Why do we pay taxes? I know many people that have close to 0 benefits from government.
I would propose all governments to make taxes 5% or 10% and remove themselves from governing.
However, if you need the police to help you, you are already getting something back. If someone else needs the police and the police catch the criminal who would have made you their next target, you are getting a benefit.
Now scale that up to the whole country. If you take part in a society where there is generally law and order — and moreover a society where everyone can read and write and some of them can manage air traffic control, and roads exist and people have the skills to build cars and sell them to you — well now you are taking part in the benefits of a society which would not exist without public spending, paid for with taxes.
For example: public spending per person in the UK is < £10,000 per year, which is much less than I pay in taxes. And I would estimate that I'm well below average in terms of spending received: I don't have children, don't have any large medical expenses, etc.
Of course, my cost to society will rise as I get older, but on average I would estimate that I'm paying at least twice (and probably many times more than) what I'm taking. And yet the current trend is for half of society to say that I'm not paying my 'fair share'. I'm not sure what definition of fairness they're using, but it's not mine.
Additionally your two examples are both high density countries, and may not generalize to a country like the UK. Also worth noting that these countries give up a fair bit in civil liberties.
Politicians always just want to raise taxes instead of raising their tax efficiency rating.
I guess they never use roads, the electric grid, the police, garbage collection, don't call the fire brigade when their house is on fire, just assume the country is protected from foreign invaders, don't need a hospital when they're ill, clean up their own roads, plant their own parks, etc, etc.
Bullshit.
You posted the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890599 a few years back but sadly it is dead now. I am a hobbyist interested in cryptography (and a fan of chacha) and so when I saw the "AEAD design similar to ChaCha, that was doing 1.5 cpb authenticated encryption" I got excited.
That said, the design of the mode of operation was quite elegant and efficient. Assuming you are familiar with the field, it consisted of taking the core of BLAKE2 as a tweakable secure PRP, with an important modification.
The core's 10 rounds was split in two sequences of 5 rounds, that transform plaintext to midstate to ciphertext and similarly from ciphertext to midstate to plaintext. We called those alpha and beta, so E(x) = beta(alpha(x)).
Roughly, each block of plaintext or authenticated data was processed using an always uniquely tweaked blockcipher. We took the the midstates of processing those blocks, XOR'd them together and encrypted the resulting block to get our MAC t. The tweaks also contained the AD and message length (through lambda_A and lambda_M respectively), so length extension/contraction attacks were defeated.
Visually encryption looked like this (you can ignore the subscripts, they were designed so that they were always unique for each invocation): https://i.imgur.com/FZCaYvf.png And decryption: https://i.imgur.com/hkBsqMn.png
The advantage of this scheme was that the authentication portion didn't require any additional primitives or crypto code, and was blazing fast. Furthermore, you only needed to do half of the computational load (for long messages) to verify that a message is genuine compared to fully decrypting the message. Finally the whole scheme is embarrassingly parallel - each block is independent from all others.
That said, only the reduced computational load for verifying isn't enough to offset choosing it over OCB3, which is very similar, and is proven secure.
somalia?