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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • Thing is, this already happens, it’s just currently more in the billionaire’s favor because instead of tax it’s a “donation”. You’re proposing the same system that already exists with lobbyists and Super PACs, just more enforced. No one is going to bite that bait when they can just pay Scheister and Swindel, Attorneys at Law, to cut a private deal with the CEOs and senators of their choice, be completely unbeholden to public opinion about it, and not be required to do it again next tax season if it’s not profitable to do so.

    Besides, I’ve had quite enough of rich assholes deciding that this year they’re going to donate $80m to exterminate the gays / to shut down solar startups / to arm all the cops with rocket launchers. In every situation, given the choice, they will always invest their money into whatever is most immediately profitable to them, morals or longevity be damned. This would cause our already easily-purchased politicians to be even more easily purchased and with semi public approval, as Elongated Muskrat now has a legal right to billionaire hero-worship? No thanks.

    The special billionaire tax isn’t an awful idea. The perks attached to it are most definitely an awful, no good, very bad idea. If something like this did get implemented it would be an absolute requirement that the investor have no say in where these taxes are spent. They may advise in certain directions, but final say should be up to a jury of some sort.






  • I mean, you say that, but a new player looking to get into Stellaris or CKII is looking at a $300 bill if they want all the content. In fact that’s what prevented me from getting into Stellaris, I own the base game, but when I discovered I’d need to shell out an additional several hundred dollars, even during a sale, for not only new species but just for base game mechanics, I stopped in my tracks.

    Compare with Civilization, I own Civ V and Civ VI and all the released content for each, pretty sure I bought each of those for less than $20.








  • skulblaka@startrek.websitetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldPSA.
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    5 months ago

    Infinite possibilities does not mean all possibilities. It is possible - even probable, in most cases - to have an infinite set which does not contain all possible members.

    As an example, the set of all even numbers and the set of all whole numbers are both infinite sets with completely different contents. Even accounting for the fact that the set of all whole numbers contains the entire set of all even numbers, the two will still differ by a factor of 50%.

    I think that Vsauce explains this concept a little better than I can as I am not a mathematician, I merely watch their content on the internet.


  • skulblaka@startrek.websitetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldPSA.
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    5 months ago

    But regardless I’m at the hospital for them to remove a teacup from my ass. I am not leaving this hospital until the teacup comes out of the asshole in question. They’re going to be working closely in that area anyway, I would think checking for contusions would be standard practice. It’s not like the relative insertion speed of this teacup is going to break my elbow as well, any injuries are going to be generally in the same zip code.




  • And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

    I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

    So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.