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- Yes but even this ignores the more important dynamic at play: rent rises to eat nearly all the productivity gains.
If you add technology to your workplace your wages should go up (not to eat all the gains of the technology, but a decent portion via wage competition), but then once your wages go up, the local rent goes up anyway.
- > How can I be free to do my gardening whenever I want when the landlord is asking for $11K rent in my SF flat?
This is the fatal flaw. It's been recognized explicitly for at least 140 years that the price of land rent rises in lockstep with productivity increases, guaranteeing there is no "escape velocity" for the labor class regardless of how good technology gets.
- Sure, the model that you propose here sounds a lot better than the one being proposed by the current administration.
It seemed like you were suggesting that a property tax (which does not function how you just described) was a good idea, based on your initial comment which called it a good idea.
- A patent definitionally only has market value (i.e. a value to be taxed) if it's something people want.
Right, I'm aware there's a spectrum from bullshit patent owners to non-bullshit patent owners. Why would you write a tax code to punish the latter while doing effectively nothing to the former?
You're fixating on the existence of bullshit patents which no one disputes. The question is whether this policy is a sensible way to address that, and you continue not to substantiate (or even articulate) any of your disposition toward that.
- And so... how does a property tax fix any of what you're describing? If it's a bullshit patent that's not being deployed to the market, it can't possibly be very valuable, ergo will have no carrying cost. Only the patents that are deployed to the market and valuable will have high carrying costs.
> But all too often it's a malign fantasy.
All too often to severely destroy the incentive to invent new drugs? Yeah, gonna need a better source than your intuition as a patent lawyer to substantiate that.
- Obsidian is a personal knowledge management system which is unique in that, yes, it's ultimately just a pile of Markdown files! Obsidian gives you a good UI to interact with it though: obsidian.md
- > allowing patent holders to try to levy (what amount to) taxes that are paid indirectly by the public.
What are you referring to here? The premium that a patent holder (one who created or purchased novel, valuable IP) is able to extract?
This is a reward for taking risk in R&D and for sharing the result with the public via patent disclosures, not a tax.
- But again: Alex Jones' and Limbaugh's hugely popular shows pre-date that. So does the libertarian strain on the right. Modern MAGA definitely spun out of the Tea Party which didn't originate at all in leftist education.
- Interesting theory but anecdotally doesn't fit with my experience.
The most compliant, least critical, and laziest thinkers in my acquaintance are all squarely "anti-institutional" now.
> Alt-media arose in maybe the last 10 years. Most of these anti-vaxxers were fully baked (intellectually) by then
This isn't true. There was definitely a crunchy left-wing anti-institutional anti-vax cohort that's very old, but the modern energy behind the movement is not from this group. And alt-media is much older than you give it credit for. Rush Limbaugh premiered in 1988. Alex Jones' InfoWars was founded in 1999.
- No, they really didn't.
Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.
Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.
For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.
- The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction.
The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.
- Grievance politics amplified by an assembly of the most astoundingly dumb people you’ve ever seen behind a podium
That’s it! That’s the strategy!
- No the implication is that you’re repeating press releases from extremely biased parties as if they are fact. They are not, and this discredits you.
In my experience, the single most important factor is realizing that the sensation of hunger is your primary enemy and that you can attack it head-on.
Satiety is not dictated by how many calories you've eaten but (mostly) by the physical weight of your stomach. If your goal is to eliminate the sensation of hunger while consuming the least number of calories, the nutrition label tells you everything you need to know: eat a lot of low caloric density foods.
What you'll find over time is that foods widely regarded as unhealthy are simply ultra-dense (e.g. peanut butter is an engineering miracle) while healthier foods tend to be extremely low-density (e.g. non-fat Greek yogurt and fresh vegetables).
The biggest error I see in people dieting is thinking they just need to muscle through the feeling of hunger. It doesn't work in the long run. Accept that it's an important sensation but it's distinct from actual starvation, and address it directly!