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207
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I was skeptical of your numbers, so I did the math:

    Taking the first article I found newer than 2022, US billionaires have about $6.22 trillion of wealth ± recent stock market changes. UBI of $1000/month is most commonly estimated to cost $4 trillion/year.

    US budget in 2024 was 6.8 trillion, but 1.87 trillion is in social security and income security programs UBI would replace, so the net change would raise the budget by 2.17 trillion to 8.39T. So 8.896 months - more like nine months than eight, but surprisingly close.

    Of course, that assumes all other taxes are wiped out, which nobody has ever proposed. I can't find a number anywhere for total income tax paid by billionaires, so we'll be generous. OMB estimates billionaires pay an average tax rate of only 8.2%. Their wealth increased 2.9 trillion over 7 years, so ignore compounding and call it 414B/yr. And pretend it's all taxed (which it isn't - most isn't considered income). That's 33.9B in income taxes the IRS doesn't collect after wiping out the billionaires. That reduces IRS revenues collected from 5.1T to 5.06T (being generous again with the rounding). That buys us another 7 months of government funding.

    Alternatively, doubling the effective tax rate on the top 1% earning over 3.3M/yr from 26.09% to 52.18% would balance the budget including the new UBI. Get the effective tax rate on billionaires to match and you can start paying off the national debt. All without touching the middle class or even lowering anyone's income below 1.65M/yr.

    Don't get me wrong - taxing billionaires out of existence is certainly a moral imperative - it just isn't necessary to fund UBI.

  • Please don't spread FUD. That memo does NOT claim Signal has been compromised by Russia.

    The actual claim is that Russia has used deceptive e-mail style tactics to trick people into authorizing a malicious "linked devices" request. This is a social engineering vulnerability, not a technical one.

  • Unsecure ≠ Insecure

    Unsecure in this context generally means not in compliance with military and classified security practices and procedures for "securing" information.

    Signal is secure in the sense of being strong end-to-end cryptography.

  • Org Mode.

    I'm generally a vim user, but for job-related task management I set up emacs with evil (too many) years ago. There were vim plugins to reimplement pieces of it, but none of them covered all the functions I would use (that may have changed in the last decade, but I have a working system so it wasn't worth the effort to check). I add tasks, tag priorities, and set recurrences for maintenance tasks. For billable or potentially billable tasks I use the built in clocking.

    I make relevant notes under the tasks as I work on them, keep the finished task until weekly manager meetings, then archive them so they don't clutter my working file but remain searchable if ever needed (which is more often than you might think).

    I add new tasks at the top. Unfinished lower priority tasks get pushed down out of sight over time. When we hit a slow period, I review them and archive anything no longer relevant, then reprioritize and start working through the backlog.

  • Last week, the group challenged the legitimacy of the orders signed by Biden claiming that an “autopen signature” was used across almost “every document” it could find.

    However, a Fox News examination of President Donald Trump’s executive orders during his first and second administrations found “the signatures were also the same.” Twenty-five of Trump's signatures on the Federal Register’s website from across both terms also found signature matched, according to a separate analysis by the Daily Mail.