ObjectivityIncarnate

A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense.

It absolutely doesn’t make sense to charge a tax of real/actual money on a value that’s theoretical.

They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.

It’s irrational to assume “cheating the system to grossely [sic] exagerate [sic] the value of their companies” of every entity valued at more than an arbitrary $X.

For example, Costco is a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet it’s famous for how generous it is both to its customers and to its workforce. Its founder left the company a billionaire himself.

we can have them give shares as payment

“The stuff you own is now too valuable, so we get to steal it from you.”

No.

a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences.

Regulation that prevents the anti-competitive etc. behaviors directly, instead of trying to assess a roundabout ‘fine’ based on net worth (which also carries the implicit assumption that any entity that reaches the ‘cap’ does so unethically, which is absolutely not the case—for example, Costco is a company with a famous reputation for being generous to both its customer base and its workforce, and its founder is a billionaire), is the best way to approach this, I think.

And honestly, if we’re at a point where the sources of the regulation are truly “captured”, then we’re also at a point where trying to deal with the above behaviors with a tax is even less likely to succeed. Fixing that ‘capture’ should be the primary focus in that case.

At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.

That’s not really what “zero-sum” means. What you’re describing is the company/entity becoming a net drain on the economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that wealth isn’t zero-sum. Being zero-sum would mean that it’s impossible for the grand total combined wealth among everyone to ever change, and therefore no one’s wealth can ever go up without someone else’s going down, or vice versa.

I don’t know how else it would work.

That’s my point, actually. It doesn’t work in practice. Given that ultimately, it’s third parties that determine the value of things you own that are on the open market, placing hard limits like that would open the door to massive gaming of those systems. It’d also be practically impossible to enforce in any real way, as that would require an actual full audit (net worth figures you see in the media are educated guesses, not enough certainty for the application of law), during which the valuation of the assets in question can be manipulated downward in myriad ways.

The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps.

The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.

The two simply aren’t connected the way you assume they are, because wealth isn’t the zero-sum game you assume it is.

The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have.

Really take a moment to think about this concept. You own a thing that’s valuable to others. If it becomes too valuable (a threshold defined completely arbitrarily, by the way) to others, “society” no longer “permits” you to continue owning it?

In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes.

In other words, the government will literally steal your stuff if the public decides it’s more valuable than the amount the government arbitrarily decided is too much?

the government gets tax money to fund social programs

Extremely wishful thinking. You’re actually more likely to net a loss of tax revenue overall attempting this, as people nearing the cap will rearrange their assets to avoid going over the cap, so no new revenue will be coming in, meanwhile the logistic cost of even determining whether someone is over the cap is certainly going to cost much more taxpayer money than what is brought in (which, again, is most likely to be literally zero or very close to it).

There is a reason that every country that’s previously attempted a policy like this aimed at the wealthiest has either since repealed it, or changed it such that it no longer targets the wealthiest (i.e. a ‘wealth tax’ that the middle class is made to pay as well). I’m interested in learning from their mistakes, not repeating them.

Not sure how well all that would work in practice

That’s for sure.

Adam Carolla used to do a bit called “what can’t Adam complain about” that was essentially this—deliberately making the topic (typically suggested by a fan) something people/he is known to like (e.g. free parking) was the best, imo.

Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes

You don’t understand where the vast majority of the wealthiest’s wealth comes from. There’s no “income” or “gift” at that level, it’s just the fact that they own things that are becoming more valuable over time. The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.

Speaking of value: net worth is just a valuation, a price tag. It’s the market saying “I would pay you $X for a share of this if you sold it”. If I buy a rookie baseball card for $5 and the player becomes famous for whatever reason and my card is now worth $100 because the demand significantly increased, my net worth increased by $95, but no one was deprived of $95 to make that so.

A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore. And any sensible person should understand why that makes zero sense.

Believing something that confirms your biases without scrutiny, even though it’s easily determined to be false, why am I not surprised?

We found no evidence confirming the phrase appearing on a lectern originated verbatim in Nazi Germany, as social media posts suggested.

However, we found no evidence confirming that the phrase originated verbatim in Nazi Germany, as social media posts suggested. The origin of the phrase was unclear, but it did not appear to have been used by the Trump administration or other presidential administrations before appearing on the lectern. Online searches for the origin of the phrase returned only results for more social media posts claiming it had roots in the Nazi regime, without providing further evidence. Searches of newspaper archives also found no instances of the Trump administration or other governments using the specific phrase.

Mindlessly spreading without fact-checking, bad look.

Are you saying we should ignore that?

This is

“I like waffles.”
“Are you saying you hate pancakes?”

-tier discourse.

There is a wide spectrum between being obsessed with X and ignoring X.

Where exactly does any of the sourced material show that the opinion “Republicans are too obsessed with trans people” is being held at all, much less among what proportion? How is “too obsessed” even defined?

That headline is infested with weasels.

Fast forward a few months to the debate, and he had a bad night. Everything that people had been warning about, was on full display. To make it worse, Trump’s dementia was having a good day.

How insane is it for this to actually be part of the discourse? About which candidate’s dementia was acting up more than the other’s on a given day?

The quoted bit above would give even a hypothetical outside party with no prior knowledge or experience of what’s happened since, a pregnant pause followed by some variant of “what the fuck?”

The media can’t legally say “murder” unless/until there’s a conviction. So it’s either “alleged murderer” or “shooter”, and they definitely chose of the two, the one that ‘safely’ implies more guilt.

One can’t really reasonably fault them for that choice, if one believes in his guilt, which you obviously do.

And do you know how history refers to those people?

How they’re referred to does not imply that they ought to be referred to that way.

They’re garbage. And they’re disposable.

Wouldn’t be surprised if you could find these exact words in a translated Hitler speech.

Chainsaw-Wielding Vigilantes Murder Innocent Dad After His Wife Falsely Accused Him of Molesting Her Daughters

Bringing this up for a very specific reason.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-extreme-danger-of-dehumanizing-rhetoric

Dehumanization is taking a page right out of their playbook, it’s a bad move both morally and pragmatically. All of the worst things a human being has ever done to another human being started with dehumanization of the victim.

it’s more efficient to focus on one [demographic].

No, it literally is not.

Explain how this supposed efficiency manifests, since you disagree. How does focusing on one race of victim reduce police brutality more than focusing on police brutality itself, which takes the exact same amount of effort?

It’s kinda like saying, “Why donate to breast cancer research instead of general cancer research?”

This is a false analogy, because cancers are too different to be accurately described as having a single shared fundamental cause to ‘attack’ with research.

A better analogy would be if someone was arguing for gun control by focusing on only cases where the bullet hits a certain body part. In this analogy, I am the one saying “why aren’t we just focusing on the guns themselves, who cares where people are getting shot, the important thing is that they’re getting shot!”

Also, hate crime charges exist because the driving force behind them is ideologically based. They exist to try to combat that ideology.

But there is no conclusive evidence that a criminal charge being ‘enhanced’ as being a hate crime, versus a non hate crime, has had any measurable impact at all on the incidence of said crimes, it’s basically just an ego stroke that doesn’t actually accomplish anything.^[1]

What’s the difference between a murder that’s a ‘hate crime’ versus one that isn’t, really? Is the latter victim any less deceased? Is the latter perpetrator any less deserving of punishment?

And motive is absolutely a factor in what charges get brought.

It should be a factor insofar as whether the crime is deliberate or happenstance, but not beyond that (i.e. whether there IS motivation, but when there is, not WHAT the motivation is). Hot Fuzz satirizes (maybe not deliberately, but coincidentally at least) this well, I think—the townspeople are murdered by the cult for absurdly trivial reasons, like having an annoying laugh. Should that triviality lessen the severity of the crimes?

You wouldn’t charge someone who lost control of a car and killed someone the same as you would someone who planned and murdered their spouse, even though the end result is someone died. Motivation is a key factor.

Right, hence my clarification that the existence of motive makes a difference, but within the umbrella of ‘motivated crimes’, what the motive is should make no difference. I say all ‘motivated’ murders are equally heinous, whether the victim was killed because the murderer is bigoted against their race, or because they hate how the victim laughs.

she tried to run over the cop and/or thats what he thought when he fired, anyway

Even if this was true, it’s honestly irrelevant. You’re not supposed to fire upon the driver of a running/moving vehicle period, lest the vehicle become an ‘unguided missile’ (via dead weight pressing on the accelerator) that can cause who knows how much more damage.

ICE’s own rules explicitly prohibit it, I saw someone citing them earlier.

The fact that all lives matter goes without saying – literally, it doesn’t need to be said.

Neither does “black lives matter”, to the vast majority of people. It makes perfect sense for the typical person hearing that phrase for the first time to react with confusion. If you explicitly say “black lives matter” to someone, you are, whether you realize it or not, implying to that person that they are racist enough that they don’t believe the lives of black people have value.

If I made a point of telling you “you know, the earth is round”, that implies that I believe that you don’t already believe that (otherwise, why would I be saying it to you?). So a response fueled by confusion/indignance from you would make perfect sense.