sp3ctr4l

Hey.

HEY!

There are a lot of penguins on some godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere that need to be bombed until they understand democracy and freedom.

('freedom' and 'democracy' subject to terms and conditions, limited time offer, no refunds)

No disagreements, no notes.

We (USians) are completely cooked, totally fucked.

We'd have to erect a new government, and then actually demonstrate stability for a decade or two... to begin to be able to undo Trump's damage, to be treated as anything other than basically a rogue nation that also has the world's... either the first or second largest/most powerful military.

I can only hope some more civilized places may begin to more seriously consider Americans seeking asylum... though I of course completely understand why they wouldn't.

For reference:

May Day, A View to a Kill (1985):

collapsed inline media

May Day, Goldeneye (N64, 1997):

collapsed inline media

If we keep on the current track, the sea will be marching up from the south and east...

Oh you replied quickly, I may have still been cleaning up the formatting.

Either way: =D

A sales tax is 100% a regressive tax.

What that means is a poor person loses way more of their own income to a sales tax then a rich person loses.

A progressive tax, like most income taxes... well the taxed amount increases as your income increases, so this is basically reversed: a richer person is taxed more in absolute terms than a poor person.

...

A high sales tax does not stimulate rich people to buy more.

All it does is mean poor people buy much less, and rich people buy slightly less, thus shifting the demographic of people buying things.

Whoever told told you that a high sales tax... stimulates rich spending... is economically illiterate, as in, they'd flunk an AP Micro course or a first year of a 4 year degree... that is absolute nonsense.

All it does is filter out the poors, who now have a dramtically tighter budget than the rich, and make it seem like only rich people are coming into your store... because poor people stopped coming in.

thank you for coming to my ted talk lol

Fuck, that sounds awesome!

I used to have a set up like that, though it was wired, not wireless. I'd just haul the rig out to the living room lol, had a fairly small and light pc, so it wasn't too much work, did cable management to make the transitioning easier.

Also somewhat related... I was just talking with another person who was unable to get that level of quality, resolution and frame rate via streaming their PC to their living room TV... also they mentioned input latency with very fast paced and fine tuned racing games.

You mind if I ask how you're actually doing the streaming?

I meant it jokingly, meta referencing the toxicity of the entire 'real gamer' elitist nonsense.

You are still a real gamer to me lol.

Though I genuinely would suggest you play Ocarina of Time, if you can.

You say you're a PC gamer? Yesterday I was in a Nintendo Switch 2 / Steam Deck discussion, and I just set up an emulator and am running the 3ds OoT remaster at 60 fps!

(Somebody just asked 'hey can you run 3ds games on a Switch? So I just... did it, and reported back lol)

If I can do that on a Deck, you can do it on a PC =D

It doesn't come off as snarky at all, no worries!

Genuienly... Like, I myself am autistic, and I'm willing to bet a whole lot of other data scientist type technical data sets type careerists either are as well, or are close.

What I'm trying to say is: It is genuienly difficult to be both well versed enough in the math and data... and at the same time have the requisite communication skills to present a whole lot of complex data in a way that people with less expertise can understand easily... while also at the same time not over generalizing so much that you are actually giving a just flat out false description or misleading metaphor.

I appreciate your summary of what I wrote in the last post.

My only quibble is: Great Depression 2.0, not Great Recession 2.0.

This will be much, much worse than 07 08 09.

Also IMO absolutely yes, Obama should have let the US auto industry collapse if they didn't accept being completely nationalized.

Play stupid games, win stuoid prizes.

Thats how capitalism works, right, right?

Oh wait no, its actually uh, bribe politicians to subsidize your inefficient and mismanaged business, and then also fund a bunch of PR to convince people that... that isn't happening, that isn't your business model.

Instead we got basically this situation where US auto mfctrs are stupendously subsidized by the US gov... yet have no accountability to it in terms of high level, long term business strategy.

That lead to all of C Suite just chasing as much profit as possible by basically just saying... fuck making a reliable cheapish car, everything is now a luxury priced giganto sized pavement princess with horrendous maintenance problems.

If they'd accepted being nationalized, well then at least we would have kept actual ownership domestic, and the GAO could have just done audits on these entire companies and then everyone would know where all the mismanagement was going on. ..

Same thing with Boeing. Boeing is massively subsidized, is a near text book perfect example of how to do regulatory capture, and wow what a surprise, it was run in a manner to maximize balance sheets at the loss of fundamental ability to actually deliver a reliable product.

Yep.

Concentrate wealth accumulation upward, socializes lossss downward.

Except this time the strategy is so fucking bad that it may very well bankrupt the state and just destroy its whole economy, which will ultimately lead to massive losses for many of the rich folks as well.

I didn't go into in the main post but yeah, US domestic air travel is down as well, which is a pretty good indicator domestic tourism is also down.

... Also, they want to just generally raise the sales tax, with the idea that this will mostly tax tourists.

But... theres no actual ... mechanism, to differentiate between a local resident sales tax and an out of state or international tourist sales tax.

... So what they want to do is bail out the already wealthier property owners, on the backs of the already poor non property owners, who pay much more of their income toward sales taxes than to property taxes.

It is literally rob the poor to prop up the idiot home and condo owners and corporations with mortgages they can't afford because they thought the housing bubble would never pop.