Thomas Paine advocated for an estate tax that had a top marginal rate of 100%, I am inclined to agree with him.
I think the pre-Reagan rates were sufficient. A balance is required; extremely high rates just motivate the wealthy to work harder to find workarounds.
you know, over a decade ago I wrote here that the government will be eliminated, that gold will become defacto currency, that debts will have to be paid and restructured, that laws will have to be rolled back, that government will be scaled down due to self destruction and lack of productivity. This id happening. I postulate that government has no authority and that individual has the right not to be stolen from by the government. The country you speak of used to exist before this giant government and it will exist after it.
Imagine for a moment that government is 100% efficient, so it is that efficient at taking money from Bob to subsidize Jane. The problem is not lack of efficiency, fraud or abuse, the problem is the very concept that Bov should be feeding Jane and that government will enforce that.
Never have non citizens been allowed to have protests in America
Bullshit. There are multiple Supreme Court rulings upholding the free speech rights of non-citizens. I recommend you start with Bridges v Wixon. And even the current very-conservative court is going to rule against the administration in the end, just watch.
Also, I notice that you ignored the points about suppression of freedom of the press or the ability of lawyers to advocate for clients who oppose the government. Care to point out where Obama did those things?
Are we going to start with the handouts to Elon that are funding SpaceX?
I get that you're (rightly) pissed at Trump and Elon, but that's just dead wrong. SpaceX isn't getting any handouts from the federal government. They're getting launch contracts, yes, but at a lower price point than any other launch provider, ever. Hate on Elon all you like, but the Falcon 9 is the cheapest and most reliable orbital rocket ever built, and has reduced US space launch costs enormously, especially if you count the political costs of being beholden to Russia for space access. Or would you rather go back to the space shuttle, with per-launch costs of upwards of $2B, rather than the ~$80M SpaceX charges?
Did you miss that Trump talked yesterday about raising taxes significantly on everyone making over $2.5 million?
He's also firing most of the IRS, which means the wealthy just have to make sure their taxes are complicated to cheat, since the IRS won't have the staff to review anything complex. On paper they might owe more (even assuming he's not just blowing smoke, which he probably is, and even assuming he can get it passed, which he probably can't), but in practice gutting the IRS means they'll pay less.
At the same time his tariff policies are hammering the economy, which will reduce revenues, and he's cutting taxes, which will reduce revenues, and he's decimating the value of T-bills, which will increase debt servicing costs. Deficits are gonna skyrocket, and stagflation is going to set in. We're going to need another Jimmy Carter to make the hard decisions to fix the economy when Trump is done with it... and they'll be all the harder because Trump is also working to exclude us from international trade and to remove the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.
We are so screwed.
Are you in Canada yet? If you want to see what Kamala would have done you can see it happening now in our northern neighbor
I've been in Canada all week. Seems very nice. The massive pro-life protest at the capitol yesterday was a little annoying, just because it was hard to get through the packed crowds, but good on them for having free speech, even on topics their government disagrees with. I don't think the news media that cover the issue or the law firms that file cases about it even get sued or lose access to work with government!
Free speech seems like a pretty cool idea. Maybe we should try it in the US.
Anyway, it's time for me to log off and wipe my devices. I'm about to head to the airport and I don't want ICE to see this post and detain me, or send me to an El Salvadoran gulag.
Does Google understand that it is very hard to cancel a nuclear power plant?
Easier than cancelling gmail.
Maybe you should ask the EU citizen living in the UK how well a digital ID works for them.
Both the EU and UK are participating in international standardization efforts, so it will work fine. It'll take some time to get there, of course.
Well said. The only consolation is that we can expect this to go about as well as the Metaverse.
One thing that's become more and more clear to me is that people need a classical liberal arts education more than ever. When you read philosophers, Western and otherwise, complicated pieces of literature, try to connect the dots in history, and generally struggle to understand how reality can be so complex, confusing, and contradictory, you end up with a whole different view of learning, thinking, and knowing than any of the twits trying to make artificial "intelligence" can grasp. And a whole lot more humility about what it really means to know something.
These companies are run by ignorant children who think that knowledge can always be turned into information, learning into computation, and that reality can be fully represented by data. They could not be more wrong.
Capturing it really means to be walking down a tree-lined street on a pleasant spring afternoon is probably better done by an excellent poem than zetabytes of data on light, temperature, sound, pulse rates, etc.
This article by Jill Lepore puts it extremely eloquently.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmaga...
I doubt Zuckerberg has spent any real time thinking about what it means.
It's heartbreaking to see the promise of technology and engineering for helping humans live better be hijacked to turn us into meaningless digital avatars of ourselves.
Why anyone would want this, IDK. What's wrong with just carrying a card in your wallet?
Plastic cards suck, for many reasons.
1. They're forgeable. Digitally-signed data is not. Sure, governments can and do implement lots of anti-forgery mechanisms, but it takes almost as much expertise to use those anti-forgery mechanisms to validate a legitimate card as it does to fake one. Approximately no one checking plastic cards knows how to properly validate them. Digital ID cards require a bit of equipment to check them, but the equipment is ubiquitous (almost every smartphone in existence has all of the tech necessary, all you need is an app), and unless the attacker can either pwn the verification device or subvert the legitimate issuing system, they're unforgeable.
2. They cannot provide data minimization. Electronic IDs enable you to provide only the subset of data that is needed for the current use. For example, if you're buying alcohol the only information the store needs is whether you're over the minimum age. They don't need your home address, your driving privileges, your name... they don't even need your birthdate. Just a single yes/no bit -- plus some way to prove that the person presenting the ID is the legitimate holder (there are some good privacy-preserving options here, but that's a subject for another post). Contrast that to a plastic card with all the info printed on the front and repeated in a 2D barcode on the back, enabling easy snarfing of the whole data set. Digital IDs are better for privacy than plastic cards.
3. They don't work online. We use various workarounds for this, but they're all far worse for privacy, requiring users to provide far more information about themselves, not only beyond what's minimally necessary for the transaction, but even beyond what the ID card has. This is because the most important information isn't so much the content of the card as the proof of authenticity.
In the future we're going to look back at the era of ID cards and papers and shudder at how bad they are.
Of course, there are also risks. The biggest one is that having an ID that does work online means that more online services will want to use that ID. This is good where it enables transactions that currently can't happen online at all, and probably good where it makes transactions that occur now but are risky less risky. It's bad where it facilitates user data collection and user identification for transactions that don't really need it at all. But IMO that risk is better managed refusing to provide ID when it really isn't warranted, and by insisting that when ID presentation does make sense that the data provided is held to the absolute minimum required, rather than forgoing all of the other privacy, usability and security benefits of digital IDs.
Was anyone buying ipods in the latter years when they were just idevices without the phone and they just started making the smaller version of ipad anyway then.
This is the same with car companies and more fuel efficient cars. President Turd tried to get car companies to abandon fuel efficiency efforts. But it turns out that consumers still want it regardless of want some orange turd says. So companies will continue making more efficient utilities.
Well, at least they'll continue marketing their devices as energy-efficient. They will probably quickly discover, however, that it's a lot cheaper and easier to put outstanding energy efficiency figures on the box and in the marketing materials than it is to actually make the devices efficient. Truth in advertising laws mean they probably can't just flat out lie about efficiency (well, assuming Trump doesn't shut down the FTC department tasked with enforcing truth in advertising laws -- or hasn't already done so), but they can certainly measure creatively.
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