FredPret

You then still have the issue of standardized advertising prices.

Right now, a company can say they sell gadget X for $999, which would not be possible if they had to work out item taxes.

The other possibility is that they now have to mark X up to take into account the most pessimistic possible tax rate and advertise the marked-up rate.

That would centralize power to the larger taxing authority.

Right now, there's a huge number of elected people in the US who wield real local power through these taxes and other rules that they can make.

It's a headache but we live in the computer age and we can automate administrative things like tax calculation at checkout; we should be using systems to aid decentralization and democratization instead of the opposite.

The US has too many tax permutations for this to be practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in some or other jurisdiction.

There's a small industry that specializes in knowing what the sales tax for a particular transaction should be at the moment it goes through.

Until we mass-scan people’s brains, there will never be reliable data on this. Facebook-tier research and anecdote is all we’ll ever have on happiness.

When “the larger consensus” is built on nothing but bullshit soft science coming out of the hard-left humanities departments and old Soviet propaganda that’s still echoing in people’s minds today, I’m just going to ignore it and form my own impression.

Not even Erlang can beat Gauss

> https://xkcd.com/224/

> “My God, it’s full of ‘cars’”

Classic

> “Europeans… so much happier than… Americans”

Citation needed, and not to a Facebook Quiz-tier “how happy are you on a scale of ten” questionnaire.

My experience is obviously anecdotal, but it is quite varied, and the exact opposite.

I would add exercise and sunshine.

But yeah, our ancestors lived in constant danger of getting eaten by sabre tooth tigers, freezing in the snow, catching maalria, and, in general, watching terrible things happen to their tribe.

They had no therapy, no supplements, no self help section on the cave wall art.

They were forced into a continual outward focus with no time for navel-gazing.

They carried on through all exigencies, and succeeded mightily.

I have learnt to love and embrace the BEAM.

Wikipedia says "Originally BEAM was short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, named after Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman, who wrote the original version, but the name may also be referred to as Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine, after Björn Gustavsson, who wrote and maintains the current version."

Whether the B is for Bogdan or Bjorn, there's something really fun and Space Quest-y about it.

This is also the argument against overregulation.

A little bit can be very good, a lot can strangle everyone but the biggest players

That I can agree with.

But there’s a lot of daylight between that and fining newspapers with extra taxes because the regime considers their opinions verboten.

> "You may have noticed that the traceroute progressively loads in lines above the bottom line. Web pages can only load forward. Since I didn’t want to use any JavaScript, I did the hackiest thing possible: every time I update the traceroute display, I embed a CSS block that hides the previous iteration! Since browsers render CSS as the page is loading, this made it look like the traceroute was being edited over time."

Love this

After the great success of centrally-planned economies over the last century, now comes the next thing they'll try:

Centrally planned information environments!

It's sure to work great.

- "I'm from the government and I'm here to tell you what's Good and True."

- "Do you have a loicense for that opinion?"

Red tape spilling into society kan be more damaging than oil spilling into the ocean.

Almost any problem is better than that solution

Awesome - are you on an Android?

I tried to do something similar on my iPhone, but couldn't get a reliable (or any) way to get an rsync script running.

I ended up with pen and paper though, which is best for me all things considered.

But the multi-pod strategy means you can give the machine soap to use in various cycles. Put some in the little flap, and some just in with the dishes.

I'm not sure if my machine even has a hardness marking, but when I used liquid dishwasher soap, I simply filled up the compartment every time.

As to the cost, yes it's 3X, but if you're reading this and you have a Costco membership, it's still a rounding error.

Pods just make life simpler and cleaner (no messy powders and gunky liquids in the soap cabinet), which is why I even have a dishwasher in the first place.

I applaud this man's commitment to dishwashers.

But you can buy a large box of generic and very cheap no-bullshit pods at Costco, and simply put two or even three of them in a load.

If you're going the multi-pod route, you can put one in the dispenser and one or more right in with the dishes.

1800x turbo?

What happens if you fast-forward a whole lot, any easter eggs?

I thought this would be an article about how ozone is heavier than oxygen and the molecules move slower or something.

I found that surprising, but not as surprising as suddenly reading about Rust!

I always thought that instead of learning to meditate in the snow and brave the cold, or learning to be zen despite a punishing heatwave, is helpful but still greatly inferior to inventing fur jackets, insulation, heating, and air conditioning.

One needs mental toughness. However it's better to solve problems for good and then have a higher technology base for the next generation to build on.

When I get dividends from US stocks, I pay a US witholding tax before the cash lands in my Canadian account

This is a good counterpoint, but forcing companies’ hand with investment will at best distort the economy, and slow it down long term.

Companies are single-purpose wealth creation machines, let them find their optimal investment mix. Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.

Depends on what it gets spent on - capital purchases dont reduce net income. You can write it off, but there are rules limiting how much.

So you could have a situation where you have $1m in profit, and you want to buy a $1m machine, but the machine goes on your balance sheet and not your income statement, so your books still show $1m in profit, even though you now have no cash. And now you still have to pay tax on the $1m.

Now, in the next year, the rules allow you to write off say $200k of that machine, reducing your profit by that much. Eventually, you get to write off much / all of the machine.

But cash is king, and on a cash basis, the tax man is doing very much better than the business in this scenario.

Better to dispense with all the accounting intrigues, tax corporations at 0%, and just tax dividends, buybacks, and salaries.

It also takes money away from the corporation, when they should be doing one of these:

- spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest of the economy

- spend their profits to try and grow, and succeed; not only spreading capital but creating new wealth that will eventually work its way around to the shareholders

- return it to shareholders, where it gets taxed

Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!").

Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.

[0] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-an...

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/primers/primer-not-all-taxe...

Criticizing individuals because they're part of a bloodline / ethnicity is:

- the exact opposite of criticizing individuals; you're really just going after the group

- the definition of prejudice

- the foundation of most (all?) giant human catastrophes like the Holocaust, the various communist land reforms, the crusades, and all sorts of horrible events

I'm a conservative, but I have to say this idea of not being prejudiced is really something great that liberalism brought to the table over the past 100-200 years. I'm gobsmacked to see people rejecting this idea.

To your credit, your original comment didn't mention all Jews, just made heavy allusions to stereotypes about them. But now you've removed all possible doubt about what you meant.

Criticize individuals all you want, but don't do it by "bloodline", ethnicity, or whether they're a banker or not. Agency lies with the individual.

You should make it an app, I would pay for it

Standard antisemitic trope

Love this.

Especially the opening line:

"“What comes with the milk, leaves with the soul” — Russian proverb."

I love a good proverb. This one goes hard.