Comment on "Yeah, but what if we used AI?"
qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months agoWhy, if the bridge will be beneficial to the community why wouldn’t it set up a donation goal to build it? If enough people want it i.e. the percived value of it is greater than the percived value of money they’re donating it will succeed, if not, it will fail because the community voted with their wallets that it wasn’t worth it and they would rather put their money somewhere else.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What if it’s a poor community that can’t afford to pay for the bridge? Fuck them, no bridge for them? Their fault for being poor?
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Exactly this, even in Foss we see a similar issue wherein large corporations can use the programs but provide no return value to the project itself.
Taxes are supposed to be a way to get rich people and corporations to pay their fair share, unfortunately in the US at least, regulatory capture, lobbying and propaganda has made it so that the scales are so extremely tipped in the rich and Corp favor that it’s in no way a fair system at present.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I agree. A lack of fair taxation does not mean that the concept of taxation is bad. It means it’s improperly (or properly, depending on who you are I guess) implemented.
qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Then they would have to count on external investment or aid or collect money over a longer period. That is no different than the current system, richer countries, states, neighborhoods have better infrastructure. The difference is that the collected money stays in the community and goes towards what the community wants and needs instead of what the politicians think it needs and filling their pockets in the process.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What if no one wants to invest in them or aid them? What if they can’t collect money in enough time before the bridge collapses?
Because, again, this sounds like ‘fuck the poor.’
qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
What if the political class is corrupt and uses the tax money and their possition of power to fill up their own pockets, bailout banks and corporations owned by their billionaire friends and family members making them invulnerable to competition ensuring they’ll control the market, oppress the population to the point that it has no capacity to resist and even if it did it wouldn’t have the time nor strength to do so after working all day just to stay alive? What if the corporations collude with the politicians to introduce loop holes into tax law so that they don’t have to pay them and if they can’t do that they’ll just trickle-down the cost onto the workers and consumers by increasing prices or lowering wages?
You can’t dismiss a system based on theoretical “what if” edge cases, especially in the face of common everyday reality that we’re all living.
The world isn’t perfect and we can’t afford to act like it is. What we can do is try things out, see what the result is and act accordingly. If you tried to bring down a tree by punching it and it broke your hand you wouldn’t just punch it harder next time, you’d try something else. The same goes for the tax system, no matter how much money we’ll shovel into it, it won’t fix the underlying issue. It doesn’t have to be perfect, nothing is, and dismissing anything short of it won’t get us anywhere.
aidan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How is that any different from the current system. Just instead of relying on people voluntarily helping them, they’re relying on beuracrats