It has gotten to the point where I now almost exclusively associate the use of emojis outside of social chat with LLM output. They are on the same level as all the "useful comments" added to my code: trash that the prompter was too lazy to remove.
Hard disagree. Compared to the OECD average, we collect almost double in personal tax revenue as a proportion of total tax revenue. What's more, historically personal tax revenue as a % of GDP stays roughly the same - regardless of active tax rates.
Where we fall dreadfully short compared to other countries is corporate tax revenue. In 2021, corporate income tax revenue in the U.S. was 1.6% of GDP, compared to the OECD average of 3.2%
It's messed up from first principles - hard work should be valued as a society over investment gains, and reflected at the individual level in take home income. Obtuse measures and comparative aggregates are irrelevant.
“Should be” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I have heard reasonable arguments either way - but it misses the point: whether the personal tax rate was all-time high or an all-time low, personal tax revenue stays roughly the same historically. In other words it’s a trap - raising the rate might make you feel better, but if history is any indicator it won’t change anything for everyday citizens.
We already have Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and have since March 2018. These new tariffs exclude steel (since we tariff it already).
The argument is that increasing government revenue doesn't automatically mean We the People benefit; it usually means more pork and other ways of funneling money to benefit the people with the power to funnel it.
> taxation and wealth redistribution remain an effective way to bolster a societies resilience
Tangentially:
It’s wild how inconsistent the public and political reactions are to different ways of getting revenue. Take this common pattern:
When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often: "That’s only 0.01% of the federal budget. It’s nothing!"
But when someone proposes a tax on billionaires that would over time raise a similar amount suddenly the reaction flips: "We’ll solve inequality! Fund healthcare!"
This contradiction is everywhere. How can $20 billion in government savings be "nothing," while $20 billion in new tax revenue is "transformational"? It's the same money.
>When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often
Did DOGE actually identify significant levels of any of this or is it simply labeled that for the expedited purpose of shrinking the federal government's effectiveness by any means possible?
They've been far less than transparent with the data that supports their findings and have been called out numerous times for misrepresentation[0][1][2][3] and lack of transparency which took a lawsuit to at least partially recitify[4]
I don't know who these people are that you're talking about, who only propose taxes on billionaires and not the rest of the upper class, or who have compared those two numbers and seen they are different. I would imagine you're talking about two different groups with different figures.
Regardless, "taxing the rich" is not one mediocre policy, but several interdependent policies. It's not just picking the 5 richest people in the world and taking their money. The transformation doesn't come from redistributing $20 billion (wherever that figure is from) but encouraging executives to reinvest into their company instead of trying to suck as much cash out as possible.
Bobby Kotick making $155 million a year while Activison lays off hundreds of employees is insane. What on God's earth could you possibly need more than $20 million a year for? That is not right no matter you slice it. That money needs to be aggressively taxed so it is instead used to keep people employed at a much lower tax rate, not in the hopes that the government can use it for spending.
I don't think anyone would scoff and the discovery and elimination of waste or fraud. I think the vibe you're describing is doubt that these supposed billions in waste/fraud/abuse live up to the hype.
Surely there's plenty of waste in federal spending but I suspect the vast majority is not going to be blatant and easy to identify
NPR did in their February article about DOGE; their story is ostensibly that out of everything claimed, NPR could verify “only” $2B in cuts which they present as meaningless:
> NPR's analysis found that, of its verifiable work completed so far, DOGE has cut just $2 billion in spending — less than three hundredths of a percent of last fiscal year's federal spending.
> "Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way," Riedl said. "It's great that he saved $2 on gas, but I think his wife may be more concerned about the $250,000 car."
> they are just using a "normal" BLE address and then reverse-engineering a key from that.
It's really clever - the BLE spec limits message size, so Apple uses the BLE address as part of the message (the first part of the public key).
But since the public address of a BLE chip has 24 bits of "Company ID" (similar to MAC addresses I guess?), and the registry records are public, they were able to precompute a bunch of public/private keypairs.
Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected.
If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation.
In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
> In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.
Sounds like it's an 802.11 monitor mode packet sniffer, recording probe requests (which have a MAC address associated with them). Connecting to the internet is probably just to hook up to their cloud service.
Defeatable by airplane mode/wifi off/phone off, sure.
As you note, it would be defeatable by putting your phone into airplane mode. However, if you're having a party with 30 people, I doubt you'll be able to get a majority of them to turn off their phones. If the owner gets ping'd if there are more than 10 people, I think it'd be hard to get 20 out of 30 people to turn off their phones before entering the party. Even if they turn it off after arriving, the box might have already registered that the device was there. I think enough people would think "what's the harm" or "I don't want to miss texts from people" that it would be hard to get people to comply with turning off their phones.
Phone off maybe. Android still uses Wifi when Wifi is turned off, as part of it's location tracking service. I loathe it. Btw if you toggle location off enough times, Android will eventually stop nagging you about it.
Let me use my device the way I want you f--- creeps!
Yeah, you can turn off the setting that makes it so turning wifi off actually does that instead of leaving it on but telling you and your apps that it's off.
I could live with that, but what really chafes my bits is how your apps can't get so much as an NMEA string without you turning the creepy tracking telemetry that pipes data on all the SSIDs and Bluetooth beacons around you back to the mothership back on. And having Location turned off breaks many apps for no good reason.
