frezik

One of my favorite exchanges from the 2008 election:

Colbert: tell me about growing up with a silver spoon in your mouth on the south side of Chicago

Michelle Obama: we didn't have silver spoons. We had four spoons.

Colbert: but there were spoons, right?

The future conservatives want is the same except it's men in fashy uniforms. We don't even have to speculate or joke; it's exactly how mines are run in countries without worker protections.

Conservatives don't make that distinction. Though OP does lean into Poe's Law.

Origami can be used as a basis for geometry:

http://origametry.net/omfiles/geoconst.html

IIRC, you can do things that are impossible in standard Euclidean construction, such as squaring the circle. It also has more axioms than Euclidean construction, so maybe it's not a completely fair comparison.

Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth

Then true capitalism will never exist. At best, it's a Platonic Ideal.

There are ways they can work around it, but their lead developer was drafted into their country's military. Ultimately, they're going to have to make their own phone, and it looks like they're making plans to do that.

For now, it's fine.

And they purposely hobbled certain things people want, like inline links and images. Some clients will do it anyway, but it's against the collective wishes of the developers.

If I wanted to track people on Gemini, I could totally do it. It'd just be in a more server-to-server way than how its evolved on HTTP (pixel trackers and such).

Some people haven't lived through the time when HTML layout was done through nested tables, and it shows.

Maybe we could have No-JS and No-Client-Storage (which would include cookies) headers added to HTTP. Browsers could potentially display an icon showing this to users on the address bar.

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the engine is too tied into the code of modern browsers for that to work.

Let's not. It's a terrible protocol with amateur design errors.

So I'm aware there is a right-libertarian argument at work here that frames all taxes, always, as "stealing". However, there's an argument here that can be used along more democratic socialist lines.

Taxation in representative democracy is legitimate when the democracy itself lives up to the terms. We have come to some kind of consensus as a society on the level of taxation and where that money should go. When we do that, and we say the road is "our road", we mean that in a literal way. A part of the fruits of our labor were diverted to build that road, and we get a say in how it works.

The US is not a democracy that lives up to the term. "Taxation is theft" is correct in this context.

Since 1970, productivity has increased by 86%. That suggests the output of a 40 hour work week in 1970 could be done in under 22 hours with the same inflation-adjusted wage. That's not even considering the productivity increases caused by industrialization in the century before 1970 (though the 40 hour work week in the US wasn't set until 1938).

Admittedly, this is a bit of a naive way of looking at the numbers, but it gives ballpark ideas of how far we might be able to go.

Note that real (inflation-adjusted) pay has only increased 32% in the same time period. This, BTW, is a much more robust argument than saying real pay has flatlined since 1970. Real wages are, in fact, up during that time period, but it's possible the numbers will shift again over time and return to being flat or down. The pay-productivity gap, however, has only been widening with time and isn't going to be fixed without drastic changes in policy.