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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Is this not just “the free market of ideas”? Which has the same pitfalls as the free market of money where if consumers are not educated and motivated to prune out bad actors, the market is easily subverted by malicious actors? Relying on people to regulate their information diets is betting on individuals with limited resources and motivation to defend themselves and the collective against concerted, well-resourced, and well-organized efforts to abuse the market of ideas because there is immense money and power to gain from doing so










  • Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad




  • Unethical life pro tip, depending on whether respecting others’ religious traditions is part of your ethics: no mass I’ve ever been to has checked identity before giving out communion. If you’ve got an hour to burn for a free tasteless chip and a sip of wine and backwash, just walk in with mild confidence, mimic others, and mumble along with the prayers, and people will probably just assume you usually go to mass at another time or are traveling. There’s no Eucharist police that’s going to tackle you halfway down the aisle and throw you in an inquisition dungeon because your papers don’t check out




  • Ah yes, the west. The monolithic political entity that definitely involves nobody who is critical of Donald Trump’s ravings. Trump and his sycophants have no place to criticize thanks to his words and actions. Anybody who gets behind his proposed annexations has no place to criticize. But there’s a lot of daylight between those groups and the entirety of “the west”, both within and without the US. If Brazil or South Africa want to criticize Trump’s annexation threats, their involvement in BRICS wouldn’t invalidate that criticism so long as they are also willing to criticize the threatening words and actions of Jinping and Putin. The world is not (yet) composed of 1984-esque political monoliths, and there is no need to voluntarily give up that heterogeneity in order to silence criticism of aggressive and threatening geopolitics