There's still the problem of how, precisely, we're going to force the rich to pay those taxes out of their own wealth, rather than them simply offloading them in the form of increased prices for the products and services their companies provide, which increased prices are then paid for by the weakest chain in the link: private end consumers, aka the middle class.
There may be a way, but it isn't self evident what that way may be.
And that prevents them from calling the company and ordering them to increase prices so that they can then use the extra income to pay those capital taxes... how?
Was it a Russian-style suicide? Did he shoot himself on the back five times, then jump from a window?
Or was it a more Western-style suicide, hanging himself at the exact same time all the cameras around him coincidently turned themselves off?
I guess it's time people start keeping a public people with powerful enemies start keeping some kind of "not, I'm not planning on suiciding today" canary of some kind.
That's common sense reasoning, which is to say, not based on anything scientific.
GLP-1 is produced by the body to regulate and balance food consumption. People whose bodies produce less than the correct amount eat more because they feel a lot more hunger than people whose bodies are normal. Taking in GLP-1 drugs, if following medical advice, brings their level back to what it should have been all along, in which case most wouldn't have become obese at all.
I'm such a case. Clinical exames never showed up any clear problem associated with weight gain, so for my entire life my obesity was linked by everyone, doctors included, to lack of willpower.
I only discovered what my issue was when I took a genetic test and discovered that my DNA came with these lovely traits:
* I feel more intense hunger than the average people, so I need to eat more than they do to feel satiated. If I eat the same amount a normal person does, I leave the table literally still hungry.
* My body accumulates more fat than the average person, so even if I eat the same amount they do and keep constantly hungry, I accumulate some fat.
* Caloric-reduction diets don't work for me. So the years and years I tried and tried them had little effect, and were mostly wasted effort.
* Fat-reduction diets also don't work for me. Good thing I didn't lose time with those since everyone recommended me the useless caloric-reduction ones.
* The only diet that has some effect for me is the Mediterranean one, which I didn't know about and no one had ever recommended.
* Physical exercise has little effect for me, as I gain less muscle mass from it than the average person. So the years of walking and the many attempts at going to the gym were also mostly wasted effort.
* And physical exercise causes more pain for me than it does for the average person, so all the time I was doing those, I was suffering more than most people while getting worse results then they do from it.
If your genetics is normal on all those fronts, then sure, a bit of willpower fixes that. With that combo though, and fully not knowing you have any of that? Not a chance.
There are three levels to this. One are individuals with bodies that gain weight regardless of what the person does.
The second is psychological, people whose bodies work normally and they do everything wrong on their own.
The third is structural. Countries in which a huge part of the population is obese while other similar countries don't have that problem, have systemic issues that cause that. In the US it's the fact policies all around favor food that cause obesity and make healthy food be extremely expensive, which is the opposite of what countries where obesity is uncommon do.
Fix this last issue, wait two to three generations, and you'll see obesity fall to normal levels, at which point, yes, bringing up the moral argument for some of the few remaining cases may even become valid.
"One are individuals with bodies that gain weight regardless of what the person does."
Physically, that's not possible. If calories consumed is less than calories burned, the body cannot add weight. It doesn't have access to zero-point energy.
The way bodies burn energy varies. Different diseases and genetic conditions regulate that. For some their bodies may burn most of the energy they take in, storing very little as fat in the process. For others their bodies store almost everything.
I provided some details about my specific case here:
Physically, it is possible, and you noted it in your comment. “Calories burned” - what could possibly make you think this is fixed across all humans?
There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body and to not use energy. Whether it be physical disability that prevent movement, or diseases that dis-regulate your metabolism.
There are many people who eat sufficient food and are perpetually lethargic. Their body has the energy, and chooses not to use it.
When I did chemo, I actually put on weight, despite eating almost nothing. I had pretty bad nausea despite my 4 anti-emetics, so food was difficult to eat. Even drinking water was hard.
So how could I have possibly put on weight? Well I was sleeping 16+ hours a day, not moving at all, and my hormones plummeted. I lost most of the muscle on my body. I obviously don’t know what my basal metabolic rate was, but it must have been incredibly low. Even my brain, which uses a lot of calories, didn’t work right. I couldn’t think right.
If you didn't use energy, you would not need to breath: breath is driven by the CO2 accumulation and the CO2 is a byproduct of the body extracting energy from organic matter. And if you believe you use energy but very little compared to the lucky individuals with god-like metabolism then you would be able to breath very infrequently (and your heart rate would also be low) compared to them.
This is a very surface-level and primitive analysis. Of course the amount of energy you use varies based off of your activities and the state of your body. Never did I say I used "zero energy", you're fighting ghosts here.
Rather, my point was simple: calories-in and calories-out is correct, but the mistake evangelists of this ideology make is assuming calories-out is fixed or even a simple equation. It's not, and this is what pushes your narrative from "science" to "ideology".
>There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body and to not use energy
Now, grammatically it makes no sense, but I thought "and" was just a typo and then sentence read as: "There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body to not use energy" to witch I responded.
Cryptocurrencies in general are a good alternative. They're strictly unsanctionable and, depending on the currency selected, also untraceable, so secondary sanctions would be extremely difficult to apply with any kind of granularity. National-scale sanctions, evidently, would still be quite feasible.
Alas, that kind of anonymity runs counter to the very soul of the European bureaucratic ethos. They absolutely want to know in detail where every single cent goes, plus the power to block transactions at will, so they're looking into some magic solution that allows them full purview and full control while perfectly denying the US and its spy apparatus the possibility to also see into it, an impossible combination of requirements.
And I say all that as a fan of the EU. It's one of their many blind spots they need to overcome if they ever want to become a technological superpower.
Some new cryptocurrencies designed for interbank communication can do 20k transactions per second now, and can scale above that. It's just a matter of choosing the appropriate stack for the task.
I think the currently fastest is Hedera (HBAR), at 2 minutes per transaction or so, and that it's also the most decentralized, without that mechanism other crypto currencies have that the more you own, the stronger your power over the network. There's still some power at the nodes level though, in that if they all coordinate they can shutdown the network for whatever reason. I also read it's designed such that those metrics improve as the network grows.
But I'm not a specialist, I'm just interested in the technology and play with it a little, so take what I wrote with a grain of salt.
For the rare few cases it may have been warranted, it wasn't a bad idea. The problem is that for the vast, vast majority of cases in which it was used, it wasn't warranted.
Remember: schools don't have tribunals to judge which student was or wasn't actually guilty of what, to which extent, with which attenuats if any, etc., to then decide who was going to be beaten and how much. The teacher merely looked at you, decided you were guilty because you didn't look into his eyes while he was speaking (autistic children were typical cases of this), and decided to traumatize you for life, fully unjustly.
When modern schools do the same but in the opposite direction, unjustly punishing teachers, that simply shows they haven't changed one iota from what they have always been.
Unrealistic expectations. Weird mind games that benefit neither party. Sexual exploitation of the actresses. Dopamine reward system mistraining. Computer viruses.
Several times I got a free or discounted Disney+ subscription. Every time I watch a few shows on it, then let it go once those promotions ended. It's just not worth the money no matter the price tier, even at older prices (that considering in my country it's already cheaper than in the US), and even less so with any kind of ad thrown with it.
If you equate what the Presidents of the USA want to what the USA itself wants, then the USA have decided they don't want that.
If not, then you'd need to organize a referendum and let the population itself decide on a one person, one vote basis.
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