fafferlicious

So your answer is “Trust me, bro. We don’t need to study this. It’s obvious bro everyone knows or. Just don’t do it. Don’t raise wages bro it’s bad. I promise. Everyone already knows this. There’s no research for it But we know it’s true. Trust me.”

I just want to make sure I understand your logic correctly.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

95 is not that high For 20 years it was over 90

And not one person that has complained about the percentile has asked about what the top bracket would be.

Are you really going to argue that a 95% tax rate on every $1 over $1,000,000 is not comparable to a 95% income tax when fully contextualized to being their one million and first dollar made in a year?

Find me a place where raising the minimum wage devastated a local economy. I legitimately can’t find one so I’m hoping you can help me learn. Here’s a write up about how Walmart devastated local economies though.

Honestly? The fact that we can even entertain, in America, that a state would have a median income of 25k shows truly just how fucked we are.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

95 is not that high For 20 years it was over 90

Now I know I hear people in the back “but it was world war time!” True. True.

How long have we been at war? Since Vietnam? How many fucking desert storms have we had? Cold war?

And not one person that has complained about the percentile has asked about what the top bracket would be.

Are you really going to argue that a 95% tax rate on every $1 over $1,000,000 is excessive or “wild”? Or does it actually represent the marginal utility of income?

Because the first 80k someone makes is waayyyyyyyyyyy more impactful than the next 80k. One makes sure you don’t die of starvation and exposure. The other is all pleasure.

I like your counterpoint about the wealth tax being more about monopolistic power. Hadn’t considered that angle. I do believe that the government must be larger than the entities it governs. If we ever want a smaller, more agile government, we need to shrink what it’s supposed to govern.

Here is why I argue for a wealth tax: Most things in life are not simply exponential. They’re logarithmic. At least for biology and natural systems. We need some corrective force that pushes back aggressively against wealth accumulation -regardless of source.

I believe they do think this through. I think your mistake is thinking they want to help the country.

They want to help themselves. They think they’ll be just fine no matter the damage, because they have all the power and control so they can pilfer all the resources until they’re “secure.”

And they’re right.

No one is stopping them.

No one.

95 % upper limit for income tax.

Don’t argue against things I didn’t say.

You don’t see an exodus of homeowners for their property tax.

Why is that? Hmmm? Is it the case that rich people wanna be where money is? And nice services are? Where the culture is? Where the art is? Where their family is? Their friends? Their children’s life?

Show me a study that unequivocally shows that raising taxes leads to mass capital flight. I haven’t seen one yet. At best, its mixed.

They say this about minimum wage “you can’t raise it to $15 business will leave and go under!”

And every fucking time states or cities increase the minimum wage, that doesn’t happen.

Stop fucking carrying water for the rich

They don’t leave. At least, not in the scary mass exodus they always try to imply.

So nothing?

We truly are creatures of habit and prefer something known. Also, people just don’t have the fucking time to know anything but passively absorbing it. We’ve collectively gone from requiring 40 hours of work to support a whole family, to now needing 80, as a minimum, for most families.

Who the fuck has time to research candidates policies? Lmao Susie needs to be at soccer practice 5 minutes ago. We’ve allowed ourselves, bit by bit, to have our time stolen because of all the wage theft we’ve allowed by not keeping the minimum wage pegged to inflation automatically. Every year they push on 2% inflation target. And every year they didn’t raise the minimum wage, they stole 2% from us.

It also makes any progress we make for ourselves, so brittle. Before, you could have two part time jobs help support a family for a bit. Now being out of work could mean homelessness.

I’ve got the same jade. It’s nice to be realistic, but knowing that there might actually be solutions some day keeps it from becoming nihilism.

Every fucking year hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans pay a tax on an illiquid asset: the property tax.

Don’t fucking tell me “oh it’s too difficult, there’s too many effects.” Tax. Them.

Progressive tax rate on long term and short term capital gains. 95 % upper limit for income tax. Kneecap their bullshit “buy, borrow, die” cycle.

Get back to the fucking WW2 tax levels, back when we had a middle class, and then we can maybe finally have a balanced budget, at least.

What would shape your opinion more: being bombarded by ads or the candidate showing up at your school to do a town hall and answer questions?

If we make things small enough, where in a typical campaign a candidate can meet their constituents at least once, does being outspent on ads matter as much? Doesn’t it at least make break-through candidates more likely if only because national parties have to spread out their spend?

I mean this honestly, how do we understand what the issues of non voters are? Is there a consistent populace that never votes or is it a variable pool? Has it been shown that non voters care about entirely different issues than voters?

The other commenter is correct, but another way to think or visualize is that any subtraction or division operation can be understood as an addition or multiplication.

X - 5 = X + (-5)

X / 5 = X * (1/5)

You can think of subtraction and division not being distinct or separated from addition and multiplication; instead, they’re just a shortcut notation in mathematics because everyone was tired of having to write extra characters.

Figuratively, at least.

deleted by creator

I can’t reconcile the fact that the entire discussion is about how we can control, based on user age settings at the OS level, the content people can access and you asking me what my proof is that the system is being created for control.

I really don’t know how to respond because it’s self evident, isn’t it? It’s there in the law? Why else add the tag to the user? Like… I just…what? Of course it’s for fucking control. There’s no other reason to have it.

As for a more broad general “the government wants to control”…I just… Look around? DMCA is a prime example. Or read people that are smarter than me about it.

They even say why I’m the message

Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

Now I can hear you already. “But EFF says age verification is the real evil and this isn’t verification! It’s just a text tag any root user can change!”

And that’s where I’m saying it isn’t. Now. But it will be. Who is pushing for this? Do you think they’ll be okay with a giant Linux loophole? Or will they try to close it? Is that not always the typical pattern with laws? Pass it then patch the loopholes.

We’ve gone from “click to prove you’re 18” to “provide a date” to “provide an id” to “make the OS and other apps verify.”

Why should I ever assume that it will stop at a simple plain text annotation? The slippery slope is documented. It’s real.

And I never said it was inherently bad.

It’s the context. It’s the context. It’s the context. It’s the context.

Please engage with me and the arguments i am making - not imagined narrow slices. This isn’t a high school debate where you get points for speed and word count.

Let me restate: In the context of governments actively seeking to restrict access to information on the Internet, I think implementing ANY infrastructure that move towards the government’s ability to achieve their censorship is bad and shouldn’t be done.

I’m not saying there’s no benefit to adding a plain text date field to user information. I’m not saying it’s the end of the world now. I’m not saying it’s verification.

I’m saying use this as a point to stand up and fight and say “NO, You have no authority over the information I can access. And we should not give in because ‘for the children is a lie’ and they’re not actually trying to protect children while our government is RUN BY LITERAL CHILD FUCKERS.”

Is there a government push to verify my name and email before I can access content or is there a government push to have age verification be at the OS level? Could maybe that be a meaningful differentiator that makes “lul r u still using ur real name? Fucking Idiot” response not relevant?

I understand the technical differences and that we can just put a bullshit date format passing value there. I’m not fucking stupid.

My objection is that it is step 0. Before you can have an OS verify to meet government mandated verificaiton, you must create the value store.

My objection is that we’re entertaining putting in the infrastructure that enables actual verification.

Because it will not be enough.

Because they will come back and say “look at this loophole”

“Think of the children” you’ll all say as you agree to give your government authority to determine what information you can or cannot access as “age appropriate” completely ignorant of what you’re handing over.

This would be fine if it was just for you, but you’re trying to give my control over my system and what I can access away from me because you’re too short-sighted to see what comes after volunteer age reporting. And when that still doesn’t save the children, which it won’t, because it is NEVER ABOUT THE FUCKING CHILDREN ITS ALWAYS ABOUT CONTROL, you’ll tell me again that it’s just another little minor infraction. It’s just a little bit more than volunteer reporting.

Afterall, won’t someone please think of the children?!

I can potentially shed some additional insight.

Hear shock proteins are known as chaperones in that they are responsible for chaperoning proteins through the folding process. This process is important because I’m biochemistry (that is the chemistry proteins can do) shape is function. If you can look at the shape of a protein (specifically any site that does chemistry or is responsible for protein protein interactions), you can confidently predict the function of the protein.

Shape is function.

So the heat shock proteins (HSPs), are responsible for chaperoning the shape that dictates function. They derived their name because they were first noticed as being more expressed when you subjected cells to elevated heat ( or a heat shock). Increased temperature can cause proteins to have the wrong shape more easily, so the cells respond by making more chaperones!

The research finds that we get fewer copies of those chaperones once the works were capable of procreating. This suggests that while the observable effects of what we call “aging” can be caused by many things. Aging more generally can be understood as a programmed winding down of our self maintenance machinery.

Of course this is just a lens of viewing it from and may not be a complete picture. But it’s a very useful and productive one.

It’s actually quite simple, aging is likely a response to sexual maturity.

We are giant meat gundams our DNA has built up to pass on our genes. The moment we can do that, all the stem cell and regenerative pathways start turning off because we’ve achieved our purpose.

There’s a lot of people here unable to recognize how important attention span is for deep, meaningful learning.

Way too many people saying “ATTENTION SPANS NOT INTELLIGENCE DUHMASSES” and failing short because they don’t have the attention span to think of implications of decreased attention span.

Long term memory is built on repetition and attention. It is entirely plausible that short form media makes you stupider - by impacting your ability for deep learning

It’s not even strictly what capitalism is about. It’s some stupid bullshit interpretation that came out of the University of Chicago economics department.

Seriously, go look at Adam Smiths wealth of nations. The only mention of the “invisible hand” is so different from what is taught in economics now

… by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

It’s not that we need no regulation. It’s just trying to say that if we set things up correctly, we don’t need to worry about people pursuing SOLELY their own personal gain. Because the market seeks out the “greatest value”, which is not just about money. It’s also the value to society as a whole.

Instead, we got the fucking bullshit from Chicago saying that the only / best way of measuring value is by profit.