Rivalarrival
@Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
- Comment on something to be reinvented 1 day ago:
Exactly. The USPS should have pivoted from daily physical mail delivery to telecommunications services by the 1920s. The breakup of AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s made the Internet possible; we could have had the internet 30-40 years earlier if we had pushed the USPS into telephone.
- Comment on something to be reinvented 1 day ago:
Absolutely. It was an excellent system a hundred years ago.
They failed to expand the postal service into telecommunications between 1890 and 1940, leading to AT&T’s monopoly on the phone system until 1982. They failed to expand their money transfer system into consumer-oriented electronic banking services in the 1990s, leaving Visa and Mastercard with a stranglehold on payment processing. We’ll have to break them apart soon.
- Comment on something to be reinvented 1 day ago:
The USPS needs to take a long, hard look at their Money Order, and pivot toward basic consumer banking. They were the first widespread service for money transfers. They need to return to that core competency. They should issue checking accounts and bank cards (rivaling Visa and Mastercard) for anyone who wants one. They should provide fee-free basic consumer banking services to the general public.
At this time, their operational model is “advertising platform” that happens to occasionally provide delivery services. Their reason for continued existence is bulk mailing. They aren’t a government service. They are a de facto business. They fund themselves, and they produce a revenue stream for their sole shareholder, the US Government. If they were actually a government service, they would be publicly funded, and junk mail would be broadly prohibited.
The USPS is currently a garbage delivery service. Neither snow, nor rain, nor uBlock Origin stays these ad peddlers from littering “Or Current Resident” with their stamped trash. They should shift their focus to parcel delivery, and consumer banking.
- Comment on What does non-gui mean ? 2 days ago:
Exactly. A TUI is not a replacement for a GUI where human interaction is essential to the process.
But, very few computer processes require direct human input. The overwhelming majority of individual operations are performed silently in the background. The presence of a TUI in an image modification program allows for certain operations to be performed automatically, in the background, without a human ever needing to be involved. I actually needed to do this, to add what was basically a watermark and a date stamp to a PDF document via an image modification program. Repeated 80-120 times a day, 6 days a week. A TUI allows for the tying together of a half dozen simple operations into a functional system.
- Comment on What does non-gui mean ? 2 days ago:
TUI. Text User Interface. Command line. Terminal. You interact with the application via the keyboard, rather than a mouse, touchscreen, trackpad, etc.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
Games have rules.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 1 week ago:
Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually,
Myth.
You can transfer the stocks themselves to the IRS, and leave the IRS with the responsibility for liquidating them. We can require the IRS to look at the total traded volume of any issue they acquire, and prohibit them from selling more than 1% of that volume in the same time period. Liquidated shares will comprise no more than 1%; those shares will not significantly affect the market value of the issue.
My personal solution - outlaw stocks, bonds and loans for fucks sake.
“Stock” is what the ownership interest is distributed among multiple people. When two people equally build a business together, they each hold a “share” of that business’s “stock”. Banning “stocks” means banning every type of joint ownership, which is every type of business except “sole proprietorship” and “government enterprise”. Banning stocks is only feasible in a completely centralized economy.
Banning Bonds and Loans is even less feasible, and results in even more absurdities. Taken to extremes, your Amazon driver would have to collect payment at time of delivery, not at time of order. Payment before delivery could be considered a type of loan. Likewise, a business’s order to a vendor for supplies would have to be paid at time of delivery. Any other time would be considered a “loan” one way or another.
- Comment on intruder alert 1 week ago:
- Comment on intruder alert 1 week ago:
I prefer Ride of the Valkyries to Imperial March.
Does the floor lamp have a “strobe” mode?
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 1 week ago:
Tax wealth.
Agreed.
I don’t think we even need to tax all wealth. We need to specifically tax registered securities. Financial assets.
Economically, it isn’t a problem for a rich person to buy a yacht or a plane: Those assets were produced by workers; they are maintained by workers. The purchase of tangible assets means paychecks for the workers producing those assets. Economically, we shouldn’t be discouraging the purchase of personal property assets.
The value the ultra-wealthy are capturing is the ownership of companies. The value of those companies is generated by workers, but is transferred to the ultra-wealthy. The workers are compensated with cash, rather than ownership interest.
What we need to do is make those securities more expensive for the ultra-wealthy to hold, and cheaper for the workers to hold. We need a progressive tax on securities, payable in shares of the security, rather than the dollar value of those securities.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 1 week ago:
Under that plan, the maximum net income would come from a gross income of 50x minimum wage. Above that, taxes rise faster than pay.
Any minimum raise hike would automatically cut income tax rates across the board.
What would likely happen is the same thing that happened when we had a 91% top-tier tax rate: People with gross earnings above that rate would figure out how to turn everything they bought into a deductible business expense, and spend until they were under the line. Which isn’t really a problem, IMO, as that spending turns into worker compensation, rather than a stock portfolio.
Under this plan, executive compensation would still come primarily in the form of stock rather than pay. That’s already a problem, and this would compound it. Stock needs to be easy and cheap for the working class. It needs to be supremely expensive for the ultra rich to acquire and hold. We need cap gains taxes that start lower but progress much faster and higher than income taxes.
- Comment on The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily 1 week ago:
Don’t try to tax the dollar value of the securities. Enact a wealth tax of the securities themselves. Transfer shares of the security to the IRS, to be liquidated slowly over time. Non-liquid securities would be held much like a lien.
- Comment on history repeats itself once again 1 week ago:
AI;DR
- Comment on Do you think defense attorneys who defend cops who unjustly killed people are ‘good’ people? 1 week ago:
Well, they’re lawyers, so they’re automatically scumbags. That being said, I don’t think you can judge a generic criminal defense attorney on their choice in clients.
I do think you can judge an attorney on their scope of practice. Copyright trolls are among the worst.
- Comment on What ever happened to Ipecac? Why is it rarely used today, there was some side effects but not to warrant most hospitals to abruptly stop the use of it. 2 weeks ago:
Studies found that charcoal and gastric lavage (stomach pumping) was just as effective at preventing poisoning. The complications of ipecac include aspirating vomit into the trachea. Digestive fluids cause some pretty severe injuries in the lungs.
- Comment on Depluralize 2 weeks ago:
I was a soldier.
- Comment on iHave a Lovesick Teacher 2 weeks ago:
Technically, his starting location is defined contradictorily, being both the same position as hers, as well as “due north”. We can only proceed if a point can be considered “due north” of itself.
Technically, his initial direction of travel isn’t actually defined, nor is that direction specified as constant. Only his initial position and “5ft/sec” speed has actually been defined. He could maintain a constant distance to her, orbiting her as she travels eastward.
In five seconds, he could be a maximum of 25 feet away from the starting point. That puts him up to 30 feet west of her, or 20 feet east of her. His possible position will be defined by an ellipse with foci at the origin and her position 5 feet to the east, with a major axis length of 50 feet. If his direction is fixed, he will be on the circumference of the ellipse. If not fixed, somewhere within the ellipse.
If his direction is not fixed, and he elects to minimize his distance from her, as his distance from her approaches zero, his revolutions around her in a given time will approach infinite, and we will have to consider relativistic effects. His body will be ripped apart into a pink mist, which he will experience for all eternity. Poetic, I suppose.
- Comment on When traffic comes to a standstill, drivers instantly shift left and right to create a Rettungsgasse, an emergency corridor right down the middle, so ambulances 2 weeks ago:
We have an uninterrupted emergency lane.
We give our emergency traffic both the left and the right shoulder to get where they need to go. You give them one lane in the middle; we give them two lanes on the sides.
The left shoulder is an uninterrupted lane. The right shoulder is our breakdown lane.
- Comment on When traffic comes to a standstill, drivers instantly shift left and right to create a Rettungsgasse, an emergency corridor right down the middle, so ambulances 2 weeks ago:
Right? Around here, each side of a divided highway has two travel lanes marked. But they also have room for three full lanes and a narrow breakdown/emergency lane.
The extra space is intended for future construction. By repainting the lines and installing a temporary k-rail median, they can shift a travel lane across the normal median, close a lane, keep two travel lanes in each directions, and still preserve adequate (but narrowed) shoulders for emergency traffic.
- Comment on iHave a Lovesick Teacher 2 weeks ago:
Is he due north of the starting point, or of the girl? If the former, he is traveling due north. If the latter, his 5ft/sec velocity has a 1ft/sec eastward component, and we need to calculate the northern component.
- Comment on iHave a Lovesick Teacher 2 weeks ago:
The boy’s speed is given as 5 ft/sec, but the question is ambiguous as to whether his position remains due north of the starting point, or due north of the girl. Your approach assumes the former, but his 5ft/sec speed may include the girl’s 1ft/sec eastward component.
- Comment on How to turn the phrase "The 1%" into a grawlixed slur? 2 weeks ago:
They still pay a high percentage of their income in sales tax, and they ultimately pay their landlord’s property taxes. The middle class might see the highest taxes, but the working poor still pay proportionally more than the ultra-rich.
- Comment on How to turn the phrase "The 1%" into a grawlixed slur? 2 weeks ago:
The relevant metric is “proportionate” not “majority”. The working poor pay a much higher proportion of their earnings in taxes than the ultra rich.
For example, our social security system is funded by taxes on the first $184,500 of personal income. Every dollar you earn above that is exempted from social security tax. That’s a 12.4% regressive flat tax. That tax is not assessed against business income, only personal income.
- Comment on That's some anxiety 2 weeks ago:
Exactly. Nothing about gender. Nothing about incompetence. The whole thing is clickbait/ragebait bullshit.
- Comment on That's some anxiety 2 weeks ago:
Read up on it. Everyone on board has anxiety. She reported no current symptoms: a cough she’d had several days earlier had resolved before she was examined.
She displayed and reported no current symptoms consistent with the Hantavirus. That’s not improper doctoring. They would have needed a crystal ball to diagnose her at that time.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, the world really didn’t need Stargate: Voyager.
- Comment on 2/10 people on Lemmy, is that you? 4 weeks ago:
It’s not about your opponent. It’s about your shared audience. Tailor your arguments to convince the community reading along, not your opponent.
- Comment on 2/10 people on Lemmy, is that you? 4 weeks ago:
Its not about changing your opponent’s mind. It’s about the people reading along. You aren’t talking to your opponent. You’re talking to the audience you share with that opponent. Never forget that.
- Comment on What would the next pres of USA have to do to gain back trust for America? Hold a televised event saying the last person was just a fuck up? 5 weeks ago:
He won’t be elected. The 25th Amendment allows for him to initiate a coup and finish Trump’s term.
- Comment on What would the next pres of USA have to do to gain back trust for America? Hold a televised event saying the last person was just a fuck up? 5 weeks ago:
The next president will be JD Vance, and he will regain a lot of trust by implementing the 25th amendment.