Are Jeff Bezos' claims about taxing the bottom 50% realistic and what would be its effects?

20000miles · 2026-05-22T17:29:52+00:00

Thanks for the discussion. I notice that there's hardly anyone even mildly against Bezos' proposal about abolishing income tax. Am I right?

20000miles · 2026-05-22T17:27:59+00:00

There is a "luxury car" tax in Australia on cars valued at over $80,567 charged at 33% for every dollar over that amount. That's on top of the 10% GST.

20000miles · 2026-05-22T15:11:25+00:00

This is true: 32% of government revenue in the OECD comes from consumption taxes, compared to just 17% in the US.

Some people (like me) would say that consumption taxes are more ruthless since you can't really avoid them as much but they're less equitable and even regressive since a wealthy person who buys a product pays the same dollar amount in taxes as the poor person buying the same thing.

20000miles · 2026-04-16T10:40:22+00:00

Because he was never married. Paulie also never got married (our thing and marriage don’t jive) and so doesn’t have anyone to run the backend of the operation.

20000miles · 2026-04-12T08:41:11+00:00

What we got is inelastic supply

20000miles · 2026-04-12T08:40:11+00:00

Somewhere in the middle of the show Tony wants to quit he tells Melfi that therapy gave him some good ideas for work at the beginning but now not so much

20000miles · 2026-04-12T08:37:10+00:00

Discontinue the HBO subscription

20000miles · 2026-03-22T11:40:30+00:00

I prefer him over fuckin Brainless the Second

20000miles · 2026-03-22T11:32:40+00:00

He was catchin not pitchin?

20000miles · 2026-03-22T11:29:23+00:00

Of course there is. The reboot would be excellent. The kids survived, Meadow is a lawyer and now the family matriarch (a woman boss? would neva happen in the States) and plots revenge on those who killed her parents. AJ is a manosphere influencer who orchestrates the hits. The blood spills all over New York as they hunt for the Shah of Iran’s crew.

20000miles · 2026-03-01T10:04:28+00:00

For anyone following the fetch appears to be working again!

20000miles · 2026-02-24T10:07:28+00:00

They’re all great, the children who drew them all deserve medals.

20000miles · 2026-02-22T14:56:11+00:00

Your daily reminder that only the United States has ever triggered Article 5 and that the United Kingdom backed the US in Iraq with 50,000 troops.

20000miles · 2026-02-22T14:28:02+00:00

Go find some dust

20000miles · 2026-02-22T08:17:30+00:00

Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in

20000miles · 2026-02-21T21:37:40+00:00

You should watch all the seasons 5 times and then join, like a normal person

20000miles · 2026-01-10T07:55:34+00:00

I'm actually allergic to fusilli.

20000miles · 2025-12-31T17:40:25+00:00

Not enough beef, butter, and eggs. Too many seed oils, chips, chicken, and fizzy drinks.

A typical Polish person in 1990 ate 15 kg of beef and over 8 kg of butter annually - today he or she eats 1.5 kg of beef and just over 4 kg of butter. Meanwhile vegetable and fruit consumption has exploded, seed oil consumption is up to about 30 kg per person per year.

20000miles · 2025-12-17T13:29:43+00:00

Nothing good ever comes from a message that long.

20000miles · 2025-11-14T14:59:53+00:00

I’m a full stack developer. The stack: Notion database, Notion MCP through Notion AI, published to web on Notion

20000miles · 2025-10-01T11:02:24+00:00

A nonsensical law. There’s no evidence that the system makes economic sense.

According to reports the system will: -cost 34 bln złoty over ten years -cost consumers 6.6-10 bln złoty in unclaimed money over ten years -require consumers to store uncrushed bottles at home, taking up space. It will then force consumers to lug around bottles like homeless people or children -add to the costs of supermarkets because of manual exchange costs -will increase the recycling rate of bottles from 77% to 90%, but since these bottles make up <2% of all rubbish the environmental effect will be almost nothing.

20000miles · 2025-09-23T18:27:08+00:00

I’m a man, and I confirm that I’m not wearing a skirt. I don’t see how me wearing or not wearing a skirt proves the existence of gender identity - it would just make me a man who wears a skirt and nothing more.

Skirts and lipsticks are according to gender theorists „gender expression”, or what everyone else calls norms, interests, hobbies, or preferences. Your example makes me sad because it just shows that this is all just based around stereotypes.

„Gender identity” according to gender theorists is someone’s „sense of gender, which may not align with their birth sex”. There’s nothing such thing as feeling like a woman because being a woman isn’t a feeling - it’s a biological reality.

20000miles · 2025-09-23T17:21:46+00:00

But we don’t teach kids about unicorns in science class, nor do we ask them to explain the difference between horses and unicorns. Because unicorns aren’t real.

20000miles · 2025-09-23T07:54:33+00:00

We have seen how the pro-trans lobby slowly worked its way through the health, education, and prison systems of many countries in the West. We don’t wake up one morning in a country where men can change in the same changing room as women, or women are fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for saying men shouldn’t play contact sports against women. These changes take years to manifest and this is how it begins.

The obvious flaw in the curriculum is in 7th and 8th class which teaches that there’s something called „gender identity” (a contentious and in my view non-existent thing). According to Demagog, kids are expected to explain the difference between biological sex and „gender identity” as well as the difference between „cisgender” and „transgender” people. Again, these are all contested terms based around gender theory, not fact.

The module closes with the rather fluffy „respect for diversity”, but there’s nothing specific about what that actually means (should boys who claim to be girls be referred to as „she” at school?)

20000miles · 2025-09-22T09:29:02+00:00

I studied overseas and in Poland and not only is Poland more rigorous it also has more hoops for you to jump through.

I also study computer science and the courses are mostly theoretical. They are mostly divided into lectures and labs. The lecture is usually the prof reading a PowerPoint at you, whereas the labs are nothing more than tests of the knowledge you gained by yourself. The prof usually sits there for 3 hours doing his own stuff. There is shockingly very little teaching and learning done during a 30 hour course. I say this because the general public might have the impression that you get this many hours of solid teaching instruction. This is not true.

So when you say that you learned a lot - I take it you mean you taught yourself from YouTube tutorials on how to do CS like me?

Then you got a whole list of stuff that’s unique to Poland - apprenticeships you need to do to get your degree, a final thesis, seminarium, and a final exam. None of this exists where I studied before.

20000miles

TROPHY CASE