“I don’t think I’ve ever heard…” friend, you literally live in an information silo. Do you speak Spanish? Because you probably aren’t hearing anything about Spain if you don’t. Do you follow any British media? Because they’re not coming to an American forum to bitch about Britain. You probably don’t care enough to even notice if someone was talking about another country, so how would you hear anything?
What’s uniquely American is making your internal drama everyone else’s problem.
I ask myself the same question every time a company raises its prices.
You killed a coral reef because you couldn’t figure out how to create headers and footers? No, there’s no AI integrated Open Source word processor.
Iron Man and Batman can only do what they do because they have the time and access to resources to do it. Guardian from Alpha Flight, for example would be something like “Working Class Ironman.” Common engineer who found out the mining suit he was building was going to be sold off to the military so he stole the prototype and became a superhero. He’s kind of an “Iron Man’s brain, Captain America’s heart” kind of character, so if you wanted the non-rich Iron Man, it exists, it’s just not Tony Stark. Tony needs to be rich or he’s not Tony Stark.
Same with Batman. The Shadow is a former soldier who uses stealth, martial arts and magic tricks to fight crime. But he’s not Bruce Wayne because being a billionaire playboy is what makes Batman possible.
Why recharacterize heroes with totally new backstories when the not-rich version is already a different superhero.
And now you’re completely characterizing my statements and lying to make yourself feel better. Good day.
I mean if your go to is to personally attack anyone who disagrees with you I don’t know why anyone would bother to have a serious discussion with you, but for the cheap seats I’ll try.
Yes, Criminal Psychopaths can, in certain circumstances be good people, other than the fact that they brutally kill some people. No mass murderer has ever been arrested that their neighbours weren’t standing there saying “but he was such a nice guy!” That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should be dealt with harshly, but the reality is, there are people who are good husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and friends who also do absolutely monstrous things when no one else is looking. While we’re at it, there’s no such thing as someone who has never harmed anyone. We’ve all done things that hurt people, and no, just apologizing doesn’t make it all go away. Some harms are more serious than others but no one is blameless. There are absolutely people who tend more toward good, and some that tend more toward bad, but I’ve also watched “good” people rationalize and try to justify some absolutely wild levels of cruelty under the wrong circumstances.
Look, I get it, you’ve been through some shit. I’ve been there and the idea that some people are good and some people are bad and as long as you find the good people you’ll be safe is really comforting. Unfortunately it’s not true. There’s no such thing as someone who is always cartoonishly evil, and there is no one who is perfectly safe, not even you.
There are no objectively good and bad people. Never have been, never will be. Every one of us is a grab bag of contradictions. Objectively good people are not rare, they’re fictional. If you seriously look under the surface, we’re all both monsters and angels on some level. Some of us just have better self-control and/or fewer opportunities to be actively transgressive.
As others have pointed out, there’s no “black-and-white” (if you’ll pardon the irony) way of categorizing people. Bad or good people are fictional. Even the best of us have ugly parts to how we behave, and otherwise terrible people can show surprising compassion. Our values can conflict and in the moment we chose to do something wildly out of character, or indulge in impulses we didn’t even realize we had.
In the real world there are no absolute heroes or villains. A man who gave his boots to a homeless man one moment, could beat another to death a few months later. Human beings are wildly inconsistent.
In terms of actual theoretical frameworks? Libertarianism is highly individualistic, anarchism is highly collectivist. Extreme libertariansim can be described as “Every man for himself” and anarchism as open ended, reciprocal (as opposed to transactional) community.
So, most billionaires just sit on unrealized assets and take out loans against them that are untaxable. This way they avoid capital gains taxes from spending down their assets, as long as they never sell them, they never have to pay taxes and can sit on them until they die. Then it’s their kid’s problem. If you put a tax on those loans that exceeds capital gains tax, now they’re losing money by living off loans, and they’re actually better off selling some shares and stock options to pay for their Bugatti and super yacht.
The foreign investment profits tax means if they skip town and try collecting income from the companies they own from a beach in the Cayman islands, (or a brothel in Thailand) they are still paying tax on it before that money leaves the local market. That’s going to cool off the market for foreign investment but it’s also going to mean that even if they skip town, they can’t dodge the taxes on income from domestic businesses.
That’s going to take a lot of math and market analysis to work out the specifics of. I’m just one rando on the internet. This was more of a high level framework to start from. With a team of wonks and a bit of time you could pin down precise numbers.
The specifics are going to need refinement, yes. The broad principles should hold though. One tax that forces them to spend down accumulated wealth, one to punish trying to offshore profits to tax havens.
As an elder millenial I might have some insight. You know how when we were kids people used to get all up in their feelings when you weren’t smiling. That’s this. “Gen Z stare”, is just “Resting Bitch Face” or “You look prettier when you smile darlin’” repackaged and rebranded. They’re mad that the young people in general and women in particular aren’t running around with goofy forced smiles on their faces to make them feel special.
Two prongs. One, tax loans against stock options and publicly traded shares. Two tax foreign investment dividends that constitute more than 10% of the total value of a publicly traded company. Step one makes them live off of dividends and realized assets. They can’t live off other loans of other people’s money and just keep hording assets, two pins them down and keeps them from trying to take their money and run to a tax haven.
They will eventually find a way around those, and you will have to adjust the tax code to accomodate, but that’s going to be true regardless. It’s a bit like digital hygene and cyber security. An endless arms race between states trying to build more effective risk management tools and people trying to exploit and the system and thus the people living within the system.
Advertising itself is deeply offensive and morally contemptible. Every ad I see for a company lowers my opinion of them, so no, I don’t think it’s a good idea or worth putting effort in to.
Significant portions of the demographic you identified don’t realize New Mexico is in the US, and couldn’t find Canada on a map, and you’re expecting them to realize there’s more countries than just Mexico to the south?
Think of it in terms of video games. Soft-launch is like an Early Access game. It’s very explicitly not feature complete, lacks the refinement of a finished product, and exists as a kind of crowdsourced quality assurance tool to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and gauge the opinion of people who aren’t professional developers who may have biases and blind spots as someone who understands the product at a deep level. A soft launch usually has minimal if any marketing done, and explicitly targets people with special interest in the product, while the hard launch is the polished final product and gets a much wider marketing push.
The word professional is so ambiguous as to be effectively meaningless, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to its original definition.
No one but the most shallow and superficial among us cares what you’re wearing. Thinking a suit does anything but make you look self-important and pretentious is an anachronism.