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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • They only need to throw one or two counties - Fulton or Dekalb - into chaos, and they’ve got the groundwork laid. After 2020, the legislature voted themselves the power to take over county boards of elections and immediately started investigations to show that Fulton’s board were incompetent. The state board now lets and random county official contest certification, more or less guaranteeing chaos and calls for the legislature to take over. Throw out Fulton County, and Georgia goes back to solid red.




  • University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

    Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.




  • Tax on hoarded wealth is pressure to make that wealth do something productive. If you can’t get enough return on your invested millions to pay the tax, then you will slowly lose that wealth. Property tax works similarly for farmers and landlords.

    The ultra wealthy are exactly the people who should be making big, bold, high-risk bets with their money, because they’ll be just fine if they lose a few million. Yet these are the same people who can live a comfortable, even lavish life off the lowest risk, lowest return investments, like government bonds. The rich say social safety nets discourage poor people from working, and I say that tax-free capital discourage it from working.

    Also, very important to remember that wealth tax proposals generally target only wealth over a very high threshold. US proposals have been $10-50M, which seems pretty equivalent to the Spanish implementation.







  • The one time Jesus went HAM, chasing religious leaders around their temple with a whip, and whose temple was it? Zeus? Bacchus? Any of those graven-image, many-gods cults? No - he went after his own Father’s priests for being money-grubbing hypocrites.

    I’m guessing that story doesn’t come up often at CPAC or prayer breakfasts.


  • Given most governments’ history of violence against unions and repressing union action in the interest of civil order, I’d rather union organizers have more separation from government. Even at times the administration in power is relatively union-friendly, a different administration always takes over.

    That said, it would be nice if the government itself could champion better conditions for workers. Government is about the only power to rival the corporations.





  • The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.

    But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.