this is the single greatest meme i have seen from any of my facebook groups and frankly y’all need to step up your game
y'all need something better to do
oh lol, i thought they were talking about this:
>implying green text kills the romance
This article is a fucking ride. My favourite part is:
“The other night I slept with this lawyer from Happn,” Calvin chimed in, “and afterward he suggested we watch a movie, and then got out a PC. It was a literal Windows moment. I was like, ‘Does the Internet even exist on a computer like that? Does it have to be plugged into a wall? Do you want to make a spreadsheet while we’re at it?’ I was really turned off. Is there such a thing as a tech boner? Because if so, I had whatever the opposite of that is.”
What the fuck
No no, this is good. It makes it easier not to contribute to spreading the genes of people who only exist to maximize social status.
Concept: A text-replacer extension which corrects “pandering to [group]” to “being enjoyable for people who are not me.”
This was actually the best idea:
We were upset by people claiming we only wanted to make things suck for them because we can’t stand it when other people are having fun in ways we don’t like, so we created a browser extension that replaces their speech with a straw man version, part 5/?
OP should be careful, since this also bites the other direction. How many articles are about “pandering to mandudegamebros” but with a different phrasing? Implicitly, this extension suggests that making a game that doesn’t care one whit about SJ is of the same value.
Some sides I’m on haven’t fully materialized yet, but they will. My blog description contains more than one metaphorical truth about which sides I’m on, that should be easy enough to guess at.
But on second thought, let’s do a reading of the blog description for anyone who thought it was just flavor text. (Not you, Anon-kun. I know you’re a very smart man of many talents, which is how you can send so many asks to so many people on this website.)
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. - This is more aspirational than anything, but also I support the right of American citizens to obtain human augmentations under the 2nd amendment, subject to certain restrictions.
Wanted time criminal. - Likes to wax poetic about non-existent possible futures. Future shocked by the 2016 election.
Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. - Two-sided:
1. In the future, the government may introduce multiple classes of citizenship in order to handle the fallout of immigration issues. Also, if the formation of a North American Union happens, entering the Orange Timeline may have only somewhat delayed it. Progressively larger international unions is the current way forward for both Liberal Capitalists and Leftists.
2. Actually, to bolster Nationalism I would deliberately create a tiered citizenship system if I were Technocratic Dictator of the United States of America Central Director of the North American Union, based on a series of tests and a period of National Service which would be used for survival training and martial education to make the nation even harder to invade and help communicate the idea that citizenship isn’t something free that you just give out.
Also, as you might guess, it indicates where I happen to live.
Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, - Using cybernetic technology to make a hivemind is Bad, okay? I don’t care how equal it supposedly makes you. This is one possible nightmare future for China, which is actually even more of a nightmare for the West than the National Technocratic Black Dragon timeline.
the Ultra-Caliphate, - Islamic Theocracy may be Culturally Diverse, but it’s a plague upon mankind which wishes to enslave us. For now a wide unification across multiple polities isn’t feasible, but that may change as conditions change. Now with cybernetic implants to enforce Islamic Law.
Google Defense Network, - Let’s not explicitly make corporations with massive surveillance networks and armies of autonomous killer robots the State, okay?
and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. - Originally the Free Peoples’ Republic of Cascadia - apostrophe positioning deliberate. If we took campus Commies and campus SJ seriously and they created a state, it would be a ludicrously oppressive disaster constantly insisting that the outgroup can’t be oppressed, so therefore it’s impossible for us to oppress them.
National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies. - If Open Borders becomes popular, the balance will shift towards a unifying global government, and that government will insist on controlling everything as far out as the Moon. This is almost inevitable with open borders, and will come out of crisis management treaties and a need to control criminals as they cross national borders. It isn’t an accident that power has been centralizing in the EU.
Its enemies may become known as National Separatists, and it will oppose them on the grounds that they are bigoted anti-[dominant economic mode] racist X-ophobic terrorists that are identical to Hitler. To expand its power, the ESF will leverage whatever means it can get away with, particularly economic, to pressure hold-out countries into joining.
However, the median quality of government on Earth is not America or Western Europe, but probably more like Brazil both in competence and in corruption levels. This isn’t an accident, institutions and culture both matter a lot, the causality for them doesn’t run purely from economic development to nice culture and good institutions. The formation of a world government is actually really, really bad. It must be strangled before it ever gets a chance to breath, here in the youth of our timeline, the first half of the 21st century.
This got long and I didn’t want to just drop it into your askbox as an unformatted multipart wall-o-text.
…I also have concerns about relying heavily on land tax, depending on implementation. If it’s based on current value, then:
You’ll have poorer people being priced out of their homes and being forced to move if where they’re living ever becomes more valuable. That’s pretty shitty, even if the land could be put to more “efficient” use. Yeah, it already happens–I think that’s the real issue with gentrification, more than the “character of the neighborhood” changing–but that doesn’t mean we should put more pressure in that direction.
1. Forcing people to move is a pretty heavy cost that’s worth at least trying to avoid imposing. Having to move can mean having to find a new job, losing any location-based community, your kids having to change schools and leave behind their friends, plus the expense and hassle of the move itself. In the worst cases it might mean being homeless. It upends your whole life. Even if a move is voluntary it upends your whole life.
2. It means telling people, “You don’t deserve to live somewhere nice. If where you already are becomes nicer, you’ll be kicked out”. That’s a hell of a message.
3. Knowing that you’ll have to go through all that if wherever you’re living ever becomes more desirable seems liable to create perverse incentives.
I’ve seen you express some disdain for the idea that, and I’m not quoting here, just paraphrasing based on memory, that people have a right to stay in the same place forever with nothing changing. But I don’t think people are unreasonable to want to be able to carve out some degree of security and to not have yet another factor outside their control that can potentially fuck up their entire life.
Additional items:
You’re taxing based on value that’s purely theoretical until someone tries to sell. In a way this is true for any property tax, but I think it’s more true for land; it’s hard to directly compare different parcels of land because the location itself is what you’re selling, more than the actual square footage. And it can change without the current owner necessarily benefiting from the “increased” value.
Also, if revenue from land tax is specifically funding services in the area, you get a situation where anywhere cheap to live has underfunded services. In the US, a large chunk of funding for public schools is from local property tax, and it works very poorly.
Anyway. My thoughts on land tax. I think you could avoid some of this–for example, by the tax being a fixed amount based on the last sale price (i.e. if you buy it for $x, then the annual tax is fixed at $y, a percentage of $x, until you sell it–at which point $y is readjusted to reflect the amount you sold it for). But that wouldn’t necessarily be in line with what it seems like you want land tax to do and represent.
It strikes me that part of what you’re after, dear owl-friend, is the moral basis for this taxation.
Either that, or simplifying the taxes.
I don’t think either is really optimal. People will create “moral” arguments against any kind of taxation that is devised, and most likely the burden of taxation should be somewhat diverse in its sources partly to make evasion harder and partly to cause less distortion. It could be simpler and altered in many ways, but having only one tax is probably a bad plan in some way.
And as for the moral basis, we both know that property and law are just force one step removed. Those claiming a higher moral standing on “taxes are theft” are just fooling themselves. (And in part, this can be chased down to a disconnect on the justification for where to root causality, where consciousness is being used to mark personhood to even attempt such philosophies in the first place, but not as the final causal root, which is incoherent.)
The year is 2077.
The new ultra-right-wing American Traditional Party clinches control of the government with only 35% of the vote in a divided electorate.
Their executive, President Ronald Jameson, issues an executive order reinterpreting the text of the Culturally Significant Properties Anti-Appropriation Act.
He reclassifies medieval and renaissance Europe, as well as Rome, and all derivative properties, as White European, a group which previously had no assigned cultural properties under the act.
Chaos ensues. Hundreds of thousands of cultural appropriation lawsuits are filed. Challenges are made both to his interpretation, and to the unique ownership of these ideas and concepts.
But it is too late. The Act was never designed with the proper restraints on power. After all, the future only moves forwards, right? And the metaphorical train of Separatism soon left the station.
People bitching about “> greentext”,
honeys, the > sign has been used to denote quotations in flat text since before 4chan even existed. If you’re worried about its ideological contamination, and that the syntax might twist your soul into an Alt-Righter or something, you’re an idiot.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
