caze

Edit: timed out on editing, yo @Joyrex increase the amount of time we have to edit a post. "(in terms of transmission, substations, infrastructure)" is supposed to be "(in terms of transmission, substations, national interconnects)"

Schemes like sales tax and financial tax are good because they're very simple to implement and raise a lot of tax which is very hard to get out of paying. To address the moral issue of double taxation I think it's important that if you have a high sales tax you should have a low income tax, or vice versa. Scandinavian countries have high sales and income taxes, making them particularly regressive. The US on the other hand has very low (or non existent, depending on the state) sales tax, and low income tax, Yang wants to introduce a federal VAT, it's a great idea. Another possible tax is a Land Value Tax, they have been much talked about for a hundred years or so, but rarely implemented. They are very progressive and should definitely be tried out before a wealth tax (land is much easier to value than other assets, like a private company or an art collection, it's a far simpler and almost certainly more effective way of raising cash than a wealth tax). It's not just right wing opposition and NIMBYism at play here, there are two big problems. The first is environmental, growth of onshore wind is simply not sustainable, the amount of land required is just too much, and it's very damaging to wildlife (massive numbers of birds and bats, as well as insects, are killed, and onshore wind is especially bad at killing the birds at the top of the food chain, of which there are far less and many of which are already endangered - offshore wind also takes out lots of birds, but it's migratory birds - who can take a bit of a culling), there are also big sustainability questions in terms of the construction, maintenance and life-time and replacement requirements, and the carbon footprint of all that. The second is down to grid infrastructure, Germany is close to it's limits, without massive roll out of new grid infrastructure (in terms of transmission, substations, infrastructure) as well as the requirement for massive grid storage (which has never been implemented in any country without abundant spare hyrdo capacity) there just isn't much room for growth, you can't just keep adding capacity, eventually shit starts to explode. Stop thinking about it as debt then, think about it as a deferred tax, which you only have to pay if you can afford to. In the UK if you get a degree and end up unemployed for the rest of your life you'd never have to payback a penny of your student debt. Rich fuckers would continue to pay out of their own pockets for their education and everyone else would pay whatever they can. It's a far more efficient allocation of resources than just decoupling the cost from the usage, which would just lead to continuing cost increases, which would be paid back by everyone as their taxes continue to increase. It would also be far easier to implement in the US, would just require the government to setup a new federal body which students can avail themselves of, Bernie's plan would be a nightmare to implement given the fact that each state currently has a lot of say in how funding for universities works, it's not a given everyone would even be able to avail themselves of free college under his plan because of that.

a wealth tax wouldn't lead to wealth being transferred elsewhere, Americans pay tax on all of their income regardless where it was made or is stored. it did lead to massive capital flight when the French implemented one, ended up being a total disaster costing them billions, but that wouldn't apply to the US. most billionaires wealth isn't real money, it's tied up in stocks and shares and other assets. much of it is productive investment in the economy (it creates jobs, pays wages, allows companies to invest in R&D, etc.). liquidating a part of this 'wealth' every year is a bad and needless interference in the economy, it would be difficult to do properly (how do you even value it? the majority of it isn't publicly traded, there is no value on it until you try and sell it; and even the very fact of being forced to pay it would already begin to devalue it. how does debt factor into the calculations?), it would bugger up the stock market, it would be bad for pension funds. when people trade in stocks and other assets they can make a profit on it, and they already have to pay taxes on that (with a few exceptions, e.g. government bonds - which can be seen as a form of taxes you can make a profit from). they've already paid taxes on the money they used to buy those shares in the first place too, so a wealth tax is a form of double taxation, they are fundamentally immoral. it's probably also unconstitutional. there are plenty of better ways of raising extra tax revenue (increasing income tax or capital gains tax for example). this is just popular because people are envious and dumb. It's a terrible idea. US universities are too expensive as it is, this would just massively increase the cost of them, the tax burden would balloon over time. It's also a massive give away to the middle and upper classes, for people from poorer backgrounds who have problems paying off student debt there are other approaches (such as we have in the UK, where the majority of student debt is never repaid - student debt should be seen as a graduate tax, payable when you are earning enough), and more broadly the focus should be on cutting the cost per student of sending a kid to college. US health care also suffers from the same cost disease as 3rd level education, universal single payer has the same problems with free college, it would just exacerbate the cost problems that are already there while letting the rich off the hook. it's possible to provide universal access without nationalising insurance or provision, most of the world's successful health systems do not do either of these things, the US should look to them for inspiration, there are numerous reforms that could work within the current system to drive down the cost of insurance and drugs and also allow for full access to medicare for those who can't afford private insurance. it is totally sustainable and the safest form of energy production, bar none. there is no such thing as nuclear waste either, it's just more fuel for later use. just stick it in a box, it doesn't take up much room. renewables cannot replace nuclear and fossil generation, it's a fantasy, they can only play a part (Germany has already hit the limit of onshore wind generation for example).

radical, but in a bad way: wealth tax, cancelling student debt & free college, medicare for all, anti-nuclear green new deal

Bernie is nowhere near as bad as Corbyn: he's not disliked as much by the electorate, he's not living in the past, he's doesn't have an anti-western international outlook. In terms of policies he's still got plenty of radical ones, but on a personal level there's no comparison.

Alan Johnson, the former home secretary, said the result was “depressing” and that Corbyn had to go. they're going to spend some time blaming the media for this, but he'll have to resign.

It's pretty cool.

No we don't, our labour doesn't define our life. Alienation is as dumb as all of Marx's other ideas.

Even if automation ends up creating more new jobs than it gets rid of, at a minimum there will be a lot of people out of work during the transition, and many of them may end up being left behind entirely. The same happened in the past, as agriculture became more productive and mechanised prior to the industrial revolution there was a massive increase in landless unemployed peasants throughout Europe, many of these people ended up going to America and Australia, it wasn't until the industrial revolution was in full swing that their home nations could start to find work for them. If UBI is just a band aid for this transition period then that's fine, that would be all it needs to be. It is possible though that the new jobs won't materialise, just because it happened before doesn't mean it'll happen this time; in which case a deeper more fundamental change would be required.

I don't need to, post-scarcity is possible terrestrially it just won't last for very long. fixed that for you. the near term will just see proof of concept missions and technological development. you're wrong on several points here: 1) you only need to launch the mining tech into space once, once it's up there you can refuel and re-use it for multiple operations. long-term this stuff would be mostly constructed in space or on the moon anyway. most rockets are over-engineered for spaceflight to get them off the Earth, stuff constructed in space would be a lot simpler to manufacture in many ways (especially if it doesn't have to accomodate people). 2) there is abundant fuel in space, you can easily extract it from water-ice asteroids. there's a bunch of different types of fuel you could make in fact. 3) there is abundant feedstocks for plastic production in space, and on the moon, and on mars. polyethylene is just carbon and hydrogen. 4) sure there are big risks in trying to do this, but there are also big potential rewards, and as the risks go down in the future due to technological advancement, the likelihood goes up; someone will eventually have a go.

our asshole nature is far more deeply embedded than that, it's not just a result of society, it's also a result of evolution. a totalitarian system doesn't even require a majority of people to be assholes either, a tiny few can work their way to the top and do massive amounts of damage.

You also need a different species of animal to implement it I'm afraid ("great idea, wrong species"), unless you remove all scarcity first, in which case you don't really need communism anyway. The inherent greed and corruptibility of people will just get in the way every time, and communism is far more easily corruptible than capitalism, with far worse results when it inevitably happens as well.

Wut?! We've barely even begun to tap into the solar energy from the sun, our current ability to extract it is far from nil and the conversion efficiency will only improve in the coming decades (solar has gone from basically nothing to around 2% of world generation in a decade, and there's big room for growth with thermal conversion too), wind energy is basically just another form of solar power too (and that's at about 6% now of world generation, so we're talking about nearly 10% of total world energy generation coming from direct solar radiation, and we're only getting started, this is all very far from *nil*). Even fossil fuels are also largely solar power of a sort, just with another 5-6 stages added in. Also, in terms of the energy created by the sun long ago and stored on the planet in various heavy elements, we have enough to supply essentially free energy for tens or hundreds of thousands of years (so even if it was a closed Earth system energy scarcity wouldn't be a problem, we just need slightly better technology, nothing too fancy even, and I'm not even talking about fusion - which would give us millions of years worth of easily accessible fuel). As for other non-Earth resources, our ability to extract them is not currently nil either, it's only cost prohibitive in the near term due to the current high technology cost and relative abundance of terrestrial resources, not for any technical reason. This is something which would only take a hundred years (max) to sort out in terms of the technology. We don't need to worry about the gravity well cost, because it's basically free to get things down a gravity well, compared to sending them up. Musk has already shown in principle that it's economical to launch hundreds of large-payload rockets a year (and it won't take long to see whether it can be pulled off in practice, I see no reason why not) so getting the equipment up there shouldn't be a problem either (and maybe in a few hundred years we'll have a space elevator too). Distance isn't a problem either, ion drives are highly efficient, would take a bit of time to get everything going, but once you've got a supply train moving it wouldn't matter. We're only just beginning to figure out the value of all the stuff that's out there too, it's almost certainly massively undervalued (100s of trillions $ worth estimated currently, probably at least 1000 times that figure, and that's only the nearby stuff, and I'm not even talking about the other planets and their moons). There's no rush in tackling space resources though, we've still got massive gains to be made improving the efficiency of earth based production. Post-scarcity is possible without mining asteroids, it just won't last for very long. Eventually we'll tap our the resources and once local prices start to go back up again due to renewed scarcity, the cost of mining near earth asteroids will start to fall, it'll happen sooner with some elements than others (e.g. Platinum), but eventually it'll probably cheaper to get stuff from space even with abundant stuff left on Earth, due to the increasing environmental costs of mining for one thing. None of this is guaranteed of course (and I'm not even willing to put a bet on the likelihood of it happening), but to say it cannot happen is simply ignorant. And to think it can't because of a basic law of physics is just flat out wrong.

This is nonsense, entropy only deals with a closed system. Post scarcity (of fungible resources and energy) is completely possible within the earth, and other planets, by extracting energy and resources from the rest of the solar system, including energy from the sun (which has either been locked into resources present in the planets or solar radiation). Sure, over a long enough time period the solar system in total will remain subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but we're talking about billions of years here. This is not to say we're anywhere close to achieving such a thing, and many things will remain scarce in such a future (such as land, complex and bulky technology, certain hard to access commodities - though with land it's maybe not a big deal, there's nothing in theory preventing the earth from maintaining a population 10 or a 100 times its present size, and most estimates have the population leveling out by the end of the century).

god they were fucking awful

fixed that for you

Watched The Irishman last night, I liked it. A bit clichéd perhaps, nothing we haven't seen before in terms of the story-telling, but it was very well done, acting from the main guys was excellent, got better as it went along, building up to a strong emotional impact by the end. The CG did take me out of it on more than a few occasions, but overall it wasn't too distracting (mostly it was just that scene at the grocers, and a few moments where there was a close-up on a static face, or some jerky old-man movement from the younger versions).

rewatching DS9 at the moment, RIP Odo.

I always find it bizarre when people find it weird that rich people know/bump-into-at-parties other rich people.

Watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night, really enjoyed it. It takes a while for any of it to make sense, lots of setup and you're wondering if there's going to be any payoff... I still really enjoyed just watching them wander around chewing the shit, going to the movies, making tv shows, etc. It was all really well shot, looked great, a very pleasant nostalgia binge for the most part, with the odd segment here and there to add a little tension (like shooting the pilot and the visit to the old sound stage). the ending was really great though, haven't laughed/enjoyed that level of graphic violence in a while, nice cathartic response to a shitty thing that happened. I also liked that it wasn't too Tarantino-y, dialog occasionally showed signs of his usual style, but it was more restrained and natural sounding for the most part.

competent lawyers. he was never going to be found guilty, insults are protected speech. Unsworth might have had more luck if he tried to sue him in the UK, a lot easier to get a libel conviction there, no pesky constitution to get in the way.

you need to pre-order the album first

Watched Ad Astra last night, what a waste of a beautiful looking film, terrible script and lots of dodgy science (the bit through ring of Neptune at the end was particularly dumb for about 5 different reasons).