There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people.
We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.
The economy has the equivalent of a permanent memory leak. The Austrians decided to restrict the amount of memory (money). The economy crashed like a program running out of memory.
Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times.
Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption.
The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout).
Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory.
Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.
Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.
Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?
The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.
All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.
The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
I do not live in the UK, but across the channel.. Had to look it up a bit as I do not follow this in great detail but there is some significant debate there on inheritance taxes I believe?
I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well.
The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me.
I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
That was blown out of all proportion, tbh; the UK used to have a tax carveout for the upper-middle-class which allows unused pension funds to be inherited tax-free, and this was in practice used as a tax avoidance mechanism, and that's going away, but it really isn't a particularly big deal in the scheme of things.
(Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
Not how progressive tax works, but it is the reality, e.g. in The Netherlands. Once you go over certain thresholds, you lose certain benefits leading to a poverty trap in some sense where the incentives of the system do not align with the implied goals of a healthy economy.
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
I bet you like the state using force to protect your stuff though, right? If someone scary sets up a tent on your front lawn because they have nowhere to live I bet you're all about using government services to enact violence.
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience,
Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.
The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
There's a question of what 'homelessness' means, there. So to take an example, Dublin counts 11,000 people as homeless, with ~120 sleeping rough. SF, a somewhat bigger city, but in the same size range, counts 8,000 people homeless... but with over 4000 sleeping rough. This is both a difference in temporary/emergency accommodation available, and a difference in definition (for instance I don't think SF counts couch surfing as homeless).
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.
It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
> It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
The main problem being, you can’t operate the bunker yourself. How do you ensure the non-billionaires on your staff don’t murder you and use your bunker themselves? This is assuming a catastrophe that forces a move to a bunker and changes the rules of society.
It’s an intractable problem, billionaires are reliant on the rest of us to do their bidding. That does not change in a crisis/catastrophe.
* Wealth inequality in US is clearly a big problem. But it’s typically not a big problem in the rest of the world, certainly in EU.
* If you think taxes and donations will solve the problem with people who struggle with basics, you are wrong. Again look at the world, places like France.
Edit: I was recalling articles claiming the company purposely fueling less than other airlines in order to increase their rate of claims for priority landing to have a better "on time" statistics.
Having attended meetings at ICAO I can also tell you many details of various aviation incidents, including their existence, are covered by some secret classification. This fact being disclosed caused most of the attendees to lose all hope in the rest of the proceedings. To their credit the FAA reps on that occasion were by far the most reasonable gov representatives in the room, and the FAA are one of the major voices pushing for greater transparency on it.
It’s generous of the classifying authority to send to the ICAO meeting somebody both appropriately credentialed to know about the information in question, and willing to talk coyly about it. Did these additional incidents inform the policy discussions at the meetings you attended?
It's funny you say that, because the way it happened was it was blurted out by a diplomat from a certain country, at which point most of the regulators facepalmed and all of those of us from outside were having the same reaction as many here.
The whole subject of discussion prior to this was efforts to improve data sharing wrt incidents.
It's cleaner than coal and oil. If you upgrade a coal plant to a gas plant, that's a step forward against climate change.
Yes, we'd be much better off with wind farms, solar plants, and nuclear reactors, but a step forward is a step forward.
Countries like Poland, running mostly on coal, would get cleaner air and contribute less to global warming if they were to upgrade their power plants to anything non-coal.
Replace them with nuclear generators and they'd also significantly reduce the amount of radiation people would be exposed to.
It's not that gas is that good, it's more that coal is that bad.
Clever use of the adjective “cleaner”. Try replacing it with “less dirty, but still pollutant and toxic” to see an alternative, correct version of what you have written.
You can put absolutist restrictions on things like that but every time you enter a cost-benefit calculus with such restrictions already in place you're going to end up with more cost and less benefit
A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot.
With that logic, humans aren't climate friendly and should be transitioned away from
Different shades of grey. We'll always cause pollution as part of being. I don't believe that the person above meant it as a final solution to keep burning fossil fuels
At that point human life isn't climate friendly... everyone wants to live like the average american with 2 cars and 4 ac units per households, when Asia and Africa come for their fair share, even if they only claim 25% of it, we're fucked, no amount of battery or solar panel will make this consumeristic and "growth forever" mentality sustainable, because by definition it is a boundless quest. Half of the world still live like medieval peasants with less than $7 a day, this is just the beginning
Is it less climate unfriendly than the alternatives. Every form of energy generation releases CO2. Gas also has the benefit that it doesn't need all sorts of extras to make it dispatachable when needed (which also require CO2).
I forgot to say hydro is also great where possible.
Both nuclear and solar have conditions where they cannot generate energy. Nuclear is also slow to scale up/down. There is a need for something that has the properties of natural gas
He's also given many talks which are on youtube on the topic, one of which is his talk of the same name at the Beckman institute [1]. It's a little under 90 minutes and is enormously entertaining as well as being informative.
Somewhat unrelated to the piece, but this is the second website I’ve seen in two days that appears to not have properly merged an edit?
“ The RAC’s head of policy, Simon Williams, says many people are overwhelmed by the multitude of apps they have to use, “when in reality you want one that you like and you’re happy using and that you can use everywhere”.
Six years ago the Department for Transport started developing a “national parking platform” (NPP) designed to enable drivers to use one app of their choice to pay for all their parking. It has been trialled by a number of councils, but a big question mark hangs over its future as public funding for the project looks likely to be withdrawn.
The RAC’s head of policy Simon Williams says many people are overwhelmed by the multitude of apps they have to use, “when in reality you want one that you like and you’re happy using and that you can use everywhere”.
Six years ago the Department for Transport started developing a “national parking platform” (NPP) designed to enable drivers to use one app of their choice to pay for all their parking, and it has been trialled by a number of councils. However, a big question mark now hangs over its future as public funding for the project looks likely to be withdrawn imminently.”
I think the other one was an npr piece posted on HN yesterday? Is there a bug with wordpress or are people just getting sloppy?
At least 6 years old.
https://superuser.com/questions/1516621/macbook-sound-balanc...
Still around as of 2025: https://www.techradar.com/computing/mac-os/its-2025-and-appl...
There’s a dedicated applet to fix this…