LetMeEatCake

I'd be surprised if USB-C was a limitation on phone technology even by 2040. The bandwidth and power delivery capacity are way beyond what are needed now. Data transfers from phones are going to increasingly move to wireless in that time frame too, I expect.

The limitation on the viability of USB-C with phones won't be the actual technological viability of the standard with respect to phones. Instead, the problem for USB-C for phones will be if another standard comes out and starts being used by other devices that do need higher bandwidth or power delivery capability. Monitors, storage devices, laptops (etc.) will eventually need more than USB-C can provide, even with future updates to its capacity. When those switch over to something new, that will be when phones (and other devices) will need to consider a new standard too.

In theory it's exceptionally illegal to curtail unionization efforts.

In practice, the law has been whittled away by decades of conservative judiciary decisions and weak department of labor enforcement. This isn't helped at all by the balance of power.

Companies can afford to scare off some degree of workers, especially at the lower end of the salary range. Big businesses can survive shutting down a store or losing business at locations indefinitely. Big businesses can afford expensive lawyers and to indefinitely stay in litigation over union busting efforts.

For workers, it's a completely different proposition. Is Walmart or Home Depot or Starbucks going to want to hire someone that is actively suing another major corporation for anything at all? It's even worse if it's labor rights related, but just suing them in the first place is going to make it a struggle to find employment at a lot of places. That's even pretending they can find & afford lawyers. Or that they can handle the transition period from job A to job B even if it isn't difficult to find job B.

These businesses hold all the cards and they know it. You see similar thinking, though different details, behind Hollywood's decision to just try and wait out the striking writers and actors. They can survive losing billions of dollars in income a year from now with unmade projects; striking workers will struggle to get by with no salary.

Candidates that will the whole party will find exciting are basically a once in a generation event, if that. This generation's such candidate was Obama. Democrats as a party are reliant on far too big of a tent to make this a viable strategy or thought process.

A candidate that I, a far left progressive, would get excited about is a candidate that a lot of center-of-left or moderate voters would find boring. Even within wings of the party there's not going to be lockstep excitement (go back to Dec 2019 and ask Sanders supporters how "excited" they'd be for a Warren candidacy!).

This line of argument is consistently just people pining for candidates that more closely reflect our own ideological views, not a reflection of the reality available to us. There was no such candidate in 2016 or 2020 and won't be for 2024. I'm not going to hold my breath for 2028 either. Maybe by 2032 we might see the next Obama, someone that excites the whole party.

Superdelegates have never decided a democratic primary.

At the end of the day the delegates are fully aware that if they take the nomination away from the candidate that won the most votes that it would utterly destroy the party and they would be surrendering that year's election up and down the ballot. Even in an extreme scenario like e.g. credible accusations of sexual assault coming out, they'd still be reticent to do it and would basically be stuck picking how to lose the election.

And before anyone says it: superdelegate pledges do not sway primary voters in any meaningful numbers. I'd wager >90% of democratic primary voters don't know what the fuck a superdelegate is, and likely only have superficial understanding of the overall process by which a nominee is selected. They're not going to know the superdelegate pledge counts or any of that bullshit. The people that follow politics enough to know that stuff are also overwhelmingly the people that care enough about politics that they're still going to vote for the same person, even if they do not outright know it's bullshit. The audience of voters that could be swayed by those pledges is so vanishingly small as to be borderline imaginary.

Superdelegates have only mattered to give losing candidates a justification they can offer to their supporters to keep running. Clinton tried it in 2008 and Sanders tried it in 2016. Amusingly this makes both of them a bit hypocritical on the subject...

The 2020 primary came down to the not-Sanders wing of the party starting off heavily divided and then consolidating on a single candidate after enough of them were winnowed out by the early states. Biden only survived that long because he ran a frugal campaign and had a strategy on SC that he was going to stick to. Honestly, going in I thought it was a horrible strategy with no chance of success. I was clearly quite wrong.

Also I’m p sure Ko-Fi has a better revenue split with those who use it than Patreon does

This line made me curious so I looked. Best I can find is that Ko-fi charges either 0% or 5% on donations, dependent on the type of donation and the type of account the receiver has with them.

Patreon used to charge 5%, but now has: 5% for grandfathered pro accounts, 5% for lowest tier accounts, 8% for non-grandfathered accounts on a pro plan, and 12% for a higher premium tier.

So yup, Ko-fi has a better split.

Yup! Source I have from 2016 has it even more unbalanced than your numbers. All shipping is 1.7% vs all road transport at 11.9%. Wish I had more recent data but their claim wouldn't be true even if those top ten ships represented the entirety of ocean emissions and was tripled afterwards.

This is a direct result of congress intentionally giving greater funding to the IRS with the explicit goal of increasing revenue by decreasing tax evasion by the wealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

The chances of congress shutting it down comes down to if republicans gain control over government in next year's elections.

You're also making the implicit and incorrect assumption that this assumption of future income is not already the status quo. It is. The IRS already does this with your automatic withholding. It just does it at a higher level than necessary, due to what I mentioned above. Withholding basically assumes that a person will continue to earn whatever their paycheck was in every future payment period (weekly, semimonthly, whatever).

Your assumptions on how this would be dealt with are not realistic. The outlines of how to implement this not only already exist, they are already used and have been used for decades. All the IRS needs to do is glue together its knowledge of your income sources and lower the withholding amount based on being able to predict an individual's income far more accurately.

Data on seasonal income is known too, for the record. Consistent trends in income changes with parts of the year are not a surprise to the government agencies that care about it.

For the majority of people out there, all their income is going to have digital records. A cash only store still deposits money in a bank, after all. For the people that don't... chances are their income without a digital footprint isn't being reported, and is small enough that no one is worried about that in the first place.

If the IRS is being told by a person's work how much they're paid, by their bank how much interest they got, by any Etsy-esque services how much they were paid... then the IRS has every bit of information it needs to get automatic withholding correct.

Right now withholding systems default to taking too much money out, because it's easier for the government to send you money than it is for them to request money from you. It also avoids the headache of most people being hit with surprise IRS bills. The IRS could keep that default, and then as the year goes on it could shift that withholding down until it's laser close. The negative there is that variability is bad for budgeting too, but with some work they could make it start close enough that it shouldn't be all that variable.