The defense industry is already the most socialized industry in the US today. Do we want Raytheon deciding that they want to sell cruise missiles to whoever they want? Of course not. Do we let Lockheed-Martin just sell F-35s to whoever they want? Of course not. In fact it is the US the government goes out and sells them to other countries!
SpaceX only survived because of government investment and intervention. The majority of their income continues to be provided by the US government. Why shouldn't the government cut out the trillionaire middleman?
Good. There's plenty of precedent for us peons - property taxes are a wealth tax. Generational wealth at the scale we see today is fundamentally incompatible with democratic principles. Billionaires are a policy failure.
People did vote for their property taxes to go up when they voted for republicans to cut taxes on billionaires. The republicans did not stop wars, foreign spending, or wasteful spending, they stopped domestic spending on things regular people needed.
Property taxes automatically goes up to cover the missing federal dollars, that is why property taxes are skyrocketing. Republicans cut federal income taxes and made it easier for CEOs to earn unlimited tax free money.
Property taxes have to pay for everything local that back in the 1950s was all taxpayer funded federally because we had a 90% federal income tax bracket and post-1929 financial regulations. Stock buybacks were illegal and CEOs could not pay themselves in stock and bubble the stock price to enrich themselves. When rich people shift money out of pockets of people who pay taxes to their own pockets where they pay no taxes, they defund the entire tax base and property taxes skyrocket. GDP is still at record highs and companies are posting record profits, but CEOs can run these companies so they and their insiders take all the money.
All the protections have been gutted by the republican party. We are back to the late 20s entering a new great depression. Removing the policies that ended the great depression is how you create a new great depression.
> People did vote for their property taxes to go up when they voted for republicans to cut taxes on billionaires.
> Property taxes automatically goes up to cover the missing federal dollars, that is why property taxes are skyrocketing.
All property taxes in the United States are at the state and local levels, not federal. I don't know what you're referring to.
> The republicans did not stop wars, foreign spending, or wasteful spending, they stopped domestic spending on things regular people needed.
Yes.
> Republicans cut federal income taxes and made it easier for CEOs to earn unlimited tax free money.
Also yes.
> Property taxes have to pay for everything local that back in the 1950s was all taxpayer funded federally because we had a 90% federal income tax bracket and post-1929 financial regulations.
I believe they’re saying that property taxes are making up for a gap in funding caused by lowered federal taxes. It’s not that property taxes are federal, it’s that lowering taxes in one area requires them to be raised in another, in order to achieve the same level of services.
But this is crazy! Property taxes have been around since the 1800s and are used today to fund local spending, the kind of stuff that the federal government is either averse to or constitutionally barred from.
The federal government wasn't spending money on schools and other services when the tax brackets were that high. That money was going to the military. Social security and Medicare/Medicaid came later, after income taxes had been reduced.
If we want to reform the federal tax system to make it more fair, there is one particularly low-hanging fruit that any politician with a brain avoids like the plague: end the separate treatment of capital gains from income. Bezos sells billions of stock each year and pays a little under 20% on all of it. The rich don't need to engage in tax evasion schemes, the system is already incredibly friendly to income from capital over income from labor.
Federal dollars to states and municipalities in Democratic-leaning states have been eviscerated. Since states can’t reasonably sunset a program with 6 weeks notice, the money has to come from somewhere else.
Yes and blue states also tend to have the least reliance on property taxes vs income tax for example. Debating this in the absence of real data is unlikely to be productive. Unfortunately trying to find good data on state/local tax rates is... more difficult than it should be.
Blue states have a higher reliance on local taxes (which makes sense when you consider that one of the things that makes them "blue" is higher taxes). Remember the drama over the SALT deduction?
> According to Detwiler, Tennessee did not bother to notify him in advance that he was in violation. Instead, they sent heavily armed men to his place of business, handcuffed him, and took him to jail. His bond was $20000.
Why should white collar crime deserve a lighter touch? This wasn't a no-knock raid in the middle of the night.
Did he have a history of violence, or was there some good reason to send armed men to his place? If not, this is just a waste of resources, and also adding many armed men into the situation made it more likely for things to turn deadly.
Is there no policy of calling someone without a history of violence (or showing up to inform with no intention of on-the-spot arrest) to let them know they are in violation of the law and request they turn themselves in within the next X days if there is no reason to assume evidence could be destroyed by the person during that time?
Because they’re part of the gentry class white collar, but blue collar crime the police force as we know it today was created to take care of the EastEnders not the Gentry class and the police have been successful in carrying out their remit in that area of law enforcement since the 1840’s/1850’s…
The police are a literal extortion racket in the US. “That’s a nice society you have there, wouldn’t want us to fuck it up would you? No? Better keep paying us then.”
> The Supreme Court is the only institution in our system capable of standing up for the rule of law, fundamental rights, and the separation of powers. Just because it is doing a bad job does not mean we should weaken its powers further.
Dred Scott. Plessy. Bush v Gore. Citizens United. The court has worked against our values just as frequently as it has upheld them throughout the history of this country. Fundamental reform is required if we are to avoid these sort of nonsense decisions in the future.
The fact that there is disagreement does not imply there is no truth of the matter. You could claim that I merely disagree with the notion that 1+1=17, but nevertheless I would be justified in insisting that a teacher teaching this "fact" should be fired.
The modern Supreme Court majority contradicts itself from one day to the next. See how they claim it's legal to fire officials of independent agencies like the FTC without cause, but illegal to fire officials of the Federal Reserve without cause, despite the Fed being an independent agency like the FTC. The decision is nonsense, and any organization that makes decisions like this is broken.
> The modern Supreme Court majority contradicts itself from one day to the next. See how they claim it's legal to fire officials of independent agencies like the FTC without cause, but illegal to fire officials of the Federal Reserve without cause, despite the Fed being an independent agency like the FTC. The decision is nonsense, and any organization that makes decisions like this is broken.
Why is it that the derisive "oh you just disagree" statement usually speaks to a missing "...and therefore aren't serious"?
What are you actually saying constructively here, if anything at all? I, for one, happen to agree that fundamental reform is clearly necessary. What that looks like exactly is where I'm sure the problems lie.
Assuming my residence due to my nationality? Bad idea. Incredibly, in this day and age, people may be born in one country and live in another! Who would have thought, eh?
> That the vast majority of people that "want reform" actually just want a Supreme Court whose majority always sides with them.
That you immediately go here in response to what are universally understood these days as incorrectly decided cases (Plessy in particular) shows incredibly bad faith on your part. Good day to you sir.
> In captions, ads enticed Meta users to click with claims like “I can show you more” or promises that “our AI transforms your hidden desires into hypnotic videos. Dark, seductive, unforgettable.” Another boasted, “there are no restrictions. All the characters are real people and there are many options. This is the AI men actually use.”
> Even more troublingly, TTP emphasized in a press release that these findings came after the group teamed up with Wired and flagged an earlier batch of 53 ads in August. At that time, Meta claimed that it had “recently rolled out new systems to better detect child exploitation.” But TTP “found hundreds of new CSAM ads ran after Meta boasted about its new technology.”
Prison is too good for the people responsible for this.
Garbage, too. I've reported at least 10 of these things. Ads, reels. Specifically as child abuse. "After review, we determined this content does not breach our policies."
> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy.
Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
> Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.
My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).
It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).
The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
> "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
Well yeah if that is how you choose to have that conversation then sure.
> more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand
I made no such claim.
You seem pretty committed to your strawmen so good day to you sir.
I love that question. It's a great question because it's designed to elicit avenues of attack.
I'd say that Democratic Socialism, today among the general population of the United States the term Socialism has no set definition, no real understanding of its roots, and no real concept of how it would be enacted politically in a Democratic society.
So I'm really not sure what you mean by Democratic Socialist. I think you mean as defined by Wikipedia.
If so, in short I see Marx as being a root among many to Socialism, and so on to Democratic Socialism. The dogma from Marx follows through to an application for people to obtain their "needs": "More of whatever, less expensive, and better evrything! And AI is actually Socialist, so let's do it and vote for me!!!" That kind of cynical approach.
What was the point you were trying to make by linking the executive order? The actual law simply states that the "Secretary of the Interior shall provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the Federal Government".
Just thinking out loud here but I wonder if there is a case to be made that by renaming Lake Ontario to something that nobody actually uses, the President has violated the law that requires "uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography". Not that anyone would have standing to actually get anywhere with that.
