The Anti-Targ

Honestly, if I wasn't pacifist adjacent joining the military in a country unlikely to get into a boots on the ground shooting war any time soon seems like a great idea. The military is basically a socialist entity, albeit a dictatorship, but you basically get food, housing, healthcare and education for free. And if you are smart, then you can get a university degree for free, and be even less likely to end up having to point a gun at other people pointing guns at you. The reason for making all that stuff free, of course, is so that the military can be filled up by poor people so the already rich don't have to worry about their kids signing up to possibly be canon fodder. Still, if you can get out of the military alive that's one avenue for upward mobility and the potential to create some inter-generational opportunities for the young'uns. Most people don't get stinking rich from a military life, but they can do all right. Of course another other way to get out of poverty is professional sports, and you can become stinking rich doing that. But that requires you to have actual talent, so it's a much harder road out of poverty. It means Britain gets to keep more of its beef, cheese and cars. Nice! Who doesn't want to have more beef, cheese and cars? I guess it would be kinda nice to be able to swap those things for maple syrup.

GST is the [classical] liberal tax panacaea. The most anyone has ever done in arguing against it is get liberals to admit it's regressive. But they always say, sure it's regressive but... But the first thing everyone needs to recognise is that tax does not pay for national / federal govt spending in NZ or Aus. Once everyone understands that truth you can look at the tax system in a completely different way. You don't have to go around looking for coins in the back of peoples' couches so that the govt can pay for roads, schools, hospitals etc. You think about what should and shouldn't be taxed to manage inflation, facilitate desirable behaviour (investment in productive activity, e.g. building houses, constructing non-CO2 emitting electricity generation) and disincentivise undesirable behaviour (investing in unproductive and wasteful activity, e.g. buying houses (aside the the one you live in), burning fossil fuels). So, since wages and salaries up to a certain level are purely productive, earned income should possibly be tax free up to, say, $100K. Also since companies that produce stuff or provide useful services are productive corporate tax should be low or nil, except where profits significantly exceed what's reasonable. Personal spending on stuff is essential in a productive economy, so a general GST should not be applied, but targetted consumption taxes are worth considering, e.g. "sin taxes" on smoking, alcohol (and other drugs), gambling etc, fossil fuel, and taxes on luxuries (needs definition). Municipal and state govts have no choice but to pay for things using tax / fee / levy revenues, so it's important to also think about what should be payed for by municipal and state govts and what should be paid for by the national govt. Most of the taxes people pay should be local / state taxes and national taxes as a proportion of personal income should be low.

No, actually it didn't, it was the massive disruption of supply across the globe, huge profit taking by large corporates and the spike in oil prices, and significantly in this particular period of inflation fertiliser costs increased a lot, which will hit the entire food production system. Oil price is almost never driven by demand, it is always driven by how much OPEC opens the taps to let oil flow. Also it matters what the cash release goes to. If you throw it all at rich people who already have more money than they know what to do with through the mechanism of QE then you'll get asset price inflation. But if you spend new money and make the rich keep their treasury investments and the new money goes into the productive economy (build schools, roads, hospitals, maintain infrastructure that's degrading) and help people get by it will have less of an inflationary effect, indeed some of that spending will be dis-inflationary because it will help the wider economy function more efficiently. Government spending is only significantly inflationary if it starts draining too much real resource (people and material) from the private economy. It's a massive oversimplification to believe that more money always leads to more inflation. It's always about how the money travels through the economy.

So not deeply human then. More deeply primal, that should be able to be overcome by human enlightenment if we use our uniquely evolved frontal cortex rather than our lizard brain to manage human relations. The breaking of current economic and political systems is inevitable. The only question is if you are going to enjoy watching it burn down or if you will deeply lament the suffering of millions that's going to happen.

As I've said elsewhere, progressive govts continue to hamstring themselves by believing the deficit myth, so they don't have the money to implement the progressive programmes that would massively benefit the vast majority because they think they need to pay for everything by putting up taxes. It's a self-inflicted handicap for Eurozone countries since their govts have no currency sovereignty. But for countries with currency sovereignty there is no excuse for not spending what needs to be spent to deliver the social benefits of progressive policies.

The reality is rich people never need tax cuts, so cutting their taxes is never serving the best interests of the govt or wider economy, it just keeps the political donor class happy. The question though is defining the low end of what's rich. To some extent I think our reserve bank has kind of helped to define that by setting debt to income ratios for getting a mortgage to buy a house. The ratio is set at 1:6 for owner occupier homes and 1:7 for investment property. Since the reserve bank thinks it's possible to service that sort of mortgage and still be able to live. There will be plenty of low/medium income people who will struggle to ever qualify in the larger cities. If your owner/occupier ratio lets you buy a national median priced house without a deposit, I think that means you're at the low end of rich. I think the national median is about $850,000, so if you have a household income of $142,000 you're at the low end of rich. Maybe there's an argument for something a bit above $150K, but that's the rough ballpark I think.

The difference between Japan attacking Pearl Harbour and the US getting their arses handed to them in Viet Nam and Afghanistan (and it should be noted Russia got its arse handed to it in Afghanistan a couple of decades earlier) is who attacked who's territory. The USA aside, I think it would be fair to say no western democracy is willing to invade and occupy another country. But I think every western democracy is willing to forcefully defend its own territory. Whether they can do so successfully or not is a different matter.

The first mistake was thinking Labor was or is high-minded. As they say on my favourite Australian political Youtube channel, Labour is the shit-lite party, it's not the not-shit party. raising incomes for the low and middle income brackets is only substantially inflationary if supply of those paycheck to pay check essentials is constrained. If supply is sufficient to meet demand then the inflationary effect is minimal. And so long as an x% income increase leads to a <x% inflation then the net effect is increased prosperity for the low and middle income bracket. People get too hung up on the absolute price-level inflation number when the important thing is price inflation relative to income inflation. There was only a cost of living crisis because incomes were not rising with price inflation. Any inflation below double digits can be tolerated over a medium term so long as incomes are rising too. Better to have above target inflation for a while longer so incomes can rise substantially than have inflation brought down without any increase in incomes. Tax adjustments to put more money into people's pockets to cope with cost of living just gives employers an excuse to not increase wages. If company profits are high then higher wages should be how people overcome cost of living issues not tax cuts. If profits are being squeezed then low end tax cuts can alleviate the pain until profits start going up and wages can rise.

They're stupid. There are only 2 things progressive voters need to be thinking about when deciding how to vote: On a national basis - re-balancing the Supreme court; on a global basis - climate change policy. How is your vote going to influence those issues? Kick out the 1 term Republican because he's not conservative enough is a thing no conservative voter has ever said. Trump didn't lose in 2020 because he lost conservative support, If anything he gained support, given he got ~12 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. But it seems progressives are all too keen to kick out Democratic presidents because they're not progressive enough. And people wonder why Democrats keep losing.

Hmmm, I wonder. They were willing to take 4 years of Biden to rid themselves of Trump, but are they willing to take 8 years of Biden before they can get a Republican back into the White House? I'm not sure, their calculus may now be "how bad can 4 years of Trump be? At least after that he will be gone forever...right?"

I don't trust Trump to do anything other than try to hand the whole of Ukraine over to Putin. The only way that doesn't happen under Pres Trump is if his inner circle can pull him back. The one clip from the last Haley - De Santis debate I saw was how De Santis accused Haley of wanting to have an open chequebook for Ukraine (I don't remember his exact words but that seemed to be the gist of it), and De Santis just a beta Trump.

The one thing that makes me not 100% mad that Bioware sold to EA was that when I was too poor to own more than one gaming platform I only had a PS3 and when EA bought out Bioware they put ME2 on PS3. That almost certainly wouldn't have happened otherwise, so I am grateful for that. Now that I have a decent gaming PC EA controlling Bioware is nothing but bad. No game should ever force you to push through the opening hours, but IMO it gets better and is worth it in the end. But if you've tried that many times and not found the motivation to carry on there are clearly better ways to spend your time.

I think we've had a similar thread in ages past. Polytheism as mythology for making fun stories is the best. Though even those mythologies often have a single supreme being as the real creator. Monotheism as serious theology for the creation of our multiverse is the only logical explanation (on the basis of the cause and effect principle) for a multiverse made by a conscious creative entity.

Those are such different games it could be argued it comes down to a matter of taste as opposed to objective measures of quality. All I can say is I've played DAI more times than I've played The Witcher 3. And I still haven't played the version where the Hero of Ferelden marries Anora, becomes king, keeps Logain alive and makes him do the dark ritual with Morrigan, Hawke romances Anders and the brother is a templar, and the Tal-Vashoth mage inquisitor sides with the templars.

Actually logically it doesn't*. But that's a whole different discussion. *Unless we're in a simulation and our gods are the dev team who programmed the simulation. I would personally not want to be in a one-person indie sim, though that could be one explanation for why the sim seems to be breaking down lately. MVP dev team, IMO, goes to the dinosaur devs. Hard to really know what the human dev team is trying to achieve. Are they trying to prove that ultra-high intelligence is bad for long term survival?

I dunno about that. To me, it really comes down to the fact that the acting talent pool severely lacks for young women who look like Abby. There is a reasonable talent pool for almost every other look but somehow not the under-30 power lifter type. Is it because young women who look like Abby all have sporting aspirations and only pick up an interest in acting once they have retired from sport? My Abby look-alike colleague is quite a bit younger than me but she got her vet degree four years after me because of her sporting career focus in her teens and early twenties.

That would be priceless. Though one might assume that there are probably few left at Bioware who have actually done that. Who's left from those glory days?

I'm thinking of November vs Biden with Haley as the hypothetical republican nominee. My guess is Haley is probably a lock for 2nd behind Trump. I'm not sure enough Dems / Indies could be bothered to register for the primaries for Haley to make up the Trump deficit.

The first woman to be president at the same time as not being pure white would be quite the thing, especially if it breaks a glass ceiling that almost no progressive will unequivocally celebrate. Not unlike Margaret Thatcher becoming the first woman PM of the UK, which curiously the British Labour Party has failed to replicate while the Conservatives have given the UK 3 women PMs, the first male of colour PM and potentially the first woman of colour major party leader. The problem is, they're all pretty useless when it comes to competency as an effective PM / potential PM, with the exception of Thatcher who was a pretty canny political operator and very effective - in the eyes of most conservatives - as a conservative PM. Maybe I'm being unfair to the Republican base, but I have a hard time seeing them get Haley over the line, however I imagine there will be a fair number of centrist women and south Asian swing voters who could make up the numbers, if they choose to ignore most of her policies. Still it looks like Trump needs to be swept from the board by forces other than primary voters for Haley to actually get the nomination. And I get the feeling most Magrats would go over to De Santis now that Trump is attacking both of them and possibly attacking Haley harder now.

Since AI doesn't even exist yet it'll be a while before anyone can even try to put AI in charge of anything important. The worry is people think we already have AI and either put too much faith in it or are starting to panic about an imminent AI threat.

So Korea-like stalemate or Russia win it is then?

I enjoyed Dragon Age Inquisition, played it multiple times. So IMO DA doesn't need to be resurrected. Dreadwolf is also a completely natural and expected follow up to Inquisition, same as Inquisition flowed directly from DA 2. It could still be a mediocre game or worse, but Inquisition sets things up for a potentially great game. This next Mass Effect game is going to have to be somewhat contrived, because the Reaper saga is done, esp if they canonise the destroy ending, to whit canonising any ending is one of the possible problems with making a milky way sequel. If they'd done a better job with Andromeda they could have left the milky way completely in the rear view.

I would still put most of the blame on the humans who did not question and investigate to properly verify whether the software was providing the truth when it started identifying so many people as alleged crooks.

What IlyaP said.

Yes, that's the so-called leak. Likely not a credible leak. People are interpreting Michael Gamble's 2 word, 2 question reply as a denial. But that kind of response could mean anything. I think it's probable they won't make Leviathan the major villain, but I have a hard time accepting they won't feature in some way. That response suggests to me Gamble didn't want to unambiguously say Leviathan won't be in ME4/5, whether that means they will be or not is another matter. They are a huge lore reveal and hugely powerful in ME3...so long as you bought the DLC or played the legendary edition, though they are revealed to a degree by the star child for everyone who played through to the end of ME3, just not in much detail. Not being in the next ME at all would be worse than making them the main villain. The leak also claims garrus will be in the game, but does not mention Tali. Most credible sources say there is a couple of centuries at least time jump from ME3 which means Garrus is dead from old age as turian's have about the same lifespan as humans. And saying there is a Dragon Age Origins remake in the works makes no sense whatsoever unless EA farmed it out to a third party studio. Bioware can't be working on 2 major games and a remake at the same time.