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I suspect there is a correlation between "intelligent" and "learned how to think critically". Not 100%, but not 0% either.

But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could.

Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidentia...

Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.


Heh. When in serious need, break out the giant ChannelLocks, and have someone else hold the jar. A foot of leverage can move most lids...

Or just gently dent the edge of the metal lid, enough to break the seal, and it'll open easily.

> just gently dent the edge of the metal lid, enough to break the seal

I think you need to know about the JarKey (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00167Z2UO/). Does the job without any risk of damaging glass or even the jar lid itself.


With only one person needed. And denting can usually be done with an old-fashioned can/bottle-opener, to minimize the chance of cracking the glass jar.

Since HN trims leading numbers: 60 Percent of grades at Harvard were As.

Which is a tax on only one kind of wealth. Back when that was the kind that mattered most, that made sense. Today? Not so much.

Still, seems like table stakes.

Start with georgist/pigouvian taxes, and then expand to other kinds of income/wealth afterwards.

But Georgist taxes can go really far I'd imagine.


No, why? If we're going to do a wealth tax, then do a wealth tax. Why single out only one kind of wealth, and the kind that is not even the most important these days?

(What's more important? IP. The value of Google, say, isn't in the land it owns. It's in the code, the database of web pages, and the google.com domain name.)


> Why single out only one kind of wealth

Because of some very good reasons. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg

> kind that is not even the most important these days

uhhh source on that? I'm pretty sure land is literally the largest asset class in the economy. Real estate is by many estimates over 2X as large as the entire combined global market cap of all publicly traded companies. https://europhoenix.com/blog/part-ii-on-asset-classes-size-o...


No, I'm not going to watch a video to see what your point is. Either tell me, or don't.

Re your last paragraph: I admit I'm surprised by that. Still... Georgism calls for a tax only on the value of the land, not on the improvements. Of all that money in real estate, how much is in the improvements, and how much is in the raw land?

> This figure includes only high quality retail property, offices, industrial, hotels, residential, other commercial uses, and agricultural land

From this I gather that a large chunk of it is the improvements.

And, if real estate is the biggest category, why focus just on the land part of that, and ignore all the improvements on it?

This article is about a wealth tax. The arguments for Georgism are about something else - about social policy. It may even work as social policy, though I have at least some doubts. But as a wealth tax, it's not very effective. (If I were a rich person, I could buy a $100 million apartment in New York, and have the rest of my assets in stocks and gold and art, and my tax liability would be for my pro-rated fraction of the land that the high rise that held my apartment occupied. As a wealth tax, that's got far too many loopholes to be useful.)


it's more than that, because it's the one kind of wealth that has an (almost) completely inelastic supply

Same is true of gold. So why single out land?

the same is not true of gold.

From Schlock Mercenary: "'That's a great question' is a terrible answer."

I don't disagree. The Democrats believed their "permanent Democratic majority" schtick, and enacted a bunch of things that much of the country deeply disagreed with.

But we also need a national reckoning on ICE's excessive use of force, DOGE, using the DOJ to prosecute political opponents, the financial irresponsibility of the "Big Beautiful Bill", the attack on the Capitol, the rest of the attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 elections, the tariffs by executive order, the threats to Canada and Greenland...


I also don't disagree, we need a national reckoning on all the things!

This is my now flagged original comment. Upset some people:

>Do you think there will be a deep national reckoning about what happened?

You're witnessing one. This is the national reckoning on open borders, DEI/wokeism, etc.


> Nations that encompass multiple ethno-cultural groups tend to be somewhat unstable

The US has been remarkably stable for a nation that encompasses multiple ethno-cultural groups. It may not continue to be so, but historically it has been a counterexample.


what do you think counterexample means? if i say most days it is sunny, is a rainy day a counterexample? please learn how words in sequence work.

No. You're not thinking it through well enough.

The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.

Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)

The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?

You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?


Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.

Juicero had customers that thought it was useful. Both "smoothie juicers" and "smoothie subscriptions" were big product categories equally before and after Juicero tried to unite them with a technological middleman. Kuerig, the Juicero of coffee, remains quite active and profitable (and wasteful).

There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.

Worse, public sector unions are ultimately at my expense in a way that I can't even fix by not buying the product, since they're taking it from my taxes.

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