That like four people have as much wealth as 7 billion others.
Water, arguably the most important thing for sustaining life, just falls from the sky.
And we still get charged a fortune for it. Yay capitalism!
I mean you can collect rain water (or build your own bore hole), process it, treat it for storage, keep it, test it to verify that it’s still safe to drink, install and maintain a pumping system to provide pressure, provide adequate documentation and inspection opportunities, provide a traceable record of where it has come from, install a water water treatment system, provide the necessary permits to verify that you’re not draining polluted water into the ocean etc etc…
But I guess if you want someone else to do that for you, some salaries, know how and materials will need to get paid for, yes.
Unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income. I mean, pretty much everything about capitalism tbf, but that particular thing is saying the quiet part out loud and it still gets almost no attention.
A flat tax system would resolve a lot of this.
The issue with a flat tax system, though, is that the value behind each dollar is different for different classes of people.
$20 is chump change for a billionaire. $20 for a middle class person might be some nice takeout for an evening. $20 could mean whether or not a working poor person can eat that day, or if they have to save what money they have for rent or electricity.
A flat tax system isn’t actually “flat”, not in practice. It’d be more accurate to describe it as “regressive”.
Nicely put. I recently bought a new house and was thinking about this same concept. I moved to a area with a high COL, but the markup on houses was much higher than other goods (still high, but not as big).
So when applying for my loan, they use debt to income ratios to determine if you’re eligible. So let’s say you bought a house and the price (yearly) was 50% of your income. If one house was at 500k and the other at 200k, your 50% for other goods is vastly different. My mortgage came out to 3600/month, right about 50%. But that still leaves another 3600 for other goods. If my mortgage was 50% at 1200, then I would have 1200 leftover for other goods, which just doesn’t go nearly as far. But the bank sees these two scenarios as exactly the same.
I agree with you, but wouldn’t a flat percentage fix this? Something like everyone pays 20% tax on all earned and unearned income, no exceptions.
No, because you’re charging people the same effective rate regardless of their ability to pay.
Someone in the 0.1% of the 0.1% can afford to give a lot more of their income than someone in the bottom 25%. As such, a flat tax rate would negatively impact lower income taxpayers compared to high-earners.
Hence why I described it as “regressive” in my earlier comment.
I would agree to a flat tax (even as high as 50% or higher if enough provisions are made) if there was a universal basic income to ensure nobody goes without it’s basic necesities met.
That at any given moment you can just call someone in completely different part of the world and have a voice (or even video) conversation like there were just next to you. Imagine explainig this to people in middle ages.
That interacting with the smallest parts of our universe changes them from behaving like continuous waves to discrete objects.
It was weird enough a century ago when it was first figured out, along with all the associated weirdness like information erasure reverting behavior back to behaving like a wave.
But now we are regularly building procedurally generated worlds where continuous seed functions deterministically placing world geometry convert to discrete voxels when interacted with in order to track state changes.
TL;DR: The building blocks of our universe behave much like how we currently build randomly generated virtual worlds where free agents can interact with them. It’s wild this isn’t being discussed more than it is.
Is there anyway you could clarify this for someone who is not knowledgeable about coding? My understanding is that procedurally generated worlds have a seed, which is a specific string of characters that will generate the same world each time when fed into the procedural algorithm.
continuous seed functions deterministically placing world geometry convert to discrete voxels when interacted with in order to track state changes.
This is the part I don’t understand.
So yes, you are correct about the seed aspect, but what I’m talking about is the function the seed is fed into.
Those functions are generally continuous. For example, a mountain in Minecraft as a non-blocky mathematical curve.
These continuous curves are then converted into voxels (volumetric pixels) like Minecraft’s blocks. Then if you interact with them, it records the difference between what the function would generate normally and the changes. This saves on memory as it only records the interactions.
Given the seed function is deterministic, the same coordinates of space and time in the world will result in the same world geometry. Then you just layer on the discrete changes from free agents and you have the appearance of a fully interactive world.
Put another way, on the debate about free will, the details in how our universe behaves is exactly how you would design a world where you had free agents. If you were designing a world without free will, you wouldn’t need to convert to discrete units at the point of interactions, as the interactions would also be deterministic and could be calculated by the seed function, even to the point of continuous fidelity (i.e. no blocks/particles, just waves).
Fantastic explanation. I can totally see the connection you were drawing now.
Convincing me that free will exists might be a bridge too far, but you’ve definitely opened a new avenue of inquiry in my mind.
When utilizing this procedural generation technique in our games, it allows us to use much less memory and processing power because the world can be continuously recreated with relatively little computational complexity. Is that roughly correct?
If so, aside from being a possible argument regarding the existence of free will, this comparison could also be used to support the idea that we live in a simulated reality, a la the Matrix. Gnarly
Is that roughly correct?
Kind of. It has more to do with tracking state interactions by free agents than memory though.
Imagine a continuous curve like a SVG. Now imagine a user nudges it to add a dent to the curve. Keeping track of exactly where the user changes it, particularly as the number of changes adds up, becomes very difficult if you are tracking those changes as an alteration to 0.65434567… to 2.25677743… on it. But if instead you convert it to discrete units, now you are only tracking a change from 1 to 2 rounding to the nearest discrete unit.
A bit like how artists can go vector to pixels easily and make changes to the pixels but getting it back into a vector is a nightmare.
And yes, it can’t directly address whether free will exists, as part of why we design worlds the way we do may be because of the foundational ways our world works.
It’s more to the point of if we are in a simulation it appears to be designed in such a way that free will exists within the simulation.
(Free will as a consequence of the design details necessitates it having been designed as such.)
A bit like how artists can go vector to pixels easily and make changes to the pixels but getting it back into a vector is a nightmare.
This is another great analogy.
Fascinating, compelling ideas that are new to me. I could have trawled reddit for 10,000 years and never found content like this. Thanks for taking the time to explain, you’re a very good communicator.
Thanks!
If you are interested in content like this, I created a community on !simulationtheory@lemmy.world for things like this.
Been a bit busy lately so haven’t posted much there, but I plan to when the opportunity presents.
Awesome, I’m in. Looking forward to more discussion in the future.
Everything.
Like, I’m talking to you now from the back bedroom of a random house in a small isolated town in the north east of England, and you could be anywhere. Travelling on a train is crazy fast. There are SO MANY leaves on that tree. Dogs are the best and there’s no way humanity deserves them. Isn’t it cool that we invented bread? My travel mug can keep hot tea at an acceptable drinking temperature for hours. Hugs are amazing. Windows are insane.
Sometimes I have to take motion sickness pills and they make me a bit loopy to the point where I start to really notice things around me, haha.
There’s a Pratchett quote that goes something like,
“In a universe so full of wonders, it’s a marvel that humans invented boredom.”
Your post reminded me of that.
As a lifelong Pratchett fan I do think he teaches a lot of good lessons! They’re just slipped in among the endless punes so’s you don’t always notice.
GNU Sir Pterry.
Oh yes. Me too. GNU indeed.
It’s basically like all the technological progress since the The Jetsons and Star Trek aired has been focused in one place. We still drive normal cars made out of normal metal and plastic to normal (or actually inferior) jobs until we die at a normal age, but it’s free to view and manipulate any piece of knowledge instantaneously and in a wide variety of public places that have open wifi.
Certainly true. My point was that right now you and I, are using an electronic computing machine that is able to compute from billions to tens of billions instructions per second. In addition (if it was too weak for you), it also has another computing chip dedicated for parallel computing that is able to run TRILLIONS of parallel instructions per second (a.k.a. the GPU).
This is probably one reason why I like programming.
I’m working on an FPGA project right now, fear me. /s
It’s always fun when you code something to tackle a hard abstract problem with brute force and you can listen to all your fans spinning up. The first time I did it I did feel like a god.
That some people can have a fleet or private planes and billion-dollar yachts while a major part of the population struggles to get enough food and has very limited access to medical care. Any sane society needs to have a minimal standard of life and needs to shift wealth (i.e. tax) as necessary to achieve it.
These jerks at the top are smart enough to not use their nukes…
Just smart enough…
For me it’s time. That when we look in the night sky we don’t see what’s happening right now, but instead light from many years ago… Dunno, just can’t wrap my head around it
Produce that are readily available all year round and having some fruits that naturally won’t thrive in your area be available in the grocery.
Flying, and to a somewhat lesser degree fast driving. The speeds involved are insane, and when flying so are the surroundings. People actually fall asleep doing this stuff now.
Sewage system and wastewater treatment
Life.
America-specific, but how well our culture-pot mixing has worked. Lots of incidents and issues make the headlines, but the crazy stuff makes the news because it’s so unordinary.
