When you pay for enterprise equipment, you are typically paying a premium for longer, more robust support. Consumer products are less expensive because they don’t get this support.

100%. When one of the cons is no meaningful protection against injury, a helmet should be a huge pro. It absolutely saves lives.

Dogmatic cult bullshit? A fight? Do you realise I’m not the original person you replied to? I’m not proselytising, I just want to know what your stance is because I’m curious. People don’t make claims in debates, you’re meant to use facts to support a point of view and identify gaps in opposing arguments.

I’m also not really here to change your stance. I don’t have a political agenda, I have an opinion, and I asked genuine questions out of a desire to have that opinion challenged and maybe reconsider my own point of view. You don’t need to “play along”, you chose to post on a discussion forum and should expect to have your post discussed.

The reason I brought up punishment is because it’s super relevant to the idea of innocence and guilt in the world most of us live in today - one where guilt is punished. I’m not some Blackstone worshipper, I know literally nothing about them as a historical figure and couldn’t have attributed the quote before today.

I’m sorry if you’re having a bad day, or if the way I’ve said what I wanted to say came across as aggressive or insincere, I was intending to ask legitimate questions and maybe, in this corner of the internet, a handful of people could have walked away with a better understanding of others.

Also, I appreciate that you’ve since edited your original comment to say “claim”. It would’ve been good if you’d admitted to your mistake, instead of assuming I was out to get you.

You’re not really making a point, you’re making a claim. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you haven’t really said any reason why you think society can’t function when they value protecting the rights of the innocent over guaranteeing 100% of the guilty are punished.

When you say “our present circumstances prove that point”, are you saying that all of society’s problems can be linked to jury nullification? Or to the fact your jurisdiction is too light handed with criminals, or felons, or both? It’s a very bold, very vague claim, considering it’s well studied that rehabilitative/educational and not punitive measures are more effective at reducing crime, so making the current system more heavy handed doesn’t seem to be the answer, if one exists.

It’s not for sport, but it’s by the same means anyone with even remotely complex assets gets tax advantages. You pay someone to manage your tax returns for you. You will naturally, by trial and error and recommendations from friends (and in the case of these billionaires, probably have accountants knocking on your door asking to do your returns for hefty fees), end up with the person (or organisation) who saves you the most money, because why wouldn’t you?

Now, you’re still liable for not paying tax you should’ve paid, but I don’t think people are going out of their way to find tax loopholes. Accountants do that for them, and there is absolutely no incentive to find an accountant that’s more “ethical” because, for that industry, it makes no sense to do anything other than get the most back for your clients.

You’re right though. There would be no tangible impact to these people’s lives, and it’s for this reason they should all be supportive of increasing the tax they pay.

Completely agree that it’d be good to actually know someone megarich. I think that’s one of the biggest problems in modern society, that people don’t have enough opportunities to interact with those outside of their immediate social spheres. I think if the megarich had to interact with normal people (and vice versa) we would all understand each other much better.

I guess I do agree also that no one is entitled to a rich persons money. I guess to go back to fairness though, I find it unfair that there are people going without basic human needs in the same countries as there are people figuratively hoarding piles of gold

I think there are two factors that make it make sense to me.

1. People who make oodles of money, that these taxes actually impact, generally don’t make that money by being any more productive than the rest of us. They won the birth lottery, or found the right way to exploit other people’s labour, or created artificial demand, and so on and so forth. So, they don’t really “deserve” that money. I personally agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a great argument in favour of higher wealth taxes because it’s a pretty subjective take.

2. The purpose of tax is to allow us to collectively allocate wealth to improve society as a whole. We might not all agree on how that should be allocated - some people think we should spend more on health or the military or education or social welfare - but tax is a tool that we (as a culture) have decided is a good way to make sure that we make progress in some shared direction. It’s not wrong to think that tax is wrong, but I personally believe that if we didn’t have that system, the world would go nowhere because everyone would only spend in their personal interests. Cynical, sure, but it is what it is.

With this in mind I think it makes a bit more sense. Increasing the proportion of tax paid by the 0.1% of people who have the most only marginally affects those people, but the amount of money raised which can be used on common interests has the possibility of doing far more good, for far more people. That money has the potential to be more productive if it wasn’t tied up in bonds, or gold, or Bitcoin, or etc.

Many/most western countries already use progressive tax brackets. Wealth taxes, to me, are just adjusting those to “catch up” with the modern definition of wealthy.

Equal proportion is not the same as fair. It’s a matter of scale. Low, middle, and even upper middle class people will actually feel the impact of, say, a 2% increase in taxes. Someone making more than a million dollars a year will not. It’ll be a simple blip on a balance sheet and their quality of life will not be affected in any way.

But brainwashing children is by far the best way???

/s

I think this was a misunderstanding of a bit of shitty functionality in threads. If you had Instagram and made a linked threads account, you would see follow suggestions for people who hadn’t made an account yet. It was basically “if this person makes a threads account I want to be following them”. I don’t believe it meant those suggested people had a shadow account or anything like that though. Still sketchy and probably drove inorganic growth, but I believe the number of users is counting the number of people opting into opening an account.

It’s just naturally going to be incredibly high, because so many people use Instagram and would’ve been exposed.

The terminology we might use down under is wanker