You’re still not answering my question.

But it’s now clear that communism for you is a religion. Upper stage communism is the paradise that is promised to those who follow the tenets of the faith fully, and I am a heretic non-believer

I will not be continuing this discussion any further

How about instead of just saying that I am wrong, describe to me how an individual in a higher stage communist state would be prevented from slacking in his duties (and still gaining “according to his need”) without state induced violence

What I described is exactly how it played out in about a dozen instances where a transition to communism was tried

There are different kinds of work which needs to be done for our society to function. These tasks have costs for those who perform them (lost time, spent energy, danger, boredom, etc).

In pure communism, everyone works hard and everyone is given the spoils of the work we collectively provide. But it is rational for any individual to not work as hard, because he will bear less of the cost of that work, but still realize the same gain

Therefore most people tend to shirk their duties, and the output of the entire collective drops. In order to maintain the system, the threat of violence is introduced, and we quickly get to Stalinist purges

It is not game theoretically aligned. It’s not his fault, Game Theory didn’t really get going until after his death

Marx’s critique of capitalism is spot on. It’s his proposed solution that is problematic

It’s crazy that they change the weights on these indexes. How are you supposed to get an accurate inflation number if you keep moving the goal posts

I don’t like it

I have to give credit where it’s due, I actually like this change. Likes used to be private, and then they became public and subject to the toxic performativity of social media

Online market places to be jointly and severally liable for anything on their sites

This should be something AI can do now. Give it a list of what kinds of ads are not allowed, and ask it if the contents of this ad are acceptable

I would love for lightning to scale the network, but I’m worried that it won’t. I don’t have much experience with it myself (I’ve set up a small channel to try it out) but I know many people have been disappointed by it.

I hope that something like the OP_CAT soft fork can be initialized, so that ZK-Rollups can be implemented on Bitcoin. IMO that would open up so many more scaling options for the network

Everyone is the just the product of luck

Totally agree! Isn’t an argument against the carbon tax though, but an argument for more transit development

There’s been a slight downtick in recent years, but it’s still up +10 years from 1970

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/life-expectancy

While I think the student protest are misguided, this seems like a good development. People have a right to (peacefully) protest, and universities shouldn’t forcibly remove people that aren’t hurting others or damaging property

It’s not the simple unfortunately, because of 2 factors:

1. Our boomers are a very large generation, larger than the millenials

2. Life expectancy has increased so people live much longer (with high medical costs)

In the 70s - 2000s we had a large generation of in their working years paying for a small generation’s 5-10 year retirement

Now, we have a small generation in their working years paying for a large generation 15-25 year retirement

And this is not something we can solve by just “taxing the rich”. The numbers are so huge that taxing Canada’s richest people is a drop in the bucket

I can’t believe the carbon tax is getting such bad press lately. IMO it’s one of the best policies to come out of the current government. Everyone is upset about high gas prices, but the forget that they get a big rebate at the end of the year. This means for people with fuel efficient cars, the tax is minimal, and the gas guzzlers pay a lot. Encourages better use of limited resources.

It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned

This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.

This is a bit of a fallacy. In a normal market, the rent for a home is less than the costs of home ownership (mortgage + maintenance + taxes) and that saved money can be used to purchase other assets.

Until the real estate mania of the last few years, if you followed this strategy, you would not be any worse off than the person who bought their home.

I personally would much rather have equity in more fungible assets than a home. Owning a home ties you to a specific location, and can’t easily be sold in an emergency. Plus it’s not a very diverse portfolio if most of you wealth is in a single property