Balkanization isn’t a master plan of any thinker, it’s a natural process as people move to cut themselves off from those they strongly disagree with.

I think there is a strong argument to be made that Balkanization is the ultimate, if unintended, result of the US founding fathers’ plan. From the very beginning it was a deal with the devil: a compromise between factions — who ought to be bitter enemies — under threat from a superior foe (the British Empire).

The collapse really began to build steam after the last great foe, the Soviet Union, was defeated.

I remember when imgur was such a great site that allowed deep linking. Now it’s total enshittified garbage!

The poll left out nonbinary folks who must have all voted for Trump!

Yet Missouri of all places overturned their abortion ban!

It’s a terrible design. If they removed that dumb always on feature and used a proper physical power button the battery would last basically forever.

Right. If your design requires 3.3V minimum then putting in a 3.3V battery and no boost converter is just dumb (or extremely user-hostile).

That’s definitely true. But I would definitely pay more for a scale with ultra long battery life.

I made the mistake of buying an off brand digital calliper and now like an idiot I find myself removing the battery when it’s not in use just to avoid damn thing running flat in one month thanks to its atrocious standby current which enables the display to turn on instantly when I move the slide (rendering the on/off entirely moot).

Next time I’ll just bite the bullet and buy a Mitutoyo.

It suggests that my solution, “house the homeless” should be discarded because it is not a perfect solution, which would be filling my house up with strangers. The goal is to make me say, “oh, I’m not willing to do that, so we should do nothing instead.”

This may be a mixture of a bunch of different arguments. There is the anti-Nimby argument which calls out Nimbys who want an end to homelessness but vote against the construction of housing for them in their neighbourhoods. “Why don’t you house homeless people in your house?” is a much more extreme, unreasonable, and therefore less efficacious version of that idea.

There is also the more general argument (from the right) that government shouldn’t be in the business of housing the homeless. The above line then proceeds by saying that your unwillingness to invite homeless people into your house is an indication that your solution to the problem is to get other people to solve the problem for you. This may also incorporate the anti-Nimby line by further claiming that what you really want is an “out of sight, out of mind” solution to homelessness.

You can order 3000 3.3V low drop out (LDO) voltage regulators on LCSC for $25.50. That’s less than a penny each.

Right but OP is talking about a house in Waleska, Georgia, which has a population of 921 (as of 2020 census). Not really on the same level as Toronto or Vancouver!

Don’t mistake my argument for a defence of billionaires. I don’t care for them any more than anyone else here. I just want to make sure that any changes we make to the law actually work and accomplish their intended goal. Poorly-thought-out laws are worse than doing nothing: they can backfire.

To give an example, the government of Canada passed a law called the Online News Act. This law targeted Google and Facebook with a special tax, called a link tax, that would force them to pay every time they or one of their users linked to a Canadian news site. The money collected by these link taxes would then go to pay to support Canadian news agencies in general.

The law backfired. Google struck a deal with the largest Canadian newspapers to pay them a flat fee but Facebook went ahead and blocked every single link to a news site for all users in Canada. This left thousands of small, local, Canadian newspapers high and dry (they were getting most of their traffic from Facebook posts linking to them). A law intended to benefit Canadian news publishers ended up putting most of them out of business.

The point of my previous example is to show that if a company is privately held (not traded on the stock market) then how much it is actually worth is not clear or obvious at all. This makes imposition of the $1B maximum wealth limit extremely difficult to properly implement.

I think what we would see in response to that is people hiding their wealth offshore, through private companies, through family members, trust funds, non-profit foundations etc.

So the billionaire has 10 relatives and hires each of them at his company, giving them all stock options as a bonus, which come from his own personal accounts. Then when it comes to tax time he’s managed to limbo his way under the $1B bar.

Take all your wealth and use it to set up a bunch of non-profit organizations for preserving national parks or saving the rainforest or running homeless shelters. Then have those foundations hire your family members to the boards of directors and pay each one millions of dollars in salaries.

There are countless ways to do this. Not just for individuals but for companies. Apple is pretty infamous for its use of Ireland as a tax haven that allows it to avoid paying corporate (profit) taxes on all its sales in the EU.

The other issue I foresee with the maximum wealth limit is how much chaos it could cause for companies. Let’s say you found a furniture company and run it really well and hire tons of employees. Then over time it grows above the billion dollar limit, so in order to pay your taxes you sell off the company to private equity who proceed to liquidate all its assets and fire all the employees. Without the limit in place you may have been happy to keep running the company and maintaining a great workplace for all your employees but the giant tax bill forced your hand. In the end, the company is largely destroyed, everyone has lost their jobs, and you retire with your billion dollars in cash.

I think the above scenarios are problematic no matter what you set the limit to. It also doesn’t address the issue of private companies (not traded on the public stock exchange) which don’t have a nominal market value. Sure, they have a book value for all their hard assets, but that can be far lower than the true value of the company.

Think of something like Snapchat which went from maybe a dozen employees and a bunch of laptops to rejecting a $3 billion buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg just 3 years later. Anyway, also how to deal with that? Let’s say you have a small company making calculator apps for iOS and Android. You earn $10,000 a year in profits from sales. Then some group of investors come together and offer you $10 billion for your company. Is your company now worth $10B just because of the offer? You’re not on the stock market. You barely make enough money to pay rent, yet come tax time you owe $9B.

You could say “well you rejected the offer so you don’t owe the government anything because you actually aren’t worth $10B.” But who decides what you’re worth? Snapchat rejected the $3B offer but most investors would’ve agreed they were worth it. But all they had was a few employees, some laptops and servers, and the app they made. They’re really not much different from the hypothetical calculator app company.

How does that work though? Let’s say the maximum wealth limit is one billion dollars and you own $750M of stock in the company you founded. Your wealth could go above and below that $1B limit multiple times in a day as the stock price goes up and down. What happens then?

How often do you use it, if not every day? Once a week? Once a month?

I use my laptop every day so it makes sense that I don’t use the power button even though it’s right there. I also have a raspberry pi set up to run Retropie that I only turn on once or twice a year when I have an old friend in from out of town. In that case I use the power button every single time but I don’t mind that it’s kind of finicky (I have to turn on several other devices with it as well as a power strip to power them all) because I don’t use it that often.

I could see the new Mac Mini being a bit annoying with its bottom side power button if you’re using it every other day. But honestly I would be more annoyed at the boot time taking 30s than the 2s it takes to reach under the case and power it up. If I had one I would probably just get the keyboard with built in power button and finger print reader though. I use the finger print reader on my laptop all the time because it unlocks my password manager.

How often do you use the power button to turn on your computer? These days I might use it once a year, at most!

People with certain mental illnesses are far more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other such nonsense. It doesn’t excuse what he did but it’s important to recognize this. Our society is a much more dangerous place for these kinds of vulnerable individuals than it was before mass media, simply because of the huge amount of exposure they have to harmful materials.

And now I’m just picturing myself cracking open a can of beer only for bees to start flying out!

This is the shit at the bottom of my compost pile that somehow managed to avoid breaking down!

That was an example that doesn’t really depend on there being exactly 2 competitors. If there are 20 competitors and they’re all spending a lot of money on advertising then they’re all producing a net negative

I mean there’s probably some small amount of money they could spend on advertising that would be a net positive because it would inform the public of the existence of their product. But beyond that, they’ve moved from informing the public into trying to convince the public to buy their product. There’s simply no limit to the amount of money you can spend trying to convince somebody to buy something and no limit your competitors can spend to convince them not to!

Society does not benefit from advertising. Vast numbers of people hate it and try to block it as much as they can. Others fall victim to it and get manipulated into buying shit they don’t need.

But overall, if 2 competitors are advertising against each other then it can turn into a destructive arms race. They each spend more and more on advertising just to keep taking consumers back and forth from each other! That’s a net negative for society!