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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • If this law is enacted, the Supreme Court will say that states can’t frustrate the operations of federal agents with these sorts of laws. Chief Justice Roberts will write the opinion and compare it to giving states the power to ban bulletproof vests from being worn by federal law enforcement and call it “a step from anarchy”. Clarence Thomas will then write a concurring opinion saying that federal agents acting on orders from the president should actually be immune for any type of civil or criminal liability for any of their actions, lawful or not.

    Then, when a Democratic president takes office the court will walk it back and say “well, actually, there’s this exception, and this exception, and that exception…”




  • And for those who don’t: Plato, a Greek philosopher, was putatively asked by a student while teaching at the Academy what the definition of a man (human) was. Plato responded that a man is a “featherless biped”.

    Diogenes, another Greek philosopher and infamous quick-wit, caught wind of this and thought that was the dumbest thing ever, so he gate-crashed one of Plato’s lectures and pulled out a chicken which had all of its feathers plucked out and said “Behold, a man!”.



  • I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

    For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won’t have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

    A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company’s outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren’t exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really “revenue” for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn’t a problem when “in-kind” meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can’t survive on a diet of stock certificates.

    I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn’t as easy as saying “You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash.” I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.


  • You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.

    (1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

    (2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

    (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

    (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].

    47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230





  • I think you’re overthinking it slightly.

    • French flag represents the language called “French”
    • Spanish flag represents the language called “Spanish”
    • Russian flag represents the language called “Russian”
    • German flag represents the language called “German”
    • Portuguese flag represents the language called “Portuguese”
    • Japanese flag represents the language called “Japanese”
    • Korean flag represents the language called “Korean”
    • Chinese flag represents the language called “Chinese”
    • Italian flag represents the language called “Italian”
    • But somehow, the British flag doesn’t represent a language called “British”, but rather, one called “English”, despite there existing an English flag






  • I donate one euro a month to lemmy.world. It’s not a lot but I’m not rolling in cash and I feel like the service is worth paying something for, even if I can only contribute a nominal amount. But I feel like they should have an option to take an entire year’s worth of donations at once would be more efficient than a monthly withdrawal.

    As it currently stands, a monthly bank transfer of 1 € is taken from my account and I feel like a significant portion of that is going to be taken by bank fees, whereas if they took a single annual transfer of 12 €, they would keep a much larger percentage of the money.


  • If the question is asking about Trump, Orban, Putin, or your other favourite dimwitted world leader, it’s because these people usually don’t actually want to fuck everything up. They want to make their country (or their notion of the groups of people they regard as their country) prosperous and glorious. But they’re just unable to take in the fact that their policies and leadership are actually leading them further away from this goal. It really is just a deadly combination of incompetence and inability to self-criticise.

    In the case of Trump, who is a pre-eminent example of this, he really does think that tariffs will make the US richer. He is a moron, of course, but that’s what he thinks. He doesn’t “know” that tariffs will damage the American economy and America’s international reputation, because he doesn’t grasp the concept at all. Anyone who has observed his thinking for any period of time after he got into politics can observe that it is very feelings-driven and not very fact-based. And a lot of his government’s policy is also ego-driven, which explains why it is seemingly always falling for Russian propaganda and why he wants to be on good terms with Putin. Though Putin is no universal genius either, one thing that he is very good at, as a result of his KGB training, is manipulating others to get what he wants. It certainly does help Putin a lot that Trump is pretty easily manipulated. And as for Trump’s comments about wanting to take over Canada, take over Greenland, take over Panama, &c. &c., most non-US observers describe that as clear evidence of his mental decline. J. J. McCullough, a Canadian political commentator, described it as being “obvious” that Trump is “losing it”.

    And ironically, since Joe Biden’s mental competence was called into question in the last US election, while Biden’s senility manifests mostly in the form of stutters, speech blunders, and random mostly-inert goofiness, Trump’s senility seems to manifest in a desire to take over the world and become God-emperor of Mankind, which is objectively more dangerous for a world leader.