Well, I was actually going to use the comparison to Canada (where the topic came up the other day in a discussion I was having) but while Canada's system is less progressive than compared to the US, the gap is less dramatic than with Sweden.
Freedom in this context always effectively means the freedom to make a profit. Are people getting addicted? Well who are you to infringe on the tobacco industry’s right to make a buck?
But after all the cigarette butts we don’t make a fuzz about the tobacco industry’s agency any more; they were just vessels for the lifestyle choices of the smokers.
Weed is still illegal in a lot of places. I guess because you can make less of a profit off of it compared to certain pharmaceuticals. Things are opening up though, perhaps in the US in particular.
> Are people getting addicted? Well who are you to infringe on the tobacco industry’s right to make a buck?
There are 2 issues here:
1) Higher taxes are a very strange and indirect way of stopping something that's considered unacceptable. Suppose we made murder legal and simply taxed "hit" contracts with a very high rate. That would be crazy, right? But that seems to be our policy with cigarettes. If we're serious about stopping smoking, then we'd make it illegal, and put the tobacco companies out of business entirely.
2) Tobacco companies specifically target children, who aren't mature enough to make good choices, and then the kids get hooked on nicotine for life. So that needs to be addressed specifically. I'm amenable to protecting kids, but much less so about paternalism for adults. Again, though, I don't see tax policy as the answer here.
If you consider nicotine addiction to be a moral issue, which it might be, then there are very perverse incentives involved in taxing cigarettes, because the government is making money from something it considers immoral. I would also mention the addiction that many state governments have to lottery ticket revenue.
Billionaires would absolutely not pay a lot in sales taxes, you are correct. Especially the sweatervest billionaires who are almost conspiciously frugal (at least in public). And even the ones who flaunt their wealth won’t buy one yacht for every day of the month or something ridiculous like that. Or terraform the Ghobi Desert in order to turn it into their own personal mega golf course.
I don’t understand why individuals make posts about grand topics like overhauling a whole tax system. It’s not like anyone is going to listen to them.
In any case. It seems to me that tax systems are complex (if they are) because you can use money (the thing that is ultimately being taxed) in order to get around regulation. If you can pay some people 10,000 USD in order to save yourself 200,000 USD, then obviously you are gonna want to do that. So then if you already have high wealth inequality you would have to device ever more clever schemes in order to truley tax the rich more than the poor.
So can you really create a simple tax system under these conditions?
I don’t know if overconsumption is really what should be disincentivized, if the author wants a good economy. It’s a consumption-driven economy. Does the “economy” want every household to get a vacuum cleaner, a television set, a washing machine, a stove, and not much else? Probably not since that creates less economic activity. Sure, that leads to environmental problems and to “poor people hating us” (though I don’t see how that matters), but those are “externalities”.
> “It’s a consumption-driven economy. Does the ‘economy’ want every household to get a vacuum cleaner, a television set, a washing machine, a stove, and not much else? Probably not since that creates less economic activity.”
that conclusion doesn’t follow. for instance, prices could rise to result in the same level of economic activity (this is unlikely to be the sole response however). the amount of money and the velocity of the economy is correlated to human output (leveraged in various ways), so it’s not that elastic (at least in ways that matters). the money then has to find different routes, nooks, and crannies to fill, and it will.
the last 100+ years has been about how to advantage capital and capital holders. it’s time to retire that poor paradigm (re, the inequalities it’s produced) and focus on work and workers as the core economic engine it is.
The thread topic is now: top the linked email’s exaggeration and make a programming language’s community sound even more like a revolutionary force. Go!
Sebastien Marie wanted to make Zig work on OpenBSD. I don’t know why Raadt then respondend by saying that Zig hasn’t proved that it can do what it claims to do. But maybe I don’t understand this mailing list’s culture (or what “import Zig” means in this context other then to port to OpenBSD).
It's not a high bar, just plain honesty. I remember a while ago someone was promoting a language called v, making many claims of which some turned out completely untrue. This might be a norm in commercial software - some people believe that you can't sell anything if you don't exaggerate - but the open source world in general prefers a more honest approach. Hence many projects always remaining at 0.x release, for example.
It is a high bar that makes OpenBSD in security-sensitive roles way more appealing than a distribution with a lower bar. That high bar paid for itself repeatedly when I ran OpenBSD in the late 90s and early 2000s.
That's true, but not for the ports collection. There's all sorts of software there with historically bad track records in security. That's the point...it's just ports of a bunch of popular software.
Maybe he needed to get that off his chest. Maybe that’s part of what people do on mailing lists, public or not. I don’t think everything that one posts is supposed to be rigorous, even though anything a person with a certain amount of fame writes in public can draw the ire of the whole internet against them with one off-hand sentence or paragraph.
There’s not much to discuss here. Just accusations of propoganda.
It must be hard to design a zero-cost abstractions language. It seems that there are more and more terms and concepts that come up in order to support more directly-pragmatic PL features.[1] Reminds me a bit of how Haskell comes across to me from the outside with all its GHC extensions. Haskell is a research language but other more specialized functional languages have the luxury of being able to theorize and implement more orthogonal and perhaps more “elegant” concepts and approaches. (Again, merely an impression from the outside.)
Consider the design effort behind parametric memory allocators. That seems like a pretty cutting-edge problem. And yet I bet the Rust folks knew that they would want/need to do this way before they started doing that work in earnest, because people from C++ seem to want the same thing (if they don’t have it already?).
I idly wonder if one could, if one was in a similar position as Rust was some years ago, just go ahead and design a full-on unapologetic type-level programming language from the start. Because you know that your type-level terms will be worthy of the moniker “language” eventually (and it might not be a compliment as such).
Just a nice, high-level language that doesn’t bother with the “bare metal” concepts that Rust the value-level language has to deal with. (Can it even be done? Don’t ask the peanut gallery about that.)
Either that or you accidentally build an emergent language that Gankro can write an article about one day titled, I don’t know, Shitting Your Pants With Higher-Order Unsafe Unwind Type-Level Allocator Escape-Suppressing Storm Cellars.
[1] In this case: you have more use for compile-time integers than something more general like being able to describe that two nat-indexed lists are of the same length, like you can in Idris.
They are also quite pleased with how supposedly socialist America already is. It seems almost like a reverse psychology trick.