Quickest, simplest fix would be to treat borrowing against unrealized capital gains as income for tax purposes.

Sometimes

There are plenty of things that Americans, in general, actually agree on. As much as the expression is disliked, there is a broad center that endorses at least moderate reform.

The problem is the fptp system that bundles people who are okay “just a little reform but not too much” with actual regressives, and people who actively support moderate reform with those too progressive for the “just a little” folks.

The end result is stagnation in popular issues due to the inflexibility of the electorate and enabling less democratic influences to dictate policy.

This, so much. There’re very real and important discussions in the medical field that (very candidly) go into these types of topics that become impossible to have (at least in the public discourse) due to these types of behaviours.

Doing something that gets your org banned by a government that isn’t even the one you’re protesting seems not only ineffective but counterproductive to me.

Censorship laws in the UK are quite dystopian, but even in less authoritarian countries, this kind of action would result in serious consequences.

that equipment was being used to further a genocide against the Palestinian people.

[Citation needed]

Finding out part of fucking around.

Countries don’t usually take kindly to people or organizations that break into military bases and vandalize equipment.

They already are. Marginal tax rate on income is ~66% and tax pressure as a whole is close to 50% of GDP. Hence increasing taxes isn’t really feasible.

No. Citizenship for a child in my country is tied to a huge amount of rights and access to welfare that essentially extends across a lifetime. Birthright citizenship would inevitably lead to an increase in (already significant) abuse of our strained welfare system.

Right now what’s needed is rapid reform in order to salvage as much of it as possible. We can’t afford to rapidly expand the system to include more people.

iirc a large reason is that trees for paper & lumber can be grown in areas less suitable for agriculture, whilst hemp competes with foodstuffs. Hence, despite the hemp being a more efficient producer of cellulose, it may be less economically efficient due to the relatively high value of alternate uses for the same land.

That first bit always feels so false and icky. Like, no I didn’t open up chatGPT to have my butt licked every other sentence. I just need the syntax for X or Y, and no I’m not delving into interesting depths of typescript. I’m monkeypatching the code to make a certain thing work and probably leaving a trail of wanton destruction behind every step I go.

It’s possible to reduce the privacy issues by using APIs with a local frontend. Given that APIs usually cater to companies instead of end consumers they actually have simple opt-outs for information logging.

Requires a bit of know-how, and you’ll be paying for your llm per use (not that bad actually, I’ve personally averaged <10$/yr in api costs) but at least you get to have all your personal issues on your local device instead.

For a chatGPT-like experience you probably want the ooga booga web generation ui but there’s others too.

Tehran Times is completely untrustworthy in this context, they’re - essentially a propaganda outlet for the islamist theocratic regime in Tehran. Given that they make such an absurd claim and that it hasn’t been independently verified - this is likely false.

See link below regarding Tehran Times:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Times#cite_note-regime-1

Honestly from the point where

…he lost all my sympathy. I was increasingly curious about how things were going to go wrong for him. More fascinating train wreck, less investment in him personally.

Same here. Back before that I was basically only on reddit. Now I’m only on fediverse. One (anti-)social media is more than enough.

No, no we did not. Actions by a state doesn’t justify collectively dehumanising an entire population. Gazans didn’t become inherently evil because Hamas did October 7, Chinese aren’t inherently evil because of the Uighur Genocide, Russians aren’t inherently evil because of the invasion of Ukraine…

where they are stuck picking up the tab for people who never contributed to the local economy and are now draining it of resources

Pensions in the EU are entirely different from how it works in the US. I don’t know how it is there, but here it is the nation you worked in that coughs up the pension money. Additionally, from what I’ve heard from retirees who did move to Spain, they have to pay income tax on their pensions to the Spanish government which means that these people would actually be contributing to the state coffers similarly to someone who was working. So, in other words you have money coming in from abroad, being contributed in taxes and spent on goods & services locally, boosting the economy.

Besides, the people who can afford to move abroad for retirement usually are the wealthier sort, so not the burden you make it out to be.

Had a quick look at their statements. The IRGC claimed to target “IDF C4I, along with a military intelligence facility located in the Gav-Yam Technology Park”.

The edge of the technology center area is 1.2km from the location of the missile strike, which seems to have been the main hospital building of the medical center. Whilst I don’t know where in the tech center area the “intended” target is, this puts the hospital area as a whole at a distance of 900m-1.5km. This is within the CEP (circular error probable) for some of Iran’s ballistic missiles, but at least from a cursory search they appear to have armaments with enough accuracy to not risk hitting the hospital when aiming at their supposed target and sufficient range to hit Israel.

Every European nation has to deal with waves of retirees leaving the work force. It’s no excuse. The general solution is increasing retirement age & per capita productivity whilst cutting down on government spending in other areas unless they fancy debt financing. Different GDP strengths is exactly why it’s a % goal rather than an absolute amount to keep things fair.

Now that isn’t a reply I expected considering how well established this particular narrative is in the mainstream.

But here you go, a well sourced academic article on the topic:

https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-path-to-october-7-how-iran-built-up-and-managed-a-palestinian-axis-of-resistance/