Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin

The Specific Compliance Oath of Ancients Paladin

“YOU ASSHOLE! YOU SAID YOU WERE WEARING PROTECTION!”

“I WAS WEARING MY ARMOR!”

I mean oath of the ancients though

Nothing gets some folks feeling the light quite like getting to ride a knight’s face for a turn

Tell me you don’t know the definition of oligarchy without telling me you don’t know the definition of oligarchy.

Take your bets now everyone, we’ve got:

• “stupidly tries to deepen ties with the cyberpunk oligarchy of China”,

• “stupidly try to deepen ties with the impotent Mafia state in Russia”,

• “stupidly try to deepen ties with petro-dictatorships/monarchies in MENA”,

• “immediately double back because they realized that reducing reliance on the US means having to actually uphold their NATO spending requirements at a minimum to replace the US subsidizing their national defenses”,

and least likely of all,

• “actually do anything even remotely productive towards genuinely achieving strategic autonomy as a democratic superpower in the world independent of the US’ trajectory.”

zipties arteries

dies of a heart attack

I kinda pulled the exact multipliers out of my butt, however! I’ve spreadsheeted this shit out and there’s a way to do it such that 60% of Americans wind up with a tax break while putting some serious screws to obscene wealth in the highest brackets. I even added an additional multiplier for every multiple of twenty times the average of the lowest quintile’s wages someone’s income rises above. Twenty because that’s the predicted “ideal” wage ratio between an organization’s lowest and highest compensated members.

So you have the top bracket rate, and then after the first multiple is passed, that gets taxed at the nominal rate times the multiplier, and so on and so forth past each new multiple.

Here’s the basic idea of what I’d think is fair

You have a basic rate for income below the 20th percentile of all incomes

Multiply that by 1.5 for income between that and the 40th percentile

Multiply that by 1.25 for income between that and the 60th percentile

Multiply that by 1.125 for income between that and the 80th percentile

Multiply that by 1.0625 for income between that and the 95th percentile

Multiply that by 1.03125 for income between that and the 99th percentile

Multiply that by 1.015625 for all income above the 99th percentile, with the additional caveat that people who top this bracket even once cannot hold public office, donate to political campaigns, or hire lobbyists and lobbying firms for ten years following them topping out.

Imagine something similar for taxes on units of housing owned, dividends earned, and so on and so forth.

The idea being that the highest rate can’t be adjusted without significantly reducing the tax burden of the poorest, basically erasing the only way conservatives have been able to balance the books whenever they try that shit.

I think it doesn’t have the same problem a challenger to other social media sites would have.

A Facebook killer has to contend with everyone’s friends already being on Facebook, same for Twitter, Instagram, and so on. This problem is probably why threads links to your Instagram account, to try and convince users that their friends are all technically already on the site!

With reddit though? Nobody’s on Reddit because of who they know, in fact people discovering each other’s handles will sometimes lead to frantic account deletions and reinstallations.

For this reason, I think Lemmy will do much better than other killer sites, however, it’s probably still not going to surpass Reddit by a longshot, mainly because while nobody cares about their friends already being on Reddit, they will care about not wanting to go through the bother of creating a whole new account and navigating how the fediverse system works for a maybe better version of what they’re already getting.

Reddit’s overall quality would have to drop into the damned abyss to cause enough of a mass exodus for a competitor to take it out for good.