We all earned the money. Nobody makes 100M in a vacuum. That sort of profit only comes from taking full advantage of a country's infrastructure, its educated population, its safety from invasion. We all provide the society that allows someone to amass that much wealth, and we all deserve a piece of the pay out.
> That sort of profit only comes from taking full advantage of a country's infrastructure, its educated population, its safety from invasion. We all provide the society that allows someone to amass that much wealth, and we all deserve a piece of the pay out.
This is such a goofy argument. The US 2% of its budget on infrastructure. It spends 4% on education (yet literacy rates are only marginally higher than they were before compulsory education). Military spending is 20% of federal spending, and could be 1/4 of that without any risk whatsoever of invasion.
You don't need more tax revenues to pay for the stuff that makes business possible.
There is a broader definition of "infrastructure." For example, Medicare is infrastructure that is directly related to the success of any company in the United States.
Has Tesla ever received a check from Medicare? Probably not. But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.
Has Salesforce ever asked for regulation or assistance from the FDA? Probably not. But because the FDA exists, Saleforce's employees don't have to spend time verifying their medication is authentic and does what it claims to do, so they can spend more focus on their work for Salesforce.
Even beyond government: how much do you think a Ford or Chevy have benefited from the US's culture? They certainly don't sell many large consumer trucks Europe or Asia. That profit exists because of the ideals and beliefs Americans have about how they should live their lives and what type of car they need to do that. Yes someone made the truck, and the truck maker should reap most of the benefits, but some of that profit should feed back into society that supported it.
Sure, we probably spend too much on the military and there exists some cronyism that we should strive to stamp out, but make no mistake that anyone with 100M in investable wealth has earned it with substantial help from the society we have all built together.
> Medicare is infrastructure that is directly related to the success of any company in the United States.
That must be why there were no successful companies in the United States before 1965.
> But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.
Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.
> There is a broader definition of "infrastructure."
"The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have already held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. Adn the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but to change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer, and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language." ~Hayek
> That must be why there were no successful companies in the United States before 1965.
Of course there were. There were also lots of successful companies before we had highways or municipal plumbing. So I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.
>Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.
Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in. Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there. They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.
Regarding your quote. Was your intention to imply that I’m a totalitarian because I’m using a slightly different definition of a word than you? That seems a bit severe.
Let’s ask Wikipedia about infrastructure:
> One way to describe different types of infrastructure is to classify them as two distinct kinds: hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure.[4] Hard infrastructure is the physical networks necessary for the functioning of a modern industrial society or industry.[5] This includes roads, bridges, and railways. Soft infrastructure is all the institutions that maintain the economic, health, social, environmental, and cultural standards of a country.[5] This includes educational programs, official statistics, parks and recreational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and emergency services.
I don’t think it’s by any means a stretch to say Medicare or the FDA are institutions that maintain economic/health standards.
> So I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Companies are no more successful with Medicare than they were without Medicare, so simply claiming that it is "directly related to success" is meaningless.
> Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in.
Your argument was that Tesla was paying lower wages, which was objectively false. Now you're really branching out! This first claim is just a low-effort handwave. They benefit because... the program exists? Compelling.
> Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there.
People went to work before Medicare, and more freely, because they kept more of their income. So the only difference you're actually stating here is that "they know they will receive benefits", which, again, is tautological--the benefit of the program is that people know the program exists. Amazing.
> They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents' healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.
How is this a benefit to tesla? Vibes?
> Was your intention to imply that I'm a totalitarian because I'm using a slightly different definition of a word than you?
I was merely observing the age-old tendency of people who advocate for the never-ending growth of the state to manipulate language in service of their goals. It usually takes the form of conflating less popular things for which they're advocating (welfare, etc) with obviously necessary things (roads, bridges, the electric grid, etc) which already enjoy broad support. I don't doubt that you are sincere in your belief that this new definition is legit. (Who wouldn't happily use terms which make their policy preferences sound better?) Yet this is an obvious example of the old trick, which is always worth calling out for the benefit of the uninitiated.
How many of the people on welfare contributed to those things? It just sounds like you're in favor of distributing the wealth to people based on their contribution to the country as a whole.
It’s simply pay for use. The more someone uses the system, the more they pay back into it. Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton and owes a lot back into it.
This is false. Toll roads are "pay for use". Capital gains tax is, objectively, not "pay for use".
> Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton
There's zero evidence that supports a strong correlation between how many assets someone has and how much value they've obtained from government services. This is just entirely fabricated.
> and owes a lot back into it
...which they've already actually paid through taxes on profits.
This bundle of falsehoods is just a thin facade around the emotional plea that "someone having more money than me is bad, and I should get some of it".
Pointing out that toll roads are "pay for use" is factually true.
Capital gains tax is, factually, not "pay for use". There's no usage that is being metered.
You also claimed "Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton" and I pointed out that there is no evidence that supports a strong correlation between how many assets someone has and how much value they've obtained from government services. This is, again, a fact - had you had any evidence against this, you could have put it here, in your reply. But no, you didn't have evidence, so you tried to (incorrectly) portray it as an "opinion".
You calling my true statements "opinions" proves that you cannot differentiate between opinions and reality. The fact that you think that pointing out that capital gains tax is not pay for use is a conjecture proves that you literally cannot tell the difference between facts and opinions.
Maybe if you stopped with the sarcasm and thought about this critically you'd see that the solution isn't taxing everyone to death, but reducing the out-of-control government spending. Because at the rate the government is spending money, you will be paying this "capital gains" tax in 2 decades on a much smaller balance.
A new type of tax on the absolute wealthiest of the wealthy is not "taxing everyone to death." I'm sure there are some great ways we can reduce/improve government spending, but that is completely separate from the idea that the mega-rich should be paying more.
His point was that a tax on unrealized gains can one day be applied to less wealthy people.
I can explain it to you with a simple example:
Imagine, for instance, you're making 50k a year and have a brokerage account that has appreciated by 100k and that you're being taxed 20% on unrealized gains in year x. In year x+1, say your account falls back to where it was before. You paid 20k plus another 10k, and you will need to set aside another 10k. In essence, your income has been reduced to 10k, which could make daily life impossible for many people making 50k annually, especially those with families.
My point was that just because we impose a new tax on unfathomably wealthy people, it doesn't mean that we are inherently going to impose that tax on normal people. We can't be so scared of our own shadow that we are paralyzed into inaction. So scared of new taxes imposed on ourselves that we don't try to tax the uber wealthy. At the end of the day this is a democracy (obv with flaws, but still a democracy.) If politicians start taxing your 100k investment fund the way they are taxing a 100M investment fund, vote them out.
If cops wanted to win the trust of the public and work alongside their fellow citizens to keep their communities safe, they would welcome to use of body cams and hold themselves accountable to a high standard of integrity.
Stuff like this certainly makes it seem like cops are more interested protecting their own power and their cushy pension packages and their corrupt fringe benefits.
Who are "they"? I know plenty of cops who definitely do want this.
The internet is fond of talking about police as though they're a uniform entity that exists in more or less the same shape across the country (or the world).
They're not. The US alone has about 18000 law enforcement agencies spread across 3.7 million square miles and at least 10 distinctive regions and 50 states. Each reports to a different government body with different rules and different amounts of public participation, each has a unique culture. Plenty of our police departments are staffed by bullies, but plenty aren't. Many are staffed by people who actually believe that their role is to protect and serve, and those of us who live in communities like that are genuinely baffled by these conversations.
My understanding is that every police officer has either personally done something unethical or has watched another cop do unethical shit and look the other way. I have personally literally never heard of a cop holding their fellow cops accountable and not been punished for it by other cops. If you know of something, please tell me. I could use some more positivity in my life.
I'm not sure why it's on me to provide evidence against such a broad and sweeping claim about more than 900,000 individuals in 18,000 departments. Your claim is statistically extremely improbable on its face (except insofar as no one on the planet has never done something unethical), which is precisely my point: when you're dealing with nearly a million people in 18000 organizations spread across a country the size of the US you get a lot of variety.
As for producing evidence: of course I can't, because "police officer reports misbehavior through appropriate channels and the infringing officer is disciplined early in their career before they caused a major scandal" never becomes a headline for obvious reasons.
My personal interactions with police officers who truly believed in their mission to protect and serve and believed that the majority of their colleagues felt the same way are all I have, but I imagine that that's inadmissible.
> My understanding is that every police officer has either personally done something unethical or has watched another cop do unethical shit and look the other way.
Given it's statistically impossible that any individual has ever been able to follow every law in effect, at any given time (or place) in their life, the simple assertion that every cop has broken a law or witnessed another do so, is more likely than not.
> except insofar as no one on the planet has never done something unethical
It's accurate to say that if that's what OP meant, but it's also entirely uninteresting, so I'm kind of operating on the assumption that they didn't mean it that way.
1. I agree.
2. Once quit a job when they tried to install ai powered driver facing dash cams in company vehicle and I wasn't comfortable with both the micromanaging that would invite, nor becoming training data.
Police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us working stiffs. If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter. Everyone would be against body cams. Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam. (I keep giving bad people good ideas.)
In the world we live in I am for police body cams, I think. Best worst option.
> Once quit a job when they tried to install ai powered driver facing dash cams
That avenue is open for police officers too. If they don’t like the scrutiny they can and should absolutely leave the profession.
> Everyone would be against body cams
I don’t understand what you are saying. If police didn’t have the authority to use violence then everyone would be against body cams? I mean they wouldn’t be the police if that were so.
Besides one of the people who are for body cams is the police themselves. (Many of them at least). They have to deal with all sort of people. Some are okay. Some are scheming liars, who make up all kind of grievances. The body cam is protecting the officers from the lies of this second kind of people.
> Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam.
They don’t need to because they work in fixed workplaces where a fixed CCTV can cover their interactions. If waitstaff would be serving on the side of random roads, backyards, and in random homes it would probably make sense for them to wear CCTV.
> If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter.
That's the thing though, if the cop's use of violence up to killing a suspect was justified, then the body cam would not matter. So if you want that authority, then you have to expect proper oversight. The longer that oversight is avoided, the more intense that effort gets. If you don't like, don't shield those that are causing the problems.
In summary, at this point with their history, fuck'em if they don't like the oversight.
Yea the cameras aren’t really the problem. The problem is that the police are free to reach for any level of violence they want, no matter whether the situation calls for it, and are immune from repercussions. Even when the cameras are rolling, nothing stops them from beating and killing at will.
> Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam. (I keep giving bad people good ideas.)
People working jobs like this are commonly under intense surveillance, being watched by multiple cameras from different angles for the entirety of their work day.
That sounds good, but it seems like every time I've seen body cam footage used, it's always had so much context removed as to make the police officers look as bad as possible. I usually have to go poking around for the full video and it always makes the whole situation a lot more nuanced than the bit that gets blown up by YouTube does.
Both you and the person you are responding to have valid points. You can't rely on altruism or rules alone. They must work together. Some positions require a certain level of idealism and self-accountability that can't be captured by system of rules. Police and doctors are two examples.
The comparison between police wearing body cameras and software engineers being monitored by screen recording is flawed. Police officers hold unique power and responsibility. They enforce laws, potentially use force, and make life-altering decisions. With such authority comes the need for transparency to maintain public trust.
Body cameras are essential for accountability, ensuring officers act lawfully and ethically in public interactions. This isn't just about ensuring an "honest eight-hour day". It's about protecting citizens' rights and upholding the integrity of the justice system.
In contrast, software engineers work in private environments where their actions don’t have the same direct impact on public safety or civil rights. They don’t have the same privileges as police, such as detaining individuals or using firearms in the line of duty, which require higher accountability standards.
Even when software engineers work on projects with life-impacting or public safety implications, they don’t operate in a vacuum. Best practices dictate that their work undergoes rigorous testing, peer reviews, and follows robust standards to ensure safety and effectiveness. Unlike police, who interact directly with the public and exercise immediate authority, engineers work in controlled environments without the same direct power over individuals.
and consider that it's absolutely certain that people died during the crowdstrike outage and recovery period (people die in and around healthcare locations all the time).
There will be some that died due to a delay in getting treatment, and|or other reason (see article for possible causes) and rightly or wrongly lawsuits will follow and judges will be making determinations of cause, etc.
Uh, if you are employed by a US company, they absolutely have the technical ability to screen record everything you do 24/7 on their hardware, and have the legal right to do so. Right now.
Cops have LESS accountability than your average office worker.
If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.
Funnily enough, The Lion King is a property that has its own controversy of plagiarism of a different animation, Kimba The White Lion. But, I guess if Disney does it it's okay...
If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be copyright infringement. As would retelling it. Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of the violation is the reason you don’t get sued
Read through the Rails docs and you'll learn all the "magic" is pretty easily explainable, mostly just predefined naming conventions and directory structures and a bunch of preconfigured gems.
I keep having this discussion with people, including coworkers (my current org is a rails shop).
The thing that drives me nuts about Rails is that the conventions I learned everywhere else break down. There's no goto-definition that works in any sane way, I'm left `ag`ing through the codebase for `def whatever`. The amount of stuff I have to keep in my head to understand what any given object is doing (due to magic) is nuts and exhausting at times.
The general impression I get from Rails and Ruby is a desire to be lexographically terse: fewer characters on screen per unit of business logic. On the one hand, you can fit a lot of code in view at once, which has it's benefits. On the other hand, you're sacrificing explicit data for that terseness, and you have to fall back to holding state in your head.
Without a doubt, Rails is powerful, and there's a lot I've loved about working in the ecosystem, but there's very significant tradeoffs to doing things the Rails way.
Oh I found the goto-definition works pretty well in RubyMine.
I would imagine goto-definition not working well to be more an issue with Ruby being a dynamically typed language and having metaprogramming features like define_method, not the framework. (FWIW I really dislike Ruby despite really liking Rails)
I love Rails, but the magic is often too much for me.
My many complaint is convention is soft. It has edge cases, divergent thinking, it has unplanned detours. This is especially true in a fast moving environment. I would much prefer that the magic wasn’t so opaque.
For me, 99% Rails is by far my fastest productivity tool. However, that 1% of the time it just sucks.
In 1 year I can stand up a system big enough that it would require 2 engineers to manage its ongoing maintenance, feature requests, bug fixes, 3rd party API updates, etc
More software requires more software engineers to maintain it, who then write more software, which then require more engineers to maintain it, on and on and on…
And you would've needed 4 engineers to build your in-house payment and fulfillment systems, except now you just pay Stripe and Shopify.
Oh, and 1 of those engineers is a "React engineer", who operates purely at the level of that framework, following boilerplate and documentation like a cook book, who would've otherwise been left out of the industry altogether but is now delivering as much value as someone who put in the work to understand JS, single-threaded UI, web browsers, network protocols...
because people don’t disclose when they’re acting nefariously, and there are no automated systems monitoring that, so you’ve got an uphill battle to prove that it even exists as a problem let alone that someone did it intentionally, etc.
in short: because
of the presumption of good faith and innocence on the part of the ticketing authority (and especially their agents, once it’s inevitably privatized etc)
It's a little bit different, but not very different. I object strongly to the idea that if something is in public then unlimited surveillance is acceptable. Cameras everywhere magnifying the eyes of the government by orders of magnitude is a very bad thing.
People exist in public. There should be very little tracking as a baseline.
> Putting up speeding cameras on public roads is not “unlimited surveillance” or “cameras everywhere”
Not by themselves, but public roads are a huge portion of everywhere when you look at person-hours spent in public.
Street corner cameras are also neither unlimited nor everywhere. But the combination of those two gets extremely oppressive.
Even just one is enough to track almost all your movements. Everyone's movements are not supposed to be in a database somewhere just because they moved through public spaces. And sure lots of those cameras are not centrally connected today, but the "it's public" argument allows it just fine.
They definitly can be. That's the slope. Where do you stop. Any totalitarian worth thier salt can easily make that leap. Use monitoring to curb one type of crime and "undesirable" behavior, why not use it for other types and before you know it, your entire existince is monitored in detail just to make sure you're acting exactly the way "they" want you to. That's how it works. The "I have nothing to hide" is a long debunked argument.
Then why enforce any laws? Any enforcement is on the same slippery slope.
I don’t think slope is nearly as slippery as you claim. There are miles of high friction slope between enforcing traffic laws on public roads and totalitarianism.
Political parties aren’t democratic institutions. They are essentially private organizations who can operate however they want. It’s only been the last 50 years or so that either party has used primaries as anything more than a straw poll
One of the problems with the US being a two party state is exactly this, people conflate political parties with the institutions themselves, which is not great.
The DNC and RNC are legally bound to follow rules established both by state law and by Congress/legislation. Yes they are private institutions but they can not set arbitrary rules.
The rules set by state law and Congress for candidate selection offer a pretty wide berth in terms of methodology for selecting which candidates appear on the ballot. There's no (federal) Constitutional mandate for primaries; procedures for how a state selects its presidential electors are up to the legislators of each state.
When it comes to their primaries, the only obligation that they have to is to follow their own rules, and the only people that are allowed to hold them to that obligation are they themselves, and maybe their vendors.
They aren't even obligated to donors who donated under the assumption that there's some promise or legal requirement that their primaries be fair. That case was dismissed, and resulted in the quote from DNC lawyer Bruce Spiva:
"You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions."
Political parties should be democratic institutions. Who else should be democratic if not the parties? In many countries candidates are rejected from elections if parties cannot show that they were selected in a fair, transparent and democratic process. The USA has much to learn from the rest of the democratic world.
But, currently, Republican primaries are largely democratic and Democratic primaries are at best a marketing period in which their membership makes no binding decisions. Compromise with the tea party forced Republican primaries to democratize, which eventually ended with the party being forced to accept Trump as a candidate against every wish of party insiders. Democrats have "superdelegates," and a ton of other ways to fix the primary, and have gone to court to establish legally that they have no obligation to run it fairly or honestly.
The same sort of democratization happened to British Labour under Ed Miliband, which culminated with the election of Corbyn as leader. In order to fix the problem, they had to purge and expel anyone from party membership that had any sort of firm value system.
Democrats don't have that option in the US, because in the US, people aren't members of parties; they're people who have registered to vote in that party's primary, or people known to have supported that party in the past. US corporate parties have employees, not members. Getting a portion of the public to participate in their primary is the closest thing they have to rallying the membership, and the way that both parties have written election law makes it difficult for them to change anything, or to prevent anyone from voting in them.
