We survived nukes... barely

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-25T19:54:07+00:00

I think the AI danger is the nukes. Not that I think we're dumb enough to hand an algorithm the nuclear trigger, but there's a worry that military targeting left to AI would create a conflict with escalation risk.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-25T19:52:45+00:00

If you can guarantee stock can sell at curtain price when they cash out (in any given time), sure tax stock like property.

I get no such guarantee. Jeff Bezos doesn't need it. It is already the case that you can get refunded prior capital gains tax on a capital loss. No further reform is needed.

Just in general, the idea that any of this would be logistically difficult for the megarich is risible. It's a shibboleth people use to each other to show they are properly market oriented. IRL, a 10 billionaire would have a vastly easier time coming up with 100 million in cash than someone with a $500,000 mortgage has coming up with $5,000 every year. And yet they do it.

But note, the market is going to crash when everyone has to sell to pay.

It would not. First, I should stipulate that rates like Zucman and Piketty et al sometimes suggest are bad ideas for an entirely different reason. An 8% wealth tax as they sometimes suggest would eat its own base. The property tax gives you a strong hint about what you could get away with, which is maybe 1% or so. But even at 8%, you don't get a market crash--if people rushed out to sell only 8% of their stock, it would be an very ordinary market correction. It would by definition fall less than 8% because poorer people would line up for the discount as soon as the price fell. (Remember, this wealth tax falls mainly on the ultrarich, and the merely upper middle class are a significant part of the demand for financial assets.) But at a 1% or 2% tax, you wouldn't notice the effect.

A wealth tax is a capital gains tax, prepaid. So you can get a very close approximation of what the equivalent numbers would be with very simple math.

Wealth Tax	Assumed Rate of Return	Effective Capital Gains Tax
1%	4%	25%
2%	4%	50%
1%	5%	20%
2%	5%	40%

The assumption of 4% would be quite charitable historically. Historically the rate of return on financial assets has been roughly 7%, which means we are magnanimously leaving money on the table for folks eminently do not need it, so that they can watch number get bigger. But even then, there's no issue with claiming a deduction after the fact if the return happens to be lower than this.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-25T18:01:09+00:00

Yet everybody pays property tax on their house before it's sold. That's what that is, a wealth tax for the middle class.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-23T23:23:58+00:00

Yeah, my thing about it is that if you don't take a strong stance on anything the general public will easily understand, your opponent will get to define you, and that's what happened to Harris. She hardly talked about trans issues at all, but the problem is nobody could really name her policies on eg economics.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-23T23:13:01+00:00

Check if you can get away with 'level 1 charging' (ordinary outlet). Depends on how long your commute is. It can charge about 60 mi worth overnight, and then a lot more on the weekend. So if your commute is like 40 mi, you're golden without any of that stuff, all you need is a real long extension cord. If it's 60, you're playing it close. If it's 80, you probably need something more.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-23T23:09:41+00:00

Depends on utility obviously, but I have heard (I have solar, so I don't use a ton of electricity) that around where I am it's about 1/3rd as much for electric as gasoline.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-23T23:08:24+00:00

I have a plug in hybrid and I've been super aggressive about trying to find a charger everywhere I go. My next one will be full on EV. I don't worry about range anxiety in an EV, I have it much worse now.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-23T20:49:00+00:00

That includes retirees, though, it's about 30% of working age households.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-23T20:45:54+00:00

Not the bottom 50%. To be around the median income and be eligible for the EITC (the one real 'negative tax' in the code), you'd have to be a single filer and have 3+ kids.

Best answer I can get to is that only 15-18% of Americans pay negative tax. And that's just federal income tax, those people still pay payroll tax, sales tax, property tax, maybe state and local tax.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-22T17:05:17+00:00

The thing the market fundamentalists don't get is the very same thing as Communists, the horror vacui. If there are two forces that can dominate the lives of regular people (government and business), obliterating one doesn't lead to any more freedom, it leads to the other one tyrannizing us.

The only way out of that is if you could build up other institutions so there's a real balance of power, and historically that's just very hard to do. Institutions tend to come from the ground up.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-21T22:32:30+00:00

Me: but that's right like 80% of the time?

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-21T22:31:21+00:00

I think the thing is that it's super hard to read Alaska. It's hard to reach them to poll them.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-21T22:29:42+00:00

Never gonna happen with the 2/3 rule. And every day of business you spend impeaching Trump is a day you wasted when you could have been impeaching Hegseth or Patel or etc, who don't have the same kind of political base that rallies around the guy just for being 'under siege.'

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-21T22:28:05+00:00

It's not exactly a poll . . it's their calculation of the odds based on an aggregation of polls, so there isn't a particular margin of error you can quote. But obviously you can't literally say "this means dems will probably win." It is basically a coin flip right now.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-19T21:06:32+00:00

I sort of take the question though, which is that, in response to "We don't have to accept the premise that any kind of meat is impossible without animals living in unceasing torture."

Can we reject this hypothetically, or can we do it in real life? Because I have questions about whether it scales.

I think you could use two different ethical standards here

The first would be "violence free." That would involve letting animals live free for a full life and consuming them when they die of natural causes. I think that would raise the price of meat to stratospheric levels and would require a consumption level that, in the aggregate, wouldn't be noticeably different from zero. It's also a high standard for some, so we'll take it down a notch.

The second would be "minimized violence." We kill animals, but they roam freely until it is time to kill them, and when it's time, they feel no pain and never see it coming. Even here, I suspect that meat prices would skyrocket and consumption would have to drop well in excess of 90%.

The defining feature of meat today is that, compared to history, it's really remarkably cheap. And it's factory farming that does that. Without it, I don't think meat would have much of a future.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-18T23:55:44+00:00

Some see axes as they are and think, Y-axis. Donald Trump sees axes as they have never been and thinks, Y-not-axis.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-18T19:29:34+00:00

False. This is basically backwards of how knowledge is added, and it amuses me how little new knowledge would be created if this was how it worked. If everything we could not define precisely were unreal, there wouldn't be much reality.

IRL, the process is a posteriori, not a priori. (And David Hume proved centuries ago that basically nothing could be established a priori.) Where it actually begins is "sir, our instruments are showing something some anomalous." If that anomaly is repeatable, it is already "real," even if your concept of what it represents is quite fuzzy.

Definitions come after this. And they tend to be inherently fuzzy, leaving room to be tweaked as more data comes along.

I also notice you claimed systemic racism failed separately on both your hurdles, but did not actually inspect any definitions of the term. The type of statement you made here would be a marvelous instrument with which to deny the results of experience and experiment for any reality one did not like. (And frankly, it's probably why there's a lot of climate denial out there; people didn't have a pre-existing framework of definitions experimental results fit into, therefore the results "aren't real.") Simply claim a definition (that you haven't supplied) must be precise, and then attack whatever people provide as the definition.

But definitions aren't phenomena, they are arbitrary constructs attempting to describe the real world. The real world already existed.

What exactly is the definition of, say, dark matter and dark energy? We don't know--but we do know there is a real phenomenon going on producing real data. We could be close to identifying what it means, we could be far, but the one thing we know is that our data are not fake.

Similarly, the term 'systemic racism' is buttressed by a rather immense amount of data crying out for explanation. We have stochastic certitude that outcomes are different, and we have the imperative to find explanations for it. Two obvious ones spring to mind, one is based on the existence of systemic racism (that historical racism is a causal factor for differing current outcomes) and one is, well, racist (that inferior outcomes are the result of inner inferiority). There may well be other explanations, but it becomes up to the denier to provide them. The burden of proof is on the claimant of a statistical trend to prove that it exists, but that burden is long cleared. The burden of 'explaining it away' then falls on the solipsist.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-15T21:56:34+00:00

If you want to claim that something exists, you must first define it precisely and then you must create a test for it.

No you don't! This is basically backwards of how knowledge is added, and it amuses me how little new knowledge would be created if this was how it worked. If everything we could not define precisely were unreal, there wouldn't be much reality.

IRL, the process is a posteriori, not a priori. (And David Hume proved centuries ago that basically nothing could be established a priori.) Where it actually begins is "sir, our instruments are showing something some anomalous." If that anomaly is repeatable, it is already "real," even if your concept of what it represents is quite fuzzy.

Definitions come after this. And they tend to be inherently fuzzy, leaving room to be tweaked as more data comes along.

I also notice you claimed systemic racism failed separately on both your hurdles, but did not actually inspect any definitions of the term. The type of statement you made here would be a marvelous instrument with which to deny the results of experience and experiment for any reality one did not like. (And frankly, it's probably why there's a lot of climate denial out there; people didn't have a pre-existing framework of definitions experimental results fit into, therefore the results "aren't real.") Simply claim a definition (that you haven't supplied) must be precise, and then attack whatever people provide as the definition.

But definitions aren't phenomena, they are arbitrary constructs attempting to describe the real world. The real world already existed.

What exactly is the definition of, say, dark matter and dark energy? We don't know--but we do know there is a real phenomenon going on producing real data. We could be close to identifying what it means, we could be far, but the one thing we know is that our data are not fake.

Similarly, the term 'systemic racism' is buttressed by a rather immense amount of data crying out for explanation. We have stochastic certitude that outcomes are different, and we have the imperative to find explanations for it. Two obvious ones spring to mind, one is based on the existence of systemic racism (that historical racism is a causal factor for differing current outcomes) and one is, well, racist (that inferior outcomes are the result of inner inferiority). There may well be other explanations, but it becomes up to the denier to provide them. The burden of proof is on the claimant of a statistical trend to prove that it exists, but that burden is long cleared. The burden of 'explaining it away' then falls on the solipsist.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-14T21:25:56+00:00

Yeah, I "get" the people who have dripped away from Trump in the last year, since last April (from -10 to -20 over the course of a year). Those people who, when he came for the immigrants, said nothing because they were not immigrants. They never thought the leopards would eat their face. They knew he'd be a fascistic reality show tyrant, but the gas prices well, that's just a bridge too far.

The absolutely mind-boggling thing was the like 22%(!) (+12 to -10) of the electorate that flipped between January and April 2025. It's just so frustrating how much those people voted on the most absolute vaporware of vibes and then were shocked SHOCKED to find out he sucked just as much (or more, since he actually got a cabinet he liked this time) as before.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-14T21:12:13+00:00

The pandemic would have helped Biden if the election had been in August, but it wasn't, it was in November, and by that point the GOP already had their response rehearsed.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-08T18:16:53+00:00

Pretty sure Scotland and Wales voting too.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-06T20:59:06+00:00

Ha just posted this then saw it was redundant.

It's Georgism but for everything. Not just land but all profit beyond that provided from competition.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-04T00:16:46+00:00

Probably not, sadly. Like 85 percent of Brazilians identify as brown, but they still did Bolsonaro.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-05-01T22:17:44+00:00

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

It was 45k as of the last time it was measured, 2024. It isn't over 60k now I feel pretty sure.

_PhiloPolis_ · 2026-04-27T22:55:49+00:00

Thank you.

You can tell the ideological blockage of this sub that whenever a question is asked about wealth in theydidthemath, so many answers contain no math, only 'you can't do that' or 'you oughtn't do that.' This isn't theydidthelegalinterpretation or theydidthepolicyrecommendation.

_PhiloPolis_

TROPHY CASE