How much tax is enough? The government would, without playing a deduction game, would love to take 20-30% of my income, while having devalued my dollar by 50-100% in the last 5 years. My salary goes half as far.
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
It's telling that you didn't even consider that the taxes would come from businesses. The businesses that created the majority of inflation by gouging consumers out and bleeding them dry every tiniest opportunity they legally could.
I mean practically this take is so wrong. If the (US) government is just so hell bent on taxation how the heck did we get to the point where taxes on income went from 90% (~1950) on top bracket to less than 35%? Business tax was (35% 2008) -> 20% (2020).
Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.
Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)
They do, but safety and social control go hand in hand.
In any case, its not as if your kid is safer at a private school. Kids are violent, no matter where they are; maybe you remember going through school yourself?
A livable wage is a wage a husband can make to raise a family, including housing, food, transportation, schooling, etc.
$20/hr is about $40k/yr. Using 30% towards housing, that means they can only denote $12/yr to housing, or $1k/month. At current interest rates, that translates to a $150,000 house.
What can you get for $150? There's nothing in any area I've looked that was actually habitable ever since the government's COVID debacle.
Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with.
So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
>The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
The vitriol is because the spread of the "theory" led directly to the harassment of Sandy Hook victims by people who believed they were "crisis actors."
Most people possessed of common decency and a moral core would find that objectionable.
Intentionally lying to sell ads at the expense of innocent people being targeted and harassed over years is probably not covered by free speech rights in the US.
And if you want to turn this into an argument about the necessary evils of a society practicing free speech, I'll just say that even if it were "covered", I'm not interested in that "right" existing in that form. Though I'm pretty sure willful lies that result in actual, predictable harm is not protected speech.
Don't even know what your last sentences are about. Are you suggesting a conspiracy of some sort?
My wife had a good job. She made the median household income in the area on her salary alone (my salary was still better, but that's beside the point).
When we had our second kid, the hustle wasn't worth it. Two kids in daycare took 90% of her take home pay. It was costing us more for her to work than to stay home with the kids.
Also, kids need their parents. An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant
It's a choice, economy is about choices and math (staying at home cost < cost of kindergarten) is the tool. (in EU you may prefer to go to work because additional income is that time is added to retirement, even if money is low it has some value).
That's my definition of better. Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone.
If anything, it highlighted the mental health crisis going on from the lack of actual community due to a lack of family and religious connections that have decimated by no longer being just down the street and now require a 15+ minute drive, thanks to the isolating nature of the car.
And on top of that, thanks to the mobile phone, there's no spontaneous visits from what community is left.
> Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone
This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)
To be fair, I still think hg is king in this area, and it's why it lose the source control battle - because it was so easy to self host, it doesn't need a central service. Git was really complicated to self host.
Now you've confused me. How is Mercurial easier to self-host than git? I've been doing both trivially over SSH to a server I have, but I was under the impression that they both had a good enough HTTP server built in as well?
> People drive with a suspended license all the time
And if they’re not getting in accidents more frequently than population, that’s fine. I didn’t include this common citation for good reason.
> How else are getting to your job? Getting groceries?
Calling (or buying) a robotic car. We’re looking decades into the future when manually piloting a car is a privilege. (Or less than a decade in cities with public transit.)
If you’re driving drunk, hitting things, recklessly speeding or texting while driving, you shouldn’t be driving. We tolerate it, extraordinarily, because driving is almost a right in America. What’s changing is it’s going from a necessity everywhere but New York to a necessity where there isn’t Uber.
(In practice, at least from the few folks I know close to the incoming White House, it will happen through increasing liability for insurers. Nobody will be banned. It will just become expensive to human pilot. Or, if your FSD or equivalent isn’t engaged, hard to dispute fault.)
That sounds like a nice future if we can get there... but if we look at recently observed trends in the US, the increased barriers to driving a car in recent history has probably resulted in lower rates of legal compliance, rather than better driving behaviors.
The risk of hit-and-run accidents, uninsured drivers, and unlicensed drivers on the road are increasing.
While public transit could be a great solution, much of the poorest in the US cannot afford to live in places with good public transport because these areas have higher housing costs.
> We tolerate it, extraordinarily, because driving is almost a right in America.
Partially. But even the laws we do have are currently being ignored, because rates of compliance are so low that it isn't even practically feasible to enforce the law. In several US states, more than 20% of drivers are driving around without insurance. The underlying problem here is beyond what can be solved merely with enforcement.
I'm hopeful it eventually happens, but I think we're a very long way from a world where someone in small-town Mississippi can ride around in a robotic car on a McDonalds wage.
It’s hard to get your license suspended! You have to severely screw up, usually more than once. If you depend on a personal vehicle for your livelihood, you should avoid it!
Going out on a limb and guessing people for whom losing a vehicle is existential have the same executive-function issues as someone who will get their license suspended and then drive on it. (Also, poverty. Registration and renewal costs money.)
You can get your license suspended in many places from nonpayment of parking tickets or even something completely unrelated to operating a vehicle like child support. Its not just getting points on your license from a bunch of speeding tickets.
Every suggestion I've seen was to make car infrastructure significantly worse in order to add a bike lane to an existing road, while also making that road significantly slower and worse for cars.
I don't think I've ever seen real suggestions to make a seperated infrastructure grid for pedestrians and bicycles that isn't just a sidewalk or bike lane on an existing road.
I'd recommend Vancouver as a decent example of how segregated lanes can work in a North American city.
That said, can you give specific examples of what you mean by "make car infrastructure worse"? Usually segregation is just a matter of putting a barrier on an existing bike lane and painting lines, which doesn't actually change anything for drivers who stay in the lines. In some cases, a lane may be converted, but this rarely impacts travel times much for the same reasons adding additional lanes doesn't improve travel times. Vancouver did lots of traffic studies on this criticism in particular that you can read if you're interested.
Are you imagining an alternative in which a bike network is added to a city, but not using "existing roads"? Where would these entirely-new roads be placed? Would you knock down the buildings between two car-infrastructure-roads, to pave it for bicycles? I suppose you could remove the car-infrastructure-road entirely and make it just a bike-road / linear park. Or you could put the bike lane underground? Or build a separated-grade elevated parkway network above the city?
You put a sign at the start of the road. "Bike street". This means cars allowed but at bike speeds. You have different paint on the street too, to make it very different from a normal road. I have seen them popping up here and there and it works very well in the towns I bike in.
As reasonable as that sounds, I think this would fall into the GP's complained-of category of "making that road significantly slower and worse for cars", and does not meet their ask for "a separated infrastructure grid for pedestrians and bicycles".
You don't need to make every street a bike street. It's enough if there is a way of getting safely close to your destination. Both for cars and bikes. The car drivers can drive on the next street unless this is their destination location. Works just fine in other big cities so it's just a question of getting used to a slightly different road to work/home.
To be clear, I definitely agree with you, I just don't think ThunderSizzle would. So it's ThunderSizzle's ideal that I am confused about, and trying to clarify. I think ThunderSizzle has asked for a (to my imagination) impossible-to-reach standard, and you have provided a very practical compromise, but exactly the sort that they would probably reject as infringing too much on existing car infrastructure.
I said roads, not streets. I've seen high-speed highways that have been modified to add a bike lane to the middle of no where for miles on end.
This is beyond useless, and is very dangerous as your combining high speed vehicle travel with bikes and pedestrians. The typical response is to then convert the road to a street (e.g. lower the speed limit, reduce lanes, etc) instead of moving pedestrian traffic away from roads. The traffic is still there, because it's the only route, but now you've added the occasional brave and stupid bicyclist or pedestrian.
Beyond that, it's more inefficient for pedestrians, because road layouts tend to follow inefficient directions that add unnecessary travel time for pedestrians.
Oh that makes sense. Yes, I keep seeing proposals to add bike lanes to highways and I just think, who wants to ride a bike next to all those high speed vehicles with no shade?
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.