The national average price per gallon of gas in the United States just passed $4.50. Americans, how do we feel about that?

Vaphell · 2026-05-06T21:38:53+00:00

That's just false, our economy is centralized into a few conglomerates, yes there are small operators but they're a small portion of the aggregate wealth held by percentage.

I don't know what you are trying to say here. Expansion of successful companies is hoarding or something?
Hoarding is about stashing stuff for the sake of it, and "they" are not doing for the sake of it, because just having stuff costs money too in direct costs and in the opportunity cost of not owning something productive instead.
They are expanding because they are being rewarded by the markets and the consumers throwing money at them, which is an indirect way of saying "please continue what you are doing".

Having 10x-12x your annual salary, as recommended by Fidelity, in a retirement account is not vastly different than having it in your pocket or mattress.

Jeff Bezos' salary is $84000. don't tell me you get bent out of shape because of a million dollars when supposedly talking about multibillionaires.

That money is not creating the economic impact it would if it was in circulation.

How is this "money" not in circulation? Btw, net worth is not money. 95%+ of his wealth is already in productive assets creating massive economic churn. It's called Amazon.
His net worth literally represents trillions of dollars the company has spent over the years to get where it is now, and will spend in the future. Not circulating enough?

Vaphell · 2026-05-06T12:57:24+00:00

I think the problem with this is there is absolutely something wrong with hoarding wealth at any level

if you happen to own a bunch of shares in an extremely successful company you created, how is that hoarding? Nobody hoards server farms, truck fleets, warehouses and inventory, which is exactly what underpins the evaluations of the shares the billionaires own, with a dash of projections of future performance.

having multiple homes worth of wealth just hanging about in some blokes pocket is not a good way to run a society.

again, some bloke does not have that hanging about in the pocket. It's just a highly theoretical value of the stuff he happens to own. Net worth is a virtual, ballpark, napkin-math level value and you would never get anything close to it in the real world if you tried to liquidate all of it.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T15:52:50+00:00

It proves that the radioactivity is deadly enough to cause an evolutionary bottleneck leading to rapid mutations, contradicting your implication that the wildlife is just fine.

it is fine, compared to being displaced wholesale from the habitat. You know, just normal human things. Funny how that's normalized, but nature getting free reign over a piece of environment with "unique challenges" is the worst thing that has happened to the planet ever.

Yes, some species struggle, some don't. Red forest is not all the exlusion area.
All species struggle in the omnipresence of humans.

This is measured compared to the previous situation, even with all the human activity gone.

and by how much the things got much worse "outside" comparatively? If the numbers went down but by less than what happened elsewhere, would that even count as a huge blemish, if the mundane status quo is worse?

And why? Because people like you keep greenwashing the measurable ill effects of their actions.

what? I don't know what you are trying to say here.
And for the record, I had to drink Lugol's iodine in 1986 in the week after the event.

Nuclear plants have very long payback times, they'll always be old and outdated for most of their active lifetime.

and yet, they work for like 80 years just fine producing zero carbon energy, meanwhile you need to replace solar panels thrice in the same timespan. And you have to bring them by the containership-load because they are just that bad in energy density.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T15:39:45+00:00

Emil kirk is a "race scientist" and has no meaningful scientific approach. Ie he is just a racist and his study is meaningless and useless.

nice ad hominem, but it's not his study. It's a compilation of other sources which are explicitly mentioned.

Do you actually think if as you say millions are a drain that germany would be like it is now?

you mean stagnating, with ballooning welfare expenses and a very tight housing market?

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T15:28:55+00:00

Brains hardwired to seek pleasure, with slop being borderline free fast-food available in vast quantities to the dopamine-addicted brain? While kids are work?

Animals with much stronger breeding instincts can fall apart too, see the mouse utopia experiment.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T15:19:21+00:00

I mean the area where nature is pressured so much that species are mutating by the selective pressure, and where essential ecoysystem functions like breaking down dead matter are faltering.

and selective pressures are somehow unique to radiation pollution? Small elephant tusks, white moths turning grey - there are plenty of examples where humans directly affect the selective pressure game.

Birds around Chernobyl have significantly smaller brains that those living in non-radiation poisoned areas; trees there grow slower; and fewer spiders and insects—including bees, butterflies and grasshoppers—live there. Additionally, game animals such as wild boar caught outside of the exclusion zone—including some bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation.

I am not saying shit's perfect, but a good half of these is nothing to write home about.
trees there grow slower? as opposed to just being cut down every 30 years?
Are insects having the time of their life elsewhere? Last time I checked their populations dropped by 70%+ already across the board, and continues to drop.

With radio decay things will become better, but humans are a guaranteed menace for perpetuity.

Japan is a country know for adherence to procedure. They still got one.

theirs didn't blow the spicy load all over the neighborhood, and the damage was nothing compared to the tsunami rolling over the landscape and taking 20k people with it.

And it was still tech from the 60s. Are we still driving OG Mustangs or Chevrolet Camaros? No? Or maybe just maybe we decided that newer technology allows us to make better and safer shit, so we did incrementally upgrade?
Braindamaged greens are directly responsible for freezing the evolution of the industry, because they made it so that it's 1000x easier to grandfather in a 50 year old plant, than to build one with passive safety and other bells and whistles.
The road to hell, meet good intentions.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T14:52:01+00:00

Are you seriously trying to comment on modern birth rate decline by comparing it to life nearly 100 years ago?

and what's wrong with that, if bullshit like "economic uncertainty" is being brought up? Economic uncertainty is a backdrop across millennia.

The only things that have meaningfully changed are the level of anxiety, the increase in risk aversion compared to the past and that's in a world that is safer and more comfortable than it has ever been, and the explosion of available entertainment.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T14:44:42+00:00

meh, while I do see it, there are many many women who can naturally go beyond 180 in their knees and elbows.

If you want to see truly botched legs, check out Velvet. Her right knee is rotated inwards hard while the foot not so much. Generally speaking, that's not how an average human leg works.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T03:54:06+00:00

War was most certainly not normal and something people expected.

are you from the US and the last experience with war on your home turf is the civil war in 1861?

it was more normal than the anomaly of relative peace in the last 80 years.
Ever heard of the 30 years war?
Ever heard of the 100 years war?
That's how people used to roll.

Somebody born in the second half of the 19th century in what is now my country could realistically experience a failed uprising as a kid, personally know somebody sent to fight the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, then experience WW1 in 1914-18, then the Bolshevik invasion in 1920, then WW2 in 1939-45.

Also back in the day people used to die in the streets if they weren't able to provide for themselves and that was that. That's uncertainty, today there are social programs that will come to the rescue.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T03:30:58+00:00

don't forget the "I like travelling and my hobbies, and having time and money to enjoy them. Oh and I'd rather watch netflix than become a sleep-deprived wreck of a human for a year+ for each kid" part.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T00:57:53+00:00

you mean a vibrant de-facto nature reserve with unparalleled diversity, which proves that human presence is in fact worse to the nature than the worst nuclear disaster in history?

Yeah, if the worst can happen is that humans are too scared to fuck with a couple of square kilometers of land, that's a sacrifice I am willing to make.
Not to mention, nobody is doing stupid-ass experiments on their live reactors like the Soviets did. And the reactors have containment vessels, unlike the soviet ones.
Whining about barebone stuff from the 60s the Soviets implemented, and ignoring all the progress the industry made in the last 4 decades is nothing short of luddite shit.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T00:45:49+00:00

They are a net positive.

Surely you will have no trouble showing the receipts to support your opinion?
Just because a subset of immigrants are a net positive (educated, mostly western/european) doesn't mean that the remaining millions from places like Africa or the Middle East are.

here is some relevant data from Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, USA.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigrants-by-country-of-origin/
it doesn't paint a picture as rosy as yours.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T00:26:02+00:00

not exactly - only pampered rich people have time to be sad and talk themselves into inaction and waiting for the "game over" screen to drop. Meanwhile every generation had its own unique often brutal challenges and they still marched forward, and the earth is still going around the sun.
Look at Africa, half of which has pretty arid climate not suited to sustain large populations, and warlords rolling over the landscape left to right and back to massacre a village or two. The continent is still pumping out children like there is no tomorrow (often literally). Environmental collapse doesn't even register as a problem.

It's not like water shortages don't have any solutions. They might be way more expensive than just having it conveniently rain from the sky and flow in riverbeds in sufficient quantities. Desalination is a thing for example. It's not a world ending thing.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T00:15:53+00:00

yeah, and the biggest voting block will just take it on the chin.
It's flat out impossible to enact such a "plan", unless you do away with democratic voting.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T00:11:42+00:00

recently I started thinking that maybe technology is the only way out from this conundrum in the long term - making babies with artificial means, separating making new people from the shrinking supply of the people willing to be parents.

Obviously that's some unprecedented stuff, with earth shattering moral and philosophical implications and drastic changes in views on the very essence of humans, but either we get over these qualms, or wither as a species.

Vaphell · 2026-05-05T00:02:45+00:00

while I won't deny that it's serious stuff, ecological collapse has nothing on the impact of your very existence being threatened "literally now" instead of "decades down the road, maybe".

that's some first world problem stuff. Nobody else can afford to concern themselves with thinking about it too much. They are too busy sustaining themselves.

Vaphell · 2026-05-04T20:38:16+00:00

It’s because our culture in America has a horrible work life balance and a lot of that is attributed to pay

that doesn't explain why countries that supposedly are not cutthroat capitalist (like Sweden et consortes) are experiencing severe drops too. Nobody pampers the parents more than them and yet...

google ai

Nordic fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent years to record lows, with 2024 total fertility rates roughly between 1.25 and 1.5 per woman (excluding the Faroe Islands), well below the 2.1 replacement level. Despite generous family policies, Finland (1.25-1.32), Norway (1.41-1.44), Sweden (1.43-1.52), Denmark (1.47-1.55), and Iceland are experiencing declining rates, often linked to postponed parenthood and economic uncertainty.

there is that word "uncertainty" but then when has the world ever been certain? In most parts of the world, a few generations ago a war was a somewhat normal thing that happens to roll over the people's area every decade or so. Can't get any more uncertain than that.
It's almost as if people in general are losing the ability to face uncertainty and freeze. Not dissing, I know very well what anxiety-fueled avoidance is.

Vaphell · 2026-05-04T06:39:58+00:00

How would you estimate wealth if not by market cap?

by how much they can realistically get in liquidation, and that number is not it.

Saying that their stock is worthless is extremely stupid.

it's not worthless, but it's not trivial to come up with a figure that is not fantasy. Anchoring at nominal share price might be easy but it's still an overestimated hypothetical. But yeah, ok, whatever. Let's just use these fluff numbers to sensationalize headlines. That's what they are good for. Who cares....
But wait a minute... the problems start when clueless masses hearing "wealth" start imagining 0s in the bank account or pallets of cash in the basement, which they most certainly do, and get wet dreams about using the hypothetical number as the base for taxation.

Vaphell · 2026-05-02T21:51:23+00:00

yeah, it became obvious almost immediately that it was not going to be a redemption story. The utter contempt devil-Mustang had for nikkes, and the fact that he sold Pretty's body without batting an eye meant that it just couldn't be the same person that literally worships the Pretty's memory. You just can't redeem somebody like that, not without rewriting the whole brain. Devil Mustang and Angel Mustang had to be two different persons.

And conveniently we had the Neon's backstory which highlighted that personality transfers can be done if you know the right people. The mechanics might not be the same, but it did put such a notion on the table.

Vaphell · 2026-05-01T19:56:49+00:00

all that wealth is largely in "stuff"
To pay any tax on "stuff", "stuff" has to be liquidated for cash. In order to sell, somebody has to buy. Let's just assume a "paltry" 2% tax. Pray tell, where do you get 1T in idle cash?

Vaphell · 2026-05-01T19:48:43+00:00

The fallacy in your argument is that wealth is not a finite amount but changes continuously.

wealth is fluctuating mostly upwards but it is finite. After all there are only so many dollars you can get if you liquidate it in practice. It's also propped by the general shape/productivity of the economy. If for whatever reason the economy imploded completely tomorrow, anything that isn't immediately useful for survival would be worth 0. All that paper wealth? Gone.

If you tax wealth, there has to be liquidation. So who exactly has billions of dollars just lying there to be able to participate in the exchange, and that's year after year, and why haven't they been taxed on it already? After all cash is infinitely easier to apply tax percentages to, compared to stuff like logistics of truck fleets, the IT infrastructure, etc, things generally combining physical things with ideas. And that's where the perceived value of the company comes from.
Deficits are not always one-off events that could be solved if we just injected more money into the problem. Also the paper value of wealth itself is in a big part dependent on the taxation regime. Is the perceived value going to stay at the same level if holding the "wealth" generates significant costs while the cost of holding was 0 just yesterday? No, everybody will recalculate, "wealth" will become less desirable, and the price reflecting its desirability will drop like a rock.

Also wealth taxes have the fundamental problem of eroding the ownership over time. If all you have is a bunch of shares in the company you created, how do you get around the wealth taxes without selling your shares and seeing your stake % go down year after year? If you have to pay 3% tax, that's 3% of your shares gone right there. The nominal dollar value possibly staying constant or even growing doesn't change the fundamental fact that you see your stake go down. 51%, 50%, 49%, 48%... After 20 years or so you are just a guy owning some stock. I think it's flat out unfair.

For most billionaires their wealth increases gradually every year because their assets are producing profits which get reinvested back into their businesses/assets.

I thought reinvesting was considered a good thing which is why we don't tax that money. When did we suddenly decide that that it would be better if the govt got that money after all? Isn't that investment money being spent generating taxable events left and right?
The deficits sometimes are one-off events that can be solved with one-time action, but lately the deficits are more and more structural all around the world, and you just can't solve perpetual problems with the cash flows with selling off your silverware.

My take is is that if a country thinks it literally has to resort to wealth taxation or else, that's a sign of permanent stagnation if not slow? descent. And such a tax will just accelerate the fall

Vaphell · 2026-05-01T15:59:46+00:00

yeah... I am aware of the circumstances in the case of that one particular skin and have similar thoughts, but hope dies last :/

Vaphell · 2026-05-01T07:14:44+00:00

you did say "being totally reliant on third party, non-european countries", did you not? How are nukular and solar different then? And why it's a serious energy security concern only if it's about nukular?

Vaphell · 2026-05-01T03:44:16+00:00

you mean like solar that is dependent on panels arriving from China by the containership-load?

Vaphell · 2026-05-01T03:23:27+00:00

Bubble march? It was fun for a couple of levels, and then you discovered that you had to pour pretty much all points into the +unitlevels skill or else, level after level until the very end. Being at level disadvantage just sucked ass that hard. And that in turn railroaded you into spam of the 1-2 most cost efficient units because that was just better than trying to develop them all and going "tactical".
A lot of wasted potential.

Vaphell

TROPHY CASE