pydry

only thing I would add is the size of HDBs - they've been shrinking which I'm sure puts psychological pressure on young adults to not have kids.

it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.

you can have neither or both but I dont see any way to have one without the other.

>The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over

I'm mystified why this isnt a problem AI isnt applied to.

It didnt go wrong

And if it did, it was because you werent using the latest model.

And if you were, it was because you didnt have the appropriate guardrails.

And if you did, it's because you didnt have AGENTS.MD.

And if you did, it's because you didnt prompt it properly.

And if you did, it you're still going to be redundant soon because I'm sure the next model released will fix whatever went wrong.

Your choice to depict blocking a freeway as "violence" doesnt make it so, it simply puts you in the camp of liberals he criticised for indirectly supporting the racist status quo.

I find it fascinating that what Martin Luther King described as the "polite liberal racist" who moaned about blocking a freeway is still alive and well.

>I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right

No, it worked because of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest tactics - the ones which you described as terrorism.

Martin Luther King wrote an essay about people with this exact attitude called "the racism of the polite liberal"

There were obviously just as many people back then who thought his type of activism - e.g. blocking a freeway would never achieve any of his goals. They thought it was just annoying, even though it was successful.

Mobile app stores are more like banks - a big problem when there are not a lot but a problem that can be remedied by having the government compete (e.g. with a post office bank).

The government could set up a competing app store, that might not be a bad idea, actually. They could hardly do a worse job than google and apple at vetting app developers and it would put a firecracker up google and apples ass.

ive been regularly seeing this exact reaction online since November 2025, sadly :/

There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.

e.g.

- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.

- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.

- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it (apple, graphene)

- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.

some smart alec would then point out that because even the cheapest, shittiest beef isnt free that this price is justified.

it is parasitic to try and prohibit competing app stores and then leverage your monopoly by charging monopoly prices.

everything google is trying to do to discourage graphene, newpipe, competing app stores, etc. is parasitic and it's right that they are being fined by the EU for this behavior.

It's very clear they dont. Maybe they will one day. That day isnt today.

Yeah you did. You wrote "he couldnt turn it [his illiquid assets] into cash even if he wanted to".

>The problem is in the calculation of "net worth".

That is not a problem.

Let them value their own assets. If they value their ming vase at $10k then the government reserves the right to buy it for...$10k. They might get away with avoiding paying taxes. Or the government might get a bargain. The incentive, though, is to be scrupulously honest and accurate.

Some people obviously wouldn't like being put in such a position.

> And, more importantly, the difference is that people choosing to put their money into something is not the same as enabling it to be taken by force.

Im not 100% sure but I think this falls under the category of just saying "wealth taxes not fair!"

no it isnt. illiquid doesnt mean unpriceable and illiquid doesnt mean can't be liquidated. people liquidate their illiquid assets all the time to pay their tax bills.

it being "complex to collect" is a criticism of many taxes which are already being paid. sales tax and VAT are horrendously complicated (far more so than a wealth tax) to collect but we still do it.

>An overlooked issue in popular discourse is that notional asset values are tightly coupled to who owns them — it isn’t transferable. Concepts like “dead equity” have been in the finance literature for a very long time. Elon Musk’s equity only has the value it does because he owns it

even if it were true, it's not a good reason not to tax him.

in fact, it might even help bring some sanity to the capital markets if he and every other billionaire were forced to price their illiquid assets for tax purposes.

theres no efficiency or impossibility argument that prevents this. the only argument boils down to stamping one's feet declaring that it's not fair (that I would have to value my illiquid assets and might be forced to sell them if I underpriced them).

> He couldn’t convert it into cash even if he wanted to.

Elon musk has been converting his assets into cash recently and he has had no problem doing it.

Bill Gates similarly liquidated his assets to fund his charity and didnt have a problem doing that.

Why is liquidating their shareholdings suddenly a problem only when they need to pay taxes?

there are plenty of ways to handle the problem of taxing illiquid wealth but I dont think there is much value in discussing it with somebody pretending that means it is "not real".

it would be like discussing the science behind vaccines with somebody who persisted in calling them "poisons".

illiquid wealth != unreal wealth.

as I said, if it were unreal you wouldn't mind losing it.

if it is illiquid, you clearly do.

economic illiteracy is not the best foundation for arguing against taxing the wealthy. by pretending the wealth "doesnt really exist" and "isnt there" to tax it highlights the underlying greed motivating the argument.

if you dont agree, perhaps elucidate on a more legitimate reason you might have had for confusing unreal with illiquid?

You wont mind if we tax it then will you?

You do, of course.

p.s. liquidity != wealth. try not to confuse them.

Landlords who have their entitlements to land rents or other natural resource rents they've captured ripped away from them would almost assuredly endorse the use of violence.

Land redistribution (of which this is a form) from the landed rentiers to the landless has historically resulted in brutal violence in order to protect their privileged claim on non-human created wealth.

Thats an incentive to rent out the property or sell up to somebody who will.

It would apply harsh market discipline on landlords - a demographic that has usually been rather coddled.

i find it weird how many Russians, Chinese and Americans are weirdly protective of their own government's oppressive behaviours in the name of patriotism.

Sure, those 8 are often thrown away while that 1 often ends up moving mountains but so what?

For vibe coded code from what ive seen it's about 10:0.

We should clearly only write that from now on.