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This is not my reaction to just you. This is my reading of "any time a wealth tax is brought up." My recommendation to you, given you seem to be acting in good-faith:

Make it clear "What you want a wealth tax to look like instead" But also, it's easier to destroy than it is to create, so I think any state setting the grounds for how they're going to try this, is worth supporting and iterating on.

I feel like every opposition I read to wealth taxes is someone saying that we shouldn't do it, because it won't be perfect. Without offering an alternative to the status quo, which is nothing.

We can iterate on taxes if they're ineffective, but it's unforgivable to not try and do something in the face of so much inequality.

There's an old Chemistry joke, that I've reapplied to Software Engineering, and it goes something like:

A New Engineer (NE) shows up on their first day on the job, notebook in hand ready to learn. They get assigned to shadow an Experienced Engineer (EE) for their first day.

EE: Now, the thing is, for any project on our team, you only need to change about 3 lines of code. NE, preparing to write down notes: Which 3? EE: Well, it depends.

(Originally about Material Safety Data Sheets, and there only being 3 relevant lines on them).

I think this is what people miss about Software Development.

I feel like we need to hold Gov't Contractors to higher standards.

Like half of these ballooning budgets are things that Private Businesses brag about on the other side. "I got a $200B Private contract with the CA Gov't." Is a big win for the company, and a big loss for the taxpayer. To some extent I think CA should be able to reclaim a large portion of their contract (in some way) because costs ballooned.

The same for Military contractors. There needs to be better enforcement of "this is the budget that you bid, we won't increase that, and you still have to deliver."

Imagine if companies ended up having to sell part of their company to the gov't if they failed to deliver their contract.

You misunderstand me.

> I think I’m okay with there being some remaining consequences for things you do to other people,

I would rather live in the world where they hadn't done those things to other people. Not that I would rather people forgive them and let them into a pizza shop. It's a pizza shop, who cares, they have a million other ways to get pizza if they want it. Ostracism is the last response we have for the wealthy doing unacceptable things.

Yeah, why don't people talk about how my model s tried to drive itself into oncoming traffic more? Not just anyone can drive themself into oncoming traffic.

But like, actually the reason is that the cars consistently make dangerous decisions when they're not being used as "glorified cruise control", and the sensors mean they only even get to do that during "perfect driving conditions"

Feels like the world that he created by hoarding vast sums of wealth, and limiting people's free speech, and cutting social safety net programs that put more and more people at risk as the world becomes less and less stable.

I would much rather have lived in the world where he could walk into a pizza place without security and fear. But I also would much rather have lived in the world where people had healthcare and they didn't have to fight companies like UHC tooth and nail to avoid getting their claims denied at every turn.

And the stability of this all comes from trust in Government regulation. Which he gutted, when he gutted the programs that were targeting him for committing fraud.

The wildest thing to me about the 2010s, was that the war on taxes got framed as a "class war". And everyone didn't understand that to mean "a war on anyone who is not the top 1%" Even reading through this comment section, people mistrust that Taxes are useful to prevent undue power gathering in the hands of a small number of people. They also then help fund programs which can help the underclass.

But the fear and dislike of taxes has clearly been weaponized by the ruling class to wage war on minimum wage workers and immigrants, in order to funnel as much wealth and power to the elites as possible.

The war on taxes was never "America vs Taxes" it was "The Wealthy vs. The Poor" and the wealthy were able to leverage the media to trick the poor people into reacting in fear that "The gov't is coming for your money." By just parroting their own fears about the gov't coming for their money and saying "it could happen to you too."

TBF, the Media really let/fueled this happening, likely because they were captured by corporate interests.

Site looked interesting, so I was just like "what would it look like to have a top tax rate like we did in the 1950s-1980s (Before Reagan dropped it)?" [1] And the hilarious thing is the propaganda it spews without any backing of data:

>At a certain point, increases in tax rates will not raise more revenue. Once someone's tax rate becomes sufficiently high, they might work less or try harder to evade taxes. Based on existing evidence, this simulation assumes that increasing this group’s tax rate beyond your current level is unlikely to raise more revenue.

And then it pretends like the maximum amount of income you can get out of the richest 1% is $203B.

This is rich people's propaganda that we've bought into by pretending that Rich people don't need this country. But that's a lie. If it were true, they would just move, instead of fighting tooth and nail for tax cuts in every single election.

Also the breakdown of spending categories and the way they're represented are pretty clearly politically motivated, and the Numbers look a little suspicious to me. They don't even align with the CBO numbers.

Another really obvious thing missing is a "Capital Gains Tax"

Which is currently pegged to like 20%, and how CEOs get all of their income. So If Capital Gains was taxed as income, I think that would at least start to make the Income tax realistic.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Feder...

I need you to reread my comment, and then paraphrase what you think I said, for me. Cause I don't get how this is someone's response to my comment in a million years unless it's like intentional rage bait, or something.

Sorry, this is russell's teapot falacy. "the burden of proof lies with the person making an unfalsifiable claim, rather than on others to disprove it"

If there is evidence this is related to cameras, then the onus is on companies making these cameras and claims to provide the data. Not on others to prove that they don't stop crime.

There's a reason you always start with the null hypothesis.

You didn't ask for data... You asked: "In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?"

That requires a specific example, which you were provided with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.

I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".

It feels like the only reason to label one side of the political spectrum "reactionary" in this way is to poison the well for anyone responding to you.

Where as, pre-labeling things as being politically one-sided is very reactionary, and seems to be what you're doing here. It's also not limited to just one side of the political spectrum. I would argue that Conservatives tend to be even more reactionary than liberals. See: All the legislation to prevent children from eating from dog/cat bowls in schools when there's no evidence of this occurring.

This is really cool and impressive... but relatedly...

Has anyone figured out what the minimum specs for Quake are?

I feel like the first thing everyone does with a computer is to determine whether or not it can run quake, and I'm just wondering what the like, most simple computer that could exist is, that could run quake?

I think the problem, is that cameras don't prevent you from getting stolen from. I know many people in the same city as me who get things stolen off their front porch, and have cameras.

On the flip side, I have basically never worried about being stolen from, and I have no camera.

The secret? All the places I've lived, have their front door in an inconvenient spot. For example, up stairs, or along the side of the house. Getting a camera doesn't make you safer... Cause all you have to do to thwart it is wear a mask. And thanks to the pandemic, literally everyone has one of those.

Saying "The West has deindustrialised" is incredibly disingenuous. The west's consumerism has driven a race-to-the-bottom for pricing of products in China and India.

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I also lived through it, and you and I remember it differently. Which is why I asked for clear examples, because it's easy to go back and forth about anecdotes.

because in his mind "it's worse to be a hypocrite than it is to torture children."

He just doesn't realize how he's also a hypocrite, so he can't hold himself accountable to his own opinion.

you're asking them to enforce the rule. I'm asking them to enforce the rule consistently if they're going to enforce the rule.

Otherwise it's a first amendment violation. I'm opposed to violations of the first amendment.

I don't care "who is going to listen to it?" if it's a rule, it's applied consistently or not at all. No "special case" for conservatives.

Read my comment again, and then think about it.

Who do you think would need to be given equal time on conservative talk radio?

What would be the other outcome of the change to the rule that I am proposing? Also I am not even against the rule being applied to talk shows, I just want to see it applied non-hypocritically.

I mean, if you think this administration is the same as the last, I recommend reading the news from a different source.

Apply it to conservative talk radio first, and then we'll talk. As applied now, it's clearly the gov't chilling speech.

No, it's calling out a red herring. It's a valid response in a discussion to say that your comment is not contributing to the topic at hand. Especially when your comment is not really comparable.

I mean, why don't you lose your mind that Trump is doing it? If it was so bad when Obama did it, then you're the hypocrite here.

This is the account's M.O. You can see my response above, but basically as far as I can tell they're deeply conservative, and they try and position themselves as a like "rational centrist" by doing this "both sides" Dance.

The giveaway that you've noticed, is they never actually condemn the existing administration without also comparing them to Obama (and for reasons beyond me, specifically Obama and not say, Biden, Bush 1/2, Clinton).

Here he is 36 days ago doing the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RickJWagner&next=466...

My read of this account is that they're deeply conservative, and like to take every example of a terrible thing the current administration is doing as an opportunity to "both sides" it in order to attempt to normalize how bad the current administration is.

They have never condemned the current administration for doing this without also "whatabouting" the Obama administration.

So to answer your question, they will say they're doing the "liberal hypocrites" song and dance, but in reality they're working towards a case that "Actually concentration camps aren't that bad, because 'both sides' do them."

In practice most people actually on the left can recognize that the Obama administration (and the Bush, Clinton and Biden administrations) were deeply flawed, but they are still lightyears better than the Concentration camps of the current administration which are detaining children and separating them from their families based on which side of a line they fall on, on a map (or more likely, the color of their skin).

It's funny because Rick's examples always what-about the Obama administration which makes it likely a dog-whistle.

Rick, if you want to beat the allegations, please condemn the current administration for their actions if you think they're wrong. We already know what you think about Obama, so you can just call out the current administration without mentioning other administrations.

Weird, cause I remember there being a very lengthy and involved debate about COVID. I remember hearing a ton of dissent and disagreement with the government positions... almost like... they weren't being censored. There are hundreds of thousands of discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, and there were hundreds of those discussions at the time. There was also plenty of conflicting advice given, including "injecting bleach" which was advice given by the then president, and ivermectin, which was advice given by 100s of online podcasters.

Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.

What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."

At some point, we as a society are going to come to grips with the fact that only like 5% of the population is capable of actually losing and maintaining weight-loss.

The rest is just all new "fad diets" that cycle every 3 years as people go through the cycle of trying them, seeing results, failing to maintain them "forever" (which is what they'd have to do), and then putting the weight back on.

Every single diet has this problem (Even GLP-1s from what I have seen). The human body seems to have some mechanism by which it attempts to maintain it's current weight. But we all continue to be incredibly prone to "this new fad diet actually works!"

It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.

Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.

Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".