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looks at unemployment rate

You are living in fantasy land my guy. Put down the FoxNews and learn actual statistics before posting


This is more an organizational/political problem than a technology problem.

Our current oligarch-capitalist system (wherein most of the world is dictatorship or plutocratic) is not capable of equitable resource distribution. However, future, better systems of organization will likely provide better mechanisms for distrubtion.

Capitalism is an old and dying system. It is clearly unfit for the 21st century. It's best thought of as anachronistic, like feudalism. Once it's been excised from our societies, we'll be able to answer your questions.


Any planned economy is inherently built upon a bias and ideology that is culturally specific to the creators of it. There is no way that the US will accept a planned economy ran by China, or by India. However these countries followed by Africa will be the most populated areas of the world, so some would argue they should have more to say about this planned economy.

Meanwhile capitalism bases itself on game-theory and evolutionary selection. You compete with power, sexual selection and resources. It's sadly a system more aligned with the natural order of things. If you strip away all banks, hedge funds, etc, you are again going to get people who want to mate with the hottest fit partner, get the most resources to ensure survival of their offspring, etc.

The organizational/political problem I mention above with the land use land in the same bucket. Who gets the best land, etc. Historically this has just been decided by war and killing each other. Maybe you're right and that's where we end up, but that is very far from the utopias talked about in the comments above.


Lots of people don't need to work, or are relatively insulated such that they have the "leisure capacity" to study for personal fulfillment.

Remember, the top 1% of households have $12M+ in assets. That's over a million households for whom work is somewhat or completely optional for them and their children. They can live a good quality life off capital returns without any hardship.

This logic still holds down the wealth gradient. Households at the 95th percentile still have to work, but the need is more flexible. The buffer of need could be years long.

So you have millions of people who genuinely don't need to worry about getting paid that much.


That's not why I studied. Maybe abstractly to prepare myself for the workforce, but the primary goal was to learn.

Unfortunately many countries like the US are very under-developed, and have trained it's citizenry to approach education as job training. This is obviously an abject failure, and probably a contribution to our anemically slow and pathetic growth rate.


Depends if you need to work or not. Plenty of people don't need to work, they can live off their capital returns indefinitely.

For the upper crust of our society, work is entirely optional. Presumably people therefore continue to work for the process or the reward of the doing.


You’re fighting trillions a year in addictive engineering.

The tech industry has spent the last 20 years (and really in earnest the last 15, accelerating over time) making their tech as addictive as possible.

Current tech is egregiously addictive. It’s worse than most drugs.

The big tech companies are now the most successful drug dealers in history.


You can get pretty far replacing your launcher with something that makes you type the name of the app you want to launch, and avoiding most apps, like FB, X, Amazon, Insta, etc.

The trillions are effective at forcing network effects, but anything outside that it pretty trivial to swap out and get a better experience.

I'm a bit surprised by the fatalism on display in this discussion. I get that it sounds like I'm victim-blaming, but you can only alter your own behavior, so assuming responsibility has merit.


No, you're fighting just one thing: yourself.

People don't want to admit this because it is uncomfortable to blamed by the problems you yourself create, but if you are addicted to your phone to the point that you feel compelled to complain about the network (on the network, mind you), then it is entirely because you let yourself get addicted and you still let yourself keep being addicted.

The most insane part of this is the subtle-as-a-hammer-to-the-face MiSTER ad shoved in the middle of the article as if it made any sense whatsoever. And people are taking this guy seriously?

Come on now.


Addiction has a demand and supply component. I think we can all recognize that fact. Personal responsibility matters of course. However, ignoring the fact that companies spend trillions to make their products addictive is a very silly thing to do.

IMO the closest corollary we have is gambling. Most countries place strict limits on gambling, because it's so incredibly addictive to some people. We can see this very obviously in the rise of online gambling platforms like Polymarket it recent years. Without regulation, a lot of people will get sucked in and their lives will be destroyed.

I encourage you to read up on how addiction works. Your comment implies a severe lack of understanding about the subject. Alternatively, you could take a course on addiction at your local college. Always good to get educated!


I don't see that as an ad. I have an original retro PC under my desk for my detox hours. His detox pill is just a smaller version of mine.

If addiction could be solved as simply as "just don't let yourself be addicted", it wouldn't even be a defined term.

Come on now.


Not letting yourself be addicted does not mean it is easy, it means that you have the power to stop it, and fuelling that addicting (as in: posting ON THE FUCKING NETWORK that you don’t like the network) is exactly that.

That’s just a decision we made about what is taxable.

Purely an accounting artifact. We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.

Net worth is real money, and is usually a very accurate measure of what people can realize. There are a few outliers who own so much that they’d move the market if they sold it all. Selling 2% to cover taxes? Not going to move the market very much.


Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution would like a word (assuming you’re contemplating a federal wealth tax; states could do it, at the risk expressed in the headline of the article we’re discussing).

That’s a law my dude. We can change it at any time. We did already for the income tax (amendment 16).

Yes, that’s exactly my point.

That is what makes the timeline GGP laid out impossible:

> We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.

Unless we don’t share a common definition of “tomorrow” or “suddenly”. (For reference, the 16th Amendment process took about 3 years and 7½ months from Senator Norris Brown’s initial formal proposal to ratification by the then-necessary 36th state. [You would need 38 states today.])


OK I think you might be reading this a bit too literally. The dangers of online discourse.

The point is that we can do it if we want to.


Maybe. If my complaint was "tomorrow is Saturday, you can't pass it on a Saturday, duh...", then yeah, I'd absolutely be reading "tomorrow" and "suddenly" too literally.

When you meant "shortly before Memorial Day of 2030", it's not clear that 51% of the misunderstanding is on the reader.


It completely solves the problem. I recommend you read “progress and poverty” to get a better understanding of it.

You don’t seem to understand how it works or what it does.


I do understand how it works, are you saying that the zoning will magically be fixed when the taxes go up or the land becomes more exlusive? because I can tell you which one has precedent and which one is wishful thinking.

Yes, zoning does get magically fixed, because the incentives that led to zoning disappear. Under full LVT, owners have an incentive to maximize their land use. Otherwise, they will go bankrupt. So places with zoning more restrictive than land use demands will be underwater financially. Think SFH tract homes in Cupertino. These homeowners have fought viciously to retain SFH zoning. If LVT was imposed 95% of them would be faced with a tax bill they cannot pay. Their only option would be to surrender their land or rezone to allow development of sufficient scale to pay the tax.

It’s not wishful thinking it’s just a fact. Zoning exists because landowners want it. As soon as they don’t want it, it’s gone.


Arson would be irrelevant for land taxes.

This is irrelevant. Who cares if someone has to type in “optimize paperclips” for it to go rogue. Same effect in the end.

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