Property taxes are use taxes. You're paying for the right to occupy an inherently limited resource, and for necessary services and infrastructure. It's not a wealth tax because it doesn't matter how much equity you have; it's the same whether you fully paid in cash or have an interest-only mortgage. It's also not a capital gains tax because the purchase price doesn't matter.
The total ownership of all public companies is also a limited resource.
Whether I have 0% equity or 100% equity in my home I still own it. The only question is how much I owe to the bank. "Oh I bought that with leverage" shouldn't change things for home ownership and it should change things for a wealth tax on stock ownership.
Then it’s an asset/property tax, not a wealth tax, because debt doesn't change the asset (even if it is secured by the asset), but it does change wealth.
> Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning countries, and the mortality of individual Kims has not helped the people of North Korea.
I guess you'd say most people in the world don't live in functioning countries then? China, Russia, much of the middle east and Africa are not democratic and sometimes the death of a dictator is the only way to move them forward. USA and many democracies in the west are also backsliding so maybe soon few people will live in a "functioning country".
Counterpoint on Kim: The death of Stalin or Mao Zedong released a death grip on their respective countries. You can't ignore that getting rid of natural death would make individual centralization of power a worse problem.
>How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?
Just one example: Trump using sanctions to block the ICC from doing it's job (and thus letting people in Gaza die and blocking steps of justice against Israel). The fact is that the centralization of power in modern times into individual hands is already unprecedented. Old people are already ruling the world and they'd do everything to rule it forever.
Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?
And not only death, but aging. Even if that society decided (wrongly IMO) that nobody should live longer than 100 years, it would be insane to enforce that by making everyone's bodies and minds deteriorate over several decades.
Yeah. My proposal would be to have 10 cent, 50 cent, and $1 coins (rounding everything to the nearest 10 cents), with $2 the smallest bill. And probably you could drop the $5 bill at that point.
There's a lot of physical infrastructure that works with quarters, and it's probably not worth giving that up for slightly improved coinage. Just drop all the coins smaller than a quarter.
There's also the 3rd amendment. It would be worthless to say soldiers can't demand change for the vending machine, when nobody at all can get quarters.
Google did more than what is "strictly legal or required", and what they did was submit a good and valid bug report. But for some reason we're mad because they didn't do even more. Why?
"I noticed your window was broken, so I took the liberty of helping you, working for free, by posting a sign that says UNLOCKED WINDOW HERE with exact details on how it was broken. I did lots of gratis work for you which you do not need to do yourself now. The world is safer now. Why are you not grateful?"
I mean if we’re going to do sloppy analogies, a bug report for open source software as widely used as ffmpeg is more like “I noticed the trees in the back corner of your free apple orchard are producing apples with trace amounts of heavy metals. I did some literal digging and sent some soil off to the labs and it looks like your back corner field may be contaminated. Here’s a heads up about that, and also just FYI in 90 days, if you haven’t been able to get your soil remediated, I’m going to put up a sign so that people can know to avoid those apples and not get poisoned by your free orchard while it’s getting fixed.”
Yes, this is a good illustration why The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics makes sense when Ffmpeg is allowed to criticise the manner of actions of Google.
I think it’s a good example of why it makes no sense. People are saying they would rather a world where people unknowingly get heavy metal poisoning from apples at the free orchard rather than a world where people are informed that some of the apples in one part of the orchard may have heavy metals in it because the person letting people know about it didn’t also remediate the soil, even though they don’t own the orchard.
That is plainly ridiculous. An orchard without heavy metals is obviously an ideal world in this case, but a world where people are at least informed of the places where the heavy metals are is orders of magnitude better than one where they’re unknowing getting heavy metal poisoning.
Can confirm, Claude is quite good at this. "Intelligence" -> "Inner neural thinking enables learning, logic, insight, grasping, evaluating, navigating challenges efficiently".
reply