tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world

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605

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think, for 'lefties,' the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.

It's schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They're still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.

I'm surprised the rest of the world hasn't tried Russia-like sanctions on Trump. When Russia invaded Ukraine, all the countries got together to target sanctions on specific Russian oligarchs, on the theory they'd undermine political will without hurting uninvolved Russian civilians. So now, I'm imagining embargoes on Ivanka Trump's fashion bullshit, a massive property tax rider on Trump's Scottish golf resort; freezing the assets of Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners.

My thought exactly. OTOH, I feel like the anti-Musk ball only really got rolling in March, and this report can't possibly cover March - it's got to be Dec24-Feb25, so probably just a hint of things to come.

Even if there's a coherent policy goal behind the tariffs, which I doubt, achieving that goal with punitive taxes on undesirable goods means that the greatest burden falls on people with the lowest income. Reaching the same goal with promotional tax incentives means the burden is paid through our normal, slightly progressive tax system and falls more on the wealthy. Tariffs and sales taxes are the worst kind of taxes.

I'm OK with a live filibuster. Being able to "filibuster" a bill by passing a note to the teacher threatening to talk all night does not promote compromise or good lawmaking.

It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn't put on a postcard...how did this happen?

He's not the majority leader any more, and without all the sycophants flattering and distracting him, it turns out that someone has been systematically sabotaging US democracy going back years.

Wonder if there's an opportunity there. Some way to archive one's self-hosted, public-facing content, either as a static VM or, like archive.org, just the static content of URLs. I'm imagining a service one's heirs could contract to crawl the site, save it all somewhere, and take care of permanent maintenance, renewing domains, etc. Ought to be cheap enough to maintain the content; presumably low traffic in most cases. Set up an endowment-type fee structure to pay for perpetual domain reg.

At least my descendants will own all my comments and posts.

If you self-host, how much of that content disappear when your descendants shut down your instance?

I used to host a bunch of academic data, but when I stopped working, there was no institutional support. Turned off the server and it all went away (still Wayback Machine archives). I mean, I don't really care whether my social media presence outlives me, the experience just made me aware that personal pet projects are pretty sensitive to that person.

Your articles seem to say that congress has periodically rearranged and eliminated "Article III courts," recently avoiding the Constitutional crisis of not paying judges of the eliminated courts by posting them elsewhere. But I'm no lawyer, so maybe I'm misinterpreting "In 1891, Congress enacted legislation creating new intermediate appellate courts and eliminating the then-existing federal circuit courts." and "In 1982, Congress enacted legislation abolishing the Article III Court of Claims and U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals"

I mean, he's technically correct: the constitution gives congress the power "to constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court." The only court the US technically has to have is SCOTUS, although it's hard to imagine them hearing every single federal case.

Interestingly, Congress does not have the power to fire or reduce any judge's salary, except by impeachment.

Disapproval is a temporary condition, anyway. Soon enough, it'll be illegal (or at least dangerous) to express disapproval, and Trump's numbers will be right up there with Putin and Kim.

Nevermind including a reporter in the group chat. Can we talk about why these people are using a commercial service to hold classified discussions in the first place? Like, isn't bombing another country SCIF-type stuff? Isn't that stuff subject to the Federal Records Act?

As a long-term non-exerciser, routine and coupling it with a reward was definitely key. I started out just walking, and walking to get lunch was a key motivator. Upgraded to a rowing machine, and it doesn't even feel like a chore to sit on the machine and watch a movie in parts or a show, going on 5 years.

Still have to figure out how to get some strength work in there. Just can't seem to find a system to consistently do a few push ups, pull ups, and stand ups.

For me, the effort of going somewhere to exercise is a big impediment, and I'm self-conscious exercising in front of people. The low barrier to start a daily workout wins, hands down.

Others find camaraderie just having other people involved in the same process, or really enjoy the variety of machines and options of a well-equipped facility.

You have to figure out which type of person you are. The most important thing is just to do something. (Unless you have specific, Jason Momoa-type goals in mind)

Wait, really? You know what Israelis do with pagers, right?

Trouble is defining "The Rich." Like, definitely billionaires, but there's only a thousand of them, and you can do a lot of damage with half that. 1% are people with something around $10-15M, and that doesn't really feel like buy-your-way-out-of-murder money. But even millionaires are probably pretty well insulated from concerns of rent and the price of eggs.

If it were up to me, "Rich" would be somewhere in the 8-figures region, but I'm one of those privileged, 'comfortable,' oldere people.

Traveled to Rome recently (as US citizen). Walked no more than 10 minutes from the gate, was 5th in line to one of a half dozen or so automated camera/scanner customs gates, and cleared customs within 15 minutes of landing.

Returned to the US, walked for 20 minutes through a maze of twisty passages to get to the customs hall, where I stood in line for another 30 minutes to get to one of a half dozen or so checkpoints where an agent scanned my passport, told me to stare at the camera, and eventually, maybe even grudgingly, welcomed me home.

Have you seen egg producer profits lately? It's great for them to have an opportunity to find out exactly how much consumers are willing to pay for their precious eggs. Super cost efficient, for them.

The message was supposedly fine, but you can't have it delivered by someone with brown skin.

Seriously: "the district told the Statesman that it was not the message that was at issue, but rather the hands of different skin tones on the poster."

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/education/article301972094.html