Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but it reminds me of Kassandra who was cursed by Apollo and destined to tell everyone true prophesies, but nobody would ever believe her.

She foresaw the fall of Troy and tried to warn everyone, but was ignored and forced to watch the city’s downfall.

Why does this need 3 mariadb containers?

My IT teacher from high school put a major emphasis on online privacy.

He thinks the internet is a major threat to individual freedom and while it brings benefits, the negative effects are too big for him.

While I don’t agree with the last statement, I do think privacy is very much under attack nowadays and while I am not very concerned what other people and corporations know about me, I still care about privacy simply because I have the right to do so and because if I don’t pay attention, a dozen different trackers will know what I have done without me granting permission.

Corporations basically take advantage of people and give nothing in return and that is bad imo.

18M.

I started replacing big tech stuff last year, and I have bought a Murena Fairphone 4 with degoogled /e/OS.

I guess my primary reason is just my natural interest in tinkering with digital stuff and trying out new technologies. Besides that, I don’t like Snapchat, Facebook or Twitter, and I’m trying to get rid of Reddit as well.

then all other players must be cutting a lot of corners

I mean, I’m pretty sure other phone companies use child labor to harvest the raw materials necessary to produce their devices, so yeah, they are screwing over tons of people.

The default Fairphone OS has Google and a bunch of other trackers.

For a good privacy friendly Fairphone, you should get the Murena Fairphone (they preinstalled DeGoogled /e/OS)

No, but there is a public Lemmy repo containing the code for the Lemmy server. Any PRS in that repo contribute to the overall experience of Lemmy. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Maybe check out open subtitles?

Besides that, in my experience movies with foreign languages usually have the subtitles embedded in the file itself (usually as ASS / SSA format), so maybe try to download movies with embedded subtitles.

Yeah, we can support by making useful PRs and fixing bugs. Unfortunately, I don’t know Rust, so I’ll have to look into that first.

NL is looking into donating 42 F16’s which is literally every F16 they have. To be fair, they won’t really be missed, because they were already phased out due to the new F35 models that are mainly used.

While any aid is good aid IMO, I do wonder how much will this contribute to the liberation of Eastern Ukraine? I mean, 61 isn’t that much right?

My setup:

Jellyfin for the frontend. Has apps for android, iOS, windows, android TV, bunch of other platforms as well…

Deluge as torrent downloader. It’s old, but it just works without the (in my opinion) complicated configurations of qbittorrent.

Prowlarr to search a bunch of sites simultaneously for torrents.

Radarr to add movies, search them with Prowlarr and add the best torrent to deluge, eventually moving the downloaded content to Jellyfin to view.

Sonarr to do the same as Radarr but for TV shows instead.

Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Zero Dawn are both fantastic games with an emotional storyline.

This is actually what makes land special compared to almost every other good. The supply of land is perfectly inelastic, i.e., you cannot create nor destroy land

Don’t say that to the Netherlands lol (they’ve created an entire province from the sea)

while the demand for land is merely regularly inelastic. If land prices are high, people can do things like move back in with their parents, move in with roommates, sell their car to not need to pay for parking (parking takes up land), etc. Because the supply is perfectly inelastic and the demand not perfectly inelastic is why, in theory, land value taxes cannot be passed on to tenants. This is borne out in practice, as well. This site describes far better than I can about the empirical evidence for this: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants.

This does sound very intriguing, and I think you (and your source!) are right. The tenants / property owners are already applying the highest possible prices on their renters, and can therefore not afford to increase prices (because it leads to customer loss). Simultaneously, the property owners can’t afford to NOT have any renters, because they will lose money. (This only applies if the LVT is higher than the increase of their land’s value). This therefore ensures that the land owner will have affordable prices :D.

I’d be hesitant towards some of these because capital investments are still productive.

All capital investments? If I buy Apple stock from you, I wait for the market price to increase and then sell it again. What have I contributed by doing this? I have not invested directly into a company (I bought the share from you, not from Apple itself) nor have I solved world hunger. I simply spent money, waited a bit and then earned more money. I feel like these kind of useless profits should be taxed; additionally, any dividend should be taxed as well, because in an ideal world, the profits would be invested back into the company, which leads to more innovation and an increase in wages.

One example of a capital investment is my education. My degrees cost quite a bit of time and money and opportunity cost, and the higher wages I now earn because of my higher labor productivity are the reward for spending time and money and forgoing income investing in my own education.

I think you’re talking about (human capital)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital], and I agree with this. This is also the reason why public education is free (despite being quite expensive). Additionally, I feel like all student loans should be with 0% interest, for this specific reason.

As a general principle, I think people ought to either be doing productive labor themselves, or at least investing their money into generating new wealth.

Do people always have to generate more wealth? Can’t they just be content with having some wealth and live happily ever after with their wealth, without the perpetuating need to create more? I feel like this is the kind of mindset billionaires have; when they have 100 billion dollars, they aren’t satisfied, because they could have 101 billion dollars. And when they got 101 billion, they’ll go for the 102 billion, etc.

I’d rather see investments in factories and education than in land speculation. My inclination would generally be to tax land, externalities, and severance first, and then see if more is necessary beyond that.

What other things wuold you tax besides land, negative external effects and severances?

Part of why is, as Stiglitz showed, LVT is the only tax necessary to fund all government expenditures, and LVT is a uniquely elegant tax: it’s basically impossible to evade, remarkably easy to calculate and administer, and requires only tracking who owns what land (something we already do) as opposed to tracking every single individual’s private financials (much more complex and invasive, imo).

I just spent some time thinking on how to evade land taxes, and I can’t think of anything. However, I’m pretty sure that somewhere out there, there’s a genius tax evader who will think of some way to cheat their way out of paying taxes; even the land value taxes.

In a perfect world, yes, all externalities would be taxed, but practically it would be incredibly hard to tax all. Like I’m sure the engagement-driven algorithms of most mainstream social media have some bad externalities, but those are extremely hard to quantify and tax without having unintended side effect. Carbon is easier to quantify and tax, however, Same with nitrogen fertilizers (nitrogen pollution), PFAS pollutants, plastic pollution, etc. Regarding addictive behaviors/substances like tobacco and sugar, I probably would want a Pigouvian tax on them. However, the addictive nature of them means that more complex policy would likely be necessary to actually dissuade smoking. An added sugars tax might be a good way to combat the epidemic of adding sugars (in all their forms) to anything and everything. Part of the reason manufacturers add them is because they’re a dirt cheap way to easily make junk food taste better to the average person.

It may be difficult, but with enough bureaucracy and a functioning IRS, it should be possible. But besides that, I guess you have a point there and to combat addictive behaviors, people will certainly need more than a new tax policy.

Yes, this would be borne out in significantly higher prices paid at the pump for their fuel. It would, however, incentivize people to find more carbon-efficient ways to live their lives. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is both environmentally and fiscally unsustainable as it is, and our economy would be improved by using more micromobility, walking, and transit. Of course, a big part of enabling this would be by abolishing restrictive zoning and parking minimums. At least in North America, it’s literally illegal to build dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods on the vast majority of urban land, and nearly every single city has outdated, pseudoscientific parking minimum laws that dictate arbitrary minimum amounts of parking for businesses and housing. If we simply made it actually legal to make denser communities, people simply wouldn’t need an expensive, polluting car and tons of city real estate wasted on car storage just to do things like get groceries or go to school/work. Also considering the average annual cost of car ownership (including depreciation) is something like $10k, car-dependency creates a huge barrier to entry for people trying to access good jobs and schools to escape poverty.

You’re right; the infrastructure in the US is very car-based, which is unfortunate. In Europe (where I live), we can walk from place to place and the public transport is generally sufficient to move around (at least, for me). However, to make the switch from car-dependent infrastructure to dense, walkable infrastructure does cost a lot of money and how would that be financed? Could everything be financed by the LVT, pigouvian and severance taxes? Also, to add to your idea, I think more comprehensive and free public transport would also be a huge way to convince people to use a train instead of a car. Also add more bicycle lanes as well, for the shorter distances (< 20km).

Yes, but it depends on the goods. Land value taxes (and lifting onerous land use regulations like parking minimums and exclusionary zoning) have been shown to reduce stabilize and reduce housing costs. LVT by incentivizing more development and cooling speculative pressure on land prices and the others by allowing more supply to be, well, supplied. Reducing land prices can vastly reduce the barriers to entry for many businesses, who could help increase overall supply in other sectors of the economy. Plus, if overall purchasing power goes up, who’s to say supply for ordinary goods won’t go up as well? In the short term there may be an adjustment period, but it’s not like I’d recommend switching to all LVT, no income taxes overnight; I’d want a phase-in period to give society time to adjust and plan around the coming changes.

I’ve spent 10min staring at this, to come up with something that can debunk this, but I can’t come up with anything hahaha. I think you’re right here, yeah.

While replying to this comment, I came up with another thing: What if someone, who owns a house and lives in it, becomes unemployed? I mean, every landowner will have to pay land value taxes, and I assume these taxes won’t be temporarily cancelled. If someone suddenly becomes unemployed (maybe a recession or an accident which resulted in a lost limb?), they won’t have a stable income anymore and if they don’t have any saved money, they will be unable to pay LVT. What’s going to happen in this situation? While the LVT certainly does have advantages to distribute wealth more equally across society, this does seem like a problem for the poor, right? I mean, a rich person has plenty of saved money and will be able to pay LVT, but a poor person doesn’t.

Something else that came to mind was when will the LVT be paid? Is it paid annually, monthly, or is it paid when the landowner dies? If it’s paid annually or monthly, then it could be very hard for poor people with small plots of land to pay the LVT. Also, what kind of percentage of the land value would the tax be? 10%? 20%?

P.S. I love this interaction lol, because it forces me to think about economics and market mechanics, which is always pretty interesting to analyze and think about. Thank you for this :D

Wait is this real?

Wow, really interesting post, thanks for this OP.

Some thoughts:

• According to one of your comments, the LVT won’t be passed on to the renters, because the supply of land doesn’t change and the land owner is already charging the maximum price the market can bear. This would be true in theory, but we’re talking about an essential good here. Land is something people will eventually need, otherwise they’ll be homeless. This is also called an ‘inelastic’ product, because the demand for the product won’t change a lot if the prices change. The same applies for food; if a piece of bread costs $1, maybe there is a demand of 10 million in a country, and if the same piece of bread is suddenly $10,000, the demand stays the same, because people will starve without it.
• In the original post, you say that you want to tax unproductive ways of earning money (such as owning land). What about financial securities? Things such as shares (as long as they’re not bought from the company directly), bonds, stock dividends, etc. Maybe also tax stock buybacks, as they’re often (ab)used to create artificial scarcity and increase the stock value (aka increasing profits for shareholders).
• with ‘negative externalities’ do you mean everything that has a negative external impact? Obviously carbon emission is an example, but what about something like smoking? When people smoke, they have a higher chance of getting lung cancer, therefore putting a higher burden on our healthcare system and additionally potentially negatively influencing others who have accidentally inhaled the smoke caused by the smoker. Would you tax this?
• Would you also tax owners of cars that use petrol / diesel instead of electricity? They also produce carbon emissions. A negative thing is that logistics can become very expensive with such a tax and additionally lots of people use the car to do something productive (such as going to work or school), in which case their productivity is kind of taxed, because their productivity is producing co2 emissions.
• Getting rid of income taxes obviously increases the amount of money people can spend, which will probably increase the demand for goods. When demand increases, but the supply doesn’t, there will be a higher inflation, which will negatively impact people who have less money (or are dependent on government welfare and are unemployed).

Now that I have typed all of this, I feel like a lot of these points can be solved by government spending (for example, provide people with free public transport, so they no longer have to use the car to get to work, increase the unemployment benefits based on the inflation index), but I’m still commenting this lol

Edit: BTW, the constitutions are generally written by rich men. So it’s not really surprising to see how the system that they have designed are beneficial towards the rich. I mean, the idea that I can have $10, invest it, wait for a while, and suddenly have $20 without actually putting in any effort is kinda dystopian to think about, because it favours the rich by having exponential growth of capital.

This differs per server. Some servers have more bandwidth and have better speed, while other servers have worse speeds.

Yup, and in the Netherlands the main train company is planning to make it even more expensive on purpose, in order to discourage people from taking the train.

Inflation occurs when the value of goods increase. This can mainly be caused by two things: An increase in consumption or an increase of production costs, which causes the vendor to increase prices in order to maintain profits.

Deflation would occur when the opposite happens, aka when the value of goods decrease. This can be caused by things such as new technological improvements (old hardware has become cheaper, because new hardware has been released and the older hardware is no longer state-of-the-art), a reduction in consumption or a reduction in production costs. Perhaps I’ve missed a few cases, but these are the main things I can currently think of.

Anyway, while deflation is generally useful for consumers (they have to pay less), it’s not very good for borrowers. Let’s take a mortgage for a house, for example. You want to buy a house for €200k and have a mortgage of €200k that will cover the house. If something bad happens to you financially (for example, you lose your job), you may end up in a situation where you’ll no longer be able to pay off your mortgage. Shit happens right? Usually, the bank would take control of your house, sell your house for €200k and use the revenue from the house to pay off your mortgage.

However, if deflation has occurred and your house is no longer worth €200k, but €150k, you still have €50k to pay off to your bank, after the bank has sold your house. Simultaneously, you’re unemployed, so how are you going to do that? If you declare bankruptcy, you will no longer have to pay off your debts and the bank has lost €50k.

Besides this, deflation can also be a symptom of something worse happening, such as high unemployment rates and a decrease in consumption, for example. When more people get unemployed, people will spend less, which reduces demand, which leads to a decrease of prices.

I’ve been degoogled for a little bit over a year now and here’s what I use (disclaimer: I own a NAS / homserver, so I got a little bit more options than most people would).

• Android OS: /e/OS
• Browser: Firefox and Bromite
• Maps: Organic Maps
• Play Store: F-Droid (droidify client in my case) and App Lounge.
• YouTube: Libretube (privacy-friendly YouTube client)
• Translation: DeepL
• Movies, TV Shows, Music: self-hosted Jellyfin
• Automatic backup of my images and videos: self-hosted Immich
• VPN server: self-hosted Wireguard server
• Document management: self-hosted Nextcloud Office + LibreOffice on my PC
• E-Mail service: ProtonMail (self-hosting this is a pain in the ass, so I’ll just leave it to experts)
• Search engine: DuckDuckGo

Check out !selfhosted@lemmy.world for tons of stuff on self-hosting services and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ for a lot of other good alternatives.