iammisc

Maintaining a national culture, at that point, will likely be looked on very negatively.

Only by those making a particular salary, which is ultimately the cause of the great right-wing movements in most parts of the world, America, Europe, Asia, S America, etc.

There are two classes forming... a globalist class where there is no national culture, just an international one, and nationalism is a dirty word. And a nationalistic culture of all the 'deplorables', where patriotism is still a virtue.

Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, and S Korea are all incredibly nationalistic to varying different levels.

How do you know someone's a European? They tell you all about how Europe is better than America?

How do you know someone is american? They tell you all about how great America's freedom is?

Japan is one of the most nationalistic countries on the planet.

So is South Korea.

Your claim that these countries are 'internationalist' is based on a flimsy understanding of their self-interested cooperation.

By all reasonable metrics, the covid vaccine makes the risk of covid negligible for all interested groups. If you're worried get the vaccine (I have) and carry on.

Sticking your nose in everyone else's business is just unhealthy. If others don't want to get it. That is their decision

Because the attributes that lead you to be rich also make you a workaholic?

This isn't rocket science. Relative wealth is ultimately mainly due to your decisions. That's why most lottery winners end up losing the money. If they had the sense to not lose it they wouldn't need the lottery to make them 'rich'.

I think it's extremely telling that our culture equates love with sex so much, that you differentiate friendship (the most common form of relationship) with 'love without sex' rather than marriage (or whatever) as 'love with sex'.

IMO. the equating of love with sex is why so many find it difficult to make friends.

No. If you bought it, you own it. The thief now owes the original owner damages. This is true in the United States and I assume England since it's old common law stuff.

It's why thieves try to steal and then turn over immediately.

The us doesn't have centralized land registries.

While the counties record titles as a matter of convenience, the true title is determined by the courts.

Other countries have centralized registries so that if the country's database says X piece of land is owned by Y, that's final. In the us it can be litigated and title insurance comes into play for the buyer who purchased it fraudulently.

I've played almost 25 years, including some professional.

To answer you... I don't come up with fingering. I just do what my hands do. The fingerings in printed music are guidelines for pedagogy.

Honestly I'm not even sure I explicitly practice fingering. It's just repetition. I frequently think I change it though.

That being said as someone whos played so long it's like an extension of my arm, don't take my word for it. Experts are notoriously bad at explaining their techniques. I do think it's just practice though. No secret

Personally, I foresee breeding programs for armies to create perfect soldiers. I foresee breeding programs for a permanent slave underclass. How can you not see the problems?

25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.

Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success.

But I mean, I do wonder what percentage of income white people in the south and southwest spend on sunblock and sunscreen. Seems like a lot. (this is a joke, for those wanting to downvote me)

Most people don't think it's a problem at all.

This has become problematic when we use the plural.

Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.

Again, why don't you share your wisdom?

Debt to your citizens is great

Except it's not. Debt to citizens represents tax payments that are owed from all citizens to the subset of citizens owning debt.

The rich own a disproportionate amount of bonds. This is expected.

By taxing all people to pay interest to the rich you're just taking from the poor to give to the rich.

Especially considering that the next generation is made up of larger numbers of children of the poor rather than children of the rich, this is tantamount to stealing from the future of the already disadvantaged to give to the ready advantaged.

Debt is not different. How can you honestly say this? German WWI debt is widely recognized behind many of the lead ups into WWII.

Can't wait for the butlerian jihad.

I dunno what cargo-cult intellectualism is. Contrary to what it may seem, I rarely read economics blogs / political philosophy, etc.

It just seems obvious to me that if you increase everyone's income by $10, price of goods will go up by $10.

The crux of the "UBI doesn't cause spiraling inflation" argument is that UBI accounts for a sufficiently small fraction of total incomes that its benefit (greater spending power for lower incomes, and the downstream economic benefits of that spending) outweighs its nonzero but noncrippling inflationary effect.

How could you have greater spending power if we agree that UBI's inflationary effect is proportional to its amount. The moment you give the money out, the spending power goes down.

In my view, this will just lead to the rich getting richer, because companies end up providing the services people will pay money for, and these profits go into the pockets of the rich, who don't really need the money for life necessities, so instead use it as capital.

The poor are no better off and are incentivized to spend the money because of inflationary effects (saving the money results in it having less spending power when they want to sell it), while the rich have no incentive to spend the money since they're already wealthy.

That is, though the $10 cash benefit you describe may of course increase COL, it does so by some amount between $0 and $10 that is influenced by all sorts of factors you're glossing over.

Can you identify, name, and explain those factors. You accuse me of 'glossing over' some factors in my 'simple' explanation, while you yourself do not identify any of the factors that supposedly would not cause COL to increase.

Honestly, you're right. That's why low-wage employees working in non-goods occupations (like clerks and hospitality) don't get mistreated. It has to do with access to goods, which are easily quantifiable.

Hey... I'm not tricking anyone. I used a term that was related to work I was currently doing. It's not the best term, you're right. But my meaning was quite clear.

If you base UBI on cost of living, and cost of living depends on UBI, then you find yourself in a feedback loop. My use of turing complete was not really accurate, but it was the context my mind was in when writing this comment.

I make mistakes and sometimes speak unclearly. No need to be pedantic.

And I am now curious about your beliefs that conservative politics will lead to a just society.

Of course not. Politics will never lead to a just society. There is no such thing as 'conservative' politics; or at least, such a thing is not advocated for in the United States. This is because most 'conservatives' are united not in any particular vision of the country but rather by what the country should not be. This isn't to say that individual factions don't have clear ideas of how society should be; just that no faction predominates. With that aside, by most meanings of 'conservative', it is used to mean limited government, little welfare, lower government spending, and policies encouraging social conservatism. Yes, I am broadly in support of these things.

On its own however, these things will not lead to a just society.

You need both conservative politics and a moral society to achieve a just society.

Unfortunately, the government cannot create a moral society. That is up to individuals to accomplish. We cannot vote on society being good. Many individuals in the united states view their only obligation to politics and the community is via voting and government. This is the worst take ever imaginable. After one votes, after one protests, after one calls their senator/representative, there is yet more to be done for community. Most people do not ever get to this level. It's not just volunteering to help those who are of a different class than you. No no no... that's the uninteresting part of civic duty. The interesting part is what you do for people like you. Do you spend time making your friends worlds a better place? What about your family? Do you make sure your friends and family aren't falling into destitution? Those things are the intangibles that no amount of voting or politics will ever fix, when a culture is broken.

For example, many liberals want universal child care paid for via public money. I don't think this is a good thing because I don't think children should be raised by businesses. They should be raised by their parents (they should be educated by them as well, in the early years at least) and their families.

In order to achieve this goal of having more parents stay home with their children, we both need to not have universal child care (should probably severely rethink public schooling too), as well as create a society that understands that parents staying home is the right thing to do, and thus does not do it. The first part is easily governmentally achievable; the second part is not. Although it's true that our current society incentivizes both parents working, there is no fundamental reason they have to (other than most people's desires for more material goods). Many subcultures in America achieve a one-income family (Amish, many evangelicals, many conservative Catholics, etc).

As another aside, I give thousands of dollars to direct action charities. I have no problem with this and would like to give more. Yet, I would resent if government took this money and instead used it, preventing me from giving it to those in need. In a lot of countries with more welfare, the people themselves become less charitable, because any social problem they expect someone else to fix. Those who fall behind anyway are looked at as failures. Far from forming community, welfare atomizes society. Thus, I am very suspicious of government welfare. Better for it to come from individuals. Tax breaks to encourage charity are fine, and better, indeed.

So no, I don't think conservative politics will achieve anything other than not directly incentivizing people to do bad. Fundamentally, I'm conservative because I want the freedom to do good.

That only means at state level and most places will add taxes at a locality level.

Oregon (my own state) has no sales tax anywhere, including localities.'

Other countries raise more revenue (taxes) and pay for more things. That is "great", you say. The US could do the same.

Well sure, but we'd have to pay off our debt first. If you want to raise taxes to pay off debt, I'm actually more in support of that than raising taxes to pay welfare. So far, all tax raising plans to pay off welfare just continue to increase the debt (and it's not like the anti-welfare people end up decreasing it either). So really until then, I'm not in support of anything other than lowering the debt.

I'm not sure that raising taxes will help. The US federal government pulls in a larger percentage in taxes as percentage of GDP than ever before, and yet is still spending it all + some. This is not sustainable.

The important question is: which countries get the best outcomes for their people through government spending?

No it's not. The important question is: which countries get the best outcomes, whether via government spending or not, and do so while not being in debt?

If his presence means nothing, then why exactly do we have a secretary of transportation?

The fertility rate of the USA and China is the same - 1.7 children per couple. China's facing a huge demographic crisis in the coming decades, primarily as a result of the one child policy.

Is this really true? No wonder America seems more depressing every day. I didn't realize China's fertility rate was so high (thought it would be <1).

Instead of trying to band-aid globalization to make a minority rich, how about we reduce the need for so much international shipping in the first place?

Because if you propose any solution to such things, you are apparently a racist.

So why are depressive disorders so prevalent there

Because there's no such thing as 'depressive disorder'. We expect people to be happy, and when they're not, we call them diseased. Nothing is wrong with them.

Also, Ethiopia is in the midst of a civil war isn't it?

Endocrinologists are terrible at knowing what hormone ranges are good for your age and sex. As a man with thyroid problems, I am thoroughly disabused of the idea that most endocrinologists have any clue what they're talking about. Certainly, for a middle aged women, must can put it together, but barring that, you're better off on facebook groups.

In addition you are using turing complete in a completely nonsensical way as nobody is using cost of living to compute with.

And yet, emergent behavior does indeed compute the cost of living. When the emergent behavior itself is based on a stat that itself is based on the cost of living, the emergent behavior will never converge.

Based on what you are saying any economic change would be completely unpredictable and the entire human race would be paralyzed by the decision on how to price a Taco. In reality we muddle through while making general predictions about the effects of our actions and reassessing as we go.

No. I'm saying that if you raise UBI by $10, then the price of tacos go up by $10, so basing UBI on cost of living is non-sensical because it's a recursive loop.

Why would it be by magic exactly correlated with the exact figure provided by UBI.

Because if everyone has $10 extra to spend, then there will be more demand for the same number of goods, so sellers will raise their prices. This is not just 'goods' either. There will be more demand for financial assets like stocks, and more importantly, foreign currencies. With the higher demand for foreign currency, it would take more dollars to buy pounds (for example), which means the dollar would lose value relatively. In other words, the dollar will be undergoing inflation.

Pluralism is not a problem, because civic disagreement is not a problem. I was responding directly to the parent comment:

It's America--everybody thinks everybody else is living their lives the wrong way.

I'm explaining why it is that others think they are living the wrong way.

One is that we're engaged in our own internal culture-war around liturgy, the dwindling priesthood, and what to do about social issues that pit Western society's priorities against long-standing Church doctrine. When the most prominent Catholics in the news aren't acting Catholic, that drives us crazy.

Absolutely, and it's because the church in America is splitting into two cultures. On one hand, there are catholics who want to be American, and fit in with secular society. On the other hand, there are those who don't see it as that important. These two groups have different cultures.

See my edit... I was asking about states with no sales tax. I agree that sales tax + no income tax is toxic. However, most states have sales + income tax. I'm asking if the states with income tax and no sales tax do better.