In terms of extracted cash? Given that the top 1% now-famously have more funds than the bottom 90%, taxing the wealthiest will definitely make more of a difference.
The number of poor people doesn't matter -- only how much large their total pool of cash is to extract from.
You really have to squint to get the idea that the 1% have more money than the bottom 90%. In reality, they own businesses that are valuable. You couldn't liquidate all their stocks and end up with their paper net worths in your bank.
If you start a company and that company is successful, you will be worth a lot of money through your ownership of that company. Does that make you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder? No.
> Does that make you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder? No.
My first guess was that "scrooge mcduck wealth hoarding" made you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder, but good to see you're ruling out the strawmen early.
The idea you’re arguing is well known on this forum in my experience. In principle I agree, people who act like Jeff Bezos has $100 billion in the bank do more damage to the conversation than good. But I think it also avoids some truth. The wealthy are not usually buying $50 million apartments or $100 million super yachts with stock.
Yeah of course there's some truth that wealthy people have more money than poor people, but you have to argue from actual facts about these things. If I start a company that's worth a ton of money then it's because I'm providing a ton of value to my customers (excluding some more arguable examples like HFTs). So the value I have is exchange value in the case of net assets, or the potential for future exchange value in the case of shares. Its a reward for doing societally-valued work.
Of course there are reasonable arguments that shareholders are treated preferentially to labour in our economy and that that's as bad thing, but the basic premise of "the wealthy people have all the stuff so let's take their stuff" is just class warfare, not a reasonable argument.
It's already class warfare, whether you like it or not. The people are only playing the role of self defence.
> not a reasonable argument
It's only "not a reasonable argument" if you mentally substitute how cartoonishly huge, rich, authoritarian, etc. Bezos and Amazon actually are with a mom and pop shop or a guy who owns a single factory.
Self defence against what? Authoritarian against who? I genuinely don't see why rich people as a whole are evil. Some, sure - Bezos clearly treats his workers like shit. But as a class I don't see them as inherently bad.
Assets are taxed. If your money is 100% illiquid, you’ve done something dumb. You prepare to liquify to settle your taxes yearly — if the taxes are higher, you liquify further; the equation isn’t changing.
That is, the format of your money is irrelevant to whether you can be taxed more for it.
It may be irrelevant for taxation purposes, but not for narrative purposes - there's a pervasive "the rich people are hoarding all the money" narrative that just isn't true. I'm pretty ambivalent on the tax front. I think UBI might be the way to go but I wouldn't say I have researched enough to say it'd work as intended.
The answers to this are so numerous and the logic so obvious that we as citizens may be to close to even see them.
Pretty much every bit of advice in the health sciences has been changing over multiple generations (lead and xrays are two easy examples from over 50 years ago)
But if you have witnessed that, wouldn't it be prudent to remain doubtful about any new advice coming from the field? After all, the probability of it being thrown out in the future seems to be almost 100%?
This is the fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is a process, not a library of knowledge. You do the best you can with the info you have right now. Every time science changes, it means it’s getting better.
Anything else is religion — wanting to have a single unchanging answer forever. That’s the appeal of religion, and in the short term it might make you feel better, but in the long term it cannot adapt and eventually is out of sync with reality.
The problem is science almost always (except maybe in physics??) pretends it has arrived at the ultimate truth this time. It’s easy to detect too: just watch for the phrase “but now we know...”
It would help tremendously if new information was presented with some humility.
Read some Feynman and I think it'll open your eyes. You could certainly engage with the fatalist nature of some of his writing, but it basically means we're always on an iterative journey of refining our position. The way I read it is that "science" is not a thing to believe in, it's merely a practice or process. You either believe the scrupulousness with the data we have today or you can guess about what will be next, but that doesn't really invalidate today's stance until it does.
With physics perhaps it is refinement, but the example of the OP was diet, wasn't it? Changing from "fat is bad" to "fat is healthy" or whatever is not refining or iterating.
I missed where the example was diet, but even there:
Old science said “we observe that people who eat excess fat die younger, therefore we conclude that fat is bad”
Later, science said “Now that we understand more about the body, we now know that we need a certain amount of fat to live because among other things our brains are made of fat and we efficiently use fat as fuel. We have also found that there are different types of fat and that some people process each type differently. In addition, the previous conclusion was too broad. Those people who died younger also had inactive lifestyles and ate mainly processed food that’s full of sugar so we threw out most of that old data and started over with a better method. We have now observed that people who consume only healthy fats live longer than people who don’t. Therefore we conclude that a certain amount of healthy fat is good for you.”
6.3 You acknowledge that you are only authorized to access Services at the location identified on your Order, and you will not divert the Starlink Kit or Services to any other locations
What makes you say that? I haven't followed StarLink very closely but it seems to me that in order to be competitive and maximize profits it would be extremely beneficial for them to have regional pricing policies.
What the price options looks like in 12-24 months time is anyones guess. Personally I'd love to buy 250 dishes (at full price, $2k each or whatever), but skip the monthly charge (or have some sort of pool agreement)
Assigning a price to a given (large) region is the easy part.
The hard part is cache invalidation! For a stationary Starlink dish, every satellite knows which cell a given dish is in, and they cooperate to route packets to that cell when they can.
For a mobile Starlink dish, they have to be able to invalidate that cache every time it moves, instead of having a cushion of a few hours for the occasional move.
It can be done, but I don't blame them for punting on that problem for awhile.
Yes that’s what I meant: it isn’t mRNA (my reflexive presumption for something quick these days) and, as a nasal spray, is presumably something conventional, quick amd stable. Seems crazy to have ignored it, based only on what I see in this article.
> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
I don't know much about the other ones but segfault is definitely healthier than a buggy program being allowed to write at address 0 or continuing arithmetics after division by 0.
> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
I remember when Firefox's crash recovery got so good, and its normal shutdown process took so long, that someone suggested that it should just crash when the user hit the exit button.
You're messing up your shades of gray. Being better than financial ruin isn't enough to qualify as a healthy outcome. "Healthy" includes a swath of outcomes, but it's not wide enough to include bankruptcy.
Hah, I remember reading a comment a while back about a HFT firm. The guys there wanted to use Java but couldn't deal with GC latency spikes, so they just bought a ton of ram, turned off the GC, and re-booted the servers every day.
>> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
