Even if they were to pass such a law which would be political suicide, it would still be up to the courts to say that it doesn't violate the Constitution. For example, a law that says anyone with a net worth of $1B can freely punch anyone in the face whenever they want and have immunity would be a clearly illegal law. That's basically what this bill is. The courts would then need to be made sufficiently corrupt to not strike down such a law as unconstitutional.
Unconstitutional doesn't mean much when it's being decided by a group of unaccountable people that weren't elected through democratic means. If SCOTUS says something is legal, it's legal. That's how the system is setup, nothing else really matters. They'll justify their decisions however they want but the material ends are the only things that matter.
SCOTUS has ruled many terrible things over the course of our nation's history (upheld slavery, said slaves weren't people, equated money with speech, decided a presidential election while denying a recount, etc). Expecting them to somehow be better is a foolish task.
It's an institution that needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, where at minimum SCOTUS appointments should be elected by a national vote rather than letting an extreme minority decide (100 senators versus ~340,000,000 people).
Well the point of capitalism (going back to Adam Smith) is that the invisible hand converts locally selfish behavior to globally good outcomes. The argument is whether or not that emerges. So if your implication was that human trait was selfishness, yes, that is quite the point of capitalism.
It's okay to have two conflicting thoughts about something and both be true at the same time. AI is awesome but at the same time is promising to do evil in the future. Why? Facebook has done a lot of good for the world, like React for instance, but also done a lot of evil as well. Billionaires have initiated the development of some amazing products and services, but at the same time they're spending their money building bunkers so they can survive an end of the world scenario that they're largely responsible for, rather than using it to mitigate some of the evil that they unleashed. Why are they doing that? I don't know. It doesn't seem necessary to me.
Yeah. A think there are a lot of tech enthusiasts like myself that find it amazing from a tinkering and curiosity standpoint, but terrifying from a power and those-who-wield-it standpoint.
Bingo. The guy has a lot of things right, but I was floored when I read "progressive consumption tax" coming from an otherwise well written essay. Consumption taxes are regressive, and no amount of progressive lip stick will make them redistribute sufficiently to achieve the effect he wants.
I would say that any tax reform that fails to reduce asset concentration will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. Let Bezos have his newspaper, if that's all he owns. Let him game the system to evade income tax. Fine. The problem is when a very small group of people own all the newspapers plus their original business empires plus their privately owned social media companies, plus their funded PACs, their psyops, etc.
All assets must be taxed directly to such an extent that concentrated assets are redistributed naturally through market forces. Tax wealth, not work.
How do we even know they're being honest? They've been lying about everything for so long, and now we're just suddenly gonna believe they're being honest only when it pertains to Venezuela? Why?
If they're lying... that's an awfully strange choice of lies. It makes them look rather thuggish. Usually you pick a lie that would make you look better, right?
The administration doesn't care about whether their motives appear palatable or not. Every decision is based on an ever increasing cascade of consequences they can dam up and then release on other people so said administration can go do something else during the cleanup. Aside from one person who's a massive narcissist they don't give a damn about how they're perceived. They only cared when other people had the authority to grand them authority, but now that they are the authority they'll never give it away. And when you don't have to worry about losing your authority you don't have to care about what people think of you. This is why the weakest monarchs were the ones with debts, and the strongest ones were those with centralized militaries.
I have a file like this, several years long, but parsed with YAML so that each day is clearly separated from the next, and for list parsing, and for dictionary parsing so each project I work on is associated with a YAML dictionary key. I can go back in time and easily find notes related to specific projects or specific dates.
I chuckled when I read that, when over-16 is considered elderly.
What will we do when we no longer have the views of 14 year olds at our fingertips? Well, hopefully they will write their views down on notepaper, and in two years we'll hear all about it.
It's a personal decision. I haven't gotten a diagnosis because I've been able to hold a job for many years, and I'm married, so I'm mostly fine. But I have spent my life avoiding most human contact, precisely because I know I'm incompatible with them, and people often want to know why I never leave the house.
I don't think there is any treatment. I think it's just a set of skills that you learn in case you want to try to pursue activities that most neurotypicals take for granted. It seems like a lot of work to me, and maybe it would be easier to just let things be, as you're saying.
I know what my limitations are and I can observe others doing the things that I can't do, including my own wife, and I imagine what life would be like if I could do those things too. But it mainly boils down to having FOMO, and thinking about how much work you want to go through in order to be able to do some of the things that you're having FOMO about.
Thanks for that insight. I previously had only a vague notion of why disorder is used. One of the main reasons I don't want to have an official diagnosis is because the word disorder has such a negative connotation. I really don't want any disorders, so if I just ignore it, try not to think about it, maybe it will go away, and then I won't have a disorder.
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