Just because the US and Israel have decided to be an axis of evil doesn’t mean that the Iranian government is all of the sudden good guys.

The Iranian people are victims and all of this. They did try democracy and we bombed them for it. Their government is not run by good people and that is also our fault.

Good intentions without the spirit of cooperation or respect for consent is still evil.

The main problem with all of these internet surveillance tools being marketed as ways to protect children is that people are engaging with them on that basis.

As far as I’m concerned they haven’t done anything to establish that they actually intend to protect children or that this is a reasonable way to do it. This seems like a solution to a different problem that ignores all of the problems it creates.

Parents should be responsible for their children. A random website creator shouldn’t have to be responsible for your children.

Websites aren’t stores where people walk in off of a public street. They are services that people reach out to and engage with specifically and intentionally. If we can address the non-consensual non-intentionality part of internet tracking and surveillance a lot of this stuff goes away. So maybe rather than regulating the website to protect your children we should be regulating the website to protect consent.

In several different ways. The trick is to attack the problem of excessive wealth accumulation by making the system feed more aggressively on accumulated wealth.

A wealth tax is important to prevent the excess accumulation of capital. Money is only really working if it’s in motion. Once it stops moving it stops adding value to the economy which is fine sometimes and in small amounts.

Tax disuse. Vacant real estate should be taxed extra. If they don’t want it taxed it should be actively used in a non-extractive way. This means low impact agriculture, preservation, or occupancy not mining, dumping or logging.

Tax non-resident ownership. You can own as many houses as you want but each additional one beyond your primary residence is going to incur a scaling tax penalty. Two probably would be manageable Three would be difficult once you get to four and five houses you’re going to find it extremely difficult to make any money. And the scaling tax penalty would apply to the most expensive one first.

If they’re extracting resources from it or doing heavy agriculture they should be paying a premium and not externalizing wastes. They could be taxed to ensure compliance and enforcement is adequate. They should also be taxed in advance to fund potential cleanup of any toxic or environmental hazards. The money can be held in escrow but it needs to not be held by the same people who have a financial incentive to cut corners.

See I don’t actually believe the problem is rich people or income inequality broadly it’s the runaway effect of the accumulation of wealth in the absence of any kind of functional theory about how money is supposed to actually work in the economy.

There are people that are going to just work like crazy people and they will in any fair system acquire more resources than most other people.

I think in a fair system the people who are likely to end up with more resources would look very different than the people who end up with more resources in our systems.

Something people don’t often understand about American dollars and American taxes is that the function of the government’s tax policy is not to pay its bills. Our government doesn’t need taxes to pay its bills. The function of the government collecting taxes is to delete money from the system.
They need to be deleting money from the places where there’s too much of it. Otherwise that money crowds out legitimate money that is the representative of economic value produced through labor. If labor has no voice, then the economy stops functioning.