people routinely choke on their own saliva too …

you’re writing as if you know what users want. let people decide themselves please. allow mastodon<->lemmy federation, make it an optional feature that you can activate on sign-up or in your profile setting. this way everyone is happy.

hmm, when i copy-paste your username into my mastodon instance search field, i get:

so i can see your user profile. however, it reports as “0 Posts” and when i scroll down, i do get a few of your posts/comments, but only very few (like 20 in total maybe).

this is what i meant when i talk about a lack of compatibility between lemmy/piefed and mastodon.

In my personal (unsubstantiated and speculative) opinion, the biggest hurdle to adoption for Lemmy and the fediverse is the lack of content in most topics outside of technology and politics.

Agree, but one thing to easily improve this is better federation with mastodon.

How many of the posts that you see in your feed come from mastodon? For me it’s probably less than 5%. Well guess what, mastodon users are about 90% of all fediverse users. stats (active mastodon users: 1.5M, active lemmy users: 36k)

Why don’t we see the large amount of already-existing content from mastodon?

(If you want to make as much content for lemmy, as is already existing for mastodon, we’d need about 1.5M new users. instead one technological change could get us there too.)

nah i think the purple thing is the filter … the smoke goes through it and acquires scent that way.

lots of food products taste boring in the west because

• we’ve been told that stuff that tastes good is probably full of additives and therefore bad for your health (think of all the chemicals!)
• and because of the same christian mindset that got us the cornflakes:

Cereal would create fortunes and create multinational companies that we still know today. But Dr. John Harvey Kellogg , the inventor of corn flakes, did not care about profits. For him, cereal was not just a health food because it would improve Americans digestion. He believed a diet centered on bland foods like cereal would lead Americans away from sin. One very specific sin: masturbation.

why are they called authoritarian? what books did they write?

was it on some nightcore music video?

oh yeah that’s an interesting thought! i hadn’t considered that before.

They can’t move a lot of it. It’s mostly shares in companies, bonds, commodities, all traded on public markets. Some is in private markets. But that’s still all managed by banks. Banks all around the world started sharing data in 2016. So governments now have access to people’s international holdings.

oh that’s interesting. i would like to know whether somebody has actually written a detailed step-by-step guide to assess people’s net worth, because i haven’t seen any so far. so i’m interested in seeing it practically done.

the question is, how do you assess net wealth? is there any kind of way of knowing how much net wealth a person has?

there might be, i’d just like to see it.

iirc china does have a wealth tax (and it is effective), just that it isn’t 100% thorough, so some people still become billionaires.

But property tax is a thing. And property tax is a wealth tax on a specific form of wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_States

This tax may be imposed on real estate or personal property. The tax is nearly always computed as the fair market value of the property, multiplied by an assessment ratio, multiplied by a tax rate.

ok i’m currently reading up on property tax in the US. it’s actually much more interesting topic than i thought. here’s an interesting infographic:

i’m still interpreting what this means. so the US does have a wealth tax but it mostly affects non-movable property (as i said in my original comment) and that is why billionaires don’t actually pay x% of their total wealth under it.

to explain the colors in the diagram: yellow + orange + light blue are the taxes that are paid on the state level, i assume? meanwhile dark blue + pink + dark red are the taxes paid on the federal level. green is the stuff you keep.

most of these taxes seem to be income-based (payroll taxes means wage-based taxes i assume, then state income tax, then payroll taxes again, then federal income taxes). income-based taxes seem to make about 2/3 of the total taxes. meanwhile property taxes (wealth taxes) make 1/4 and sales taxes makes the small remainder. (rough estimate from looking at the diagram).

so to introduce a “wealth tax” would mean to create a new category (“Federal Wealth Tax”) that taxes all net wealth except real estate (which is already taxed on the state level), am i seeing this correctly?

also:

Local officials determine values [of houses] and may be disputed by property owners.

The question is, how do you assess the total wealth of a person, once they have moved their stuff abroad? How do you even begin to measure it? If there’s no local cooperation from the local government to actually check and estimate the total wealth, is there any way to even find out about it?

yeah this is income tax. what about wealth tax?

but the assets they actually make money on are not easy (often impossible) to move.

companies have been moved to china en masse since 1970 though

edit: but i agree with you about houses that are rented out

this is just an uninformed take. the reason why “taxing billionaires doesn’t work” is said by some people, is because there’s free trade and billionaires could just move their stuff abroad where it isn’t taxed. we need an end to free trade first before taxing wealth becomes feasible.

it has nothing to do with “taxing my feelings of becoming a billionaire” or such

omg that’s hilarious. thank you

yeah, there’s a mastodon account posting these. they’re gold.

hell yeah join the club 😆

eh i remember when a bank robber who stole $100 got 20 years in prison (because it was bank robbery) meanwhile a cop who shot an unarmed innocent civilian got away with a fine.

the cops are not there to protect you, they’re there to protect the banks.