Auria

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Capauri @capauri]

maybe deleting in the morning but america from an immigrant’s perspective. i came here 2 years ago.

i began actively disliking europeans since coming here. every attitude except the american attitude sucks. i had to stop walking around with noise cancellation turned on in case somebody drive-by complimented me on the street, because it happens so often, and i’d hate to be rude and to not respond. do you even know what kind of stares you get when you speak to a stranger on a european street?

everyone in america wants everyone else to succeed; in europe, everyone wants you to remain comfortably within the crab bucket. in europe i was told everyone on america was just fake nice. that’s giga cope. americans are smarter than you, europoor - americans understand that if you succeed, they succeed by proxy. you get nothing from poor, defeatist neighbors. if everyone’s successful and everyone’s generous, then everyone succeeds. this mindset is the only objectively correct mindset on earth - everyone else is wrong. everyone else thinks success is a finite resource , which is incorrect. if i succeed, then obviously all of my friends succeed, because i love them. i obviously love you, dear reader! you are on this platform like me, you think like me, you want humanity and civilization to persist forever like me, you live near me! i want you to do better than me! you doing better than me benefits me! if i do better than you, it will only benefit you too, because i love you, and want to share with you!

i want everyone to do better than me - it’s not a finite resource, afterall. if you’re better than me now, that’s great, that just means i have more to learn from you while we both shoot for the moon. this is just not the case anywhere else on earth and it’s too easy to take this mindset for granted, and that’s what i found makes America so unique.

[Ethical Hustler @SaveTheLibs]

@ArtemisConsort It can be used to argue for Nordic genes or the American system. The only thing it can’t be used to argue for is the Nordic system.

Alas…

[Possum Reviews @ReviewsPossum]

"There's no way 250,000 girls were raped in the UK. That number must be exaggerated."

Okay, let's pretend it's exaggerated, just for the sake of argument.

How many children need to be raped for you to be upset about it?

[thinkingcap @chrisheatherly]

I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.

The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.

There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.

What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.

Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.

This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.

That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.

What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.

Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?

No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

[Squirrel Hand LLP @Squirrel_Hand]

@AliceFromQueens @jimmygandhi @xwanyex "Theory of mind" ≠ "Theory" + "of" + "mind"

[Auria @AuriaMax]

"They just assume there are benevolent people in charge somewhere who can't save the world because they don't have enough money."

[Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 @chadfelixg]

When someone complains that a super wealthy person could 'end homelessness, end hunger, give people healthcare,' or especially 'make the world a better place,' they have no idea what any of that means.

They want to feel morally superior.
Typically the best answer they can give to the question of 'how,' is 'give billions to organizations that help people,' or 'tax the rich.'

Taxing the rich is a form of justice for them. They see being wealthy as inherently immoral.

They just assume there are benevolent people in charge somewhere who can't save the world because they don't have enough money.

'Funding,' is often a relevant argument, just not in the way they use it.

There's a very good reason why government programs to reduce poverty have massively increased poverty and why charity organizations always need more money, but never solve the problem they're fundraising for.

For the liberal mind, however, it's a simple moral situation. A good person wouldn't want to be wealthy. The act of giving your money away or not resisting government confiscation is an act of moral virtue.

It doesn't matter if it actually helps anyone. It doesn't matter if the government program is wasteful or the charity pays their CEO $500 million a year. What matters is you sacrificed for the Greater Good.

Elon Musk innovating new advancements for humanity and creating jobs is meaningless to them because he profits from it, which they see as immoral.

You can be rich if you 'support,' the right social justice causes.
You can be rich if you 'give,' your money to social justice causes.
You can be rich if you run for office to expand government programs and promise to tax the even richer.

Engaging in Capitalism to promote Capitalism is a sin, however, and that sin must be punished.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The problem with universal suffrage is that the more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the smaller the fraction of people there are in it with the native intelligence to understand how it works.

When the majority of humanity was employed in whacking at the dirt with a pointed stick, and the height of technology was a slightly better pointed stick, anyone with a triple digit IQ could understand what was going on.

Now, we have things like stock markets, the internet, transportation infrastructure, and the Linux kernel, but most people who vote are unable to conceive of these as anything but large piles of chocolate coins, or something else they can put their mouths.

Because that's how the average monkey interacts with money. They stack the blocks, the research assistant gives them a token, they exchange the token for a banana.

It's no good trying to explain to the monkeys what supply chain is, or how a trillion dollars worth of rockets can't magically be converted into a trillion dollars worth of bananas just because they're both measured in dollars, as if a six-foot man and a six-foot plank of wood were interchangeable.

Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn't really help.

Because the problem isn't just that the monkeys aren't paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don't have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don't.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of "retard" changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what's really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category "retard" grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn't dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that's sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn't correctable, because the problem isn't ignorance, it's complexity.

You can't make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can't even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren't believable to someone who doesn't have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what's going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn't even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Cute theory, let's play it out.

A monkey hoards a trillion bananas. The troop, enraged, beats him to death. They gather around the pile to feast at last.

But... oh wait, there is no pile.

It turns out the "bananas" were shares in a banana-launching company the dead monkey founded.

The shares were worth a trillion because he was alive to run it.

Now he is dead and the stock is worth $0.

The retarded monkeys have clubbed their way into a recession.

But it gets worse.

Half the "bananas" were tied up in a rocket that supplies bananas to monkeys on the far mountain who had no bananas at all.

Another chunk was tied up in a little satellite dish that beamed banana coordinates to the troop after a flood took out their trees.

So now they realized they beat to death the only monkey who knew how the dish worked.

So the monkeys sit there.

No bananas.
No rockets.
No coordinates to get more banananas.

Just a dead body and a powerful sense of fairness as they all now became infinitely poorer.

OH

And somewhere a smaller monkey watches the whole thing and quietly decides he will never build anything in front of these animals again.

[hrdk @hrdktwt]

Someone on Reddit built a game where you ride a dirt bike on top of any company's stock chart.

[Auria @AuriaMax]

@grok @wifispy @bryanrbeal Thank you Bryan. I'm a host and this conversation is completely insane. Most hosts aren't watching guests with indoor cameras, and many rely on their wifi for everything you said. It would be very very stressful and possibly dangerous for guests to mess with that!!

[eigenrobot @eigenrobot]

idk who needs to hear this but governments are not simply entitled to their citizens' belief in their legitimacy

it must be re-earned continuously

politicians forget this at their peril
https://t.co/Kg9R4VmH1v

[ThymeToBeBorn @ThymeToBeBorn]

You know who also has more time to do this stuff? Retired people. So the working man/woman and the parents of many are more likely to be underrepresented among the politically heard class. Sad!

[Bugman Hegel @FedPoasting]

The Karmelo Anthony ordeal boils down to the simple fact that a non-trivial number of black people believe that they should be governed under a sovereign hood code, and any white person who is in proximity to a black person consents to be governed under hood code. This means that any interpersonal escalation, regardless of the degree of escalation, creates the grounds for the exercise of deadly force to defend one’s “manhood.”

They do not think they should be required to submit to the law of the white man. If Karmelo were being tried in a court applying “hood code” he would be completely innocent because he murdered in defense of his manhood. So it is not that they are just pretending they believe Karmelo is actually innocent, they genuinely do believe he is innocent, but under a different set of “laws.” They therefore understand this to be a “modern day lynching” in the sense that Karmelo is being forced to submit to the law of the white man, and therefore his right to murder on behalf of his manhood, which they do sincerely believe is his right, was “violated.”

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

No, you don't get it.

He does not have $1 trillion sitting in cash, it is 99% stock in his companies.

To make that wealth liquid would mean selling all that stock which would swiftly destroy *both* the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, others) and the wealth. If he sold it all, he'd end up with maybe $100b max, several hundred thousand people would be out of work, the companies ruined and many of their suppliers also ruined.

Okay, but now Elon has $100b in cash, and can "solve the world's problems".

$100b divided by the world's 8 billion people is $12

If you were in charge, several of the most innovative industrial companies in the world would be destroyed, hundreds of thousands out of work, and space would again close to human civilization for another generation.

But everyone on earth could have one nice meal and you could revel in your altruism.

[stevemur @stevemur]

So currently, in terms of concrete outcomes, about $150 million is being extracted from high earning Seattle taxpayers per year to help house 15 lucky people.

[Will Munny @WJMunny]

My father passed away a few months ago and I've been dealing with his estate in a rural area. It is amazing how easy it has been dealing with the local utilities, banks, and government simply because there is no "process." it's just normal people figuring things out on a case-by-case basis and treating you like a human being.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

here are some facts about California. some of this is hard to believe.

first of all, it's important to understand the concept of "ballot harvesting," which is perfectly legal in CA. this refers to a situation where someone completely unaffiliated with the voter can collect and submit their ballot for them.

this flow is completely legal:

- a homeless person arrives in LA, where they are eligible for cash assistance, SSI, food stamps, healthcare through medical, and an array of other taxpayer-funded services
- they are registered to vote by an NGO (many such NGOs exist and explicitly do this).
- they do not have to provide a residential address or any proof of residency to vote. they only have to provide a mailing address, which can be anywhere (church, NGO HQ, homeless shelter). their home address can be "a park" or "an underpass".
- their ballot is mailed to the homeless shelter (or whatever address the NGO elects for them)
- the only verification done for the mail-in ballot is "signature verification" and uniqueness (only one vote per person is counted theoretically).
- the signature can be an X. if they register with an X, they can sign with an X. that is sufficient to pass verification. signature verification is also deliberately loose. the signature does not have to be a perfect match.

now consider the hypothetical scenario, which is fraudulent, but virtually impossible to detect:

- a homeless person cycles through the LA system. they get registered with their mailing address listed as the NGO HQ or homeless shelter
- they "sign" their registration with an X or nondescript, easily replicable signature
- they disappear. never seen again. or they exist, but it doesn't matter. they don't get purged from the voter rolls for 4-8 years typically.
- the address where they registered receives their ballot for several cycles
- operatives are aware that they have X amount of votes to make up. they fill in X many thousand mail-in ballots themselves. the ballots are manually postmarked (permitted). they forge the signature to match whatever signature (could be an X) was submitted upon registration
- ballots can be accepted even if they are postmarked at 11.59 pm. polls closed at 8 pm. (you would need an accomplice who is a USPS employee)
- the only fraud checks are de-duplication (if the homeless person through some miracle voted in person, only one of their ballots would be counted) and signature verification
- because very few of the homeless people in question would have voted in person, this gives NGO operatives tens of thousands of possible mail-in ballots to submit unilaterally.

the big problem is that there is NO way to detect this type of fraud. NGOs that register homeless people to vote exist. that isn't a secret. ballot harvesting is fully legal. voting by mail is encouraged. signature verification is as loose as possible. de-duplication doesn't solve anything, since few homeless people vote in person. and no one in power locally is going to spend political capital on rooting out such fraud, since they are all wholeheartedly committed to "voting rights".

in a situation where fraud is undetectable, the absence of hard proof of fraud is not evidence that no fraud exists.

Raman has gained around 20k votes since election night. She is around 3k votes ahead of Pratt now.

there are over 72 thousand homeless people in LA county.

[Notabot @Notabot1185810]

@FischerKing64 Mormon hate has a weird off-brand anti-semitism vibe.

[Terry LaForest Lynch @ly43475]

I knew a woman who had been part of the first human trials for the very first oral contraceptives. They were told to expect a big increase in sexual desire. When she experienced nausea/vomiting, weight gain, and severe acne, she was dropped from the study. All the women who had unwelcome side effects were dropped from the study.