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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m not going to “finely enumerate and spell out the letter of the law in hundreds of variations” for you.

    I didn’t ask you to. I asked you to add some actual substance to what you’re proposing instead of simply hand waving “someone should do something somehow” which is useless and ineffectual. Your stance will mean the status quo is maintained, and I personally don’t want that.

    Income and wealth taxes also have hundreds of variations and fine tunings. Saying I have to invent a whole new system on my own right here and now or else I’m not serious is not serious.

    How about even just one part of your propose solution? You’ve given absolutely nothing except “rich people”. You’ve offered nothing that can be acted on. If you want change, you have to be able to talk about what change you want. If you can’t talk in reality, then yes, you are not serious.



  • No, that’s how American K-12 schools are funded.

    Partially true, but not absolutely. K-12 in many places in the USA are funded through property taxes. I’m in the USA and my public school system is funded via income tax. No property taxes go to school.

    That and infrastructure.

    True in some places. False in others. Some places derive income from high property taxes. Other places choose high sales taxes. Yet others do it on income tax.

    Which is why poor areas have worse schools and roads; and police from outside their tax area. Which is both a great way to punish the poor in the old school protestant fashion and force them out the second the wealthy want their land.

    Again, partially true. Some states have state taxes that fund various projects at the municipal level irrespective of the wealth of the locality.

    I don’t disagree that a more equitble system for funding schools should be designed and implemented, but you know know that because I’m trying to have that discussion with you in another thread and you’re weak as water on that and won’t discuss any specifics except “someone else should pay”.

    And you know exactly what I mean by paying in his entire life.

    I know your words on that don’t match reality, and you’re skipping a really important part of that reality. I’ll admit I was wrong one part of that. I said he likely started “paying into the system at age 18”. We know thats wrong. His sign tells us he built his house at age 25. Age 25 is when he would be first paying the property taxes he’s complaining about. So he’s spent even less time paying into the system and already wants to be except from it for the society benefits he still gets.

    Finally, paying half your income on property taxes is not financially sustainable. It’s ridiculous to me that you would even pretend it is.

    Again, you’re making stuff up from nothing. What are his expenses? He owns his house. He’s retired so his healthcare is covered by Medicare. If he’s living on just social security he’s likely not even paying income tax because his income is low. What are his other expenses? Food? Clothing? Electricity? Water? He might have a well and not even have that bill. Are you saying half his income can’t cover those things? Further, we have no idea what he earned in life. Did he spend it on stupid stuff? We don’t know. I’m certainly not claiming any of my assumptions of him as fact, but that isn’t stopping you from doing so.



  • The fact that schools are funded by the surrounding area is crap and needs to change. It’s a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

    Unless there is an article or background on the guy in the picture you’re projecting a HUGE amount of stuff you just made up on that guy.

    He’s retired with a social security income.

    That’s what his sign says. I take him at his word on that one.

    He paid into the system his entire life already.

    Well, no he didn’t. He didn’t start paying into it until he started earning money. Likely for the first 18 years of his life, he lived of what other people put into the system. Many of those people that paid for him are in the situation he’s in right now, except now he sees it as unfair.

    Telling him he must sell and move out

    No one is telling him to move out. He certainly isn’t saying he will be forced to move if he has to continue to pay property taxes. You just made that up.

    because he’s not wealthy enough is exactly what we should be working against.

    He’s not saying he is not wealthy enough. You just made that up. In fact, his sign is indicating he does have he wealth to cover the property taxes via his Social Security. He’s saying he doesn’t’ believe he should have to pay anything one something he bought decades ago while he continues to enjoy the services of the city and society the tax dollars pay for.






  • If you want to get reductive, you never truly own it even if you live in a society where there is no tax.

    The rule of law that allows the concept of private ownership to be upheld in society runs on tax dollars. If you take away all of the tax dollars, the mechanisms that define and enforce the rule of law go with it.

    In a completely tax free society someone can just kick in your door of your house and shoot you, and now they own your house. Who will stop the thief/murderer? There’s no police, no courts, no judges, no jails. If instead of an individual its a foreign nation, there’s no military to defend your nation’s borders. All of that comes from tax dollars. So even then you never really own your own house because someone can take it (and your life) away from you.



  • This assumes the language in question follows the same rules as, in this case, English.

    When

    In many of the common uses of “when” in English. Mandarin (Chinese) as an example doesn’t use one word for that mixed idea of English’s “when”.

    One common English usage of “when” would be substitute for literally “which time”. Or even more complicated, the Mandarin language has a word for the concept of a “completed action” where there is no single word in English that translates. While English may conjugate verbs to communicate when an event occurred or will occur, Mandarin skips this.

    An English phrase like:

    “I ate breakfast this morning” when conceptually translated to Mandarin, then literally translated back to English would be: “I eat breakfast. Finished. Today. In the morning.”

    I’ve been told that the Finnish language uses something similar for time words (instead of conjugating verbs), but I don’t know if that’s accurate. If there’s a Finnish speaker reading this, I’d be interested in knowing if this is true.






  • Well done in identifying an unpopular opinion!

    ACs allows big oil to keep working class citizens forever hooked and dependent on the power grid to not die in the summer heat.

    Not all of us live in tropical climates. I use way more energy keeping the house warm in the winter than cool in the summer. If you’re looking at big oil’s favorite season its likely winter in my latitude.

    Man, imagine a world without air conditioning.

    Err, thats not hard. Phase change refrigeration (as in, not using big chunks of ice to cool something) not quite 125 years old. Even then it wasn’t used at the retail level in large businesses until the 1920s so just about 100 years ago. Even in the 1970s having air conditioning in homes was not common. Even in the USA when I was pretty young we didn’t have air conditioning. So its not hard to imagine.

    It would be so much better.

    I experienced it firsthand. It wasn’t better.