ObjectivityIncarnate

people who interpret “no ethical consumption under capitalism” as a license to do whatever they want, because it’s all unethical.

Have you actually encountered someone who did this? Everyone I’ve ever known of who was in the ‘do whatever they want’ mindset, certainly wasn’t because of how they interpreted that ‘slogan’, it was just because they don’t give a shit to begin with—they almost certainly had never even heard it before.

I remember the joke that Microsoft called it that deliberately so that if people wrote “I hate ME” it wouldn’t sound like they were trashing the OS.

You thought that because the headline is pretty deliberately misleading. Clickbait trash.

The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.

So you admit the headline is lying, then? The headline doesn’t even try to use weasel words to say “some users”, it just straight-up says that the update removes things, heavily implying both that it’s a global change, and that it’s deliberate.

I feel like people have completely forgotten that Kamala was at like 3% when she bowed out of the primaries.

You mean the same Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) that Trump and Musk killed the enforcement of after a tweet? (Both billionaires, btw.)

Goalpost move, you said billionaires prevent those laws from passing. They passed. You lied. The end.

Are you arguing that a 1% excise tax limited to stock buybacks (even lower than the 2 and 3% I already argued won’t change the status quo) in any way counters [anything]?

Nope. A new tax that applies only to the wealthiest demographic successfully passing is just another refutation of your assertion that billionaires prevent legislation that affects them negatively from passing, and that’s the only reason I mentioned it. More desperate goalpost moves.

For every legal loophole that is closed

So you admit they do get closed. I thought billionaires never let detrimental legislation pass?

It would be convenient for you, if I were to suggest that, or any other argument you try to put in my mouth.

Behold, your words, verbatim:

When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.

Criminal charges isn’t a fucking conviction.

Nobody said it was, straw man builder. But the headline is deliberately misleading, and that’s what I was pointing out.

There is literally zero reason to cherry-pick specific cities when assessing ICE’s actions as a department.

What point are you trying to make about it being higher than the general population?

…that that demographic contains more than double the incidence of violent criminals than the general population. What else?

That they are doing ever so slightly better than arresting people at random?

The crime ICE is arresting people for is not a violent one, so this is a complete non-sequitur.

you just get loans against your static wealth at incredibly favorable interest rates.

It’s more than that, because the wealth of those who utilize loans this way typically isn’t static. It’s not about just getting a good rate, it’s that the assets they use as collateral appreciate in value at a rate higher than inflation and the interest rate combined, so in practice, the interest rate is literally negative. The price of having access to these loans is that their net worth just grows a bit more slowly as a result.

Of course, this only works as long as said assets continue to appreciate at that rate.

This would be funnier if it wasn’t so aggravatingly accurate, lol.

That headline works whether or not that C is capitalized, heh…

Ostensibly, at least.

With violent conviction: 7%

That’s a lot higher than the general population, isn’t it? Google says it’s 2-4% estimated (there’s apparently no explicit data collected on specifically violent convictions—there is for “felony” convictions, but there are a ton of non-violent felonies, so that’s pretty useless for this kind of comparison).

I also can’t help but notice that the article, especially the headline, is very careful to say “most” only about certain “city crackdowns”. According to the same chart in the article, among all ICE arrests across the US from Jan 20th to Oct 15th, only 33% had “No criminal charges”, which means 67% of them did have criminal charges. Pretty stark contrast to what the headline would like to imply, isn’t it?

Overall, pretty blatant cherry-picking. I hate that it’s so difficult to find media that will just present the facts without any spin.

There’s a large gap between disliking and wishing for death, lol

Despite the headline tax rate being over 90% in the 1950s, the federal government collects about 3 times more real revenue per person today (with a top rate of 37%) than it did then.

The only reason it was ever that high is because the tax code at that time was so full of loopholes/deductions/etc. (that are closed today) that you could have that be the rate with practically no one actually paying it.

What I’m trying to say is, don’t hold your breath for that to ever return in present day.

1. Irrelevant, as I never claimed such. I pointed out the lack of correlation between billionaires per capita increasing over time, and poverty over the same period of time. Not all correlation is causally linked, but all causally linked things are also necessarily correlated. But if two things are not correlated, then they can’t be causally linked, either (at least not to a statistically-significant degree that isn’t wiped out by other factors), and that’s what I pointed out.
2. So, by which financial measure would you say that working-class Americans in 1925 are doing better than they are in 2025, then? There must be at least one, if your assertion is correct.
3. Then that should make the question above, all the easier to answer.

Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.

Are you seriously suggesting that legislation that is detrimental to billionaires never becomes law?

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, among other things, imposed an excise tax on stock buybacks, something that will literally never impact anyone who isn’t significantly wealthy, and that passed. A year before, the Corporate Transparency Act passed, and basically struck the death knell for shell company schemes, (not a whole lot of that happening among the working class, lol) by requiring “Beneficial Owners” to be reported to FinCEN, so they know who the actual human beings who own them are. Billionaires lost the ability to hide assets and real estate within anonymous LLCs.

It’s ridiculous to think that billionaires are all just smiting any and all legislation that would negatively impact them at will. You are clearly deep in some echo chambers.

Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation

I think you don’t understand what “correlation” means. The correlation is clearly and inarguably what I showed it to be: billionaires per capita went up as poverty went down. That’s a plain fact.

43% of the US living in poverty

I’m not going to bother examining how legitimate this stat is, because even if I just take this at face value, what is that compared to the 40-60% I cited? It still does nothing to support the point that billionaires are ‘holding the working class down’ to any statistically-significant degree. If we take the bottom of the range of the estimate I got, 40%, and took your figure as-is, 43%, then a 7x increase in billionaires per capita increased poverty by 3% total over 100 years! That stat takes “nothingburger” to a whole new level.

That doesn’t do much of anything to support the assertion that billionaires are ‘capping the lives of the working class’, when there being seven times more of them makes no statistically-significant difference in the poverty rate.

Not to mention that 1925 is in the midst of the roaring twenties, before the Great Depression, and your article was written a few years after a global pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s economy—two facts that both skew things in favor of your claim.

This is 10x more aligned with the smug, sanctimonious condescension of the “Reddit” stereotype than anything I’ve ever written. You’re projecting.

Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.

Trickle down economics is the argument that financial benefits given to the wealthiest will naturally make their way down to the rest, so there is no need to aid the impoverished directly.

There is literally nothing in what I said that suggests that course of action, at all. My talking about how taking direct action to eradicate poverty ought to be the top priority is literally the opposite of that. You’re full of it.

the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.

Billionaires (inflation-adjusted, of course) per capita in the US increased by about 7x compared to 100 years ago, while the percentage of the population living in poverty is 4-6x lower today than it was 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.

The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?

Concession accepted.