yes_this_time
This person was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking fentynal and meth. These are awful drugs and they are putting lives at serious risk. Plus digging tunnels in parks is... just too much.
The conditions you describe do sound awful.
I think defending a drug dealer digging tunnels in parks probably causes harm to the support of homeless. It's just too much.
Unless I'm misunderstanding and the wrong article was linked?
That is interesting. I wonder what the 25-29 cohort would look like (thinking of the flat growth top left).
In general should a gap be expected given the wider opportunity for men in trades?
Lower population in of itself is a good thing.
It's the change that is disruptive and will cause suffering in ways that are unique to the suffering caused by over population.
As population growth slows, the younger generation needs to support more elderly. Which means we need some combination of:
Working population being more productive. Population making do with less.
However you approach it, there will be segments of the population that are very unhappy.
A sales tax as a general term on goods that have negative externalities. That produce pollution, have negative health impacts, use public infrastructure etc.. whole foods, homes at minimum should be exempt. I agree that the poor shouldn't bear the brunt of tax policy changes.
Yes tarrifs getting passed to the consumer is completely the point, to normalize for asymmetrical human rights across the globe. Fair trade, not free trade. Not isolationist either. An elegant way to implement would be based on a democracy index.
The aluminum example is a good one. The consumer in this case is the company importing aluminum. They can buy from an authoritarian country at a 2x tarrif (or whatever), or a democratic country with no tarrif.
But... more of a thought experiment, I think that would be the way from a humanist perspective. But the geopolitics are very challenging.
On progressive taxes: my apologies, i wasn't very clear. Yes I'm familiar with how it works, I just meant raise the bottom tax bracket. EG: first 30k is not taxed.
On economic systems: there are negative trade offs with scale, central planning, vertical integration. Less diverse ideas, can be slower. There are still middlemen just structured differently.
I'm not against publicly owned companies though, they should tend towards infrastructure and natural monopolies (rail, telecom, probably some tech...)
I disagree that it would be easier/more efficient to break up companies than to tax them as they approach that state of need. But I'm not against the idea.
Generally tarrifs over income taxes makes sense in some ways, I don't expect him to understand what he saying or implement changes the right way, and there are geopolitical challenges.
If you think of taxes as friction or a decinsentive...
We should move away from income taxes. Consider a progressive income tax system, where the first 15k is not taxed, and the next 15k is taxed at a rate of 10%. Start here. Why are we taxing income at these levels?
Sales tax on goods makes sense. As it covers externalities.
Sales tax on services doesn't make sense. Why are we taxing exchanges of labour? This impacts productivity.
Trade is good when it's taking advantage of geographic advantages in a healthy way: I will trade you maple syrup for lemons. But not when a developed country is just exporting their exploitation: I have health, labour, environmental rules and you don't let's trade... A tarrif to equalize here makes sense.
Lastly developed economies should tax corporations on revenue (not income), this makes sense once they get to a certain size or share of the market. At the point where they are no longer adding value and instead just using size to hold market position through uncompetitive practices.
I did a quick search and couldn't find an answer.
I wonder if part of the disconnect is that they are using just a general "dwelling" in CPI. As opposed to price per square foot. That is, is dwelling size shrinking, while costs are growing, this could cause housing costs to be understated in CPI
The library is appealing to me because:
Precedence: pre internet I could connect to the library over a landlines and access the library and community news.
Expertise: not necessarily deep tech expertise, but with information retrieval, curation, education.
Community access: libraries are a municipal service with brick and mortar locations, and are heavily involved with community/public engagement.
For clarity, on the fediverse instance aspect. I was thinking more read only, with users being more official organizations with a barrier of entry vs. The general public. I personally wouldn't want libraries to be moderating public discourse - this should be arms reach. And wouldn't want them worrying about liability.
Public information (like safety bulletins for example) shouldn't exclusively be sitting on a for profit ad platform, it's bizarre.
Libraries should evolve to play a larger role in the internet, theyve been trying to reinvent themselves and i think this best aligns with their spiritual purpose. Some ideas:
Caretakers of digital archives.
Caretakers of relevant open source projects.
Could I get a free domain with my library card?
Could I get free api access to mapping or other localized data?
Should libraries host local fediverse instances for civic users? (think police, firefighter alert, other community related feeds)
Ah, I deleted because I wasn't familiar with the community. I just said OVH looked nice, and that a lot AWS features are just things you can do yourself but pricier.
I was looking at OVH a couple of weeks ago.
If I was a provider outside the big 3, I may consider a strategy that focused on great documenation/guides/templates to enable users to spool up common services with just the hardware service on my platform.