• 14 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Fairly far left myself. I agree with the person who said that

    The left is loyal to ideals, not people

    To me, one of those ideals is being anti-death penalty. I believe that no matter what the crime is, a government that claims to represent all people, as a democratic government theoretically does, can never justify the killing of one of those people by their hand. Were it up to me, they would be removed from office, prosecuted, tried, convicted, and tossed in jail for the rest of their natural life (which judging by the age demographic of the federal government, wouldn’t be too long).

    The prospect for an impeachment for treason raises some interesting questions about how the legal and political systems of the United States interact though. Because impeachment is a political process, impeaching a government official doesn’t constitute that a crime was committed, and committing a crime doesn’t necessarily impose grounds for impeachment. If the Vice President was impeached and removed from office due to committing treason and let’s say criminal proceedings were brought, there’s no precedent as to whether any of the evidence brought in the impeachment trial or the successful removal would count towards evidence of the treason trial itself. In the most extreme of cases that would likely never happen, a government official could be arrested, tried, convicted, and (under current law that I disagree with) executed without ever being impeached and leaving office.

    Also wanted to note that impeachment doesn’t just apply to the President, it applies to

    The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States

    Which means federal judges, cabinet officers, etc. Though most notably, no one in Congress







  • Correct me if I’m wrong, OP, but it sounds like you’re talking about retreating to the axioms of the particular belief system, as in there is a point where reason breaks down because you get to things that you (the person whose expressing their opinion) have accepted that’s different than me.

    To me this is a bit of a Motte and Bailey fallacy as your question was whether or not you have a good argument and then someone replied to that and then moved to the set of assumptions which has nothing to do with argument.

    For me personally, the other person has to demonstrate some level of critical reasoning for me to respect their opinions, even if their assumptions are different than mine. Beliefs that are entered into using reasoning are more useful than ones without because they can be changed which is what discourse is all about






  • I think I recently saw an article about a trial of the 32-hour work week in the UK that most of the companies ended up sticking with.

    I work at a smallish company that has to be really precise with how much time is charged to specific (mainly government) programs, but there’s a lot of downtime. I think this would really help.

    John Maynard Keynes, basically the founder of modern, macroeconomic theory predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only be working 15 hours a week. Ironically, up until the 80’s in the US, average work hours per employee per week was trending down and had it continued would have gotten as low as 15 by now (I think, can’t perfectly recall the trend line)



  • While it is true that most early astronauts were aviators, specifically test pilots, it’s also important to consider that it was the case then as it is now that the US Navy operates more planes and has more pilots than the US Air Force. Just percentage wise, that would edge towards more Navy pilots who use the naval terminology in their ranks (the Mercury 7 were 4 Navy pilots, 2 Air Force, and 1 Marine I think, though I could be wrong). I would assume that the culture would skew even more Naval as space flight progresses as early spaceflight was a couple of guys in a tin can to larger scale craft.

    Another weird quirk too is that common military rank terms like “captain” and “lieutenant” don’t line up between the Navy and the others (at least in the US). So the OG Star Trek guys would be Colonel Kirk and Captain Uhura under Air Force terminology, and that just sounds weird




  • Main problem with this is that unemployment isn’t handled by the IRS, it’s a program under the Department of Labor and administered by the States and federal agencies notoriously don’t talk to each other.

    There’s also nothing wrong with just giving them unemployment benefits, but you structure your tax system so that the rich people, when they end up needing to claim unemployment, are paying more or equivalent in taxes paying into unemployment than they’re getting in the payout. You simplify both sets of laws, the IRS is in charge of collecting revenue and the subdepartment of Labor tasked with this only has to worry about dishing out your cash so the administration of the benefit is simplified, and you still get your desired result of exceedingly well off people not “dragging” the system


  • Would just like to pop in here and say that terms like “millionaires” and “billionaires” typically refer to net worth/wealth, not income. This is why Jeff Bezos was able to claim some of the federal COVID aide because, despite being a multi-billionaire, his income in that year was below the threshold (I think it was sub-$100k) as income from investments didn’t qualify under the structure of the plan.

    While I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment of people whose net worths are upwards of a million being able to claim unemployment, actually calculating net worth is extremely difficult to do, especially among the wealthy. That would put an unreasonable burden on the unemployment benefit system that would probably end up costing more in administrative costs than the money saved by not including to the ultra-wealthy in the benefit. Preventing the latter is the main benefit of universal programs