Do you also give all your information to a random caller that offers you a free cruise? I think you forgot that politicians are legally bribed to behave against the wishes and/or needs of the people.
You're right that moralizing is beyond useless. Instead let's define the bounds of our morality by our tax code. What can go wrong?
I assume when you file your taxes, you refuse all deductions and tax credits that you're eligible for, because obviously the most moral thing is to give as much of your money to the government as possible, right?
Most of us don’t lobby the government to write laws that carve out near-zero tax burdens.
Which, with the growing wealth inequality, explains that why the tax burden on the middle income keeps stable or grows; while services and benefits keep shrinking.
For starters, how about paying at least the capital gains rate?
For large businesses, they’re finding ways to pay less than 20%.
But tabulate all of the
ongoing costs to build and maintain our national infrastructure, legal system (no business without the courts), law enforcement branches, etc.
Deduct the income taxes currently levied on wage earners.
Roughly, the rest of the money needs to come from corporate taxes and capital gains.
That’s not what’s happening though. Instead, it’s quite alright to double tax middle income earners.
If you recall, property tax deductions were capped and so overnight the Republican government found a way to increase the average earners’s budget. Mortgage interest deductions are next.
> For starters, how about paying at least the capital gains rate?
> For large businesses, they’re finding ways to pay less than 20%.
People do pay capital gains tax when they realize capital gains. What makes you think they don't?
Businesses pay corporate income tax which is a different thing altogether. They're already double-taxed (when the company turns a profit, and again when they distribute those profits to shareholders).
> But tabulate all of the ongoing costs to build and maintain our national infrastructure, legal system (no business without the courts), law enforcement branches, etc.
> Deduct the income taxes currently levied on wage earners.
> Roughly, the rest of the money needs to come from corporate taxes and capital gains.
Not true at all. There are excise taxes, import duties, sales and property taxes (these fund local and state governments, which handle a lot of the courts and law enforcement), payroll taxes (paid by the employer, not part of the income tax). There are other options that are not implemented in the US, like VAT, land-value taxes, financial transaction taxes. The government also has other sources of funding like fines, fees, bonds, inflation. There are many things besides capital gains and corporate income taxes.
> If you recall, property tax deductions were capped and so overnight the Republican government found a way to increase the average earners’s budget. Mortgage interest deductions are next.
The average earner doesn't itemize deductions because they won't exceed the standard deduction, which was raised at the same time that the state and local tax deductions were capped. Those deductions were mainly a way to subsidize states that charge high state taxes (which happen to have more high earners) at the expense of states which charge low income taxes (and happen to have lower earners).
Mortgage interest deductions are already capped and again mainly benefit higher earners who can afford large mortgages that would actually have enough interest to make it worthwhile to itemize.
Who are you in real life? You don't sound like someone who works in software programming for a living or understand what poverty is like. Are you an exec? A manager?
The utility of money decreases the more you have (outside of lifestyle inflation). When basic needs of society (like housing) aren't being met, there shouldn't be a cap on what the wealthy pay imo.
The "money" the very wealthy have is not cash sitting in a checking account but usually shares in some corporation. That absolutely has utility if you want to continue having a say in how your company is run. Besides, should the government come around and check for any property that it deems you're not sufficiently utilizing and confiscate it from you? It seems like that policy could be abused.
The government already controls a budget in the trillions of dollars - several orders of magnitude more than any private entity - and so far has not used it to meet basic needs like housing. What is the evidence that giving them additional money will solve the problem? It doesn't cost anything to relax zoning laws and let people build more housing.
> The "money" the very wealthy have is not cash sitting in a checking account but usually shares in some corporation. That absolutely has utility if you want to continue having a say in how your company is run.
So what? That’s the cost of of going public. That the wealthy found a way to abuse it (share classes) means they’ve made the stock market less useful for everyone else.
> Besides, should the government come around and check for any property that it deems you're not sufficiently utilizing and confiscate it from you? It seems like that policy could be abused.
You’re jumping the gun here but…
The government is already involved in property rights. There is no concept of ownership without a government supported legal framework.
A government is expected to be involved with limited resources, and discourage undesirable outcomes while encouraging good ones. My government does this through tax benefits and tax penalties.
I don’t see most people asking for more than this.
> A government is expected to be involved with limited resources, and discourage undesirable outcomes while encouraging good ones. My government does this through tax benefits and tax penalties.
You mean like offering a tax break to incentivize investment in certain areas?
I don't think someone being able to continue owning a portion of a company they created is a undesirable outcome, do you?
The wealthy and the government are generally rather intertwined wouldn't you agree? It's not a matter of budget but of sharing a scarce resource, something the wealthy and powerful, (and so by extension the government) are historically not so inclined to do. Taxation is a means of systematising the sharing of resources.
It might be worth thinking about what it is that is being depleted, exactly. When I "run out of willpower" it doesn't really feel the same as when I "simply cannot do it anymore". If I lift a weight enough times, eventually I simply can't anymore, no matter how much I will it. It's not a decision, like a decision to stop working on a problem. That would be a lack of willpower to continue...?
Is there really a mental equivalent to physical exhaustion that leaves us beyond the ability to make a decision? Is that what running out of willpower would be?
Believe it or not, even something like physical exertion has hard-to-define limitations. The amount of reps that you can do of an exercise is more based on how forcefully your brain drives your nerves to activate your muscles and keep going. If you have a habit of sticking to sets of 10 reps, odds are you will feel exhausted at 10 reps, and this is because once you hit your magic goal, you're no longer applying the same concentrated mental energy, and you suddenly feel tired and stop there. But if you did that set like as if it were the last set of your life, or like you were at the olympics trying to break records, you'd be able to push 15 or 20 reps, rather than just the 10 that you do as your comfortable limit. You have the physical ability to keep doing something until the moment that your muscles lock up from lactic acid buildup and you just drop. But people rarely ever reach that state. They stop much sooner because pushing further requires more concentrated brain input which they don't want to dedicate. Maintaining your current routine is effortless, and we tend to favor the easy, comfortable. Pushing your limits is uncomfortable, and in a world where we have become so accustomed to prioritizing indulgence and comfort it becomes hard to break out of our safe zones.
Reading your comment made me realize that you're right, there really isn't such a hard rule even with physical exertion. Even putting some motivating music on might make you push for an extra rep or two. If a gun was to your head maybe you'd do even more. The extreme end might be phenomena like "dead man's grip" where inhuman strength is shown while on death's door.
If you compare the same pizzas restaurant vs. homemade then sure, but learning to do it well allows you to modify everything to suit your needs. A really nice thin crust can be made with quite a bit less dough, which may then need a lot less cheese to saturate the dish. Just like that you've knocked down two of the most calorically heavy parts of a pizza!
Neapolitan style pizza baked at high temperature is actually extremely sensitive to excessive topping. Too much sauce or fresh mozzarella, and there will be too much liquid for the center of the crust to cook properly. I'll typically only use maybe 3 tbsp of tomato sauce, and aim for 50% of cheese coverage by area if using hand cut mozzarella cubes, or 80% coverage if shredded.
My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250 calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.
A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800 calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though, and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.
I don't know what rock you've been living under, but licking the boot and bring patient leads you to be stuck in the same position because "you're too valuable right where you are" for 33 years until the company gets restructured and you get laid off with nothing more than a "sorry!" before you could get your full retirement package.
This argument keeps being thrown around but it's pretty clear to me that this time it's actually different. Every new attention-grabbing invention is more potent than the last, and the Internet just might have crossed a threshold where it can actually break us on a large scale.
The whole thing about fecal transplants is that the resulting changes in your microbiome make it so your pull to sugar is weakened. Your diet changes because your cravings change. Imagine how easy it would be if you craved food that was "good for you", or that your cravings for bad food were severely weakened. That's kinda what having a healthy microbiome is like
Put yourself in the shoes of your average content moderator. Aren't they there for the paycheck like most people at their jobs? Why does everyone assume these people are first and foremost bastions of acceptable behaviour? They are instructed by executives as to how to do their jobs. Now executives are learning nuance and say "oh there's more to this than you thought, so here's the updated guidelines to follow now", to shift blame for this broken system to the moderators when all along they were following orders from above.
No, those folks are not there just to get a paycheck. They are evangelists for a viewpoint who use their moderation powers to eliminate thoughts they don't like.
And yes, those teams really did come up with their determinations of what was OK and what wasn't, based on their own beliefs. That made that quite clear in their repeated, stupid posts on memegen.
I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are in that position because they specifically want the power that comes with it. We see this all the time with volunteer moderators getting high on their power, pushing through whatever agenda they have regardless of user opinion.
I think those types of people are even more likely to end up as paid content moderators, since the work tends to be too tedious for most average people to deal with.
» I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are in that position because they specifically want the power that comes with it.
I love that you were courageous enough to say this because this is completely true and also why we say #ACAB. Most people who want to be police officers are absolutely unfit to be police officers!
I hadn't actually thought about applying that reasoning to the police and while there is a higher bar to becoming a police officer, I do have to agree with the overall idea.
There probably isn't any job which is an exception to this, politicians are similarly mainly people who want the associated influence and even engineers become engineers so they have control over engineering. It's just that the incentives are more perverse with politicians, police and moderators than with engineers.
Once the pool for some jobs gets large enough, the self selection of those who apply for it can become a problem.
From what I understand from rumors in the area, is those who couldn't become police (for whatever reason) would then go apply at the prison, and those who couldn't get a job there (and it appears they take anyone with a pulse) would go work for TSA.
Perhaps the "public servant" idea should be taken to a larger extreme, and some positions picked by lottery instead.
Are other cases of online abuse, workplace harassment, discrimination, etc. so rare that people are actually chasing problems like this for a paycheck? It would be wonderful if that was the case, but I doubt that it is.
Many people willingly do things like this voluntarily at their jobs to the point that the job they were hired for seems like a second priority for them.
