For some reason people in art believe they don’t have to compete like every other individual creating a business

If you think art is about selling a product, what’s the point of being alive?

Really bad graphic design overall. They might as well have used WordArt.

Interacting with people whose tone doesn’t match their words may induce anxiety as well.

Have they actually proven this is a good idea, or is this a “so preoccupied with whether or not they could” scenario?

I’m gonna do the most annoying thing in the world here, and just tell you to go watch Finding The Money. I feel like that’s a dick move in 99% of circumstances, but I did explicitly start this thread with the notion that after watching that documentary… I felt like these were misleading terms. So if you wanna discuss whether they are misleading terms given that context, it might be useful to share that same context.

I’m down to talk more afterwards. You’ve been a good pen pal.

I, uh… think we got off on the wrong foot. I don’t see spending or taxation as a bad thing.

I mean, peep the @midwest.social, for a hint. And I did specifically say that I wouldn’t recommend any terms to replace “raise” and “revenue” that have a negative connotation, such as “deactivation” or “destruction”.

I’m also aware of the multiplier effect. The benefits of government spending are actually why I’m so interested in reframing the conversation about spending and taxation.

I will quibble with this:

The spending of a tax dollar is the beginning, not the end, of the benefit.

The spending is the beginning, yes – but not a tax dollar.

Governments don’t need to tax first, in order to spend second. It’s the opposite. That’s why “raise” and “revenue” are such terrible terms. Because they prime you to think that taxes are how we pay for things. We pay for things by just paying for them. The government spends dollars into existence. Taxation is just there to incentivize economic activity to chase those new dollars and keep a stable value.

If you view taxation as necessary to gather the funds to do something, you can have a bunch of resources just sitting around doing nothing and never be able to utilize them because you can’t gather the funds without destabilizing the economy. But if you can just spend the money into existence, you can go ahead and increase the utilization without taxing first and then adjust taxation as needed from there on out.

And it turns out, this is how money has always worked. Taxation has always been a cleanup step to keep the spending productive, not a prerequisite to enable the spending in the first place. The myth of tax as revenue is relatively new.

I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can’t help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.

You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.

Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say “Well… it’s complicated.” And if it’s complicated – if it’s not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil – then it must not be genocide.

I’m not sure. I’m not a wordsmith or an economist. But I would expect it to be something that conveys a sense that the money is being decommissioned rather than mobilized, or annihilated rather than gathered.

But the sense of deactivation or destruction is usually a negative feeling, so I would want to find a word that puts a slight positive spin on it. This is a happy conclusion to the money’s journey. Its task is done and the inflationary pressure associated with its work is now relieved.

After watching Finding The Money, terms like “raise” and “revenue” applied to taxes seem deliberately misleading.

He was also depicted as the villain in the Robin Hood tales.

Feels about right.

So any day now, we can expect a custom porn video where the stars make fun of a meme collector’s folders and then delete them.

Meanwhile…

Steam is so funny.

Buying there instead of pirating is a joy, the ads actually feel like a benefit instead of a punishment, the analytics seem to be aimed at saving me time by highlighting stuff I’ll like instead of gaslighting me into emptying my wallet…

The result is:

I buy lots of games, watch lots of ads — share ads with friends even — go out of my way to give them more analytics data points, and trust their recommendations enough to shell out $2.99 for something on sale after only 10 seconds of research.

Why are other companies not able to follow Steam’s approach?

“Nobody uses hard drives anymore. Have the intern replace all mentions of hard drives with solid state drives.”

Inelastic demand. One of many reasons that the stuff you learn in Econ 101 is pure fantasy.

So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.

• Cinnamon swirl
• Bacon
• French fries
• Toast
• Tea

Dude gave up his entire life to send a warning to as many people as possible. You think he’s gonna not post further warnings on Twitter?

If you really wanna play out that conversation, here’s how that goes:

I say “The vicious Nazi graffiti doesn’t belong in the same category as the anti-zionist protest signs”

And you say “Those protest signs aren’t just anti-zionist, they’re antisemitic. If you’re calling for the end of the state of Israel, you’re calling for the extermination of Jews everywhere.”

And I say “So if you really just wanted to say that anti-zionism is antisemitism, why did you pretend to agree in your first reply?”

–

But we don’t need to bother with that tedious BS, because I can use my super hacker skills to… view your comment history.

You’re trying to replicate OP’s original sleight-of-hand.

Placing unequivocal Nazi shit in the same category as people calling for international law to finally be applied against a decades-long genocidal regime, and then saying “You gotta tolerate or detest 100% of these things in one fell swoop. It’s a bundle deal. And remember, I put some Nazi shit in there!”

If you’ve watched just 2-3 hours of news coverage in the past 8 months, you’ve seen this play before. It doesn’t – or it shouldn’t – fool anyone anymore, and you should be embarrassed to even try it.

It doesn’t seem like the ruling says copyright concerns justify overriding a right to anonymity under GDPR, but that the right to anonymity doesn’t exist in the first place.

I think that’s probably a better place to be, because it means they can legislate a right to anonymity.

Solid attempt at pretending to miss the point.