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sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

Here in Canada when you lobby for basic human rights they just seize your bank account and call you a nazi.

The number of $1000/mo is hardly arbitrary in terms of what's being proposed by others. It was what Andrew Yang proposed during his presidential campaign, it was the dollar value proposed in the study cited in the news story I linked to, and it's also the number used in the study cited in the LA times article that started all this. If the number is unreasonable, it's not because I picked an arbitrary number to be unreasonable, it's because the proposed number is unreasonable.

No matter how you slice it, if the government gives $1000/mo to everyone, they need to get that money somehow. Usually the proposal I see is "progressive taxation", which I've factored into my argument. You could create a federal sales tax, but that would need to be extremely high and would greatly increase cost of living. You could tax large businesses, but most people don't realize how little money is actually there -- in my example of Canada, the entire TSX stock exchange has a market cap of only 3,529 billion, so an annual cost of 360 billion(again just using the numbers the others suggested) would take 10% of the value of all publicly traded companies in the country and would completely use up that money in a single decade.

"Oh god they might weaponize our weaponized weapons!"

The only thing socialists hate more than productivity and food is other, slightly different socialists.

Socialists and food. Moral enemies.

A centrist said to me "at least Kamala Harris didn't engage in a coup" and I was like "uh, you mean like the one that just occurred?"

Hey.... Uh... I'm not trying to be rude or anything, science reporting is just really bad these days.... But I read the paper the articles are talking about this and it was actually about using ferric chloride as an insecticide. They suggested instead using the ferric chloride as an etchant of copper, titrating out the resulting ferrous chloride using sodium hydroxide, and using the remaining copper chloride instead or alternatively just leave our some sugar cubes because spiders love sugar cubes and a happy spider isn't a bitey spider

https://youtu.be/a3_PPdjD6mg

(Though I guess she didn't)

您会喜欢成为这个庞大的大陆帝国的一部分

The problem with speaking of UBI as a concept is that it's really easy to forget that there are costs as well as benefits, and the cost is enormous. The brick wall is between the people talking about all the benefits and the people talking about all the costs. Actual numbers matter a lot. If it is as I say and UBI will be the largest government program period and almost as large as all other government programs put together, then many of the discussions are nonsensical, such as discussion of whether the administrative costs of a small scale means tested welfare program going away would support the cost of a society-wide benefit.

Remember that this is at its core a discussion about actual implementation details, which is why it's referring to research. I've been talking about the big problems with the experiments based on the real facts about how UBI would need to be implemented.

I do understand you aren't necessarily advocating for UBI, but that doesn't change the fundamental problems with the concept. It's adherents are using studies that don't take into account the overwhelming damage the largest social program in world history would create. They just hand free money that came from magic to people and see if their lives get better. As I said, the other side of the equation is the massive harm to working people who have to pay for it, and the broader economy as a whole caused by knock-on effects.

Edit:

I'm just thinking of it, imagine if someone goes "if poor people are hungry they should just buy a farm!" -- and they produce all kinds of studies showing that owning a farm eliminates food insecurity for the owners. It's great that owning a farm is so great, but where did the money to buy this farm come from? I'm sure a lot of poor people would love owning a farm but it just isn't in the cards because it's not something they could afford to do.

There are 45 million canadians, I'm picking 30 million Canadians as the Canadian citizens over the age of 18 which would make them eligible for UBI -- it isn't likely to be given to children or non-citizens, so there would be an eligibility critera. From that point it's an extremely simple calculation, 30 million times 12,000 dollars equals about 360 billion dollars. Since that's almost as much as total federal outlays in 2023, you'd need to effectively double federal taxes to match, and I'd expect that would double the top marginal rate assuming incorrectly that the same amount of money comes in.

If we give $12,000 to each person each year, that's what it would cost, disregarding administration costs.

Presently, even under the massive taxation up here, most individuals don't pay $12,000 in income tax. Only those making 60,000 or more pay at least that much(with much more taxes elsewhere including sales tax, local tax, sin taxes and the list goes on), so it would effectively mean a small minority of taxpayers would be on the hook for paying for everything. That would put a disproportionate burden on a small number of earners such as those trying to support a family on one income by working a dangerous, dirty, or uncomfortable job. Lots of guys in the oil sands working 6 weeks of 12 hour days would see their wages hit hard. They aren't up there for the love of oil, they're up there to make money and if you jack up taxes like you'd have to on them the companies won't be able to pay enough money to keep them at work because so much is being sucked away.

Under CPP (Canada's version of social security), someone could be eligible for up to 15,672 per year, but only 3% actually get that amount. The actual amount you get is proportional to the amount you paid in, so some people will make the full amount but many people will make nearly nothing. These limitations are why CPP contributions are 5.25% on income below $60,000 and yet according to the program administrators CPP is solvent for the next 75 years. The average CPP recipient gets about $840/mo. People can start to receive CPP at age 60 for a large penalty(36% reduction in monthly payments), or 65 for the base amount, or 70 for a slight bonus. The administration of this may cost a bit more money per capita, but nowhere near as much as opening the spigots to millions of additional recipients. The numbers simply don't add up. Moreover, you'd have to politically get people to give up a program they "paid into" all their lives, and that'll be difficult. As well, programs like old age security are going to be similarly difficult to get rid of since lots of people over 70 rely on it for a chunk of their living expenses.

Up where I live, something like 45% of of each dollar I earn already goes to government. With UBI, I expect that number would reach closer to 90%. I'd lose tens of thousands of dollars for ten thousand dollars in benefits.

Implement UBI, and there will be no livable wage. If they implement it here, my choices will be to flee the country and renounce my citizenship, or die in destitution with my entire family. I won't be able to afford to work. It will mean that the government has effectively confiscated everything I own because for example if I had 100,000 in retirement savings I'd only get 10,000 after tax.

I don't think in your calculation you realized just how bad the world looks with UBI.

The entire Canadian federal budget in 2023 was about $500 billion dollars and that's a number putting the country deeply into debt. Canada has 45 million people. If we assume only 30 million are eligible for UBI, we're looking at 360 billion dollars. There is no cheat code here, the money has to come from working people. The only way to do it would be to make that 45% more like 75% (I'll tell you right now I'd have to quit my job because I couldn't afford to keep it), but that confiscatory level of taxation would definitely drive down productivity so for anyone dumb enough to keep working it would likely be much much higher.

Equilibrium doesn't mean you won't see stratification. Imagine a container with water, crude oil, and kerosene. If you shake it up, it mixes up, but it finds an equilibrium whereupon the kerosene is on top, the crude oil is in the middle, and the water is on the bottom. This occurred because gravity exerts the greatest force on the water, a lesser force on the crude oil, and the least amount of force on the kerosene, and so the crude oil naturally floats on the water, and the kerosene naturally floats on the crude oil. In equilibrium, and perfectly stratified.

The taxes required to maintain universal basic income are one force of gravity that will pull everyone down, but of course the poor won't pay tax, and even if the ultra-rich do pay tax, who cares? It goes to UBI so the money ends up right back in their pockets anyway. Meanwhile the working class and middle class fully feel the pull of that gravity. A second force of gravity will be the effect on asset prices, since many people will (like they did during COVID) take their free money and throw it into the markets. It's important to realize that if you implement UBI you can't get blood from a stone and it's likely that you will pull more money from the middle class workers than you give them because the money needs to come from somewhere and the middle class is where all the money is.

Arguably, we're in such a situation right now. The west is in a time with a fairly poor Gini coefficient, and some of the worst social mobility ever. The rich stay rich, the middle class might stay middle class (but many are not), and the poor stay poor. That's in spite of (but really because of) the government being 50% of GDP. Meanwhile housing, food, energy becomes unaffordable for anyone and everyone's quality of life is suffering.

To propose a sort of welfare program for citizens is to forget history. We had examples of societies that had lots of immigrants and then the state made citizenship a means to have the means to survive in the Greeks and the Romans. In both civilizations, there were many slaves imported to do work without pay, and as a result there was no opportunities for the working and middle classes, so as a result there were powerful social programs implemented. This whole scheme ultimately ended with those civilizations ending. It didn't help because money isn't wealth. You want your best and brightest in the working and middle class trying their best because they're going to come up with new and better ways of doing things and better ways of building wealth in terms of the stuff we need. Otherwise you end up slowly getting bogged down in a quagmire of the increasing effort needed to maintain the status quo while the wealth slowly leaks away into nothing or aggregates in the super powerful and wealthy.

And the door on the right is just a chute leading directly to the buildings boiler.

Zelensky suspends debt repayments to foreign creditors as of Aug 1. I guess we'll see what ramifications come of this, but I can't imagine it'll be without consequences.

Family court really is the saddest place in the universe. It seems that every case is another tragedy unfolding, since you don't tend to need courts when things are going well or if things break amicably.

And going up against a pair of pro se litigants can't help either. Some do a fantastic job of representing themselves, but I can imagine a lot of what's going on is theatrics that a pair of real lawyers would cut through relatively quickly...

One problem with all these big city politicians is they never lived in nature, just their little curated spaces.

They don't realize that a lot of us are guests in nature instead of living in spaces that have been clear cut and paved over, and stuff like forest fires isn't a change, it's what forests do. It's part of the lifecycle of a forest, certain seeds won't even open unless there's a fire, showing that it's something so expected by nature that trees built entire strategies as species around forest fires meaning it must have been pretty constant forever.

When you're a guest in nature instead of clear cutting everything and leaving a little curated nature space with a permit tied to each tree like in Ottawa, you have to plan for certain eventualities. Eventually if you're not careful you'll get wild animals that can and will kill you sniffing around that threaten human settlements. If you're not careful you're going to get floods that threaten human settlements. If you're not careful you're going to get forest fires that threaten human settlements. When you're a guest in nature these are things you have to worry about because forces of nature don't care about your ideology.

But someone who has lived through a forest fire can tell you what happens next: You get to watch ecosystems thrive and grow. First you see ferns and grasses start to take root, then the fast growing deciduous trees start to grow and you go "Oh, I guess the leafy trees are going to take over" but after a few years you can see the slower growing coniferous trees starting to outcompete them because they grow year round.

But that's nature, and people who live in places without real nature don't understand it has always been dangerous and something human beings need to manage or face consequences like what happened in Jasper.

(I made a mistake, not searx, that's just a search aggregator. YaCy. That's an actual peer to peer open source search engine. I host yacy but it's just one of the engines accessible to my searx instance because searx is a really nice thing to use)

Everyone should really try to set up a searx instance on their machines. There's only a few hundred users right now. If enough decent folks started running it and scraped a little piece of the Internet they care about (you can even set it up as a proxy server to scrape any site you've been to) then we'd have a search platform that, while imperfect, would at least actually have all the sites places like Google refuses to show.

In a recent effortpost I analyzed the socialist nature of German national socialism, Italian Fascism, and Marxism. In today's language we could consider them to be respectively racial socialism, national socialism (the term national that the Germans used refers to an ethnostate while today we consider a nation something more like a land and it's government) or state socialism to avoid confusion with German national socialism, and class socialism.

Both Mussolini and Hitler cite Marx in their ideology. Mussolini was a member of the socialist party prior to his creation of the Fascist party, and is named after 3 different socialists. Hitler may have opposed Marxism and Bolshevism, but many of his writings and speeches credit Marx explicitly in the creation of National Socialism. His intention to exterminate the Jews was borne of the same ideological framework that had the Soviets exterminating the Kulaks. Engels published an article advocating for the genocide of Hungarians as not appropriate for inclusion into the dictatorship of the proletariat which also helped justify the German genocide of Jews. Although Hitler rejected class socialism, he often described how his ideology was socialism perfected, without the flaws of Marx. Later, Ludwig von Mises pointed out that German national socialism implemented 8 of the 10 points of socialism laid out by Marx and Engels.

Fascism makes sense as state socialism, a left wing continuation of the enlightenment project intended to be the next step after feudalism and capitalism. This can be understood easily because neither racial fascism nor state fascism intend to restore the monarchy or the nobility, and instead to collectivize the nation under the racial folk or the nation-state respectively.

This all continues to make sense in the framework I've laid out, of "racial socialism, state socialism, and class socialism". They all implement socialism, but in different ways that aren't compatible with one another. As a result, they will all ultimately clash with each other (and even fascists and german national socialists clashed over their ideologies despite being allies)

Some people think fascism and national socialism are right wing because they're authoritarian, nationalist, racist, and seek to preserve existing hierarchies, which all can be quickly refuted.

You can also see the whispers of angry Marxist in saying "it's authoritarian so it's right wing" well does that mean every communist state ever is right wing? It doesn't seem a legitimate analysis to assume something is right wing solely because it is authoritarian. Rospierre's reign of terror was undoubtedly authoritarian but by the standards of the day extremely left wing.

Nationalism also seems like something you can't really peg on the right wing specifically. Were there no Soviet patriots? Considering Stalin's one nation policy that seems unlikely.

Racism is a non-starter. Marx himself was highly documented as deeply anti-Semitic despite being an ethnic Jew himself, and shockingly racist even for his time In Marx's time, there was little distinction between the capitalist and the Jew, and in his essay "On the Jewish Question", he writes "What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money". Many socialist regimes implemented state racism such as the Russians cracking down on Jews or the CCP participating in the Uigur genocide.

As for maintaining or restoring old hierarchies, that's also obviously wrong. Both Germany and Italy had an existing hierarchy of nobility prior to the takeover by fascism or German national socialism, and those ideologies sought to reconstruct society in its own novel image, a hallmark of socialism in the 20th century. One might consider it right wing that there were any hierarchies at all, but by that measure marxist and boshevik socialists were also right wing since they all ended up building new hierarchies in place of the old.

This understanding of what marxism, fascism, and german national socialism is important because today everything is claimed to be nazi or fascist if the speaker doesn't like it, but we need a real framework for what is and is not fascist. Simply saying "I don't like that" does not make something fascist or national socialist, it needs to fit within the frameworks of racial socialism or state socialism. We can define violence against fascism as violence against state socialism.

So back to the topic at hand, would I agree that violence is justified to fight such a thing? Well, that's tough to say. It's easy to say about Italian fascism since my grandfather did fight them and justly so. On the other hand, Spanish fascism existed well into the 1970s and only ended because the dictator died and his heir just happened to give up power to create a liberal democracy. And in yet another point of view, the left has created the postmodern bureaucratic state and largely staffed it, creating the current situation where 120 years ago the government made up 10% of GDP but today makes up 50%, and the so-called free market that remains is overwhelmingly regulated so much that it's ultimately the state in control. Outside the context of world war 2, I don't think I'd be willing to use violence regardless of how much I disagree with it. The government won't stop doing this simply because I physically attack it. In fact, it's likely to make things worse. We have countless examples of such, including situations like the Reichstag fire which justified state crackdowns.

Political violence by be cathartic, but often it's ineffective, or even horrific. The French Revolution may have killed off many from the aristocracy, but the reign of terror turned into a crime against humanity, a purge of anyone remotely dissenting until the crowd finally turned and ended the reign of terror by purging those tasked with purges. Violent revolutions in the Soviet Union and China resulted in mass death and further tragedy. By contrast, a lot of good things have come from people winning the argument relatively peacefully Europe's relative democracy didn't come about through revolution, but by convincing the royal families to give up power over time. The world slave trade ended not because of a particular act of violent revolution, but because anti-slavery won the moral argument.

With respect to current movements that widely use violence allegedly in pursuit of attacking fascism, I don't see "antifa" burning down FDA offices or central bank buildings or department of education buildings or welfare offices. So why don't they attack these elements of state socialism if they oppose fascism? In my opinion it's because they're lying. Opposition to fascism is a facade being used for good old fashioned thuggery.

Who do we attack? Anyone we don't like! If you think killing a baby in the womb is an unjustifiable violation of that baby's human rights and that shouldn't be allowed, then we don't like you and we'll attack! If you think local law enforcement should arrest people who have committed actual crimes that violated other people's rights, then we don't like you and we'll attack! If you want to vote for someone who wants to reduce state interference in the economy, we hate you and we'll attack!

Other than the fact that nobody wants to piss off violent terrorists, nobody believes that the violence is remotely in the name of opposing fascism. Often those antifa folks seem to be fighting in pursuit of more state socialism rather than less. They aren't fighting for liberty or smaller government, they're supporting and supported by the state, and part of the state that wants to encompass everything in our lives.

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