damnedfurry
@damnedfurry@lemmy.world
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 4 days ago:
Taxes in the US are overwhelmingly used for the military
“Overwhelmingly” is a bit of a ridiculous way to describe 13% of the budget, don’t you think?
and to enrich rich fucks
Cite a figure for this nebulous category, if you can.
not to help the poor.
Actually, welfare spending is barely less than military spending, at 11.8% of the budget.
By letting someone sit on them to “allow them to appreciate” is letting someone doing nothing accumulate the wealth gains of society that we all work for.
The same can be said of anyone who owns a house. There is nothing wrong with a thing you already own becoming more valuable to others.
Because those assets appreciate faster than inflation, they create inflation pressure as more asseted people have income to burn that doesn’t reflect actual economic movement. Decreasing the value of money that other people need to use to buy things to live.
This is a very confused couple of statements; most egregiously, you’re conflating asset price inflation with consumer price inflation, and only the latter has a direct effect on the working class.
The ultra-wealthy have a low ‘marginal propensity to consume’. If Jeff Bezos gains $10 billion on paper, he does not spend $10B on consumption goods; most gains remain invested. Appreciation alone does not automatically translate into CPI inflation, because unrealized gains are not income.
No one lives in a vacuum and letting people hoard assets has a negative impact on everyone else.
It’s objectively nonsensical to refer to the notion of purchasing something, and its market value increasing while you merely continue to own it, as “hoarding”. Not to mention, again, that net worth is a valuation, a price tag. It is not money. Stop acting like when the price of a stock goes up, that amount of cash money is magically vacuumed out of the wallets of the working class.
If everyone became a laborer with proper compensation, society would thrive.
People want to be able to own things (aka assets), though.
If everyone became an asset hoarder
Ownership isn’t hoarding.
society would break apart as there would be no one to operate the machinery of society.
Except this literally cannot ever happen because the demand created by the market is the whole reason those assets appreciate in value in the first place. It’s a self-correcting issue: if too many people try to just ‘own assets’, the demand will drop, and said assets’ value will start depreciating, incentivizing those people back in the other direction, to laboring.
…increasing the price of those assets, devaluing other ways of earning money
Asset appreciation is not income, stop equivocating the two.
reducing wealth inequality pushes us towards the first.
Not necessarily; it’s entirely possible for everyone to have identical wealth, and also all be poor. In fact, that was the default state of humanity for the vast majority of its history.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 4 days ago:
If you have wealth anywhere over say, $50 million, you hire an accountant to assess your business’s value.
‘Oh, our accountant says the valuation is just under the threshold for the new tax, what a coincidence!’
It is trivially easy to shift assets around in such a way that having a net worth threshold for a given tax is basically a guarantee that no one will pay it. Many countries have tried this already, and failed. Why repeat their mistakes, instead of learning from them?
We need to remember that people, and especially the ultra-wealthy, are not inert blocks of wood that don’t react to policy changes like these.
I’m calling bullshit on this. There are all sorts of taxes that fall heavily or solely on the wealthy.
Firstly, I said “only the wealthiest”, so don’t already start nudging those goalposts by “calling bullshit” and immediately tweaking it to “heavily or solely”. Secondly, if there are so many, name three.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 4 days ago:
The real value in a wealth tax is breaking up the money from individuals, the revenue is just a bonus.
And the mask comes off, revealing the true motivation. You’d happily waste the taxpayer money that is the poor’s lifeline in many cases, reducing overall tax revenue, because hurting the rich matters more to you than helping the poor.
money that’s now actually moving through the economy zombie wealth sitting in some rich fuck’s paws, doing nothing but contribute to inflation.
- Net worth is a valuation, a price tag on something that’s already been transacted on, how could it possibly contribute to inflation? What nonsense.
- The ultra-wealthy don’t have Scrooge McDuck vaults full of cash, their wealth consists of investments in businesses that run within the economy.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 4 days ago:
Switzerland’s wealth taxes, depending on area (there is no country-wide wealth tax) starts at the equivalent of ~$100,000 on average, putting it very squarely in the
‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.
category I mentioned before. That is absolutely not a tax aimed exclusively at the ultra-wealthy.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 6 days ago:
This is basically urban legend at this point; “buy borrow die” is a tiny piece of the ultra-wealthy’s financial strategy, at least when it comes to the “borrow” part, which is what everyone’s focused on:
-
In reality, the ultra wealthy do not borrow against a large fraction of their unsold gains. On average from 2004 to 2022, the top 1% of wealth-holders only borrowed 1-2% of their annual economic income.
-
Borrowing while holding unrealized gains is, in fact, more of a middle-class activity than an ultra-wealthy one: Americans in the 50-90th percentiles borrowed 42% of their unrealized gains in 2022, compared to just 4% for the top 1% of wealth-holders.
-
The primary tax avoidance strategy for the top 1% is not to borrow, but simply not to sell appreciated assets.
-
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 6 days ago:
Not likely. First of all, the net worth numbers you see for these ultra-wealthy people are all educated guesses. To actually legally impose anything based on total net worth, you need to actually audit net worth and get a real figure. The resources it would take to do this are very unlikely to yield more tax revenue than they cost, especially because there is so much one can possess whose value is pretty much completely arbitrary (the high-end artwork, etc.).
It’s actually all-but-certain it’d be a net loss of tax revenue. There is a reason that every time such a policy targeting only the wealthiest is put into place (it’s been tried numerous times over the years in a bunch of European countries), it’s gotten rid of soon thereafter, or ‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.
- Comment on Carl Sagan's 9 timeless lessons for detecting baloney 1 week ago:
It’s also important to keep in mind that a fallacious argument leading to a conclusion does not actually disprove the conclusion; identifying the fallacy just means that if the conclusion is correct, that argument is not the path to it. And if the fallacious argument is the only path to conclusion X, then there is simply no basis for presuming X to be correct at all.
red herring: might as well call it by its social media names: “ackshyually”, “whataboutism”, etc.
Well, “ackshyually” is actually (:P) rooted in mocking people who pedantically and pointlessly correct others, to the point of being more irritating than informative. The ‘Jimmy Neutron salt’ meme is a pretty good example of this:
Red herrings as a type of fallacy, on the other hand are about using something to support an argument that doesn’t actually have anything to do with it. The Wikipedia page itself gives a solid example of this:
For example, “I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected.” The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic.
- Comment on The developers of PEAK, explaining how they decided on pricing for their game. 2 weeks ago:
Getting the Orange Box for $10 back in the day has to be my all-time best.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
I see what you mean now; your wording was ambiguous, specifically “do”.
anyone impersonating gestapo would post anything worse than they already do
sounds like you’re saying ‘would post anything worse than they already post’.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
You haven’t been on the Internet very long, huh?
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
they’re platforming and subsequently legitimising them.
You could make that argument about them being allowed to have an account at all, but simply marking that account in such a way that informs the userbase that it’s not a troll/parody account or something, but the actual organization?
That doesn’t “platform” them, they’re already on the platform at the time this happened. And confirming that something asserted to be true, is in fact true, is a good thing.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
It’s basically giving uncle Sam a list of targets to hit next.
How, exactly? Even if you use your real name as your username (which no one does), unless it’s very uncommon, that still won’t uniquely identify you.
- Comment on Make Microsoft's CEO cry by installing Chrome's 'Microslop' extension 5 weeks ago:
What an idiotic article, from the headline down.
Locally replacing some letters with some other letters is going to make Microsoft’s CEO cry? Really?
Also, not using Chrome, lol.
- Comment on There are only like 3,000 billionaires and they're not physically imposing people. 1 month ago:
Smugness and delusion in equal proportion, it seems.
- Comment on There are only like 3,000 billionaires and they're not physically imposing people. 1 month ago:
I’m simply not equivocating protecting one’s person and protecting one’s assets, since it makes no sense to equivocate them.
It’s seriously absurd to call that “bootlicking”, and you’re only calling it “euphemistic” because you failed to grasp what was a very simply-stated statement.
- Comment on There are only like 3,000 billionaires and they're not physically imposing people. 1 month ago:
If you Internet Tough Guys were ever going to do anything, you would have already. This is nothing more than an impotent circlejerk, not to mention it also violates Rules 3 and 4 of this community.
- Comment on There are only like 3,000 billionaires and they're not physically imposing people. 1 month ago:
The thing that annoys me the most is the amount of money it takes to protect their wealth…the money paid for private guards and security alone is in the hundreds of millions.
Considering the above “protecting your wealth” instead of simply protecting yourself from hostile third parties is extremely disingenuous.
- Comment on No contest 1 month ago:
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 1 month ago:
I will deduct 10 points if your paper is between 620 and 649 words
Before I read the rest of this sentence, I thought some goofy troll grading was going on, lol
- Comment on In 2015, the Fortingall Yew, one of the oldest trees in Europe, decided trans rights are tree rights and switched its sex to female 🏳️⚧️ eat shit transphobes 2 months ago:
🤓 Being trans has to do with gender identity, not sex. The whole foundation of transgenderism as a concept is that sex and gender identity are independent elements of a person. So as a corollary (I think, haven’t used that word in a while lol), no non-sapient creature can ever be trans, because you need consciousness to have a gender identity in the first place.
- Comment on I think there's an imposter amongus 2 months ago:
Suddenly remembered Mitch Hedberg saying on stage, after some of his newer material didn’t land as well, “My old shit’s better than my new shit~”
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 2 months ago:
When Firefox started recording key strokes
Source? That’s news to me, and when I tried finding a source myself, all I found were extensions etc. to add that to the browser.
- Comment on The Enshittification of Plex Is Kicking Off, Starting with Free Roku Users 2 months ago:
The pricing model hasn’t changed.
Doesn’t enshittification also entail the removal/reduction of previously-existing features/functionality?
- Comment on Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.” 2 months ago:
Is there another more ‘generic’ German term that would fit when talking about this period of time in retrospect? So you could have one line that says the German equivalent of ‘he was the leader in Germany during this time period, commonly referred to by the title Fuhrer’, and then no need to keep using “Fuhrer” anymore in the rest of the article.
- Comment on Women and men and consensual sex 2 months ago:
Combine that with some rape cases that get swept under the rug with phrases like, “boys will be boys,” “she was asking for it,” or even something as outright cruel as “it’s the only way she’d get laid anyways,” and yeah, where OP is coming from isn’t too hard to understand.
And yet, cases of male victims of female rapists get “swept under the rug” basically 100% of the time, but the outrage toward that is non-existent, even though the also-swept-under-the-rug fact is that women rape men just as often as men rape women:
And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).
In other words, if being made to penetrate someone was counted as rape—and why shouldn’t it be?—then the headlines could have focused on a truly sensational CDC finding: that women rape men as often as men rape women.
The whole reason a woman raping a man isn’t simply called “rape” in these statistics is because of successful explicitly anti-male lobbying by feminists like Mary Koss, and NOW, who don’t think it “counts” as rape when the man is the victim of a woman.
As one of these male victims of a female rapist, it’s always extremely frustrating to see women complaining to men about things like under-reporting, or men who get away with it, when it’s so much more of a problem with the sexes reversed that the average person believes that it is something that is literally impossible. A boy got molested by his female teacher, and she won child support from him! Could you in a million years imagine a male rapist achieving such a legal judgment from a girl he molested?
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 3 months ago:
The vast majority of the increase, is what I said. In other words, I’m saying it wouldn’t be nearly at the 3% mark without those users, and with over a quarter of all Linux users coming from the Steam Deck userbase, that is, in fact, true.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 3 months ago:
Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install
Yeah, that’s not at all accessible to the average consumer; they don’t know what a “DE” even is, much less why they should choose any over any other.
Very, very few people want to deal with something other than a ‘just works’ situation.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 3 months ago:
I think it will continue to rise. People are updating their rigs all the time. Whenever they update their rig they’ll have to ask themselves whether they want to continue with Windows on their new rig, or try with something new.
The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks, which run on Linux, not from people switching to Linux on their PCs.
If it continues to rise, this is the reason. The general public is less and less into using a desktop at all as time goes on, much less running, and much less changing to, an extremely niche operating system on one.
- Comment on Oh no my harvest is too bountiful 3 months ago:
cis he/him
insert ‘I’m gonna pre’ compilation
- Comment on Investors are making up the highest share of homebuyers in 5 years 4 months ago:
Yes, and my rent covers literally all of them.
So, nothing’s keeping you from buying a house then, since what you already pay in rent covers all of the cost. Right?
I should not be forced to pay a premium for a feature I will never use.
Why haven’t you bought a house already, then? Could it be that it doesn’t just cost what you pay in rent each month?
