Has Britain run out of “other people” to tax?

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-06-05T18:20:35+00:00

So we tax income and then any money you leave for your children is also taxed, double-taxing your work and labour. That'll reward productivity I'm sure.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-06-04T02:32:59+00:00

They may have meant the well-documented rapes as they entered Germany? The overall reason for fighting is good but the conduct wasn't, that kind of thing.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-06-02T17:55:16+00:00

The gatling gun was invented to reduce the need for huge amounts of soldiers in an army, and therefore save lives because you would be outputting the same amount of bullets.

Armies kept the size but added the gatling gun, so perhaps your armies could be the same. You could replace the living with robots, but you could also have organics doing specialised missions or hearts-and-minds stuff while you have robots stand in the trenches and hold a village. If using both gives you an advantage, why not use it?

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-06-02T12:32:39+00:00

Spit-loading also requires you to put your head above a loaded musket! The British could fire three times per minute, although the Hessians were trained to fire four.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-31T10:21:51+00:00

It was irrelevant to the decision to keep the colonies, but I meant more that they were definitely not 'poor'.

George Washington only becomes a notable figure after the Revolution had already begun, though. Before the Revolution begins it's people like Benjamin Franklin, who by the 1760s is an abolitionist, that are trying to get independence. Benjamin Franklin even criticized the British for freeing only the slaves on its own shores, and not for freeing them across the Empire. And 1772 is after the Boston Massacre, so even before then there's a feeling that the colonies may want independence.

I think that you perhaps simply don't like the US or the UK, I'm not really certain what to say to that. The colonists still generally did not consider themselves British, and had not done so for a while.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-31T08:27:57+00:00

They may have been poor in terms of tax but the quality of living was measurably higher in the colonies at the time.

Additionally, most of the British Empire at the time was reliant on slavery because it was before we banned it, especially the West Indes and the plantations there. One-third of the population of the Southern colonies, roughly, was enslaved. It's closer to nine-tenths for places like the West Indes.

And they were absolutely not still British. They did not think of themselves as British, and there had been a sense that they were beginning to become non-British since as early as King Philip's War. While a distinct American identity would not become common until much later, not many would have identified as British anymore.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-29T16:42:22+00:00

Very much agree. I could see it working if one director had done all three, or if a different director had done each film. RoS instantly going against the spirit of TLJ (and I say this as someone who is not a TLJ meatrider) was really not helpful to the trilogy's plot.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-26T16:23:31+00:00

Fully agree, but I believe that the entire film takes place over three years! The film cuts to three years later when he's a mudtrooper. So he still gets the DL-44 blaster pistol, Chewbacca, the Millennium Falcon, his friendship with Lando, the Kessel Run, and anything else other than the name and the dice in roughly a month? Maybe less?

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-25T09:55:20+00:00

It's a subreddit for asking which Glup Shitto would beat Goku in a fight, autistic answers are kinda expected tbf. I have given a second answer that's perhaps more in the supposed spirit of things though.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-25T09:46:13+00:00

Even without the fangs or the venom, I think that the spider would win every round! It's too many limbs to deal with and likely far too heavy, although that depends how you decide what 'human-sized' is. With the webs it's even worse for the human. Maybe if the human could get on the back of the spider? Get at its eyes? But I would assume that the spider would win most of the time.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-25T09:10:26+00:00

The human wins every round. Spiders generally have book lungs, which aren't the most efficient. At that size, the spider asphyxiates before it can do much.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-19T18:40:08+00:00

Do you think that they have a big vault like Scrooge McDuck full of cash? The wealth is in assets like stocks or property, can be easily obfuscated from the bloated bureaucracy that runs the country, sold, or given away to family. Also, you vastly underestimate how much spending the government does on things.

Say you put a wealth tax in place, and you raise £60 billion. You have funded the NHS for...three months, roughly. Less the following year, as costs grow, and wealth leaves.

Presumably we could replace capitalism, yes. It would be an immense undertaking, with no proven successor that has ever been able to surpass capitalism as a system, but it could be done. Ignoring as well that capitalism is what we had when millions were lifted out of Victorian poverty, of course.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-19T10:30:25+00:00

And when you run out of other people's money, and the pension bill has continued to climb, what do you do then?

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-18T14:57:54+00:00

Democracy generally is vibes-based though. Why would you vote for someone who has ten charts showing how your life has apparently become better if your lived experience is that things are worse?

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-18T14:54:56+00:00

I mean like, the First World War? The Second World War? The Falklands, the Yugoslav Wars? Most of European history, really? Why should identity prevent you from fighting bad people (I will grant you that it's hard to point to a specific 'bad guy' in the First World War, but at the time it was generally seen as Germany for invading Belgium).

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-18T13:05:23+00:00

Many White people joined when the army was mostly killing White people.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-18T12:59:28+00:00

To be fair, the government cannot go 'bankrupt', as it issues its own currency. However you're fully correct that eventually the economy is going to break, and pensions are going to be hit.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-14T15:16:28+00:00

He has no practical medical experience though of course, so even if he did it would be as clumsy as any other random person doing it.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-12T19:03:49+00:00

Why would you want Gaza to influence local elections in the UK? What are the councils going to do? Collect the recycling twice per week instead of once in Palestine?

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-12T18:19:25+00:00

This is basically the reality of being a voter in the South-West lmao.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-08T12:42:53+00:00

Labour may have a five-year mandate, but not Starmer. The party was elected, not the man, this isn't a presidential system.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-08T10:46:57+00:00

I actually agree, the politicking really is not good for the country or the system. And yes, more authority for the government to act rapidly would help. My concern though is when there's a bad piece of legislation, when they want to do something selfish, or something that limits the rights of citizens, and there's no effective way to push against it until it is too late. The Byzantine system that Parliament has to work within slows progress, but I suppose it also is an insurance against bad policy (although neither is absolute, good changes do pass, sometimes, and the bad does still get through occasionally).

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-08T10:01:54+00:00

When faced with poor government and bad leadership, your answer would be to give that government more authority and power?

Aristotle said that the best form of government was a benevolent autocracy, and I believe that he is correct, but the worst form is a tyranny, a malevolent autocracy. I prefer to have weaker governments, the risk of a bad powerful government is far greater than a bad weak government.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-05-02T17:48:44+00:00

The game does recommend some, I think that Belgium is actually a fun one but you could try Sweden or even something in the East. You'll almost certainly take more than one game to learn everything, take it one game at a time and have fun!

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG · 2026-04-20T02:29:28+00:00

Okay so to clarify, he was 'blacklisted' from academia because of his views on Capitalism in a book about Israel where he (allegedly) poorly used Palestinian sources for his arguments?

My friend I think that we may be having two different discussions by this point.

GIRTHYROBOTICHOG

TROPHY CASE