I always like to remind people who are like "the rich aren't paying their fair share!" that you could liquidate like 3 of the largest companies in America, and solely use their equity to run the government (you couldn't without losing all the equity in the meantime, but bear with me), and it wouldn't put a dent in the budget and you'd need to liquidate the next 10 largest companies next year, and by year 3 or so you probably wouldn't have enough market cap left on the S&P 500 to keep going.
It's like, you have this beast that's so big and sucks up so much money, you can't possibly feed it.
It's crazy to think about because we all pay so much tax, but our great grandparents often didn't have to pay any direct taxes -- no land taxes, no income taxes.
The Jacobins actually played with taxation like what we have during the French revolution, and it was wildly unpopular and killed (along with unpopular revolutionaries like Robspierre)
People will say the obvious, that the expectations of what the government does have changed dramatically over the past 100 years. The word "expectation" is an odd one though because as an example, the US taxes enough for medical care to provide universal healthcare, but then it just doesn't. Many such cases. The problem isn't limited to the USA, however. Italy for example has an economy composed of 56% state spending. Many countries are near the same levels of spending they saw during the world wars. And what do we get? Demands for more money!
Another thing that happens when the government is so big and takes so much is it chokes out everything else. People can't tithe to the church for example, if they're already paying half their income in various taxes as is the case in many countries. They can't save for a rainy day. They can't donate much to the poor because they are the poor. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle where wealth is soaked up and makes individuals poorer, and because they're poorer they need more big government interventions to make up for their lack of wealth. Government becomes totalizing whether we like it or not, and that's what my grandfather fought in the world wars to prevent. He died quite bitter at what happened afterwards.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND/CAN
It's like, you have this beast that's so big and sucks up so much money, you can't possibly feed it.
It's crazy to think about because we all pay so much tax, but our great grandparents often didn't have to pay any direct taxes -- no land taxes, no income taxes.
The Jacobins actually played with taxation like what we have during the French revolution, and it was wildly unpopular and killed (along with unpopular revolutionaries like Robspierre)
People will say the obvious, that the expectations of what the government does have changed dramatically over the past 100 years. The word "expectation" is an odd one though because as an example, the US taxes enough for medical care to provide universal healthcare, but then it just doesn't. Many such cases. The problem isn't limited to the USA, however. Italy for example has an economy composed of 56% state spending. Many countries are near the same levels of spending they saw during the world wars. And what do we get? Demands for more money!
Another thing that happens when the government is so big and takes so much is it chokes out everything else. People can't tithe to the church for example, if they're already paying half their income in various taxes as is the case in many countries. They can't save for a rainy day. They can't donate much to the poor because they are the poor. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle where wealth is soaked up and makes individuals poorer, and because they're poorer they need more big government interventions to make up for their lack of wealth. Government becomes totalizing whether we like it or not, and that's what my grandfather fought in the world wars to prevent. He died quite bitter at what happened afterwards.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND/CAN
I've talked about this a few times recently, that the amount of money charged by the US government to the taxpayer for medical care is basically as much per capita as Canada or the UK spend to give everyone healthcare.
Some people go "Oh, well we have reasons not to have universal healthcare", and if that's what people want then fine, but it's like... You shouldn't have to pay twice. Either you need private health insurance or you need to pay so much for public healthcare it could give everyone healthcare anywhere else. But it's really messed up that you could pay twice and maybe still not even get the healthcare you need once without going bankrupt.
Some people go "Oh, well we have reasons not to have universal healthcare", and if that's what people want then fine, but it's like... You shouldn't have to pay twice. Either you need private health insurance or you need to pay so much for public healthcare it could give everyone healthcare anywhere else. But it's really messed up that you could pay twice and maybe still not even get the healthcare you need once without going bankrupt.
You can't change something you don't understand, and you've systematically shown your lack of understanding of economics.
Here's a graph of state spending as % of gdp for several countries. knock yourself out.
Here's a graph of state spending as % of gdp for several countries. knock yourself out.
Capitalism is the private ownership and control of capital, free trade, lacking barriers. Once the state starts micro-managing, that's not capitalism anymore. It's something else. Maybe overall the market is more or less capitalist overall, but the state micro-managing markets is definitionally not capitalist.
You can laugh all you want, but it's an important distinction to make. Our problem today is an omnipresent state that is overbearing into every nanometer of our lives. If people get rich off of that, it's just the state rewarding its pawns.
As for the state enforcing property rights, that's part of the problem of pure capitalism, that it can't actually exist because at some point you need to enforce property rights or contracts and the state needs to step in, and every step away from the ideal puts you onto that spectrum. When you get to half the economy being the state and the other half being pawns of the state like we've got, you're well past capitalism, and you can laugh and laugh, but I'll still be correct. I'd be like saying the thing you hate most about fencing is getting shot. If you're getting shot then you're not fencing anymore. "Oh, but I always get shot while fencing, you just don't know what fencing is!"
You can laugh all you want, but it's an important distinction to make. Our problem today is an omnipresent state that is overbearing into every nanometer of our lives. If people get rich off of that, it's just the state rewarding its pawns.
As for the state enforcing property rights, that's part of the problem of pure capitalism, that it can't actually exist because at some point you need to enforce property rights or contracts and the state needs to step in, and every step away from the ideal puts you onto that spectrum. When you get to half the economy being the state and the other half being pawns of the state like we've got, you're well past capitalism, and you can laugh and laugh, but I'll still be correct. I'd be like saying the thing you hate most about fencing is getting shot. If you're getting shot then you're not fencing anymore. "Oh, but I always get shot while fencing, you just don't know what fencing is!"
This whole conversation is very strange... "Capitalist" this, "Capitalist" that, but then "Money printer"
The capitalist can't really print money. They can print disney dollars or tokens in your favorite monetized video game, but those things aren't really currency, just pre-purchased merchandise, an agreement between you and one other vendor. The only entity that can print money That's the state, which is not part of a capitalist system by definition.
Even when the state "participates in capitalism", it's like a planet or a sun -- it warps the space around it, becoming a gravity well. It becomes a new point of reference sucking in and modifying everything around it.
Now you might argue that banks print money because of fractional reserve banking.
Who do you think allows such a strange system to exist? Who made it the basis of the whole monetary system?
That isn't to say that totally hands off capitalism would be utopian or perfect, but very often I see people blaming capitalism for an omnipresent state which intervenes in markets constantly such that you can always feel the pull of its gravity well.
I realized recently that bitcoin's fundamental design is broken, and it will never become the universal money standard people think it will. its fixed volume is part of the problem. If you'll only ever have 21 million of a thing (split up into satoshis), then eventually all the bitcoin that have ever existed will exist, and every time more things can be bought with bitcoin (compared to the basically nothing you can buy now other than fiat currency) each satoshi becomes more and more valuable, so where the problem with the money printer is that it pulls value out of the currency that exists and puts it elsewhere (usually in the state's hands because gravity well), in the case of bitcoin it pulls the value out of the things being bought and put it in the existing currency, so as the economy grows the value of your satoshis grow, and you have ultimately the same problem except instead of the money printers having disproportionate buying power, it's the money havers having disproportionate buying power.
That said, I think crypto could nonetheless be the answer. The ideal would be to have some sort of intelligent daemon who would look at the things being bought and sold with the currency you have and exactly shrink or grow the money supply to keep the relative value of each unit the same. What better daemon than an algorithm everyone agrees upon by downloading a piece of open source software?
So how do you solve the second problem? I think it's by being careful about where the new money supply goes or is taken from. I'm imagining that during times of market cap growth the miners and the users (those who are buying and selling with the currency, not just holding it) would get a little bonus, not a huge amount per transaction but enough to grow the overall supply. When the market cap of the currency falls, you'd have fees go up a bit and the extra be destroyed -- not a huge amount per transaction, but enough to shrink the overall supply.
Unfortunately, such a design has a major problem is it doesn't give people a chance to get insanely wealthy through just grabbing a thousand bitcoin back in 2008 for a few pennies, and it doesn't give the state the chance to get insanely wealthy through just printing so much money everyone becomes poor except them. Its strength as a currency would ultimately be why nobody would feel like championing it.
The capitalist can't really print money. They can print disney dollars or tokens in your favorite monetized video game, but those things aren't really currency, just pre-purchased merchandise, an agreement between you and one other vendor. The only entity that can print money That's the state, which is not part of a capitalist system by definition.
Even when the state "participates in capitalism", it's like a planet or a sun -- it warps the space around it, becoming a gravity well. It becomes a new point of reference sucking in and modifying everything around it.
Now you might argue that banks print money because of fractional reserve banking.
Who do you think allows such a strange system to exist? Who made it the basis of the whole monetary system?
That isn't to say that totally hands off capitalism would be utopian or perfect, but very often I see people blaming capitalism for an omnipresent state which intervenes in markets constantly such that you can always feel the pull of its gravity well.
I realized recently that bitcoin's fundamental design is broken, and it will never become the universal money standard people think it will. its fixed volume is part of the problem. If you'll only ever have 21 million of a thing (split up into satoshis), then eventually all the bitcoin that have ever existed will exist, and every time more things can be bought with bitcoin (compared to the basically nothing you can buy now other than fiat currency) each satoshi becomes more and more valuable, so where the problem with the money printer is that it pulls value out of the currency that exists and puts it elsewhere (usually in the state's hands because gravity well), in the case of bitcoin it pulls the value out of the things being bought and put it in the existing currency, so as the economy grows the value of your satoshis grow, and you have ultimately the same problem except instead of the money printers having disproportionate buying power, it's the money havers having disproportionate buying power.
That said, I think crypto could nonetheless be the answer. The ideal would be to have some sort of intelligent daemon who would look at the things being bought and sold with the currency you have and exactly shrink or grow the money supply to keep the relative value of each unit the same. What better daemon than an algorithm everyone agrees upon by downloading a piece of open source software?
So how do you solve the second problem? I think it's by being careful about where the new money supply goes or is taken from. I'm imagining that during times of market cap growth the miners and the users (those who are buying and selling with the currency, not just holding it) would get a little bonus, not a huge amount per transaction but enough to grow the overall supply. When the market cap of the currency falls, you'd have fees go up a bit and the extra be destroyed -- not a huge amount per transaction, but enough to shrink the overall supply.
Unfortunately, such a design has a major problem is it doesn't give people a chance to get insanely wealthy through just grabbing a thousand bitcoin back in 2008 for a few pennies, and it doesn't give the state the chance to get insanely wealthy through just printing so much money everyone becomes poor except them. Its strength as a currency would ultimately be why nobody would feel like championing it.
ngl, that would force me to go and listen to all her albums so I could find clues that might lead me to One Piece.
The Liberals used to be the center left party, but they're insane left now, and the NDP has always been the insane left party, and they're also insane left. Both parties have been walking around sniffing their own farts like they represent every Canadian and speak with the authority of all Canadians.
The official opposition is the party with the second largest number of seats. They sort of push back against the party in power to keep them honest.
The BQ are the Bloc Quebecois. They're literally separatists, they want Quebec to be its own country. I really want the liberals and NDP to get pantsed so badly that the separatists end up doing better than both parties, a party that got no votes at all outside of quebec, but still earns more seats than either the liberals or the NDP.
It would just be a crowning moment of funny for all these idiots talk of "Canadians want this" "Canadians want that" apparently Canadians want to either be conservative or separate tabarnac!
The official opposition is the party with the second largest number of seats. They sort of push back against the party in power to keep them honest.
The BQ are the Bloc Quebecois. They're literally separatists, they want Quebec to be its own country. I really want the liberals and NDP to get pantsed so badly that the separatists end up doing better than both parties, a party that got no votes at all outside of quebec, but still earns more seats than either the liberals or the NDP.
It would just be a crowning moment of funny for all these idiots talk of "Canadians want this" "Canadians want that" apparently Canadians want to either be conservative or separate tabarnac!
We just need to flip 3 more seats and my dream comes true of a conservative majority with a BQ official opposition.
aww, the poor dear. He shot someone dead and now some people don't want to hang out with him.
On the first book was sort of a philosophy book for my son, the one I'm working on right now is a science fiction book set 100 years in the future.
I tend to try to write lots of different things though I will fully admit the science fiction book is going to have very strong philosophical underpinnings.
I tend to try to write lots of different things though I will fully admit the science fiction book is going to have very strong philosophical underpinnings.
Our province is set to immediately end dst once surrounding us states do.
So I'm pretty excited about that.
It's one of those things where, how is it no one has done this yet?
So I'm pretty excited about that.
It's one of those things where, how is it no one has done this yet?
Oh, I remember that one, it's really silly. I don't remember it being notable enough to continue the series(I made it to book 3), but it was perfectly entertaining for the time I spent with it.
The idea is that if you call it the niggakernel then there's some percentage of people who refuse to kill the process because they don't want to be racist.
I think the most important thing we can take from this manifesto is that we aren't teaching our kids how to write very well.
If I caught my son writing a manifesto like this before he killed a bunch of people, I'd slap him with a ruler and make him write it again and again until it was actually a good piece of writing and not something that'll be totally embarrassing. "Look here boy, a compelling piece of writing such as a manifesto needs to have ethos, pathos, and logos or it's just the rambling of a crazy person!"
After 50 rewrites he'd be like "You know what? It's fine. I don't need to shoot up the school." what? Of course you need to finish this and go your school shooting! "No, it's ok, I realized after trying to make this manifesto have ethos, pathos, and logos 50 times that the reasons I'm doing this are really stupid." oh, ok.
If I caught my son writing a manifesto like this before he killed a bunch of people, I'd slap him with a ruler and make him write it again and again until it was actually a good piece of writing and not something that'll be totally embarrassing. "Look here boy, a compelling piece of writing such as a manifesto needs to have ethos, pathos, and logos or it's just the rambling of a crazy person!"
After 50 rewrites he'd be like "You know what? It's fine. I don't need to shoot up the school." what? Of course you need to finish this and go your school shooting! "No, it's ok, I realized after trying to make this manifesto have ethos, pathos, and logos 50 times that the reasons I'm doing this are really stupid." oh, ok.
confirmed this can't be true, because I've owned brand new cars that were born before that and I refuse to think about a human being who is old enough to shoot up a school is younger than that brand new car (in 2009)
Those caffeinated flavor things are SS tier. I tried the caffeinated crystal light packets, and it's got me hydrating like 2 big 32 oz water bottles every day.
Because everyone's so fat, and they know that they shouldn't be eating so many cookies, but they're not going to stop. So they go "well, these cookies have like 7 cups of sugar per cookie, but at least there's oatmeal and raisins!"