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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • Thing is, this already happens, it’s just currently more in the billionaire’s favor because instead of tax it’s a “donation”. You’re proposing the same system that already exists with lobbyists and Super PACs, just more enforced. No one is going to bite that bait when they can just pay Scheister and Swindel, Attorneys at Law, to cut a private deal with the CEOs and senators of their choice, be completely unbeholden to public opinion about it, and not be required to do it again next tax season if it’s not profitable to do so.

    Besides, I’ve had quite enough of rich assholes deciding that this year they’re going to donate $80m to exterminate the gays / to shut down solar startups / to arm all the cops with rocket launchers. In every situation, given the choice, they will always invest their money into whatever is most immediately profitable to them, morals or longevity be damned. This would cause our already easily-purchased politicians to be even more easily purchased and with semi public approval, as Elongated Muskrat now has a legal right to billionaire hero-worship? No thanks.

    The special billionaire tax isn’t an awful idea. The perks attached to it are most definitely an awful, no good, very bad idea. If something like this did get implemented it would be an absolute requirement that the investor have no say in where these taxes are spent. They may advise in certain directions, but final say should be up to a jury of some sort.




  • MLK advanced civil rights by being a nuisance. Gandhi pushed Britain out of India by being a nuisance. I’m sure there are others.

    It is in the nature of protest to be disruptive. It has to be. If it isn’t, it gets ignored. Climate change is getting ignored. What would you rather they do, go deface an oil refinery? That’ll just get them arrested and the news suppressed. Big public displays that can’t be hushed are the only way to make sure your message reaches the world. These folks have been considerate enough to make sure that message didn’t permanently damage its canvas. I don’t know what more you could ask from them.



  • If we had an appropriate scheduling for it so that it could be properly researched and manufactured we could just treat it like every other plant-based medicine we have (of which there are VERY many) - isolate and extract the compounds you’re interested in and recombine them in a pill or gel or aerosol form. Making supplements or tinctures or whatever, from cannabis, wouldn’t be any more difficult than creating aspirin from willow. The only reason it’s difficult is because it’s so highly scheduled that nobody is allowed to work with it.







  • skulblaka@startrek.websitetoMemes@lemmy.mlGot Played
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    6 months ago

    Chucks and Vans are definitely not good shoes. They are stylish shoes, but the shoe itself is a piece of cloth over a piece of cardboard. No wonder you have bad feet, bro, you’ve been walking on trash.

    I bought a pair of steel toe boots with good insole and arch support for about $85 three years ago and those things are still going strong. Comfy and durable. If you’ve got big feet or want nicer boots than me, that can range up to about $150, anything higher than that is designer bullshit. Don’t fall for a brand name.




  • skulblaka@startrek.websitetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldPSA.
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    6 months ago

    Infinite possibilities does not mean all possibilities. It is possible - even probable, in most cases - to have an infinite set which does not contain all possible members.

    As an example, the set of all even numbers and the set of all whole numbers are both infinite sets with completely different contents. Even accounting for the fact that the set of all whole numbers contains the entire set of all even numbers, the two will still differ by a factor of 50%.

    I think that Vsauce explains this concept a little better than I can as I am not a mathematician, I merely watch their content on the internet.




  • And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

    I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

    So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.