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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • The key is to skip all the YouTube and instagram-ready blogger posts that turn journal decoration into a hobby. Just read Carroll’s book, jump in, and pretend they don’t exist.

    If you can’t handle the read for whatever reason and HAVE to get it from video and blog posts, what you’re looking for is now called a “minimalist” bullet journal. Even then, you’ve still got a decent chance they’re going to add distractions that will make it distracting and harder to sustain.



  • In this case, the United States. When healthcare is expensive and hard to access, not everybody gets it.

    Syphilis symptoms can be so mild they go unnoticed. When you combine that with risky sexual behavior (hook-up culture, anti-condom bias) and lack of testing due to inadequate medical care, you can wind up with untreated syphilis. If you become homeless, care gets even harder to access.

    You get diagnosed at a late stage when treatment is more difficult. They put you on a treatment plan, but followup depends on reliable transportation and the mental effects of the disease have made you paranoid. Now imagine you’re also a member of a minority on which medical experiments have historically been done without consent or notice.

    You don’t really trust that those pills are for what you’ve been told at all. So difficulty accessing healthcare, changing clinics as you move around with medical history not always keeping up, distrust of the providers and treatment, and general instability and lack of regular routine all add up to only taking your medication inconsistently.

    Result: under-treated syphilis









  • It isn’t a defense at all. You said you didn’t understand. Abused people (or peoples) becoming abusive in turn is a common process, and that phrase is commonly used in such a way that searching on it will reveal many studies of the process, and what has been tried (successfully and unsuccessfully) to short-circuit it.

    Understanding is not absolution, though. You can both see how the genocide of Jews led to fears, politics, and colonial interventions that contributed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and also condemn that genocide and those perpetrating it (which I absolutely do). But not understanding the motivations makes any problem easier to effectively resist or solve, as you can use that knowledge to determine where and how to apply pressure and create a lasting rather than a temporary change.






  • I was skeptical of your numbers, so I did the math:

    Taking the first article I found newer than 2022, US billionaires have about $6.22 trillion of wealth ± recent stock market changes. UBI of $1000/month is most commonly estimated to cost $4 trillion/year.

    US budget in 2024 was 6.8 trillion, but 1.87 trillion is in social security and income security programs UBI would replace, so the net change would raise the budget by 2.17 trillion to 8.39T. So 8.896 months - more like nine months than eight, but surprisingly close.

    Of course, that assumes all other taxes are wiped out, which nobody has ever proposed. I can’t find a number anywhere for total income tax paid by billionaires, so we’ll be generous. OMB estimates billionaires pay an average tax rate of only 8.2%. Their wealth increased 2.9 trillion over 7 years, so ignore compounding and call it 414B/yr. And pretend it’s all taxed (which it isn’t - most isn’t considered income). That’s 33.9B in income taxes the IRS doesn’t collect after wiping out the billionaires. That reduces IRS revenues collected from 5.1T to 5.06T (being generous again with the rounding). That buys us another 7 months of government funding.

    Alternatively, doubling the effective tax rate on the top 1% earning over 3.3M/yr from 26.09% to 52.18% would balance the budget including the new UBI. Get the effective tax rate on billionaires to match and you can start paying off the national debt. All without touching the middle class or even lowering anyone’s income below 1.65M/yr.

    Don’t get me wrong - taxing billionaires out of existence is certainly a moral imperative - it just isn’t necessary to fund UBI.


  • We had one, but there was a schism over the location of the Brunswick Shrine. That kicked off a round of mutual excommunications. By the time it was over, the mod had accidentally excommunicated (blocked) themself and everyone else had blocked each other.

    So start one! Or five! May a thousand communities bicker for the greater glory of Eris Discordia. Kallisti!