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timorl boosted

straight up I am in love with water fountains. whenever I look at a public water fountain I go "this is literally a monument to a functioning civilization." when I look at a public water fountain I think about all of the technology, all of the water filtration and pipes and infrastructure that came together to provide Me drinkable water in a public space
some urban designer built Me a fountain to drink from because I might be thirsty. Literally the opposite of hostile architecture.

@kmic Robienie takich rzeczy z nieletnimi na pewno jest... legalne?

@AmpBenzScientist That's a false dichotomy, you can have proofs *and* proper motivating examples. They don't even have to be physics, there are other ways in which calculus represents parts of the world. @2ck

timorl boosted

Can open sometimes be too open? Here's a post about what the @gnome community wish it didn't do when deploying its @matrix instance, and how it's going to fix it.

blog.ergaster.org/post/2021061

@rysiek If you make posting even slightly more inconvenient for yourself you'll post less, and that would be a tragedy.

@novimatrem These should be called "sentient rights" anyway, but I guess humanity isn't ready for that yet.

@jmw150

> But it could cost millions to try and replace right person with specialized skills.

I don't quite get what you are getting at in this paragraph. There are some (as far as I can tell not many) people who are really hard to replace (in the sense of work they do, in a genral sense everybody is irreplacable, but I'm guessing this is not what we are talking about), but I don't think this correlates particularly well with how wealthy they are, and I'm neither sure that this is what you wanted to say, nor what the implications for wealth taxation would be if it was true.

> it may be beneficial to live and die by the community

I'm not advocating for massive collectivism here, so I'm not sure why you got this impression. Wealth taxation rules out only extreme individualism, about the same as any other kinds of taxation or, for that matter, living in a modern state. Even eliminating wealth disparity, which I implied I would be in favour of, does not preclude individualism.

> I feel that wealth pooling between friends and family is due to this reason.

"People should rely on their social circle in times of need" is a bold argument to make just after criticizing something for excessive collectivism. ;P

While I think I get the distinction you are hinting at here, I'm pretty sure it's actually contrary to your goals. If you want more individualism then leaving people's material security at the whims of their family is almost certainly a bad idea. Not to mention the practical problems that stem from this approach – in sufficiently poor communities if you earn some money through lots of effort, you are expected, exactly by this principle, to share it with a lot of people. Since you cannot accumulate any resources at all, you get stuck needing lots of effort to acquire more money, keeping you poor. In such cases you have to literally escape your community to escape poverty.

@FailForward @freemo @ejg

timorl boosted

#sxmo on the #pinephone is one of the coolest and most empowering computing experiences i had in a long while!

A tiled window-manager on a mobile computer sounds crazy? not as much as the unified uni-dimensional logic of mobile interfaces, all trying to mimick android/iOS...

The ethos of sxmo/pmOS is of minimalism (shell scripts, suckless, dwm, etc.) and user empowerment. So easy to build interface/menus/scripts that suit your need!

Never thought i'd be excited by computers so much again :)

timorl boosted
i'm transhumanist because i'm trans and i believe in human rights

also i'm a transhumanist as in i wanna be a robot but yknow
timorl boosted

@FailForward
I haven't been actually responding to you, and this was more of a very general point, as I'm not sure what the specifics of a taxation system I would support would be – in fact I'm not even sure it would strictly be a wealth tax, perhaps a Georgian-adjecent land-in-the-broad-sense tax would be better. Anyway, I'll try answering the question under the assumption wealth tax is going to be implemented.

I think all kinds of wealth, including the ones you enumerated should be counted as wealth and taxed in this case. None of this should ever be completely impossible to liquidate, we have lots of financial instruments that should allow selling parts of one's wealth whatever form it is in. I suspect the actual tricky part would be assesing the real worth of assets – how much is a promise of $20Mio in 20 years really worth right now? (Although I think this is a pretty bad example – in this case another entity currently owns the money, so they are already being taxed – the promise itself shouldn't be worth much in this framework... I think?) At least with shares it is simple, they are already part of the best calibrated price assesment instrument we have.

Note that I'm also not sure how the tax rates should be structured – I suspect taxation progressive with the amount of wealth would be better, but the devil here is surely in the details, which I unfortunately am not able to provide.

@jmw150 @freemo @ejg

@jmw150
I'm pretty sure this is exactly the wrong way of looking at this. Wealth taxation is, if not the fairest, at least massively better than income taxes.

Wealth concentration has huge implications, most of them negative (less social cohesion, practical effects of a group of people being able to influence decisionmaking disproportionately etc.), and the fact that it gets someone out of the rat race is one of them. If we want to end the rat race, not just get a select few out of it, creating a class of people who benefit from it while not taking part in it is a sure way of creating opposition.

And even if you want to get people out of the rat race, replacing income tax with wealth tax should help with that. Although hopefully not to the extent that you could get your family out of it and create a wealthy class again.

Government getting too strong is a argument against it, but I don't think it's particularly relevant – government has ways of getting stronger that are absolutely not dependent on the specific form of taxation that it imposes.

@FailForward @freemo @ejg

Terran horribleness, abusive software, capitalism 

@moonbolt That is exactly why I am so happy to be using a now, despite it pretty clearly not being up to usability standards.

@t0k
I was thinking of researchers.one/ . Doesn't seem completely dead, so maybe there is hope for it still?

I totally agree with the analysis of the problem you presented, it's a really hard to solve coordination problem.

@eff

@t0k Not federated ones (and I don't expect federation to make a significant difference here) pop up once in a while, but the reputational investment required to make one actually successful never seems to materialize. :\

If you want I can dig up the most recent one I know of next time I'm at my computer.
@eff

timorl boosted

@freemo The lie about ineffectiveness of masks which he admitted to and justified later seems to be the lie these reports are referring to. Whether the justification is reasonable is a separate topic, but there was definitely a direct, admitted lie involved.

The posturing seems to be mostly about "See, this person we told you is untrustworthy was caught telling a lie!" hoping people will just read the headline (a strategy that works depressingly often :/) with a subtext of "See, Fauci was lying about masks then, maybe he still is now!" for the anti-maskers.
@realcaseyrollins

timorl boosted

@realcaseyrollins

Yea in the few minutes i spent looking it up since you mentioned it I saw something similar though you got some important details backwards (assuming my source was accurate).

Basically early on he told people not to wear masks. In email it showed he actually thought wearing masks were effective despite telling people not to wear them (in the email he said they are effective for infected people to wear them but did nothing for healthy people).

Basically people were mad at them because he was telling them not to wear masks when really he knew that was bad advice. Apparently Fauci responded to that allegationa nd justified it by saying he was trying to prevent people overbuying masks and leaving none for the medical professionals.

Side note, if we accept that masks are effective but only when infected people wear it and there is little need for uninfected people wearing it then this would in fact been a reasonable argument that everyone should wear a mask, since we often dont know who is or is not infected until they have already been infectious for some time.

@timorl

@freemo @realcaseyrollins It's very unlikely he will be fired, it's mostly posturing by the Rs as far as I can tell. The lies mentioned are about him dismissing masks as ineffective early on, which he did publicly and already has been criticized for - but I guess an "email leak" confirming what everybody already knew is reason enough to stir some shit.

timorl boosted

Polish university student Wojciech Kosior shares his story of how he managed to graduate without being forced to use Zoom, Skype, or other nonfree programs: u.fsf.org/3bv

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