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No_one
29d ago
Swedes tried to conquer Germany, mind you. And paid an extremely heavy price for that.
You're talking about small countries.
Large countries, with the exception of China, which just keeps sitting there, have a strong record of expansionism. Spain. France. United States. United Kingdom. Japan, once it modernised.
Glassnoser
29d ago
Taxing capital gains is not a way of avoiding taxing labour. The capital gain is a return on an initial investment that was earned with labour. Taxing it is taxing labour, just in a way that creates a deadweight loss by taxing someone who saves more than someone who spends. You get all of the deadweight loss of taxing labour and then some.
In my third link, Scott Sumner directly addresses the point about inequality. Taxing capital gains doesn't reduce inequality. The two brothers in his example are equally wealthy. But one chooses to invest his wealth and the other chooses to spend it. The fact that the one who invests it earns a capital gain does not mean he is wealthier. His brother had the same opportunity and didn't take it because he valued earlier consumption over later consumption. Claiming there is a difference in equality is just like claiming there is a difference inequality between someone who bought watermelon and someone who bought blueberries.
The author is saying the current privileged mix of taxing investments less than labor income isn't good enough, that we should institute massive taxes on labor to reduce all taxes from investments to 0.
He's not saying that at all. You've completely misunderstood. You should read the articles more carefully because he directly addresses this kind of argument.
yofuckreddit
29d ago
IIRC step-up on death is less of a policy choice than a remnant of "who knows what grandpa paid for that stuff," which matters less now it's all on a 1099-B or whatever.
Didn't even think of this, but makes sense.
Mewis
29d ago
No offense meant, but it sounds like something is going on with her if she's gaining weight but doesn't want to talk about it. You should be able to talk about it, even if the conclusion you reach together is that she likes food more than being thin. That might be all that it is (and there is definitely a lot of shame in our society around excessive weight gain), but she might also be communicating some other difficulty. It's worth asking if there's been any emotional trouble recently, whether from family or work.
I don't think there's much to be gained in trying to psyop her this way. Of course, having a better body is it's own reward, but it might shift the dynamic in other ways. She might feel ashamed or insecure, and those feelings might cause resentment. That's the worst case scenario. I think it's unlikely that she'll be inspired to join in.
SteveKirk
29d ago
It's still important for stuff like dad's coin collection. Imagine trying to figure out your cost basis on something like that.
Doubletree2
29d ago
Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle. The models were already quite androgenous and subdued in their sexual characteristics (certainly there was no option to look like Schwarzenegger or Parton). The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?
The pictures of the new models linked look just look like garden variety incompetence. Yes the waists are wider but there's also just a general reduction in detail and quality. Looks like someone decided to cut corners, maybe chose the cheap 3d modelling house.
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
If you’re consuming articles and not shows it might be hard to see the difference. Their articles tend to differ little from what you’d see coming from one of the wire services.
SlowBoy
29d ago
I think the current map looks more like Russian Pyrrhic Victory than Ukrainian Pyrrhic Victory. With the caveat that final borders are not yet drawn.
Mewis
29d ago
Right, but the reason you don't want powerlifting advice is... Because you don't want to be humongous. Which is totally fair, but if you eat like a normal person and lift weights, you'll just look "toned".
Regardless, it's entirely possible to effect great changes in your physique just through calisthenics. I know some people who do calisthenics with incredibly impressive physiques.
Good writeup
I appreciate you saying so.
I suspect that people are drawn to rule utilitarianism because it resolves a certain bind they find themselves in. Let's suppose that I have a landlord who is an all around scumbag, and I don't like him. Suppose I know that, if he needed a live saving medical procedure that cost, say, $10,000, and asked me to help out, I would say no. So his life is worth less to me than $10,000. On the other hand, if I had an opportunity to do him in and take $10,000 in the bargain, and get away clean like Raskolnikov, I would not do it. I think people with certain worldviews feel obliged to articulate an explanation of why that is not irrational, and within those same worldviews, they don't have much to cling to in formulating the explanation. Dostoyevsky's explanation would probably strike them as unscientific. They don't realize that if they keep that up, their grandson might actually do it.
Or maybe, they need a pretext for pointing a finger at the people they feel are doing wrong, and being able to say more authoritative sounding than "boo!", that, again, flies within their worldview.
He's not trying to smuggle a plan for the rich. Read the part where he advocates for a progressive consumption tax again.
At this point you might be thinking “Yes, but wouldn’t eliminating all income and consumption taxes be a giveaway to the rich?” No, it would be restoring fairness by taxing the thrifty and spendthrift at equal rates. If we think the rich should pay more tax, then let’s put a progressive consumption tax into effect. This is easy to do, just turn the regressive FICA into a progressive payroll tax, with much higher rates for those with high wages and salaries. This sort of tax can achieve any desired degree of progressivity. Unlike most libertarians, I think a progressive payroll tax is desirable for simple utilitarian reasons.
He is explaining that there is no reason to tax capital gains if your goal is to reduce inequality. From the second article:
What “principle” suggests that patient people should be taxed at higher rates than impatient people—even if they have the same lifetime wealth?
Your only answer that seems to be that they have different wealth, which he explains is not true, so what reason remains for taxing capital gains?
As for what is wrong with discouraging saving, he never says that saving is inherently good. He gives a very clear and specific reason for why it's bad to discourage saving.
The inheritance tax discourages saving, and thus reduces the capital stock. This lowers the real wage of workers who work with physical capital.
This one may clarify a few things.
ulyssessword
29d ago
You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.
Spoilers:
They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.
SteveKirk
29d ago
The new "female" model is just the male model with boobs stapled on
Oh no no no, they can't just bait like this, it's not sporting. And the worst part is PoGo is one of the few videos games that has an actual female player base rather than male not-models with boobs strapped on.
It'll be interesting to watch the universal condemnation turn into "only the chuds hate this" after the articles come out. It happens every single time, like people just forget what they used to think.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
29d ago
Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.
Honestly, I think microaggressions are best modeled as "real, but 100% projection/revealing too much about the speaker/thief thinking everyone steals".
I propose "micro-defection" for this, or enshittification-by-social-capture. The "my patients/students/customers are [not my favorite race or gender], so I won't try as hard serving them; what are they going to do, fire me?" effect. The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke (which we see in stuff like Covid vaccine distributions, grading disparities by gender, etc.).
"As a nonbinary player I always wished they'd remove genderlocked customization"
Failure to acquire properly-fitted women's clothing generally blows ex-men's cover even before you see their face (ex-women don't have this problem since women's clothing is a strict superset of men's clothing). It is strange that there doesn't seem to be anyone trying to fix that problem (or if they are, they're on the down-low/everyone who wears it passes so well they're invisible?).
Though, I do have to say that the disruption is even-handed enough (and not just "ill-fitting female clothes on the male model") that I don't think it qualifies as "micro", since even the models that transpeople would prefer are ruined by this change (being they would already have picked "attractive model of the opposite gender").
TIRM
29d ago
From a redditor:
When you try and make the hips bigger, it makes the hands massive.
More just dumb than clearly some ideology. Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.
philosoraptor
29d ago
Well, there are according to your own immediately previous post, about 28% more WM/AW than BM/WW with no particular reason to think the flipped-gender versions would balance that out. This seems to roughly match my own observations for the tiny, potentially biased bit that's worth. The numbers and the way they were arrived at have a lot of room for rounding errors but not enough to cancel out or reverse the conclusion they'd lead you to.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?
I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.
Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle.
I mean--I did characterize it as a "small thing!" But when a (widely known as incompetent) video game company feels comfortable removing distinct genders from what is sometimes characterized as a "kids game," that doesn't seem like a completely empty data point, either.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
29d ago
it makes the hands massive
But the real question: does that happen in reverse?
It would be darkly humorous for a yaoi fan to create a male model with large hands (I don't know why they do this) only for the final product to more closely resemble the unflattering physical stereotype of yaoi fans.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
I've written some fanfiction, but I think I'd rather make friendships in the physical world. It's better for my kids, better for networking, better to have someone who can lend a hand in real life from time to time.
If someone in the community I lurked on reached out to me and said, "Hey, I saw your post on TheMotte and recognized that you were talking about us, would you like to join an online game together?" I would accept in a heartbeat. But I don't necessarily want to create a new online attachment.
philosoraptor
29d ago
I seriously doubt there are very many people who want all that death and destruction for its own sake, at least excluding Ukrainians directly affected by the war. I'd like to think that's something people want instrumentally if they want it at all, certainly not as a terminal goal, and that most would prefer to minimize it all else being equal.
SwordOfOccam
29d ago
I don’t know that you’re espousing rule utilitarianism properly, but I don’t think you’re straw manning it. Like, I agree with your three points, but that’s not what makes rule utilitarianism rule.
You clearly don’t like universalism, which is implied in utilitarianism as a general rule, but not unique to it. You seem to really focus on that. I don’t understand what you consider “standard” utilitarianism to be in comparison.
If you ask me how many billion people I would rather die than my cat, my emotional response is I’m okay losing the three billion+ people in Africa and China and India and such. I don’t know those people. My cat loves me.
Logically though, there’s gotta be a better way to strike a balance between partiality and self-interest, alongside recognizing it’s pretty hard to justify a moral system that values my cat so much. If you recognize that other moral agents exist and that you should seek fair compromises as much as possible, then that seems better than any alternative I’m aware of.
Which is to say, one can distinguish between personal and systematic moral decision levels. Rule utilitarianism sets rules that protect individual liberty as a bulwark against oppression and as a safety valve. Obviously, opinions differ on the fine points.
Rule utilitarianism also recognizes that certain aspects of virtue and deontological ethics have immense practicality. You should not steal because stealing is bad, because it’s not prosocial and attacks property rights.
I too value my identity groups over others. I was willing to formally kill people to protect the interests of my preferred groups. Still am informally.
In my mind, the US constitution is a good representation of rule utilitarianism. I don’t think it’s correct to blame the ills you do on rule utilitarianism specifically. Theoretically, other forms of government could still be in line with rule utilitarianism, say a sufficiently benevolent philosopher king. Or what communists think communism should be if only we could become New Men or whatever. Sky’s the limit if we give up concerns of “how would this go in real life.”
So I’m going with “not even wrong” because you come out swinging, but I think you might be beating up the wrong guy.
Forgotpassword
29d ago
Also to be frank I'd expect interspousal transfers to skew male -> female in terms of who created the funds. For every Mackenzie Scott there's hardly a counterbalancing force of... I don't know, Travis Kelce deciding to donate future Taylor Swift's money to the NRA.
SwordOfOccam
29d ago
Imagine holding two thoughts in your head at the same time:
-
I do not value everyone equally for both reasons of emotion and practicality.
-
Logically, other people have every right to feel the same way I do. Perhaps there’s a compromise in here if we distinguish between the personal and higher levels of moral policy. We do not live in an ideal world, but perhaps we can move towards “better.”
People in the know (Mearsheimer had a talk on this in '14, Bill Burns-the ambassador said as much in his leaked 2008 memo etc) have been saying Ukraine is liable to get invaded if US tries to integrate it into NATO.
US:
So who exactly was saying Ukraine won't get attacked?
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