ObjectivityIncarnate

I did some digging, and the mastermind of the scheme Allen was involved in (who he helped investigators nail, one of the main reasons his sentence was reduced) was sentenced to 30 years. However, he was only forced to hand over a paltry $38.5 million, out of $3 billion?! Barely 10% of the defrauded amount!

Seems like it’d be pretty straightforward to, as a rule, penalize for the entire ‘profit’ of the fraud as a baseline, then you can add the fee (otherwise, you’d still just be breaking even if caught) on top of that.

Some things to consider, for those interested in objectivity:

• We have basically no background info on Roy Brown (the homeless guy), no idea about prior convictions etc. that may have influenced the sentencing. Bizarrely, the actual crime on the books in Louisiana, where he committed it, has a massive sentencing range, of 3 to 40 years. This seems to be the one and only primary source for this info at all. Also, his was a violent crime,^[1] which tend to carry harsher sentences compared to non-violent, regardless of the type of crime.
• Allen took one of those ‘help us fry the bigger fish and we’ll go easy on you’^[2] deals from investigators, and as a result, prosecutors weren’t even seeking anything close to 15 years. Said bigger fish got 30 years.
• The laws, including sentencing minimums etc., aren’t exactly the same in Virginia (Allen) and Lousiana (Brown).

P.S. The Snopes article on this is 15 years old, so imagine the age of the actual screenshot.

they’re easy to carry around

It doesn’t matter how easy they are to carry around, having to carry them around is by definition less convenient than not having to carry anything around.

your “argument” is entirely subjective.

You don’t know what “subjective” means. There’s nothing subjective about ‘having to carry this thing around all the time is less convenient than doing something once and being set for months/years’. That’s just a fact.

A batch of private GOP polling data obtained by Axios revealed that President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy is wildly unpopular with independent and undecided voters

Bullshit clickbait:

1. The headline is clearly trying to imply that Republicans are the ones not supporting the policy
2. No sign of Trump ‘panicking’ whatsoever

What an idiotic article, from the headline down.

Locally replacing some letters with some other letters is going to make Microsoft’s CEO cry? Really?

Also, I’ll not be using Chrome, lol.

“Would you wear a seatbelt if you knew you weren’t going to crash?”

I don’t know that. I don’t know the condom isn’t preventing anything.

Dude…It’s a hypothetical…the “whole point” is that people only use condoms (and seat belts) because they do something that the user needs done. That’s why people wear seat belts in their car, but not on their couch at home.

No one actually enjoys using condoms, and as soon as their functionality (contraception and/or STI prevention) isn’t needed, they’re ditched immediately. Just like how people don’t put on a seat belt when they’re getting into their car to sit stationary in their driveway and listen to music or something.

A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense.

It absolutely doesn’t make sense to charge a tax of real/actual money on a value that’s theoretical.

They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.

It’s irrational to assume “cheating the system to grossely [sic] exagerate [sic] the value of their companies” of every entity valued at more than an arbitrary $X.

For example, Costco is a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet it’s famous for how generous it is both to its customers and to its workforce. Its founder left the company a billionaire himself.

we can have them give shares as payment

“The stuff you own is now too valuable, so we get to steal it from you.”

No.

a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences.

Regulation that prevents the anti-competitive etc. behaviors directly, instead of trying to assess a roundabout ‘fine’ based on net worth (which also carries the implicit assumption that any entity that reaches the ‘cap’ does so unethically, which is absolutely not the case—for example, Costco is a company with a famous reputation for being generous to both its customer base and its workforce, and it’s valued at several hundred billion, its founder is a billionaire himself), is the best way to approach this, I think.

And honestly, if we’re at a point where the sources of the regulation are truly “captured”, then we’re also at a point where trying to deal with the above behaviors with a tax is even less likely to succeed. Fixing that ‘capture’ should be the primary focus in that case.

At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.

That’s not really what “zero-sum” means. What you’re describing is the company/entity becoming a net drain on the economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that wealth isn’t zero-sum. Being zero-sum would mean that it’s impossible for the grand total combined wealth among everyone to ever change, and therefore no one’s wealth can ever go up without someone else’s going down, or vice versa.

yeah but that’s a goalpost move because the topic is contraception, not STIs.

It’s also not even an argument, because there is no real “option” to compare condoms to re STIs at all, and the fact that they’re good for that takes nothing away from the main thing that makes them inconvenient, being “An object you have to physically carry around with you and have on your person in the moment every single time you have sex”.

I don’t know how else it would work.

That’s my point, actually. It doesn’t work in practice. Given that ultimately, it’s third parties that determine the value of things you own that are on the open market, placing hard limits like that would open the door to massive gaming of those systems. It’d also be practically impossible to enforce in any real way, as that would require an actual full audit (net worth figures you see in the media are educated guesses, not enough certainty for the application of law), during which the valuation of the assets in question can be manipulated downward in myriad ways.

The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps.

The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.

The two simply aren’t connected the way you assume they are, because wealth isn’t the zero-sum game you assume it is.

The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have.

Really take a moment to think about this concept. You own a thing that’s valuable to others. If it becomes too valuable (a threshold defined completely arbitrarily, by the way) to others, “society” no longer “permits” you to continue owning it?

In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes.

In other words, the government will literally steal your stuff if the public decides it’s more valuable than the amount the government arbitrarily decided is too much?

the government gets tax money to fund social programs

Extremely wishful thinking. You’re actually more likely to net a loss of tax revenue overall attempting this, as people nearing the cap will rearrange their assets to avoid going over the cap, so no new revenue will be coming in, meanwhile the logistic cost of even determining whether someone is over the cap is certainly going to cost much more taxpayer money than what is brought in (which, again, is most likely to be literally zero or very close to it).

There is a reason that every country that’s previously attempted a policy like this aimed at the wealthiest has either since repealed it, or changed it such that it no longer targets the wealthiest (i.e. a ‘wealth tax’ that the middle class is made to pay as well). I’m interested in learning from their mistakes, not repeating them.

Not sure how well all that would work in practice

That’s for sure.

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It’s one of those things that’s beneficial but not profitable (like the postal service), and therefore a ‘service’ that the government should be providing with tax revenue, imo.

You’re missing my point, which I thought was clear, but add “when the condom is not preventing anything” to the end of the bit you quoted to clarify it.

My point is that, unless you have a good reason to do it (the source of the “sense of safety” and the prevention of the “paranoia”, described above), you’re obviously not going to do it.

If your partner is infertile, and you know that both of you have no STIs, neither of you are going to want to use a condom. Condoms are used because they’re needed, not because they’re wanted.

You obviously have very strong opinions about this.

It’s not an opinion, that is the only responsible and ethical way to go about it.

Medical standards, such as those from the American Urological Association (AUA), explicitly state that a vasectomy should be counseled as a permanent procedure. Using its potential reversibility as an incentive to persuade a hesitant patient is generally considered a breach of the standard of care.

Also something that’s rarely considered: while vasectomies are often covered by insurance, vasectomy reversal very rarely is, and can cost over $10,000 out of pocket, in the US at least.

‘I can always reverse it’ should not ever be a factor in one’s decision to get a vasectomy, nor would any ethical doctor say anything along those lines.

Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes

You don’t understand where the vast majority of the wealthiest’s wealth comes from. There’s no “income” or “gift” at that level, it’s just the fact that they own things that are becoming more valuable over time. The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.

Speaking of value: net worth is just a valuation, a price tag. It’s the market saying “I would pay you $X for a share of this if you sold it”. If I buy a rookie baseball card for $5 and the player becomes famous for whatever reason and my card is now worth $100 because the demand significantly increased, my net worth increased by $95, but no one was deprived of $95 to make that so.

A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore. And any sensible person should understand why that makes zero sense.

Corrected to nearly 46%, with source. 🫠

Those are similar to if not precisely the circumstances under which the majority of unplanned pregnancies happen, and nearly 46% of all pregnancies are unplanned.

Lots and lots of people are just horny idiots who are really bad at considering the potential long-term consequences of their short-term actions.

I can’t speak for everyone in my gender, but I’ve rarely found an issue with them.

Not what I said, though. Do you prefer sex with a condom to sex without? If not, you align with what I said.

Especially early in a relationship, they were always bog standard for me.

That’s obviously in the “good reason” category. Also agrees with the other part of my sentence, as tons of short-sighted people forgo them altogether, including one-night stands with strangers.

An object you have to physically carry around with you and have on your person in the moment every single time you have sex, versus things like:

• a pill that, while needing to take it daily, leaves you protected at all times, you don’t need it on hand at the time of the sexual encounter. And most pills aren’t even that strict about what time you take it each day, as long as it’s around the same time every day
• a vaginal ring that only needs to be swapped out once a month (and can safely be removed for a few hours during sex itself without losing efficacy, if desired)
• an injection that lasts 3 months
• an arm implant that can last 5 years once inserted, depending on type
• an IUD that can last for over a decade once inserted, depending on type

Condoms are far less convenient than any of these.

You can have it reversed within ~6 years and regain a high percentage of fertility.

No responsible doctor will recommend you get a vasectomy under the assumption that you’ll be able to reverse it if you change your mind.

It is not meant to be reversed. You should only do it with the expectation that it’s permanent; it’s supposed to be permanent.