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I've always been very weirded out by people who make lolcows a part of their daily routine or identity. Like yeah I hate a lot of the people who have threads on kiwifarms but that's all the more reason I don't think about them, talk about them, or stalk them every fucking day.
xianc78 boosted
_Why ‘Starving the Beast’ Feeds It Instead_

FTA: I once believed, like Milton Friedman, that among the most effective tools for reining in excessive government growth is to “starve the beast” – that is, to keep tax revenues as low as possible. Starved of tax revenues, big government would have no choice but to shrink into smaller government, one that can survive on appropriately small sums of revenue.

I no longer believe that this theory of “starving the beast” is correct. It’s now obvious to me that as long as the government can finance its current expenditures with borrowed funds, a policy of refusing to allow taxes to be raised in order to meet expenditures doesn’t starve the beast; that policy engorges the beast.

The reason the government is engorged when tax revenues are kept below expenditures is that, as a result of this policy, much of current government spending is paid for by future taxpayers-citizens. The debt that the government issues to fund current expenditures comes due in the future, when many of today’s taxpayers-citizens will either be in lower tax brackets or their graves. The burden of repaying this debt falls on many people who aren’t even born when the debt-financed expenditures are made. The bottom line is that deficit financing allows today’s taxpayers-citizens to get goodies from the government and then shove the bill for these goodies onto tomorrow’s taxpayers-citizens.

Because deficit financing allows today’s taxpayers-citizens to spend other people’s money – and because no person spends other people’s money as carefully as that person spends his or her own money – the demand for government ‘services’ today is higher than it would be if today’s taxpayers-citizens were obliged to pay for all the government they demand. Just as, say, people in New York and California will demand more government services if those services will be paid for largely by people in Florida and Texas, people in 2026 will demand more government services if those services will be paid for largely by people in 2056.

Unsurprisingly, there is empirical evidence showing that attempts to starve the beast result in increased government spending.

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/why-starving-the-beast-feeds-it-instead/
xianc78 boosted

Farmers and local farm shops are increasingly using social media to sell their food. Buy local. Buy local farm food.

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The whole Red/Blue button question is the new Trolley Problem as it has become a shitty meme and I hate it.

xianc78 boosted

Clone Hero is FINALLY adding leaderboards. Took them long enough!

@cjd If that ever happens it would be fake. James Corbett has done extensive research showing that the US/China rivalry (and the NATO/BRICS rivalry as a whole) is fake and both countries/alliances support the exact same agendas.

corbettreport.com/the-multipol

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Do you normally buy appliances new or used/second hand?

xianc78 boosted
@sampler This is interesting, because there's no reason to push any button *besides* the red one. If you push the red button, you survive in either case. The blue button is for people that don't know how to draw a 2x2 box.
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Who could have anticipated this? Who with an IQ above double digits could have possibly seen this coming?

@coolboymew Well if you can't buy those, then I guess go with this Audiobox TV. There doesn't seem to be any smart features outside of viewing image and video files on USB, much like the GPX ones.

amazon.com/Audiobox-TV-24D-Wid

@coolboymew And I just realized that they are all currently out of stock on their website. Maybe you can find them on Amazon.

@coolboymew GPX is the only company I know of that is still producing dumb TVs. The only "smart" feature is the ability to play video and image files off of removable storage.

Though I haven't tried them out myself, but I imagine the firmware is similar to the GPX Projector I got for my brother and it works great.

gpx.com/in-home/televisions.ht

@cjd
>Even Moldbug has acknowledged that fixed supply currencies are fundamentally broken.

I wonder what his opinions are in regards to a demurrage currency. It's basically a currency that is designed to lose value over time, though it's not the same thing as inflation it's more like a coupon with an expiration date.

I think there are even demurrage crypto-currencies out there as well.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrag

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Mainly gaming/nerd instance for people who value free speech. Everyone is welcome.