Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin

Nah, I just think official language status is a violation of free speech, and of the natural development and evolution of culture.

I mean just look at France and Quebec in contrast, motherland French and Quebecoise French are nearly separate languages from each other with how incomprehensible they can be to each other, and yet both Quebec and France have strict prescriptivist official language policies in place supposedly in the name of “preserving the French language.”

If there was any sort of naturalness to any of it they’d rigidly have maintained the same exact language with all the same linguistic conventions, and yet that has not happened at all, debunking the supposed entire point of this farce in the first place.

The only reason to maintain it at this point is that it excludes the lower classes from public office and official spaces, since they are the most likely to diverge from a prescribed cultural structure, and you can see that in Ontario where francophones raised riot when funds were beginning to be allocated for the language support of Indian and Chinese languages that actually had more speakers within Ontario than French did. It’s not about preserving a minority language, it’s about refusing the rights of immigrants to have their languages accommodated as well.

Day doesn’t start at 12, it ends at 11:59 before turning back over to 00:00

Personally I’d argue for base 36 time!

36 hours, each consisting of 36 minutes, each consisting of 36 seconds.

Lets you treat time as a 0-Z number with two decimal points, the day ends at Z.ZZ at night, plus base 36 is SUPER conveniently divisible, which jives really well with how most folks actually consider how much time they need to do whatever or what time it is.

As if the micro plastics crisis hasn’t already made the “pie in the sky” solution a necessity at this point

Isn’t AI impossible to meaningfully open source because of how learning models work?

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.

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 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.

zipties arteries

dies of a heart attack

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.”

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