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Valid point, but would be stronger if 'their' had been spelled correctly.
The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
391–400 of 653 posts
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whomever controls the process that decides what a representative sample is and selects candidates is now the middleman.
It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.
>You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#393Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn't it unsettle King dogmatics just as much?
In a world where the best ran country on earth is a "enlighten despotism" AKA Singapore, Nope. They think we just need more LKYs, or really, AI systems controlling everything. A benevolent dictatorial AI running society is exactly what all the futurists think is coming. Go read Orions Arm.
Disney land with a death penalty. If that's your thing.
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#395I was hoping the comments would be full of similar stories, in which a demon makes a half-hearted effort to pull you into his clutches, only to be naively blown off, then not thought of again until his true nature was revealed.
Our story of this sort comes from when my partner interviewed at Theranos (!) long before the collapse or any public recognition, related the super-creepy interview process, and I was like "sounds like a big no to me." When the Theranos story blew up it was like "oh boy".
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad. This looks more likely an israeli operation which sourced girls from russia and likely had the FSB as a customer/scratch my back I scratch yours/collab thing. I mean, most US politicians and the president seem to be on an "israel first" agenda.
>As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad. This is driving me up the wall. Look, I know part of this talk/accusation [about Mossad] is coming from Nazi/antisemitic circles, so people being hesitant to engage makes a bit of sense. But come on, it's not a stretch to consider. The idea that the US would let a Russian operation go uncheck…
Something “not-being-a-stretch” doesn’t need any consideration without evidence.
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> clinical trials of unproven vaccines [...] that directly caused deaths and hospitalizations of many girls You have not shown this so far. The article that you believe supports this claim does not. There is a lot of reasons to do a vaccine trial in India instead of the US, and a very likely one is simply cost. If you want to accuse Gates of trying to murder Indian girls instead of Americans, then you have to show th…
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Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#398Power corrupts, end of story. Democracy (limited terms), taxation and anti-monopoly regulation are examples that show a path to cure the disease. Nobody should be trusted with too much power for too long.
Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests. Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power? Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.
Power concentration can happen regardless of taxation level though. You can have relatively high taxes and relatively low authoritarianism. But you can also have low taxes and full blow dictatorship.
Taxes are much lower in Belarus and Russia vs western Europe, and they're much more authoritarian, coupled with third world tier public services outside of their capitals.
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case. Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp. If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they l…
> Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create. I believe this attitude is pretty common in many parts of the world. That being said, I do th…
> That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
This confusion is precisely why the middle class has less power than ever before. You and many others have been sold a meme that your tax dollars are in service to a greater good, and you are a bad person if you recognize this to be a scam.
At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.
If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.
Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most super-wealthy folks are not going to spend anywhere on the order of $200B or even $20B (in the broad timeframe of Elon's payout) on their own consumption. Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that, any more than if the money was spent by NASA? (The whole Apollo program and surrounding stuff probably cost on the order of tha…
Nope no complaints, but most wealth isn't being spent. If the majority of the wealth was being spent, then there wouldn't be wealth imbalance (as all that money would flow elsewhere into the economy). The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral f…
> The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.
The critical insight is that this doesn't actually work. When we say Jeff Bezos is worth $200B, we don't mean that he has $200B of money that's locked up in a vault when it could be redistributed. We mean that there are a variety of productive businesses in the world - for Bezos, mostly Amazon - which he holds ownership claims to. The vast majority of wealth in the modern US isn't money, and can only be converted to money by finding people with lots of money and selling them the right to sit on the investments instead.