Yes, but also I don’t think the Democrats have any stronger candidate to run against Republicans.

This is a real problem. Who’s in the national Democratic pipeline? Biden kind of sucked the life out of anyone associated with him - Anthony Blinken? Lloyd Austin? Pete Buttigeig was the closest thing Biden had to an attack dog, but he keeps losing elections and I don’t know what he’s doing now. I thought Katie Porter was cool for a while, but she blew her run for senate and is currently choking on a run for governor of California. Bernie’s too old.

I don’t even know who else is out there.

Basically the same reason the US hasn’t switched to metric.

At what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?

That’s actually the point: use taxes to force rich people to make high risk investments.

If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your farm to pay the property taxes, then you sell your farm to pay the taxes and someone else gets to put the capital to better use.

If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your $10B company to pay the wealth tax, then you have to sell enough of it to pay the tax, and someone else gets more say in how the company runs.

Wealth tax encourages people with ungodly fortunes to make bigger, more risky bets, because they have to overcome the constant drain of wealth tax. Ultra-wealthy shouldn’t just coast along on the low returns of super-safe investments, because those are the people who can afford to lose part of their fortune.

Instead, we have the guy with $1000 YOLOing his life savings on GME options, because the $80 he can get from an index fund isn’t going to get him to retirement, while Berkshire Hathaway is sitting of $300B of US treasuries.

Income tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it’s not a solution to inequality.

Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don’t address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.

Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can’t get to a working system if we don’t even start. Tax wealth.

For most of our history, real estate was wealth. You needed property to grow crops, mine resources, build a factory, or do any kind of venture that would make money. It’s only in the 20th century that we really start having a significant amount of wealth in stock markets that couldn’t be directly traced to a physical asset. The robber barons figured that was a good excuse to stop taxing their wealth.

Luigi.

If you want the real answer…

The Radiance of God.

Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.

The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.

I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.

Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?

Do you think the country would be better off with Senator Mehmet Oz?

Because that was Pennsylvania’s choice: Mehmet Oz or John Fetterman.

If you go back to the primary, it was Fetterman or Conor Lamb, a US Rep who - although he voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker - also voted to deregulate small banks and against de-scheduling cannabis.

Lemmings outside VA may not know that Spanberger is a Democrat.

.63W: N100 server with 2 HDD & 2 SSD. Cable modem. 5-port POE switch. WAP. Ooma VOIP device.

The POE & WAP are like 10W between them, but I had to add them to get strong enough wifi to one particular client. Authentik somehow consumes 3W. Immich also has a high idle load, so I leave it down most of the time.

At least my provider, when they need to build a new plant or do capacity upgrades, they get the PSC to give them blanket increases in service charge or kWh-rate, on the basis that everybody contributes to the higher demand. Now we’ve got single customers claiming they want the full output of two or three power plants, and why should I pay the mortgage on those plants for 20 years? When the data center will be gone in 5?

It’s way more complicated to build a GW-scale power plant than a GW-scale data center, mostly because the power plant is subject to environmental studies, fuel supply, etc, so a DC looking for investors that can just say they’re going to build a big warehouse, fill it with computers, and get electricity, magically, from the local utility, gets to outsource the hardest problem, and stands a better chance of getting their funding (regardless of whether they actually build anything).

I forget where I keep seeing that some huge fraction of proposed DCs will/are never built, suggesting that many of them are just investor scams. Showing their work on power supply would (presumably) make the scam harder to run.

When an alcoholic sets about seeking forgiveness, they’re supposed to go around to the people they’ve wronged and apologize. They’re also supposed to recognize that they make poor alcohol choices and need to give it up.

Maybe the MAGA people could recognize that they make poor political choices and give up their voting and their activism.

Like, I try to think how I would react if I made a choice so monumentally bad that thousands of people died, people were tortured, or an entire national economy thrown into disarray. There’s no reparation I could pay to compensate; no sacrifice I could make to balance the scale. That’s kind of the point of forgiveness: the wounded party has not been made whole, maybe can not be made whole, but accepts that trying to wring compensation out of the offender will only make another injured party. But there’s still the question of how to keep the offender from doing it again.

Not a farmer, but my romanticized view of “proper” farming is a partnership with nature to get the whole ecosystem to focus on human-useful products. Apparently, that’s not particularly profitable to the person trying to single-handedly farm a square mile or more, and discoveries like this seem one more way to decouple food production from natural processes. One more step in converting farms into factories.

I spend a good part of the day just trying to keep it running.

True that. When I stopped working, I added regular exercise, hoping to stave off the decay as long as possible. Working OK so far, but I know that it’s inevitable for doctor visits to become part of the routine. Just the next phase of life, and I’m going to have to figure out how to make the most of it. Keep the brain sharp - the modern world has a lot more opportunities to share my brain than the old world.

Similar boat: I am fine; everyone else seems fucked.

I suspect this is why those old robber barons had such elaborate social circuits: to keep themselves distracted from the shit going on around them and any role they played in creating said shit.

There’s not much an individual can do about the systemic decline. I mean, vote for people who seem like they’ll work against it, but that’s kind of tears-in-the-sea.

You spent your working years trying to do the right thing & help your country/people on a large scale; you can do that in retirement on a small scale. Look for a mutual aid group, help your neighbors, look for local NPOs who could use your skills. When the system sucks, we have to help each other outside of the system. Remind each other that people are actually, usually, pretty decent, and that our perceptions get twisted by a handful of ragin psychoaths who have somehow gotten to be in charge.

Must be a new thing. My 20-year-old BR drive has never complained.