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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.

    People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.

    Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.

    We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.

    Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.

    The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.

    The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.



  • Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.

    The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.

    Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.

    Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.

    Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.

    Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.

    And then progressively tax everything above that.





  • The humiliation of losing to a black woman.

    The past months the mood in America has been: not these two old geezers again.

    I am honestly optimistic that it’s going to be a landslide for the Democrats without Biden. Americans are just sick of Trump and they didn’t want Biden to run again.

    So the Democrats are giving the people what they want, while the Republicans are trying to force feed them something they don’t want.

    Let’s see how this plays out.


  • I am not a lawyer, but what is clear is that each State sets its own laws. By the constitution, States are in charge of elections.

    What I have heard is that Biden has to release his delegates, who are already bound to him. Many states have already had their primaries completed with the Biden/Harris ticket winning.

    Sending those electors to the Convention and letting them choose someone else is going to be a grey area.

    If they choose Harris, it’s pretty sound. When a president steps down, the VP becomes president, so there is definitely precedent and a legal basis.

    But if Biden releases his delegates and lets them vote for anyone? That will be challenged and it will go to the supreme court. And SCOTUS is corrupt enough to find some flimsy legal excuse that helps Republicans.

    So yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. But I am not an expert.



  • Correct.

    And Kamala is the most logical choice, because there will be the least amount of legal hurdles, since she was already on the ticket.

    And the Republicans already said they are going to mount legal challenges, which can easily lead to SCOTUS deciding the election. So I expect Sanders, AOC and progressives to strongly push for Kamala.

    But I fully expect the DNC to push forward some corporate candidate like Bloomberg.

    It’s going to be interesting.



  • That’s going to be very difficult to achieve. Anything below the Berne convention is a legal impossibility.

    What I think should happen, is that digital preservation should become a recognized fair use.

    For example, digital content should be offered without DRM and at minimum price to recognized libraries for archival purposes.

    If this is not done, the libraries may break the DRM themselves.

    As soon as the copyright holder stops offering the content at reasonable prices to the public, the libraries are free to lend out the DRM-free content to the public.

    And when the copyright term expires and the works enter the public domain, the libraries may immediately offer the DRM-free copies to the public.

    The advantage of such a scheme is that it only requires one country to legally mandate it. And that country will not be in violation of the Berne convention or other treaties.