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Did you pay your taxes? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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Related: Robert Reich posted earlier today that Tesla paid ZERO taxes on $5 billion in sales (earnings?), so that’s just fucking great.

Microblog post saying “so funny how the US govt desperately needs 25% of the $2500 I made on a small creative project, but won't tax any of jeff bezos $239.4 billion”
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[–] 26 points 9 months ago (8 children)

"We have a finite environment - the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist". ~ Sir David Attenborough

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Couldn't they also be a mathematician? The Pointcarré recurrence theorem is a good example of infinite rate in a fixed dimensional space. Also, that quote really oversimplifies environmental engineering, the ozone layer has been fixed by the kyoto convention because every person with the simplest understanding of the carbon cycle can understand why the earth has been able to sustain ressource consumption for all animals and can still do so for a very long time still, infinitely or not.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Ozone was fixed because the cost of shifting to a different gas was economically viable for largely Western countries.

    The Montreal protocol was still impressive though as something that many countries could agree on without it becoming political. Ah, simpler times.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Haha, i agree, and thank you for the correction, my memory is not what it used to be, the montreal protocol did fix the ozone layer problem, the kyoto protocol adressed different issues, my error. Hopefully common sense will shift regarding the assumption that nuclear energy is bad, in my view, it is the only way to sustain humankind as we move past the recent start of the fifth industrial revolution. Humanists like Marx, Keynes and Rifkin seem to agree that the hopeful (and paradoxially very unlikely) sixth will be the death of work but I still have to see how things advance before I start believing into it.

    China has shown a lot of promise thus far with their carbon reduction and development of small scale nuclear reactors, and hopefully someone will fix the fission theory someday. And concerning the simpler times, things are strange indeed in the future we live.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    IMHO mathematicians go into the madman category.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Obligatory

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    At times when we cannot understand the causality of a problem, it is better to acknowledge what we know, and more importantly, what we do not know rather than to create narratives from ignorance. I hope that my words will find you in a tone of compassion, not as an attempt to be classist or make you think that your grasp of reality is not valid.

    Rest, and relax, math is not the issue here, the problem is ignorance. What you have just posted a tribalistic fallacy believing that things are simple, us vs them and the system being akin to big brother, this is a normal human behavior that some describe as Projective Identification. Nature is more complex than we think and so is a reality in which over 8 000 000 000 exist, and all pitch in to the pool of what the future will always carry back to us. Wether positive or negative.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    economic growth isn't necessarily material growth.

    there is no material limit on how much code I can write. or the books i can sell digitally.

    the economy can grow with less resource use, and really it has compared to history. agriculture is far less resource intensive than it used to be due to improvements and far more economically productive.

    that's what progress is and why productivity continues to skyrocket. we can do way more with far less.

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