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All the more reason to let states and local governments do more. Rather than a unitary congress or executive that only 1/2 the people (+/-) like.

The only way to fix things would be proportional representation and moving away from the two party system.

On the one hand giving parties more power sounds a little gross.

On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...


3 or 5 member multi-member voting districts determined by a geographic clustering algorithm using approval voting.

Honestly I am surprised that tackling a method of easily collecting approval votes hasn't been done yet.

Like even in the abstract "here is what a voting sheet would look like" that isn't meaningfully more complex.

To be clear I think it is a hard problem and so far is the biggest detractor to alternative voting schemes.

However given all that I agree with your point that it is a meaningful path forward.


A lot of things are easier at the federal level.

After all the federal budget is so large because you can swap states but you can't get away from the IRS.


Yes. Plenty is correct. Fidelity let's you buy SpaceX at IPO with only $2K in the bank.

And there are other reasons to be cautious. Many passive funds don't license the SP500 and instead mirror it with their own synthetic index. They are not bound to respect this decision.


I think caution is most warranted, but I also think it's likely that SpaceX will become a real-life Weyland-Yutani Corporation (i.e. "The Company") of Alien and own space. But I'll be long dead before that plays out.

I've always favoured Tessier-Ashpool S.A. as comparable. The creation of AI's and Freeside and Musk's pronatalism slots in nicely.

Musk isn't a natalist. The global population is going up. And yet, he complains about not enough births. Because he is a white supremacist. He wants white people to outnumber other races. The current state of affairs would be satisfactory to him if he were merely a natalist.

The population is very hard to count, believe it or not. In many places, the birth rate is well under replacement and in the others it's dropping quickly. Furthermore there's widespread fraud and deliberate miscounting which also makes it hard to really know.

So let's get this straight, you think the global population is not going up?

> In many places, the birth rate is well under replacement

Of course, in some places, this is true. But not globally. We don't need more births to keep population going on. There's a surplus of starving, fecund people globally. Musk amplifies and composes tweets about how white people are going to be a minority (we have been for basically all of human existence, but w/e), and he's even said things like if white people are a minority, we will all be killed. Which only makes sense if the assumptions underlying this claim are that white people are uniquely non-violent (i.e., supreme). Or it's an admission that everyone commits genocide against everyone else. Which is so transparently fictitious that someone as allegedly brilliant as he is couldn't possibly believe it.

The most generous description of him is that he's dumb. The least generous is he's a white supremacist.


Source?


> But I'll be long dead before that plays out.

Given how that's played out in the movies, I'd be happy about that.


Social security and Medicare are also payroll "taxes" in that they're not optional and are automatically deducted.


This is called insurance, not tax.


If the government mandates it under threat of violence, it’s called a tax.

It could also be classified as an insurance premium, but a government mandating it is the key characteristic of a tax.

But the fact that the government reduces the annuity amount by increasing retirement age and benefit purchasing power means it is not insurance either. It is wealth redistribution from the working to the non working.


Yeah, that's how insurance works: it is wealth distribution from those who have not become (yet) an insurance case to those who have not.

If you have a car, you need to pay car insurance. Is that also a tax?

The concept of insurance is independent of mandatory or not. That should be obvious, I wonder why it isn't to you. Maybe your ideology prohibits clear thinking and makes you vote Trump?


>Yeah, that's how insurance works: it is wealth distribution from those who have not become (yet) an insurance case to those who have not.

In the context of differentiating between wealth redistribution and insurance, insurance does not redistribute wealth, insurance redistributes risk since underwriting in a competitive marketplace ensures you only a premium commensurate to your risks.

For example, the government mandates only liability insurance up to $x, for which the premium for the same coverage can be vastly different depending on each person's driving history. While this can be considered a tax because the government mandates it, one can see how this is not wealth redistribution since the "tax" being paid is at least partly dependent on one's risk profile.

Contrast this with a government mandated defined benefit pension contribution equal to a percentage of one's earned income, with a known fact that one's contributions will reflect their benefit less and less as the years go on. That is far more "wealth redistribution" than "insurance".

Another example is in the US, health insurance premiums are more tax than an actuarially calculated premium based on health risk. This is because health insurers are not allowed to price health insurance based on health risks. It is explicitly a redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and sick, due to the maximum age rating factor and inability to underwrite based on pre-existing health conditions.


Something can be mandatory insurance AND a tax.


Au contraire, enacting such a law is akin to forcing FB to support certain speech. That itself is unconstitutional and any such legislation would be struck down.


NYC unions are not your average worker. In my north of NYC town the labor rate for a union worker is 3x that of non union..and state laws mandate govt projects must pay that rate.


Yeah, that is what unions are for, protecting worker wages from the ever tightening noose of greedy capitalists that would otherwise use slave labor if they still could.


Very much dependent on age, rest and general conditioning. I went from sea level to 14K at Pikes peak in 1 day and it was quite uncomfortable. I managed, but folks who lived in Denver with lower physical fitness levels than me, did better.


Agreed, we live at ~5K and went up to Pikes Peak; my wife and I had no problems (beyond minor headache), but my son's lips were turning blue and he was feeling pretty bad.

Other amusing things from that trip: we went up there the 3rd of July, and it snowed. We charged the car in Colorado Springs before we left, got up to the peak with 36% battery remaining. My wife worried we wouldn't be able to make it back. Got back to CS with ~70% battery left.


Lol, on my trip up Pikes Peak I was blissfully unaware that altitude sickness could be a thing. So I can't recall if I felt any different. I do recall the carburetor on my motorcycle was acting a little strange, however.


$100B isn't a startup. And if there's a $100B deal, you better believe the cash is there. Case in point - Netflix/Paramount wanting to buy WB. Or the $44B that Musk had to raise to buy out Twitter shareholders.


Both your examples are purchases. Musk had to raise actual capital to buy Twitter because the people getting the money were taking it and walking away.

Funding doesn't work like that. Investors are giving you money as part of a longer-term deal where they stick around.


Take it to it's logical conclusion. Free universal choice of schools rather than being tethered to your home address.


The revenue is in the ads. If they hit a decent run rate prior to the IPO then there's a viable path to profitablity and justification for the insane capex.


More WeWork than Theranos. Theranos was a fraud.

WeWork was a legit real estate business with a SaaS multiple on valuations.


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