UnderpantsWeevil

Billionaires don't have taxable income because they've successfully lobbied for carve outs that exempt them from taxation.

That's what makes a wealth tax impractical. How do you pass it through a Congress that's been wholely co-opted by a billionaire friendly caucus?

Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from Wall Street, isn't going to author a wealth tax. Kamala Harris, the former Senator from Silicon Valley isn't going to sign it. And the SCOTUS majority that's on the Harlan Crow payroll isn't going to uphold it.

He realizes this every couple of years and then he forgets again during the next shareholders meeting

The infamous examples of $500 hammers, for example, were anti sparking hammers for working around flammables or munitions, hence requiring special materials, certification, and low production runs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Commission

I'm not one to praise Reagan, but the Packard Commission picked off some incredibly low hanging fruit. The $435 hammer ($1235 adjusted for inflation) was a boondoggle by any standard. That it was overcharged by a factor of 2-3x instead of the sloppy journalism implying a 100x markup doesn't refute the fact that these contracts were corrupt on their face.

While a soap dispenser having an 80x markup seems absurd, it might be more reasonable than it seems at first glance.

Either the equipment could be purchased wholesale much cheaper (as was often the case even for industrial grade goods) or the production should have been insourced to the department that had a bespoke demand.

The fact that Boeing exists at all is absurd, given the degree to which government monopsony and security concerns force them to act as a department within the public sector. But the extortionary rates illustrate the fraud that is the reason these public-private relationships exist.

If you're part of a caste system, you don't have to be at the top to endorse it. We saw this play out in South Africa during apartheid to devastating effect for decades.

Building increasingly narrow traunches of hierarchy guarantees nearly everyone will have someone else they can bully. White women might be subhuman relative to white men, but they're ubermensch compared to pocs, foreigners, and white children.

They do not respect you or your bodily autonomy.

They see you as fulfilling a particular role and revile you for failing to fulfill that role. For all the noise about individual liberties, conservatives are just as collectivist as the rest of us when it comes time to talk about honor and obligation. The only question is what obligations are due and to whom.

They’re rigged because, uh, um

Party Control of Party Primaries: Party Influence in Nominations for the US Senate

Using a simple and easily understood measure of party support, I show that candidates who are less connected to the party are less likely to win and also less likely to remain a candidate in the primary. I find that parties not only are effective in helping candidates win but also are influential in excluding certain electoral options from being presented to primary voters.

This is how black people in the south managed the Democratic party; by voting for the least racist Democrats in the primaries

The black voter enjoyed a heavy Republican bias for nearly a century, and suffered much of the same treatment (GOP treated them as a captured constituency, Dixiecrats suppressed their turnout with fraud, incarceration, and terrorism).

By Kennedy, the northern Dems were embracing civil rights not as an electoral strategy but a labor organizing strategy. The vote was largely split, with black voters biasing by party in individual regions rather than as a national block.

It wasn't into Clinton - when Southern Strategy Repubs had fully purged their party of black voters - that the trend was fully reversed. That wasn't a decision by the NAACP or the median black voter. It was a Nixonian gambit. Black voters were viewed as a handicap. Appealing to fascism was how you obtained a majority in American politics.

Reagan, the Bushs, and then Trump seemed to further this theory. You'll get two white voters for every black voter you lose, by being the most racist candidate in the ticket.

Cities are about to get raided by hillbillies & rednecks

I've got some terrible news for you, about the political contingent common to plenty of big cities. It won't be hillbillies and rednecks tearing shit up. It'll be city cops, state troopers, and the deranged failsons of used car dealers.

They don't need to be paid now. They can get fast-tracked onto the federal courts later.

the entire clone war era was a government that had become largely pacifist and demilitarized

The Jedi were plenty militant as needed. And the drone armies of the Trade Republic were clearly in regular production and use. Then you had the Mandalorian Wars, which had left the Galaxy with a sizeable contingent of heavily armed and armored vagrant mercenaries. And the Outer Rim continued to be a shit-show all through the Republic Era. Hell, the Gungans had (relatively) advanced planetside military.

I don't see anything in the Star Wars cannon to suggest the Republic was pacifist. What fueled the Clone War was simply the outward facing private militaries and commandos and space wizard super-soldiers coming back to the imperial core to duke it out on home turf.

leaving them scrambling and reliant on Palatine’s indoctrinated space cops

Which were pitted against Dooku's army of literal killer robots (which Palpatine also helped commission and field).

"Ah, but if there had just been a third standing army!" doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem was, at its heart, the endless ratcheting of tensions and the failure of the Jedi (specifically Obi Wan and Anakin) to achieve a ceasefire, acceptable terms for surrender, and a new peace.

Jedi wouldn't have been embedded in crowds of space cops to begin with if they hadn't been trapped in a spiraling expansive endless war that collapsed democratic rule and created the Imperial Galactic State.

Oh sure. You can buy tannerite explosives as part of a gender reveal kit, ffs. But, like with any kind of fireworks or similar explosive materials, there are risks to improper transportation and use.

You can buy firecrackers from stales on the side of the road in some states. But people injure themselves with firecrackers all the time.

Detonators are difficult to build and transport. In a high risk activity, like domestic terrorism, the offender has a bias towards getting the thing to work and away from personal safety. This compounds the risk of accidents.

And that's before you get into the process of milling the combustion material. Which, again, not great for your long term health if you're just trying to hack it in your garage or kitchen.

You see I do have rights, and that’s something Americans are about to lose.

I've seen this dogged insistence that Americans have rights but an election can take them away and all I can think of is the Iraq War Protesters, the OWS protesters, the Climate Change protesters, the Pro-Choice activists, LGBT activists, and the anti-Genocide protesters who have all seen police action against them.

You're not about to lose your rights. You're simply going to be subjected to a level of enforcement traditionally reserved for ethnic, religious, social minorities, labor organizers, and other broadly defined "Leftists".

And chosing between two evils is a bad position to be in, but they can still chose.

The choice is an illusion in a system as degraded as the American democracy. Even at the most superficial level, you're telling people they have a choice of who to support when the Electoral College clearly denies them this privilege. If you live in Texas, you'll be counted as a Trump supporter whether you are or not. If you live in California, you're counted to Harris. The swing states are exactly that - all or nothing. Individual voices don't matter.

And that's before you get into the decades of legalized disenfranchisement, vote caging, and voter intimidation that have shaped the results in states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Florida has the single largest number of disenfranchised voters - 1.1M people, roughly 1 in 14 eligible voters. They are legally disqualified from casting a ballot in the state, overwhelmingly biased against ethnicity. Then you've got places like DC and Puerto Rico, which are fully disenfranchised at the Congressional level and only tangentially represented in the EC, via ex-pat voters and the 23rd amendment.

This isn't lesser of two evils, its a ratchet. Dems backstop progress with legalistic delays and poor leadership. GOPs ram ahead in direct violation of law and precedent, then face no consequences other than a brief sabbatical from high office during wave years. The end result is a consistent march towards fascism.