That like four people have as much wealth as 7 billion others.
Unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income. I mean, pretty much everything about capitalism tbf, but that particular thing is saying the quiet part out loud and it still gets almost no attention.
A flat tax system would resolve a lot of this.
The issue with a flat tax system, though, is that the value behind each dollar is different for different classes of people.
$20 is chump change for a billionaire. $20 for a middle class person might be some nice takeout for an evening. $20 could mean whether or not a working poor person can eat that day, or if they have to save what money they have for rent or electricity.
A flat tax system isn’t actually “flat”, not in practice. It’d be more accurate to describe it as “regressive”.
I agree with you, but wouldn’t a flat percentage fix this? Something like everyone pays 20% tax on all earned and unearned income, no exceptions.
No, because you’re charging people the same effective rate regardless of their ability to pay.
Someone in the 0.1% of the 0.1% can afford to give a lot more of their income than someone in the bottom 25%. As such, a flat tax rate would negatively impact lower income taxpayers compared to high-earners.
Hence why I described it as “regressive” in my earlier comment.
I would agree to a flat tax (even as high as 50% or higher if enough provisions are made) if there was a universal basic income to ensure nobody goes without it’s basic necesities met.
Nicely put. I recently bought a new house and was thinking about this same concept. I moved to a area with a high COL, but the markup on houses was much higher than other goods (still high, but not as big).
So when applying for my loan, they use debt to income ratios to determine if you’re eligible. So let’s say you bought a house and the price (yearly) was 50% of your income. If one house was at 500k and the other at 200k, your 50% for other goods is vastly different. My mortgage came out to 3600/month, right about 50%. But that still leaves another 3600 for other goods. If my mortgage was 50% at 1200, then I would have 1200 leftover for other goods, which just doesn’t go nearly as far. But the bank sees these two scenarios as exactly the same.
Water, arguably the most important thing for sustaining life, just falls from the sky.
Hot water, directly from the tap. Showers are clearly underrated.
And we still get charged a fortune for it. Yay capitalism!
I mean you can collect rain water (or build your own bore hole), process it, treat it for storage, keep it, test it to verify that it’s still safe to drink, install and maintain a pumping system to provide pressure, provide adequate documentation and inspection opportunities, provide a traceable record of where it has come from, install a water water treatment system, provide the necessary permits to verify that you’re not draining polluted water into the ocean etc etc…
But I guess if you want someone else to do that for you, some salaries, know how and materials will need to get paid for, yes.
Yeah, that’s not how it works. If it was, there would be no privatised water companies because we’re not all fucking daft. But we are ruled by kleptocrats so, you know. IMF Forces Water Privatization on Poor Countries
I’ve really tried but I’m still failing to understand your comment. You seem to be saying that if what I said was true, private water companies wouldn’t exist, due to the fact that people aren’t stupid. But we are ruled by people who steal and the IMF forces poor countries to private water processing.
Ok, so I get each individual word, but both as sentences and a paragraph I am either to thick to understand what you are saying or your explanation doesn’t make any sense.
If you try to to word it to me like I’m a dumb 4-year old I think we would have a better foundation for debate.
The best sense I can make of your statements is something along these lines: I (me, the author of this here comment) am dumb, because what I’ve described sounds sensible, but the real world is not sensible, and we can see evidence for that because private water companies exist. And they exist because our rulers steal from us.
Have I gotten close? Is that actually what you’re saying?
(If you have patience to reword things for me, please bear in mind that I do not live in the US, as you do, so my context is different to an American context).
I’m not USian either.
There is no sense in allowing a private profit from a natural monopoly with no risk attached (we’re never going to decide we can live without clean water and water is supplied geographically, you don’t get to choose the provider). Demand will always be there and, as a society, we are much better off doing all the work you describe at cost. Lining the pockets of shareholders does not make any sense. But that is exactly what is happening.
I’m in the UK. It is an extremely sore point here: Water firms’ debts since privatisation hit £54bn as Ofwat refuses to impose limits
Ofwat is refusing to limit the soaring debts run up by water companies as research reveals the firms have outstanding borrowing of almost £54bn accrued since privatisation.
Customers are paying on average £80 or 20% of their water bill towards servicing debt and rewarding shareholders, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The scale of debt, or gearing, taken on by the nine main water and sewerage companies in England is raising concerns about their financial stability as interest rates rise.
The level of net debt held by water companies is revealed as Guardian data shows the main water and sewerage firms in England have paid dividends to shareholders of £65.9bn up to 2022.
Note the £54bn in debt they’re charging us 20% to cover (first para) compared to the £65.9bn they’ve doled out to idle shareholders (last para), mostly via tax havens, just to add insult to injury.
And the sewage they are spilling into our waterways because they have not invested in infrastructure. Why would they when they can hand the money to shareholders and rely on the govt not to make them meet even the most minimal of standards?
People are not stupid. There are overwhelming majorities in the UK for nationalising water (and rail, mail, energy, all the stuff that it makes no sense to privatise). But democracy does not mean shit when there’s profit to be extracted. And the profiteers do their very best to make us stupid by insisting there is no other way and wearing everyone down until they believe it. Which is easy, because they own all the media so even if we don’t entirely buy their bullshit, it’s very hard to hear anything else above the din they’re making.
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I am saying that water provided to people is something society should do for it’s citizens and not yet another way for pieces of shit to commoditize living.
No. And you can clearly read well enough to know perfectly well that is not what I am saying. Pretending to be obtuse is such a bizarre tactic, why do you do it?
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We had a bad algae bloom affect our water supply making it undrinkable a few years ago and it really was a wakeup call that we take it for granted. We couldn’t just turn on the tap and pour a cup of water anymore. People snatched up all the drinking water at the grocery stores and some places started price gouging by charging upwards of $50 for a 6-pack of Dasani water bottles. Thankfully it only lasted a week or two, but we keep drinking water stored in the garage now.
Having money means you automatically get to have more money - ie interest, rent, investments.
Why is that crazy? If I loan the bank money and they make money on my loan I should get paid for it.
How does the bank make money from your money?
If I leave a pile of money in my closet, it doesn’t grow like mold.
Exactly. And that’s why banks pay you to give it to them instead.
Banks provide a valuable function to society that works on two sides:
- There’s a group of people who want to keep their money safe
- There’s a group of people that need a loan to get started in a business that will then make money and improve society
The bank takes all the money that has been deposited and makes the loan, charging interest. It then pays the depositors (less) interest to incentivise them to put money in the bank (instead of under the mattress).
In order for society to advance and grow you need a source of finance to get things off the ground. Anything from small businesses to massive infrastructure projects. Banks help facilitate that.
Banks use your money to invest. They only have to have a small percentage of their holdings in cash on hand so they can invest, make money, and pay you interest.
Your money isn’t just sitting in a vault at your local Bank of America branch.
Society. As much as laws and taxes and all the various things suck, it is still better than the alternative.
Not trying to quibble or be pedantic, but I see it as a complex subject. Laws & taxes are extremely recent practices, while societies were probably around long before modern man came along, ~300kya.
I would also think some of those societies functioned nicely indeed, and were arguably an improvement over what we have now.
Try handling any society > 1000 people without any laws or taxes.
i’m pretty sure a shared tradition and morality handled most of what we might call ‘law.’ as for taxes, that’s something that works with lucre. the vast majority of human history did not seem to function with lucre.
as for a threshold of 1000 individuals, i would tend to think most societies splintered in to smaller ones the larger they grew, as is natural.
a lot of that is speculative of course, but generally seems supported by the history and clues we do have. meanwhile, what i know for sure is that this mega-society is headed for a massive collapse, and is certainly not self-sustaining, nor at equilibrium with nature. cheers.
Even with all the scaling issue that having larger societies come with, I don’t see how modern technology would be doable without it. Try running a chip fabrication plant using a highly distributed workforce.
Well, we’re way, way over the overpopulation limit, with too much environmental destruction in our wake, so I guess it’s all pretty academic at this point.
Also, I certainly don’t find that a high-tech, capitalistic civilisation is required to maintain a society with high happiness & quality of life. We already know due to multiple encounters with existing primitive peoples around the world that people can be perfectly happy, content and occupied with far more primitive tech, without money.
That said, primitive societies can also be quite violent, stressful affairs, too.
Everything.
Like, I’m talking to you now from the back bedroom of a random house in a small isolated town in the north east of England, and you could be anywhere. Travelling on a train is crazy fast. There are SO MANY leaves on that tree. Dogs are the best and there’s no way humanity deserves them. Isn’t it cool that we invented bread? My travel mug can keep hot tea at an acceptable drinking temperature for hours. Hugs are amazing. Windows are insane.
Sometimes I have to take motion sickness pills and they make me a bit loopy to the point where I start to really notice things around me, haha.
There’s a Pratchett quote that goes something like,
“In a universe so full of wonders, it’s a marvel that humans invented boredom.”
Your post reminded me of that.
As a lifelong Pratchett fan I do think he teaches a lot of good lessons! They’re just slipped in among the endless punes so’s you don’t always notice.
GNU Sir Pterry.
Oh yes. Me too. GNU indeed.
That at any given moment you can just call someone in completely different part of the world and have a voice (or even video) conversation like there were just next to you. Imagine explainig this to people in middle ages.
It’s basically like all the technological progress since the The Jetsons and Star Trek aired has been focused in one place. We still drive normal cars made out of normal metal and plastic to normal (or actually inferior) jobs until we die at a normal age, but it’s free to view and manipulate any piece of knowledge instantaneously and in a wide variety of public places that have open wifi.
Certainly true. My point was that right now you and I, are using an electronic computing machine that is able to compute from billions to tens of billions instructions per second. In addition (if it was too weak for you), it also has another computing chip dedicated for parallel computing that is able to run TRILLIONS of parallel instructions per second (a.k.a. the GPU).
This is probably one reason why I like programming.
I’m working on an FPGA project right now, fear me. /s
It’s always fun when you code something to tackle a hard abstract problem with brute force and you can listen to all your fans spinning up. The first time I did it I did feel like a god.
That some people can have a fleet or private planes and billion-dollar yachts while a major part of the population struggles to get enough food and has very limited access to medical care. Any sane society needs to have a minimal standard of life and needs to shift wealth (i.e. tax) as necessary to achieve it.
That interacting with the smallest parts of our universe changes them from behaving like continuous waves to discrete objects.
It was weird enough a century ago when it was first figured out, along with all the associated weirdness like information erasure reverting behavior back to behaving like a wave.
But now we are regularly building procedurally generated worlds where continuous seed functions deterministically placing world geometry convert to discrete voxels when interacted with in order to track state changes.
TL;DR: The building blocks of our universe behave much like how we currently build randomly generated virtual worlds where free agents can interact with them. It’s wild this isn’t being discussed more than it is.
Is there anyway you could clarify this for someone who is not knowledgeable about coding? My understanding is that procedurally generated worlds have a seed, which is a specific string of characters that will generate the same world each time when fed into the procedural algorithm.
continuous seed functions deterministically placing world geometry convert to discrete voxels when interacted with in order to track state changes.
This is the part I don’t understand.
So yes, you are correct about the seed aspect, but what I’m talking about is the function the seed is fed into.
Those functions are generally continuous. For example, a mountain in Minecraft as a non-blocky mathematical curve.
These continuous curves are then converted into voxels (volumetric pixels) like Minecraft’s blocks. Then if you interact with them, it records the difference between what the function would generate normally and the changes. This saves on memory as it only records the interactions.
Given the seed function is deterministic, the same coordinates of space and time in the world will result in the same world geometry. Then you just layer on the discrete changes from free agents and you have the appearance of a fully interactive world.
Put another way, on the debate about free will, the details in how our universe behaves is exactly how you would design a world where you had free agents. If you were designing a world without free will, you wouldn’t need to convert to discrete units at the point of interactions, as the interactions would also be deterministic and could be calculated by the seed function, even to the point of continuous fidelity (i.e. no blocks/particles, just waves).
Then if you interact with them, it records the difference between what the function would generate normally and the changes. This saves on memory as it only records the interactions.
I WISH that’s how minecraft did it! But minecraft specifically does not do this. Once the chunks are generated, they are stored on disk as full voxels, from bedrock to sky. When minecraft version/generator function changes, you can see the transition line between old and new chunks (used to be abrupt, now smoothed a bit). Large worlds take up gigabytes, or even terabytes of space, even if most of it is wild terrain.
Yeah, I was simplifying the description a bit from the actual technical underpinnings of Minecraft specifically.
Also, yes, it’s how Minecraft arguably should have been doing it, while versioning the seed function to ensure backwards compatibility with old worlds.
I disagree with the rest of your thesis too. You are saying that in principle, the state and dynamics of the world could be described by a generator function, such that you input (x,y,z,t) to it and it returns what is happening in that place at that time without needing to reference or calculate the rest of the world. Or it would, IF NOT for the free will. Like how if I asked you “what is the millionth Fibonacci number” you could use the Fibonacci formula to simply calculate the millionth number without needing to do a million intermediate additions.
But what if I asked you “what is the millionth SHA256 hash of ‘’”? The hash function is perfectly deterministic, there is no quantum woo involved, and definitely no free will. And yet you would not be able to answer me without calculating every single hash in between. Or for a physical system example - a double pendulum is extremely simple, yet you could not predict its state at time t, even knowing its starting parameters exactly, without calculating its dynamics for all the time in between.
This is my position. Humans are purely physical systems, there is no need to invoke magical outside supernatural influence. Physics does not behave differently, switching between “particle” and “wave”, depending on whether a human is involved. This is a common misconception in popularized science. To determine what choice a human will make, knowing the starting positions of all the particles in the lightcone is sufficient. However you would not in general be able to predict the final configuration of a system without calculating every single intermediate state in between. Free will does exist, but to you making a decision it is impossible to tell whether your momentary mental state is part of the greater physical universe, or embedded in some calculation about that universe.
Except for both Bell’s paradox and the recent Weigner’s friend variation, superdeterminism is one of the three possible ways to resolve the paradoxes, so the notion that free will exists is very much not physically clear at all given the most recent experimental results.
Also, you seem to have misunderstood my point.
I’m saying that tracking non-deterministic state changes is easier in discrete data than continuous data, so if the universe we are in is one that was designed, the design detail of interacted with quanta resolving from continuous to discrete behavior at the point of interaction strongly lends itself to the rejection of superdeterminism.
There’s no advantage to switching from continuous to discrete tracking at the point of interaction if interactions are entirely deterministic, and inconsistency between the two introduces unnecessary and unexpected side effects.
The quantum eraser behavior is pretty clearly in line with a lazy optimization at work, so this conversion is apparently expensive or undesirable enough to need to be optimized away from when possible.
Modeling a continuous universe (in line with general relativity) at macro scales but switching to discrete at micro could be advantageous for both deterministic and non-deterministic simulated systems running on discrete hardware; however, switching from one to the other exclusively around measurements and interactions rather than uniform discretization across the board would be a very bizarre design decision, no?
The general difficulty in calculating certain deterministic functions which you bring up is a non sequitur to my point, unless you can make the case that converting from continuous to discrete at the point of measurement/interaction would be advantageous to an entirely deterministic system where multi-body interactions still seem to occur continuously without issue prior to measurement?
Fantastic explanation. I can totally see the connection you were drawing now.
Convincing me that free will exists might be a bridge too far, but you’ve definitely opened a new avenue of inquiry in my mind.
When utilizing this procedural generation technique in our games, it allows us to use much less memory and processing power because the world can be continuously recreated with relatively little computational complexity. Is that roughly correct?
If so, aside from being a possible argument regarding the existence of free will, this comparison could also be used to support the idea that we live in a simulated reality, a la the Matrix. Gnarly
Is that roughly correct?
Kind of. It has more to do with tracking state interactions by free agents than memory though.
Imagine a continuous curve like a SVG. Now imagine a user nudges it to add a dent to the curve. Keeping track of exactly where the user changes it, particularly as the number of changes adds up, becomes very difficult if you are tracking those changes as an alteration to 0.65434567… to 2.25677743… on it. But if instead you convert it to discrete units, now you are only tracking a change from 1 to 2 rounding to the nearest discrete unit.
A bit like how artists can go vector to pixels easily and make changes to the pixels but getting it back into a vector is a nightmare.
And yes, it can’t directly address whether free will exists, as part of why we design worlds the way we do may be because of the foundational ways our world works.
It’s more to the point of if we are in a simulation it appears to be designed in such a way that free will exists within the simulation.
(Free will as a consequence of the design details necessitates it having been designed as such.)
A bit like how artists can go vector to pixels easily and make changes to the pixels but getting it back into a vector is a nightmare.
This is another great analogy.
Fascinating, compelling ideas that are new to me. I could have trawled reddit for 10,000 years and never found content like this. Thanks for taking the time to explain, you’re a very good communicator.
Thanks!
If you are interested in content like this, I created a community on [email protected] for things like this.
Been a bit busy lately so haven’t posted much there, but I plan to when the opportunity presents.
Awesome, I’m in. Looking forward to more discussion in the future.
These jerks at the top are smart enough to not use their nukes…
Just smart enough…
Produce that are readily available all year round and having some fruits that naturally won’t thrive in your area be available in the grocery.
For me it’s time. That when we look in the night sky we don’t see what’s happening right now, but instead light from many years ago… Dunno, just can’t wrap my head around it
Flying, and to a somewhat lesser degree fast driving. The speeds involved are insane, and when flying so are the surroundings. People actually fall asleep doing this stuff now.
Sewage system and wastewater treatment
