sigh Very much true and very much not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes. If you like progressive taxation then the onus is on you to justify your claims that applying the exact same regime to another characteristic (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement) Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not (you've failed to do this btw because you can't because they are either both totalitarian or both not because they are the exact same premise).
Also, you fail to appreciate what tax penalties look like. This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file. It was said partially in jest, but it is actually a good policy if you can price it low enough that it doesn't cause migration but high enough that it does cause more kids.
I don't really agree with the specifics but I can identify with the emotion. To me the problem with AI isn't AI, it's that investors are idiots and put hundreds of billions of dollars into AI companies that have near zero chance of being profitable enough to pay them back and those companies took that money and blew up computer parts supply chains that are vital to the rest of human existence. If we didn't have this massive build out that has no chance of repaying itself and instead had a build out that only doubled ram/gpu/nvme prices we would be far better off. As it stands, we're going to have a ton of gear that will be of questionable utility once any of the disruptors get their 100X+ per watt improved/different hardware going and to get that hardware we broke everything else. This ai stuff will also likely plateau and have the openweights models and opensource tooling catch up and at that point the companies are basically GPU REITS with diminishing demand as the stuff ages out and the disruptor's gear gets built for much better performance per watt. They've made it really ugly for us now and it will get really ugly for them in the midterm future imo. Not a good outcome for anyone.
If the government can charge me a higher rate of tax because I am not a useless turd with no marketable skills then charging people more for failing to keep population at or above replacement is also not an infringement of freedom. While we are talking about freedom, have you looked at what happens to societies when population growth rates collapse? They tend to not stay societies for very many generations after that. They tend to get invaded and added to an empire that still has a positive population growth rate, or they collapse internally due to the weight of unfullfillable promises and infighting over the shrinking pie and get picked off at the edges. In that regard, policy to preserve the birth rate is a freedom enhancing choice if you think our current society is free. I personally think it's not that great but everything else is pretty bad, so it's the best of a bad situation choice, which makes it worth preserving.
is there any decent management software for a whole network of these yet? That's what keeps me going back to unifi with opnsense as the router. Last I checked it was basically openwisp, which was hugely painful/complicated to get working when I last looked a few years ago. I would love nothing more than to have a viable option to start replacing the unifi stuff (even better if there is also 10gb switching but that feels like an absolute pipedream still without a large budget for datacenter gear)
Tieing it to a real person will juat make the pressure to hack real peoples accounts much higher. Just maje a way for a user to cost them money if irs spam. Like deposit a quarter to call if no complaints for a month you get it back. If they report you youlose the quarter. Spam phonecalls gone in a month
I shouldnt have said useless, whether it is accurate or not, i apologize for that. I take issue with the rest of your criticism though. My comment is on a policy discussion about people who have chosen a set of ideas having less kids. Its not about a people with some innate characteristic that they did not choose having less kids. Their less kids is a direct consequence of their poor policy preferences and as such it is a self correcting mechanism that we shouldnt be breaking and certainly should not be spending my tax dollars on. Suggesting other bad policy choices they could take up was perhaps in bad taste as well so i apologize for that as well. the spirit of my comment is still desperately needed in the discussion because it is utterly missing and it is the correct one. When people who choose a set of ideas make moremoney and have way less kids the problem that needs solving is their ideas, not their birthrate
Wouldnt it just be better to have a lefal system that enforced the contract without extra bs? Lawyers would be unhappy as their wages normalized but that would be a large benefit to society as well
Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids
Zero dollars. Because the marginal cost of production is zero and the movie production budget is just a sunk cost. We need to cut copyright terms back to the original term of 14 years and call it a day. Instead of the commons being ceded to benefit itself with hifher content production, the commons was just robbed to give us current copyright law
has anybody figured out how to get this to open a fixed layout? I'm using tmuxp to do this easily with tmux but would switch to this pretty quickly if it was easy to get my layout over. It's really nice. It's like zellij without the bloat (but with different ai bloat that doesn't seem to drag down performance at all and isn't in your face unless you want it in your face)
You missed my first point. You get a different outcome because you can hit a different price point securing your outcome and that outcome is still constrained by law. If you make a few hundred billion like Elon did you too can do that. My point was that this mechanism is a criticism of the system, not of Elon. Elon is not doing something wrong here (at least not provably wrong yet in a court of law, see what happens as the horse he bet on loses political clout and the various institutions take a look at what was done with a different political foot on their throat).
The second point was the ambiguity in outcome is what allows societal change and I don't want to lose that because there is still a lot of stupid enshrined in our legal code and institutions. We need enforcement to be lax enough to allow people to break stupid laws and the legal code to be ambiguous enough that, when enough people's opinions have changed by the law breakers breaking the law and nothing bad happening/ the law breakers being closer friends and family of enough people that you can get a big change to the law through, either via the courts deeming the law unconstitutional or the congress critters changing the law. It's a fine line on multiple fronts there between effective changing to suite current needs and too much corruption and I don't see a way to change the system that decreases corruption without also decreasing flexibility for change so I am very cautious on that front.
This doesn't contradict my claim at all. This is and should be a criticism of the system because the system has an ambiguity of outcome built in. If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules. I do agree with you that it would be nice to fix this so that the only difference between hiring the 50 dollar an hour and the 2000 dollar an hour lawyer is spending an additional 1950 dollars. I don't really see a way to fix this without also losing the ambiguity that makes other aspects of the system work though (i.e. the ability to do illegal things like same sex marriage/relationships enough that the overton window moves in the population enough to allow a legislative change to allow those things).
The original claim is stupid because it is applying a personal moral judgment to a legal system at the individual level, usually for the purposes of justifying theft or other punishments for the person being talked about. it is irrelevant whether the person is honest or dishonest by your own personal moral compass, what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under. The criticism needs to be leveled at the legal system and its ability and desire to change to accommodate the criticisms is the measure of the total system. By this correct measure what we have is amazing vs what has come before and alternate systems tried in the 20th century (looking at you *isms, which have all been terrible in the long run and usually also in the short and medium run).
The marxist nonsense about exploitation is getting really tired and needs to die already. Yes, we get it, marxists don't value anything that grows total output, don't think it should be compensated and are totally fine living in the stagnation that view creates. If they could all just skip a few steps and go to the end game of their philosophy that would be great because I'm tired of hearing from them.
Also, you fail to appreciate what tax penalties look like. This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file. It was said partially in jest, but it is actually a good policy if you can price it low enough that it doesn't cause migration but high enough that it does cause more kids.