Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

It's often difficult to tell the difference between a stranger wallowing in ignorance and a stranger deliberately pretending to be ignorant, with AI-driven bots an additional factor in an already difficult game.

Still, it occurred to me as I saw someone pretend that progressive tax brackets are anti-capitalist, that even if the commenter in question was a troll, it is an issue that involves a lot of numbers, and so others might benefit from being reminded how things work.

Someone online wondered what is the point of capitalism if working hard leads to "penalization" in the form of a higher tax rate. But of course, there is no point at which earning more money leaves you with less money.

Even at a 90% top marginal income tax rate, which we had during the 1950s and 1960s (boom times!), earning one extra dollar more than $400k would mean another dime in your pocket.

Still, one might say, it seems odd that the harder I work, the more goods I make, and the more goods I make, the higher percentage tax that gets taken from me!

This seems like bad reasoning on multiple levels.

Firstly, nobody should kid themselves: How hard you work has very, very, very little to do with how much money you earn. Right there are people working much harder than anyone reading this and probably making much less. There are also people doing next to nothing and earning more every year than any of us will earn in our entire lifetimes. I think it is fundamentally wrong to talk about the effect of income tax brackets in the abstract, as if they'll hit all of us, rather than putting concrete numbers to is. CEOs don't work 200 times as hard as their employees, and yet earn 200 times as much on average. That's concrete.

Secondly, why focus on the percentage brackets at all? In one sense it's as simple as this: the more goods you make, the more money you earn! I'll say it again: There is no point at which earning more income means less money in your pocket.

But let's say you really are fixated on the percentages. Okay, fine. Try this one on for size: The tax rate in the US is 37%, period. It just is. But as a country, we recognize that people may be struggling to make ends meet, ad might be enormously burdened by that, so we give several different kinds of discounts.

We give everybody a "standard deduction" on which we charge no tax at all. So a single person earning $14,600 pays zero income tax on any of it. We also allow for some deductions even with the standard deduction so that money paid to charities reduces the tax you might owe, too.

After that we give additional discounts, since you're still working your way up the earnings ladder.

If you earn $578,125 or less, you get a small discount, and if you earn $231,250 or less, you get an even bigger discount.

You get a really big discount if you earn $182,100 or less, and another small one at $95,375 or less, and a huge one at $44,725 or less.

I mean, at that point you're getting two-thirds knocked off the normal 37% rate, which is huge!

I think it is a very good thing that the tax structure makes things easier for those of us who haven't yet reached $578,125 in income per year. I would be delighted to one day reach my full 37% tax rate!

#politics #blog #economics

Some thoughts I've been noodling on recently, from books or social media or newsletters:

- The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has.

- Streaming services have burned through vast fortunes to come in second to cable+broadcast in watch times. 7% for Netflix? Wow.

- There is not, and never has been, such as a thing as a "free market."

- Current AI models demo well, but are proving to be less useful than most people hoped for, unless you're a student. Doesn't mean they're useless, just not world-changing.

- I'm starting to think every company with revenue of 50 billion dollars or more is too big, and needs to be broken up just because. As a start.

- I'm very interested in the idea of a US Federal Jobs Guarantee at $15/hour.

- If company executives could actually face penalties for their actions that exceed the profits from those actions, the world might be a better place. If they could face prison terms, it definitely would be.

#blog #personal

I've been trying to think of a way to describe how America generally enshittifies everything over time in ways that other countries don't, despite other countries also being capitalist. If our economic problems are caused by "capitalism," then why are we nearly alone in experiencing them? How is capitalism making China better but the USA worse?

I think I'm circling "financialization" as a universal descriptor.

I've often ranted against private equity specifically, but in quite times I have to admit that there are good and bad PE firms. The legal and cultural incentives are aligned against the good ones, but they do exist. I think most of our problems are caused specifically by private equity firms financializing everything, but sometimes the call is coming from inside the house. For example, I don't think Boeing's current woes are PE-caused. They put MBAs in charge, and those MBAs financialized the company, leading to enshittification.

I have nothing against people with MBA degrees. I just don't think they should be in charge.

With Tim Cook in charge of Apple, his tendency to financialize things is pushing out Apple's long history of good stuff in ways that taint Apple and make me glad governments are digging in. It seems like the company has been in tension between good engineering and design on one side, and Tim Cook insisting that Services revenue grow on the other side, and Cook is CEO, so that side is winning.

Financialization. I'm not sure where I first picked up the word, but a search of Cory Doctorow's site tells me he's used it quite a bit, so possibly there, or possibly the book "These Are the Looters," which I--well, enjoyed isn't the word--appreciated recently.

I''m but one quiet voice, feeling slightly uncomfortable as people push for changes to the status quo I think are slightly too radical. I think of myself as a progressive but not a revolutionary, and I think labeling "capitalism" as inherently evil isn't productive.

Our economic problems in the USA aren't caused by “capitalism,” no matter how many times people say they are. As evidence, see other capitalistic countries not having the same problems. They're caused by financialization, relentlessly making finance the ultimate arbiter of everything. That's not uniquely an American issue, but it's run amok here like nowhere else, and it has ruined, is ruining, or will ruin everything you enjoy about capitalism unless it is stopped.

#blog #capitalism
#enshittification #financialization #apple #boeing

I may be one of the last people to finally watch part 3 (aka Season 2) of "Money Heist." Which means I'm very late with this complaint, but waiting nearly 30 episodes to suddenly drop an English song into the soundtrack is jarring enough, but having it be the very recognizable acoustic guitar of "Delicate" by Damien Rice, that is a gut punch. The death of a major character hits hard enough in any case, but with that song?

An episode later, they rolled out another English song, "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire, in a much more positive moment, but then they undercut that by having another character learn about the aforementioned death and sob like a broken person.

All in all, I feel emotionally manipulated by English-language music.

#personal #blog #moneyheist #television #music

I find myself increasingly frustrated by specific ways the American devotion to capital makes life worse, and today I realized part of why. I invited people to this country to be my family, and now I feel responsible for how I perceive this country’s failing compared to whence they came.

Musing on this, my partner interrupted me to say that things here are better, and I should stop. I needed to hear that today!

#blog #personal

Staggeringly, Chase sent me an email I am required to click to receive money electronically from my Chase credit card balance.

An email. With a link. That I must click.

I checked the website and the app, then called Chase. Not the number in the email, of course, but a number I already knew. The person I talked to confirmed that the email was legitimate, but also said that clicking that link was the only way to receive the money electronically. Not via the website, not via the app, only by clicking a link in an email.

I am having serious trouble believing this to be true, but all the evidence seems to be pointing that way.

It's like nobody at Chase has ever heard of spam email, as if no Chase employee has to take employer-mandated training annually that explains in great detail how you should never never never click links in emails and supply banking details.

I'll wait for the paper check in two weeks. I will never click that link. Shame on Chase for sending it!

#blog #chase #fraud #spam

I have spent too much of my life consoling myself. "Things could be worse."

But you know what? Things could be better!

They don’t have to be, it isn’t inevitable, but it’s *possible*.

Things are better than they used to be, but they could be better still.

#personal #blog

Inasmuch as the index at JustWatch is accurate, it paints a dire picture of the movie library at Netflix. The fact that Netflix makes it incredibly difficult to navigate their library based on things like release date makes it hard to confirm this, and it's hard to come away thinking that navigation choice isn't deliberate.

The oldest movie Netflix currently features seems to be "White Christmas," from 1954. In fact, that seems to be their only movie older than 1962.

https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/netflix/movies?release_year_until=1961&sort_by=release_year

Is that accurate? How could we be sure? Clicking on the names of the actors in that movie doesn't pull up any other movies, even though Bing Crosby was in more than 100. That's suggestive.

In 1962, a second movie appears! Its original title is "प्रोफ़ेसर", but in English it translates to "Professor." Then in 1966 we get "आम्रपाली" and in 1969 we get "Prince," another Hindi movie. If you're looking for something in English, your second choice is a 1972 documentary called "FTA," about Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland's opposition to the Vietnam War and the titular Army engaged in it.

1954, 1972, and then in 1974 we get the disaster movie "Earthquake." Finally in 1975 we get "Jaws," a Robert Redford movie, and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Three whole movies! From a year which IMDB reports had 3,682 movies, although that admittedly include a lot of non-English films.

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?ref_=kw_ref_typ&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&release_date=1975%2C1975

Back when I got red envelopes mailed to my house, I could watch basically any movie ever made, or at least any movie released on DVD, and I am sure I watched more than three movies made before 1975.

JustWatch believes that the Netflix movie library currently has 3,916 movies, which is quite a comedown from what Marketwatch once described as "4,335 in March 2016 and 6,494 in March 2014." Still, it's higher than when I checked JustWatch in May of 2021, which reported 3,622 movies then.

We're paying more and more for less and less. Companies are pulling movies and shows from streaming to abuse tax law, and we have no legal recourse. This isn't the fault of Netflix, or at least not Netflix alone, but it's badly broken.

#blog #ip #decline #netflix

Macau seems like Las Vegas, but smaller, cleaner, and slightly more Chinese.

#blog #travel #personal