Why do you persist in treating the rich differently? They are just people. They aren’t a special class of people that are better or smarter. They just have more money.
Treat everyone the same, and this comes out as “why tax people”. Well, that’s a complicated question with a pretty clear answer that I don’t think is worth repeating.
Stop assuming they’re better than you. They aren’t.
Civil society requires the willing participation of the populace. It’s the best kind of society, but it’s only available to a culture that has decided not to be assholes.
I choose not to be an asshole. Even when it would be easy. Even when it would improve my life or mood or bank balance. I refuse to idolize people that are assholes. Even if they’re rich.
Even in the strictest of command economies, the opportunity to be an asshole exists. You can’t command your way into a scenario where the choice of villainy is simply unavailable. Every single one of us has to make the choice to turn away from the pull of assholery ourselves and to refuse to countenance it in others.
I still believe that we, as a species, have both the capability and the requirement to step back from that cliff. We’ve done it before. Mostly, I don’t want to live in the world your approach would create. I think the only people that would enjoy it are the folks you’ve given your free will away to.
I’ll argue! Most of this is simply wrong… but first I’m going to reject the premise of your argument.
You’re providing a false choice by suggesting that money can only be concentrated or diffused and that it can only be concentrated or diffused at the level of the single individual. You’ve placed two extremes on the table (a command economy driven by oligarchs vs a command economy driven by autocrats) and asked us to pick.
I pick neither. A command economy is not necessary to achieve reasonable societal goals, and it’s not necessary to flip the switch all the way into a 1950s Red Scare version of communism to be able to see where the economic model of unfettered capitalism breaks down.
The next problem is that you conflate the question of “how should the government collect taxes” with the question of “how should an economy operate”. Those are different questions with different answers, but the underlying principle is the same.
The government should prevent circumstances in which being an asshole is financially rewarded. The citizens should try to avoid being assholes. A civil society should correct the behavior of people that are being assholes using social pressures.
In the economic arena, that basically boils down to “not fucking over the little guy”. The government should seek to prevent circumstances where the little guy gets fucked over. The citizens should try not to fuck each other over. A civil society should shun those who violate that norm.
In the taxes arena, that basically boils down to “pay your fair share.” We all know what that looks like and feels like because we’ve had to divvy up the check after a long night of drinking. Folks with cash throw in some extra to cover their friends that might be struggling, a couple of people that are doing well might just “make the check right at the end of the night.” It works out. People know how to do this instinctively. People, by and large, know what their fair share is. Some just don’t want to pay.
In a situation where people consistently make the moral choice to not be an asshole, a lot of economic models can work. The breakdown isn’t in the economic model, it’s in the role of the civil society - society is not enforcing the “don’t be an asshole” rule. Instead, we’ve decided to idolize the assholes.
There’s not an economic model that works when everyone is trying to fuck over everyone else.
You’re focused on the wrong problem.
Dude that line of reasoning went out with Reagan, and the last time it worked was in the 1920s. You might want that to be how the rich behave, but mostly they just lock capital away and watch the numbers grow.
We don’t need an economy based on pandering to rich assholes in the hopes they give us money. We need an economy where everyone pays their fucking taxes. It’s that easy. If the very wealthy stopped hiding their money and coming up with impenetrable tax evasion schemes and just paid their taxes like everyone else, we wouldn’t have to raise them on anyone.
Betting White House networks are too locked down to game on. If Elon is gonna live under the stairs, he needs his leet gaming setup.
No. When you create something that gets used for propaganda, you have three choices - speak out, stay silent, or support it. None of those options are apolitical.
I think you’ll see a combination of 2 and 3 out of agency leadership. #3 whenever possible, #2 if supporting Trump’s statement would touch off internal protests.
I think the overriding objective right now is to protect the workforce and I think the leadership in place is willing to do what it takes to achieve that goal. I don’t know if the workforce is willing to see the kind of pandering that will likely require, and I’m not sure even a maximum pandering platform will work.
One way or the other I think the agency may be fucked.
The reason I am generally skeptical of the technology is the same reason I’m not going to try to give you a definition.
I’ve never seen it solve a problem or be proposed as a reasonable solution to a problem. What happens instead is that someone says “could we do BLOCKCHAIN for this, it’ll make it way more modern” and the subset of people that want to look really forward-leaning and cool say “YEAH”. If that subset of people is loud enough, a lot of money gets spent and a bunch of implementers have to figure out how to jam in something they can say is blockchainy… leading to a proliferation of definitions.
The results have been universally more expensive applications with fewer helpful features. I don’t like “blockchain” because everything that touches it gets worse.
I bet the fine just offsets the cost of the prosecution, it’s not gonna be some settlement, it’s just “time and costs of the lawyers on our side”. Agree that if it’s meant to be punitive, it’s pretty laughable.
Nah. Folks are big mad because it’s exactly what we all expected when bezos bought the post. It didn’t immediately slide headlong into the void of bullshit pandering, so we developed a sense of false hope. Now it’s gone, we know it, we’re annoyed, and we’re mad about getting took.
Got it.
Space weather is weather - just like on Earth, it’s subject to so many unknowns and unknowable that reliable predictions are somewhere between really hard and totally impossible.
So - on Earth we don’t try to predict the exact weather that a given building is going to experience before we build it - that’d be super hard. Instead, we look at the rational maximum based on what we have seen and add some on top as a margin of safety… and that’s where we get building codes. Same applies in space - we make some measurements and add a factor of safety to cover our uncertainty. We have the same idea of building standards for pretty much everything except, to some extent, radiation.
The problem is that nobody has really found a workable solution for radiation shielding other than the EM shielding effects of large planetary bodies (see: Earth) or “thick shells of dense mass between the sensitive stuff and the outside.” Dense dumb mass is obviously not a great answer because of the launch cost - some have proposed using water, but you’d need a lot to provide adequate shielding… basically, you need a thick enough shell to match the wavelength of whatever radiation you’re shielding from.
I saw something kinda cool at AIAA Ascend from I think UMich that was proposing to basically pump enough electricity into space that the EM field would generate radiation shielding, but that’s like TRL 0 and electricity is also not always easy to come by.
Anyways, since there’s not a good answer for handling radiation, there’s no “building code” and the level of precision on the radiation level experienced is kinda irrelevant from an engineering standpoint. We can’t effectively protect against any amount, so if it’s >0, we have a problem.
I’d also suggest that from a “routinization” perspective you want a consistent building code, not a precise answer - because weather changes over time.
Both things exist, certainly, but I’m not sure how I’d establish a common unit to describe a set of things that are mostly waves but with a few particles thrown in. It’d have to be some kind of total energy flux through a selected region of space for a given time, and it’d be super specific to both the region and the timeframe since a CME event at the wrong time would really skew your results… I guess it could be some kind of time-average? So the thing you’d need is a total annual average energy flux of both EM and particle radiation through a region of interest. Such a thing certainly could (and probably has) been measured, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it all combined. This is maybe a start? It at least has all the radiation information in one spot.
I’m not sure I understand the value proposition of having that kind of information if someone took the time to do it, but it’s a fun thing to think about.
I think honestly it’s not just the conflict of interest threat that warrants someone in public office divesting themselves. We’re seeing that it’s better for the companies too - keeps them insulated from the impact of unpopular decisions.