The continuing American embargo on Cuba after the Cold War has always been toddler tantrum level of pettiness.

I thought Obama had finally closed that chapter, but I was wrong.

Exactly. Every time the UN does something, people say “they can’t enforce it”.

Well, that’s the whole point of the UN. To resolve things without using force.

It’s a good design, designed by people who learned from the horrors of WW2.

It’s sad to see how many people nowadays forget those lessons and are itching for global war.

Yep, all the electrical engineers who have chimed in say it looks more like explosives.

A battery would get hot and start a fire. It wouldn’t instantly explode like this.

Correct.

But nobody is enforcing compliance.

So they can just keep it on American servers and sell it to OpenAI or share it with the US government.

Also, there are a lot of bots copying everything on reddit and other sites. Even if reddit would comply with GDPR, these bots cannot be traced and cannot be fined.

For one, you can’t transfer a 401K to your kids.

You have to first cash it out, pay income tax and then you can transfer what remains.

Then you’ll need to educate yourself beyond what the government tells you.

Look up the ProPublica leaks. Someone is serving a very long jail time for leaking that out. It clearly shows how billionaires have very low taxable income, probably lower than yours.

To then say that you are upper class and Jeff Bezos is middle class is… Absurd.

The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.

People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.

Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.

We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.

Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.

The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.

The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.

Yes, I fully agree.

So we need to find the right messaging.

I don’t know about Germany, but here in the Netherlands most people identify as middle class.

So “stop taxing the middle class” and “let the billionaires pay more” is a message that should resonate.

I’m optimistic and I believe we will get there. The level of equality we have today would be unfathomable for somebody living before 1945.

Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.

The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.

Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.

Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.

Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.

Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.

And then progressively tax everything above that.

Why doesn’t the USA or Europe just accept the Jews and let the Palestinians have the land?

Jordan especially has a ton of Palestinians. More than half of Palestinians already live outside of Palestine.

Your question actually boils down to, why don’t they take all the Palestinians so Israel can have the land?

And the answer is: they don’t want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing.

Totally with you here.

How did I end up on a timeline where I am vibing with Erdogan.

No more billionaires, but everyone can be a millionaire.

The shortest path to equality is to greatly reduce taxes on the middle class and increase them on the wealthy.

It puzzles me why leftist parties don’t all embrace lower taxes for the middle class.

I agree. The rule based order only works if the rules apply to everyone.

And from a more realpolitik perspective: the Arab world is our (European) backyard.

We really don’t benefit from instability there.

While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.

From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.

But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.

In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.

Israel only bombs terrorists, not civilians.

Your German nationality will now be revoked for thinking the wrong thought.

Exactly.

If the USA tried to again be a White/European ethnostate and allow anyone with Caucasian heritage to immigrate and barred everyone else from immigrating, then no one today would accept that.

And if they went full on apartheid and started putting natives and minorities in locked down ever-shrinking reservations, people would really lose their shit.

When white nationalists try to advocate for such policies, they are rightfully criticized for being racist.

I can never understand why Israel gets special treatment in that regard.

Indeed, also it’s much nicer to use a shared high quality tool than to buy an el-cheapo disposable tool.

Even something simple like a crowbar. I once borrowed a (shorter) professional crowbar after struggling with a (larger) cheap one. The thing I was trying to pry came out like butter.

Even though physics dictates that a shorter lever should be inferior, it just had a much better design and grip.

Better for our wallet, sanity and environment.

Netanyahu and the right need more terrorists in order to justify further land grabs, so yes, that’s the goal.

Radicalize more people, so that those people strike back, then engage in war and take their land.

And yes, this is also how the Europeans and Americans took land from the natives during colonization.

I didn’t think I’d find a mercantilist in 2024, but here we are.

No, that’s not how it works, otherwise the US would be a poor country based on their massive trade deficit.

Trade takes place because it is mutually beneficial. Each parties gets something out of each trade.

Reducing trade therefore will always hurts both countries.

Exactly which loses more will depend on a lot of factors, but in general smaller economies are more dependent on larger economies.

Usually with these types of things, it tends to be worse for the smaller economy, but both suffer. (See Brexit, Sanctions on Russia, Iran and Venezuela, and also historically those on apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia).

Turkey has a GDP 2-3x that of Israel, so I don’t know why you’d think it would be worse for them.