmer, it will have a rising force compared to the other. Gravity can't make it fall relative to the other one. (To be precise, they could both be rising or falling, just that the cooler one will always fall relative to the warmer one, unless there's momentum of air coming in from outside the system and interacting with the geometry of the landscape, like winds blowing across the canyon).
Gravity is not pulling air downward in a thermodynamics-violating way. If we started out with an atmosphere that was not in steady state, where it was a lot more diffuse and bigger than it should be, then yes, as gravity pulled it down and compressed it, it would get warmer. But that would only happen once (or rather it would oscillate like a spring for a while but eventually settle down).
So yeah, I don't get this at all. I don't know if the temperature gradient at the Grand Canyon is completely due to the greenhouse effect, but I'm pretty sure it's not anything to do with what you're saying, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
I don't deny the lock in effect is real and present to some degree, but it's not a way to avoid taxes, only to delay them a bit. Owning stocks is not an end unto itself for most people, they're a vehicle to get returns, either through dividends or appreciation. So yes, they can own the Apple stock for longer, but eventually they'll sell which triggers the full effect of the tax.
Also there are strategies to monetize without triggering gain (eg leverage, death).
The death loophole is bad and should definitely be closed. I'm not sure how leverage could be used to avoid taxes, but it should probably be closed as well.
HighResolutionSleep
29d ago
My parents forbade me from reading fanfiction.
That's strange. How did that happen?
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
29d ago
In New Jersey and many other US states (not California, and I have no idea about Canada), property taxes are NOT based on a percentage of property's assessed value, though they are expressed that way. Instead, a municipal budget is constructed and the revenue required for that budget apportioned among the properties according to their assessed values. Doubling all the property values uniformly without changing the municipal budget would not change property tax; it would halve the tax rate.
somedude
29d ago
And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee".
The terms of the agreement are right there in your link, can you please point to the one you think obligates the US to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine? As far as I can tell this claim is pure /r/worldnews tier cope crossing the line into blatant lying.
I came here to post something similar. The short version is, while the article author says:
Heat DOES flow from cold to hot, it just must be less than the heat flowing from hot to cold, and that is what the referenced diagram shows.
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