hark
@hark@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 2 weeks ago:
The report won’t go viral because it’s a 100+ page report. Everyone plays a different role, Gary’s role is to raise awareness of the solution of wealth tax and push for an implementation. He’s done a great job at that. I have watched the documentary written about in that article and I agree it wasn’t good, he didn’t push back enough most of the time. His skill was limited in that respect, but his skill at getting clicks is still good to give traction and momentum to the idea of a wealth tax where others can pick up the torch and carry it to the goal.
Farage does not advocate for a wealth tax and Gary has talked about Farage multiple times on his channel, pointing out that he is taking advantage of the situation where institutions and the elites are indeed corrupt, but will not implement a solution to fix it and will actually do the opposite. I don’t see how that messaging benefits Farage. If you make a wealth tax a partisan issue, then you’re cutting along party lines rather than class lines and that will mean people in poorer classes not supporting a wealth tax simply because of allegiance to their party of choice.
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 2 weeks ago:
You claim it’s not about stats and yet their issue is that he didn’t want to get dragged into a pointless argument over the minutia of some chart. If these hosts agree that wealth inequality is a problem, then it’s an established point that doesn’t need to be rehashed through arguments over a chart. Gary knows this, his audience knows this, the hosts know this, and we know this, and many are living through this. What purpose does arguing over a chart do other than to try to distract from the message? If you want a strong message that resonates with people, you have to keep it simple and straightforward.
Whether he’s a grifter or not is a matter of opinion. Dismissing his message by calling him a grifter is a textbook example of ad hominem. His message is simple:
- There is massive wealth inequality.
- Wealth inequality tends to get worse since the more assets one owns, the more they can use that as leverage to obtain even more assets.
- A wealth tax addresses the heart of the problem by taxing wealth directly.
What is your issue with these key points? That he hasn’t spent enough time in the chart mines? That you think he’s a grifter? Clearly his method of communication has been effective in drawing attention on the issue while offering a solution and I think that’s a great thing.
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 2 weeks ago:
Those two hosts agree there are problems with economic inequality, so then what’s the point of the graph? Is the graph showing there isn’t an inequality problem? If so, doesn’t that mean the hosts themselves are dismissing the graph?
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 2 weeks ago:
When you want your message to reach the masses, you have to oversimplify, otherwise it gets bogged down in details that ultimately may not even matter. People are having trouble with basic cost of living: shelter, healthcare, education, and even food. Focusing so heavily on numbers and graphs is how you get clowns claiming that it’s just a “vibecession” just because some dumb metric like GDP or their arbitrary basket of goods looks fine, meanwhile these people can’t afford the basics.
The problem is that the field of economics is biased so heavily towards policies that benefit the rich because that is how you get funding. Economists are largely in servitude to the rich and that is why they consider an effective tax on the rich “bad economics”. What these past decades have clearly shown that catering to the rich does not work. Why do you think they’re so vehemently against a wealth tax? If it was so ineffective then they wouldn’t care about a wealth tax getting established.
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 3 weeks ago:
Apparently the hosts of that video you shared don’t like graphs either because they covered the most critical part of the graph with their dumb grinning faces: Image
Gary has a point, there can be endless playing about with numbers, and looking at a single graph is not enough to draw a vast conclusion. How about we look at a stat from the same page that graph was pulled from?
and that stat highlights the point Gary was trying to make about looking at the wealth of the top 0.1% who are largely the ones taking wealth from everyone else, including from the rest of the top 10%. The host trying to pull a gotcha on Gary can’t even read the graph he handpicked because he said that things are better now than in 1980 before trying to correct himself by saying “they’re kind of like they were in 1980” even though actually the share of wealth for the top 10% was lower in 1980 and the share of wealth for the bottom 50% was higher.
On top of all that, the numbers end at 2020, which is right before plundering frenzy that the wealthy did thanks to all the money printing that took place during the pandemic. Here’s the page with graphs and stats for anyone interested: …org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
- Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age' 3 weeks ago:
How is a wealth tax just moving water? What would you say is more effective? A wealth tax isn’t just about recapturing some of the wealth back from the wealthy, arguably that isn’t even the most important aspect of it, but rather having the mechanisms in place to map out and track wealth. Having that in place would massively benefit us to understand the velocity of wealth and where exactly it is being accumulated so that we can more effectively act to remedy massive inequalities.
If you want to learn more, this video goes into it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmK74mfpHQA
- Comment on I'm just trying to finish my plate now 3 weeks ago:
Am I supposed to guess which thing I said you didn’t like?
- Comment on Data from the 2023 Insomniac leak showed that most first party Playstation games sold more physical discs than digital copies 3 weeks ago:
I’m sure Sony has made the calculation and found they come out ahead by removing the overhead of manufacturing discs and drives, eliminating borrowing/used game sales (of which they get no cut), and preparing people for a completely disc-less PS6. Sucks for users’ ability to play games in the future, but companies don’t tend to care about that and in fact see that as a positive since they have more control over what you have access to.
- Comment on US Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “I'm thrilled to report that after 35 years, on July 4th, we will end the subsidies for wind and solar projects” 3 weeks ago:
The ghouls are having a feeding frenzy, only accelerating the death of the empire.
- Comment on magic 5 weeks ago:
If I find come across a great sale, I might as well pick it up. I wear my shoes until they disintegrate, so it takes a while to get through to the next one, so I’ll have a backup of maybe 3-4. It’s good to at least have one backup just in case anyway.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
It’s all fake. Might as well call him a quadrillionaire.
- Comment on Women in dating apps 1 month ago:
Even worse than getting a “hi” or “hello” is “?”. I don’t know where people learned to do that, but I’ve had more than one person start a conversation in Teams or Slack with “?” and it always makes me think I did something wtf-worthy to just get a “?” out of nowhere. Apparently it’s their way of asking if I’m available.
All these people don’t seem to understand the advantage of asynchronous text messaging where you can greet and ask a question at the same time.
- Comment on What does everyone think of the economic outlook for the next year? 2 months ago:
They can’t print oil, but they can play games with the strategic reserve and maybe implement heavy (heavier) subsidies, but yeah, eventually reality should set in. I just have no idea how long that would take. So far the market seems to take trump at his word every time.
- Comment on What does everyone think of the economic outlook for the next year? 2 months ago:
I have no idea what an economic crisis would look like anymore. Ever since 2008, it seems the playback for any sign of economic trouble has been printing ridiculous amounts of money and shoving it directly into the pockets of rich people while playing a shell game with bad debts. This seems to allow the terrible economy to keep limping along.
- Comment on these eco-facist stickers 2 months ago:
They should start with themselves.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Cringe on my Hinge? We shall measure true caliber in Soulcalibur.
- Comment on Vibe management 2 months ago:
These companies have been tokenmaxxing i.e. judging employee performance based on how many tokens they use, so employees are incentivized to use up as many tokens as possible, even if it doesn’t actually improve productivity (and can actually result in the opposite).
- Comment on During the Obama Admin I saw a lot of the W Bush Miss Me Yet bill boards traveling the country. How come one or many people put up one of Obama that says, Miss Me Yet? 2 months ago:
Bush created ICE (plus the surveillance state apparatus we’re stuck with today), invaded Iraq, had a stupid border fence, and had surging oil prices towards the end of his term along with the greatest financial crisis since the great depression. Trump is merely following the same script, financial crisis pending.
- Comment on American workers are tired of waiting. 2 months ago:
The trolley problem is used to pretend harm reduction works, but if you extend the image, you’ll find all the ones tied on the bottom rail will be moved to the top rail, just spaced out so that one side can pretend they’re slightly better, even though they’ll end up killing the same people anyway. If you think it’s acceptable to let “the good guys” carry out a genocide, then you’ll find anything acceptable. Keep sacrificing one group after the other as you justify your harm reduction scheme.
“First they came for[…]” I’ll let you figure out the rest.
- Comment on I need this 3 months ago:
lumbar support? more like gaybar support, right?!
- Comment on Me watching someone on Lemmy getting cooked for having the same opinion as me: 3 months ago:
Based? Based on what?
Based on having the same opinion as me.
- Comment on To whoever decided it is acceptable to wear yoga pants in public: 3 months ago:
Pants smooth things out.
- Comment on Don't be a coward 4 months ago:
True, sometimes the most abusive businesses are small.
- Comment on K.I.S.S. 5 months ago:
True, but maybe a good compromise would be having the fuzzy date in parentheses/brackets if there’s enough space.
- Comment on K.I.S.S. 5 months ago:
I absolutely hate fuzzy dates, not only because of the problem you mentioned, but also because they can get wildly inaccurate. For example, on youtube I often see something counted as posted a year ago, but if I look at the absolute timestamp, it was actually 1 year and 10 months. That’s too big of a difference to truncate.
- Comment on spending 5 months ago:
The solution to debt is more debt.
- Comment on Shit, I'd pay $9 5 months ago:
This is just one of many uses of texting.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 5 months ago:
I already vote for democrats all the way down ballot for every election, now what? How about democrats do their fucking job and actually try to get elected instead of demanding we settle for fascism-lite or else we get fascism?
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 5 months ago:
remove fascism vs keep fascism seems pretty “black and white” to me.
Democrats don’t even want to defund ICE. How are they removing fascism?
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 5 months ago:
How do you think we got trump in the first place? Democrats kept moving to the right and making things worse until a candidate like trump could seize the moment. So yeah, you will die on that hill because it was a hill built by voting the “lesser of two evils” while both parties moved to be more evil, until we’ve got the current level of evil we have now.
