This is a loaded explanation. Yes, war does require quick response, which is hard to achieve in a decentralized state. The small nuance is that war or similar events are comprising a tiny fraction of what a government does (not by impact, but by total amount of things to do). And guess what, direct voting is just fine and fast enough for such thinks as any and all taxes, industry wide restrictions or permissions, economic focus, foreign policy, immigration, healthcare, education, social security and so on.
"Primary" is fundamentally anti-democratic concept. It basically says that we, oligarchs, will pick whoever we want and you, plebes, will vote for him. Just like the first past the post system, where two oligarch's candidates are having a nice little internal contest, is anti-democratic. Until that is fixed, no amount of pleading and rationalizations will help "fix oligarchy".
Billionaire doesn't pay tax: let's settle with you paying half of all stolen money as a fine and we'll drop the case.
A regular citizen doesn't pay tax: lets jail or deport you, bar the entry for a decade, take away your home, car and anything you own in general and make you unable to find job for the rest of your life. Also your tax is double that of the billionaire, glhf ;) .
As Italian, I really disagree. The only entities that pay all the taxes are employees because the taxes are collected directly from the salaries.
Big companies have the opportunity to make tax elusion (there is a reason why many Italian companies have legal HQ in Netherlands or Luxembourg), small companies, artisans and freelancers usually avoid to pajly VAT
> In percentage terms this means that during the 1970s between 15 and 20 percent of Italians evaded taxes while the rate climbed to 26 percent in the 1980s. In the 1990s, tax evasion fell again, hovering between 15 and 20 percent. Workers employed in manufacturing evade very little, whereas the highest evasion rates can be found among the self-employed
> The severity of evasion becomes obvious when we consider that the Italian state annually collects only a total of €350 billion while losing €250 billion through evasion (D’Attoma 2016).
> If one asks Italians why they evade taxes, they primarily say that they evade because everyone else does so
> A distant second is the reason that Italians would be more likely to pay taxes if they had the feeling that the state would spend their money more wisely. Much lower in the ranking come issues such as the soft penalties for evasive behavior, the complexity of the tax rules, and the unlikeliness of being caught. A total of 87.1 percent of all Italians think that their fellow citizens evade taxes
Even if evidence did agree with this uncited, broad assertion (I've seen nothing to that effect), it'd still be an indefensible justification for inequity in punishment.
Even if billionaires don't pay income tax and are only taxed occasionally when they sell assets, there isn't much doubt that the corporations they create and invest in generate massive amounts of tax revenue in the countries they operate. Not to mention all the revenue generated from property tax, income tax from their employees getting paid by the company, local fines and fees, sales tax, import duties, etc.
You can want the super wealthy to pay more tax when they sell stuff to fund their lifestyles, but that doesn't mean their work isn't generating large amounts of economic activity which turns into tax revenue for governments.
Billionaires don't seem to create anything new when they're billionaires. You look at companies like Google or Meta and they acquire companies and teams but what sort of truly successful projects and products did they create from whole. It seems like a string of failures, canceled projects and lackluster product offerings to me.
If we can tell poor people how to behave for their own good then we can certainly help billionaires out too by taxing them back to creativity.
How is it that concentrating wealth in private pools is better than spreading it around?
> the corporations they create and invest in generate massive amounts of tax revenue
Economic activity does generate tax revenue, billionaires generate economic activity. But if we took the billions (leave them millions, gready as they are) and spread it around it would have the opportunity to generate much more economic activity
The concentration of wealth, and the resulting concentration of income and widespread middle class impoverishment is catastrophic for our economy.
It is why, in real terms, incomes have been static for thirty years whilst the size of the economy has roughly doubled
I've confidently picked 8+blue and is now trying to understand why I personally did that. I think that maybe the text of the puzzle is not quite unambiguous. The question states "test a card" followed by "which cards", so this is what my brain immediately starts to check - every card one by one. Do I need to test "3"? No, not even. Do I need to test "8"? yes. Do I need to test "blue"? Yes, because I need to test "a card" to fit the criteria. And lastly "red" card also immediately fails verification of a "a card" fitting that criteria.
I think a corrected question should clarify in any obvious way that we are verifying not "a card" but "a rule" applicable to all cards. So a needs to be replaced with all or any, and mention of rule or pattern needs to be added.
I wonder, did they pay for the artists whose art they took without paying or asking to train that LLM model they are promoting? I guess we know the answer :)
Article mixes "elites" and real elites. The mere usage of the term employment is a dead giveaway, among other issues. Real elites are not employed by someone as a general rule, with some exceptions of course. Article would be more aptly named "Overproduction of qualified or overqualified workers".
It's been awhile since I've read Turchin but I'm pretty sure in his own examples elites are indeed employed in prestigious positions. Which is really his whole point, there are only so many prestigious positions. His example using musical chairs has always stuck with me.
Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.
I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
Because 8GB is literally enough? There are multiple 8GB Macs in this house and they are fine. I wouldn't use them for development work but they're completely competent at the basics.
What's basics? Of course one can always overbuy hardware compared to the tasks but we are discussing some usage more fitting to the laptop form factor. I would argue that for a laptop a basics is at least some kind of office white collar work or similar. And so it is most likely that at least 2-3 of the Electron monstrosities would be used, an office package or something along the lines, multiple loaded tabs in a browser a few of which will be memory leaking enterprise crap, a few communication apps etc. Nothing really outlandish, only handful of apps, but because they are all fat, they will eat the 3Gb margin super fast and start caching.
The storage is fast enough to not be too much of an issue, and the basics would be mostly a web browser, a lot of things can be done with only it, and if you need to do more than web browser, text editors, you probably should want more than the Neo in the first place
Tons of 8GB users out there who are happy. I'm on 16GB and its definitely enough for a power user - and running multiple coding environments, Docker, IDE's. MacOS is really good with caching.
> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners
This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised.
Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.
The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly.
8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.
Perhaps because it's enough for a lot of things. I only came up against the 8GB limit when I ran a LLM locally using Ollama. It worked but wasn't workable.
8GB isn't ideal though and 16GB would've expanded its capacity to do more things. But soon as I want to do more things I shuffle over to my PC with it's dedicated GPU and 32GB o ram
I'm guessing Apple cuts capability to the lower end so as not to hurt sales of the higher end. Usage profile is often dependent on context. There are enough non-power users (when mobile) like me that 8GB isn't ideal but it's enough. And if it wasn't enough we could've paid more for the 16GB, but I personally decided it wasn't worth the ridiculous Apple ram price premium.
So these are my reasons for saying 8GB is enough. I'm also using an M1 MacBook Air, so the puniest of the lineup. Next laptop I'm considering is possibly a think pad with linux so I'm no macOS fanboi.
Reputation system and elected or at least transparent moderation is what's needed to curb any bad actors. In fact, identity verification would make it easier for spammers, just buy stolen identities in bulk in darknet for a few dollars and fire away. Facebook supposedly leans very hard into real identities and the end result is a dead wasteland of bots talking to bots. And on the other hand, there are plenty of regular forums with not a sign of bad actors, because they were collectively exterminated and the newcomers are vetted.
Is anyone else bothered that "social media" for the last few years is equated only to the micro-post platforms like xitter, bluesky, mastodon etc.? Are there any "normal" new social networks with no arbitrary character limits, tree comment structure, usable categories or subforums and sane UI, not singularly focused on a tiny screens?
I can understand this issue with low margin private businesses. But the LLM bots are now everywhere.
I call my bank and I must tell a dumb robot a description of my problem, which it then claims to not understand and fucking hangs up on me. Now I need to repeat like a parrot "operator, operator, operator" until that clanker resigns and connects me to an operator. And the issue is managing a specific account, so nothing in the FAQs was relevant. Bank has more than enough margins for human support.
Or another case - our government went all digital lately and we have main point of access to many stuff via an app/webportal. That service only has a very dumb and limited bot as a support, while service governs a lot of important functions. So instead I have to write comments under their Facebook marketing posts, then if I'm lucky some human spots them and then a real support writes me in a Facebook messenger. This is beyond infuriating. Government also has more than enough money to spend.
Same with other businesses with proper margins, like telco, automotive etc.
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