Well, I mean… not much better.

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Which doesn’t really change the point does it. These people are de-facto kings ruling us; their wealth subverts the entire idea of democracy. You can’t tax them out of existence without taxing their wealth because none of them have any actual income. Banks fall all over themselves to fund anything they care to do.

In any case, 2% isn’t going to do fuck-all even if it gets passed which is hardly a certainty.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

Le Coq suggested that when simply considering the 10 biggest fortunes in France, the tax would bring in no less than €13bn for the state.

A 2% tax on billionaires. Give me a break.

The point isn’t to bring in money, the point is to eliminate these blights on society by any means necessary. How bad will the world have to get before something that looks like this happens? When the world was more civilized - the world conservatives constantly pine for - the ultra-wealthy were taxed over 90%, because we knew that too much power in the hands of a single person was immensely dangerous. We knew this intrinsically from generations of being ruled by kings, but we got firsthand experience with it from them constantly fucking up the economy.

There was shame in being wealthy. Hell, there was shame in being rich when I was growing up - it was understood that you couldn’t get mega-rich without stepping on the necks of the working class and being horrible people. It’s nearly Christmas - go rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life for crying out loud. 1946!

You forgot to escape.

For anyone interested in some light fiction on the subject, may I direct you to On the Beach by Neville Shute.

Yeah. He must be talking to a crowd that he figures can take a guess, but I wouldn’t think that such a crowd would find it very funny. A normie crowd would just have no idea wtf he means at all.

Wasn’t the right poised to take it all in a landslide only just… checks notes - yesterday?

So… they think it will… vaccinate them?

So I understand the ultra-rich’s way of doing business now is to never realize gains but rather take loans against a percentage of their unrealized gains (backed of course, by the unrealized gains themselves) and spend that money rather than ever make any income. Does anybody know of any good ideas to handle that type of scenario?

Smith was speaking shortly before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits China on Wednesday. He’s expected to warn Chinese officials not to provide aid to Russia.

Or else they’re going to get a very stern talking to.

I’m sorry, which editor allows you to exit easily with escape colon q bang enter?

Uh huh. That’s what I thought.

What is religion, if not conjecture about the origin of mankind (and by extension the universe) that people believe without evidence?

Religion identifies the simulator and insists that its intermediaries can offer a liaison between you and them, and also that if you don’t believe in their particular simulator, you will be punished. It has been used for centuries to control the populace and to take their money.

A proponent of simulation theory isn’t likely to tell you that it solves any philosophical problems, or that they now understand the universe wholly. I’ve never heard anyone talking about it claim that they know who/what is behind the simulation.

So IMO the distinction between the two couldn’t be more clear.

I imagine there’s at least a couple wacko groups out of there trying to twist simulation theory into a purely religious endeavor, but that wouldn’t represent the mainstream conversation about it.

ChatGPT’s Answer:

The expression 6/2(1+2) involves both multiplication and division. According to the order of operations (PEMDAS/BODMAS), you should perform operations inside parentheses first, then any multiplication or division from left to right.

Let’s break down the expression step by step:

Inside the parentheses: 1 + 2 = 3

Now the expression becomes 6/2 * 3

Division: 6/2 = 3

Multiplication: 3 * 3 = 9

So, 6/2(1+2) is equal to 9.

Amazingly well put. Capitalism is necessary. Unrestrained capitalism is deadly. The unfortunate reality of capitalism is that even as it is in the process of burning everything to the ground, it looks for all the world like glorious success. And it is glorious success, if you don’t compare it to what could be in a system where it was properly restrained.

Soaking seems like a particularly egregious loophole.

Boy does this ring true. I worked for years for a giant multinational publisher and one of their biggest sources of income was taking government money for educational stuff for schools and turning that money into absolutely no useful products while making sure no opportunity to hire another middle manager was overlooked.

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