Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There’s no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.

Older people grew up on BBSes and later “Bulletin Boards”, which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a “celebrity” vs “fan” content model where it’s all geared around followers and likes. It’s all parasocial relationships from the “fan” side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.

I heard yesterday about how a lot of Imams in Michigan posed for selfies with him.

Everyone knows where he stands.

I strongly suspect that isn’t true. I think anti-Trump people know where he stands, but I bet a lot of pro-Trump people are about to be in for a big surprise.

Related: we’ve all heard the stories of a time traveler going back to kill Hitler before his rise to power. One common theme in almost all those stories is that the attempt fails, that’s why history is as we remember. This morning has me thinking that maybe time travel was involved in a couple of Trump assassination attempts.

I like that only Iowa and Arizona are the only states with full names labelled without weirdness, and they’re completely wrong. If it were a human completing this map, I’d say those were the two states they were confident about, and they’re obviously wrong.

For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn’t useful if you’re doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don’t. There’s a “C/CE” but there isn’t a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there’s no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you’re using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It’s pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you’re out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it’s a UI issue that you can’t just say “hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it”.

Don’t forget that workers like tips because tips allow you to cheat on your taxes. I’ve never met anybody who worked in a tipped job who reported 100% of the tips they received.

Another issue is that everybody thinks they’re above average. Waiters / waitresses think that if there are no more tips, they (being above average) will lose out.

It’s not some kind of sneaky thing where if workers are paid with tips the customers pay more. When workers are paid in normal wages instead of tips, the prices are just higher.

The problem is that many tipped workers love tips because most of the time they can avoid reporting all of them, so they pay less in taxes. Employers like them because it can make their prices seem lower because the price on something like the menu isn’t actually the final price someone pays. The people who hate tips are the customers who can never be sure what the final bill will be, and who often have to “tip” a minimum of 10%, often in advance, for service that isn’t tip-worthy.

It’s ridiculous to pretend that businesses don’t have business models that support paying a living wage, or that without tips they’d go out of business. The only difference is that they can list lower prices knowing that the final bill will include a tip. If tips were eliminated they’d just have to list the items with a slightly higher price. The customers also know that that tip is going to be included. Other than European tourists, nobody goes into a restaurant and thinks that the final bill will merely be the cost of the food they ordered. They know they’ll be expected to pay a tip too. Getting rid of tipping would just mean that the tip would be $0, and the food would be a bit more expensive.

Calculators just have a bad user interface in general. It’s pretty amazing that the UI was established in 1970 and was never changed after that.

Or uses a serious calculator.

Looking at “Table 1”, the 2022 value for the US is 12,555 in PPP international dollars. 1/4 of that would be 3139. The only countries below 3200 are countries with a significantly lower development level than the US: Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Turkey, Slovakia, Chile, Hungary, Poland, Greece and so on.

US peer countries in terms of development would be countries like Germany, France, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Denmark, UK, Japan, etc. Of those, only Japan and the UK are below 6278, which would be half the cost of the US system. Canada is close though at 6319. And some, like Germany and Switzerland are closer to 3/4 of the US costs.

I think it’s more fair to say that the US could have a much better healthcare system that also covered everybody in the country for half the cost if it switched to a Universal system. To be able to do it for 1/4 the cost, the US would have to have an economy like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc. Wages and costs would have to be significantly lower. To put it in perspective, as a Canadian if they think they’d have a functional healthcare system if the funding was cut in half. I can pretty much guarantee you they’d say no.

Universal healthcare is much, much better than what the US has. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s just a better system, even if you’re relatively well off.

Having said that, I do wonder where they got the 5% and 20% figures from. The US system is very wasteful, but not 4x as bad as a Universal system.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022

Sure, everything is gameable if you’re a billionaire, but it would require clever lawyers and involve some risk.

Hardly. Historically there has been a lot of cheating in elections. Look at Chicago up to the 1970s. Election fraud was common there.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1973/05/08/how-the-chicago-tribune-exposed-city-vote-fraud-in-1972-and-won-a-pulitzer-prize/

Nobody can prove that there’s less cheating in Chicago elections today than in the 1970s, but people trust that it’s more honest.

Obviously, the kinds of unrealized gains that are a problem aren’t $250k that someone uses for collateral on a mortgage for a house they plan to live in. The problems are the millions or billions in unrealized gains that someone might use to get a $10 million loan from the bank that they then use to lobby the government to open up new loopholes in the tax code.

Taxing wealth and/or unrealized gains is tricky to do right, but not doing it at all is even trickier. If you let the ultra rich just keep getting richer, they’ll continue to use that wealth to control the political process to make themselves richer and more powerful. Obscene levels of wealth inequality and democracy can’t coexist.

Can you prove that your vote was counted and that the number of votes for your candidate went up by one as a result? If you can’t prove it, then it’s based on trust.

But, if they tried to move to another country and renounce their US citizenship they’d have to pay an exit tax based on the entire value of their assets, including unrealized gains.

Right, but no way to verify who you voted for.

And, you have to trust that the website is telling you the truth. You have no way of verifying that it always gives the same answer to everybody. I guess someone could test that there’s some connection to their real ballot by intentionally screwing up their ballot. But, that doesn’t mean that there’s any way to prove that when it’s counted that the actual tally for the person / people you voted for are going up not down.

I think the best way I’ve seen to illustrate it is the stories of immortals earning incredible amounts of money every day who still can’t reach the wealth of Elon Musk.

Like, you’re an immortal born during the ice age 80,000 years ago. You are somehow making $5000 per day (or its equivalent in gold for the 79,700 years before dollars are invented, and you save all of it. You’re not as rich as Elon Musk.

The US has exit taxes, as do many countries. If you try to renounce your US citizenship, you can be taxed based on the value of unsold assets.

I hate that the US is one of the few countries in the world that has citizenship-based taxation. It’s awful and stupid. But, in theory, it does mean that an American couldn’t just avoid taxes by moving to another country.