Good idea, but then let’s get rid of the concept of retirement too.

That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately

Yes, because your wages go to said retirees. Who do you think owns all the companies not increasing your wages?

The rich in this case == old people. People over 55 own 73% of the US. Billionaires don’t come close to the wealth of boomers. In countries with national pensions they just do it via taxation, in the US it’s via retirement funds invested in the companies abusing workers.

People don’t seem to get that everything has a cost in human labor to it and if you want people to continue enjoying the benefits of what is actually a pretty good economy all things considered, there need to be enough workers. If there are not enough workers, you can’t have retirement anymore. In fact, a few decades from now we’ll have to get rid of retirement as a concept unless we want actual slavery.

Oh no, not just stagnant GDP. Stagnant/decreasing GDP per capita. The absolute GDP is down even more.

Literally the opposite of what’s being talked about? The issue is people aren’t having enough kids and our economic system is predicated on there being enough people working to support those who don’t work (kids, retirees, disabled people). Over the coming decades, we won’t have enough people for all the people who need to be supported.

Raising wages fucks the people trying to retire because their stock holdings lose value. It’ll have to be slavery if you want to continue having retirement as a thing. Ideally colonialism + slavery, just import slaves from countries still experiencing population growth, such as many African ones…

Wait I think something about this idea might be problematic

Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we’ll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it’s really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).

Well they mostly have crossovers these days, like everyone else. No big SUVs, but then that could be said of most European marques other than the Germans, Volvo and Land Rover. Even the current Espace is a crossover rather than an MPV like the first 5 generations

Taxes on cigarettes are higher than taxes on pouches and the pouch users will likely live longer than cigarette users, but are quite likely to develop cardiovascular issues down the line because they’re getting way more nicotine than smokers.

Been a while since I played it (I’m past the boss mommy with the annoying babies and on top of the plateau, but still haven’t reached many parts of the map for context), so this really played with me giving me 3 places super close to Raya Lucaria and 2 that looked fairly similar to Raya Lucaria at a first glance but ended up being completely different places lol

Cars have more emissions though, which is worse for public health, and they’re better at killing pedestrians. The license for motorcycles isn’t a tax in of itself, but 1000€ and having to spend 20 hours in school and then registering for exams where most of the spots for the summer are already gone by march just to have the ability to ride a motorcycle 6-7 months a year is a decent deterrent and the reason most people don’t ride.

I personally find it OK for people to ruin their health.

I mean if you’re in the US, it’s fine. Everyone pays for their own health insurance anyway. Let them all get fat, sick and shoot eachother. In most of Europe, we tax or ban things which have no real benefits, but clear drawbacks. Meat still has protein which you need some of, whether it be from meat or plant sources. Carbs you should still be eating some, just not a ton of sugar. There’s no amount of nicotine that’s good for you though, same with alcohol, so we tax those things. Heroin can easily completely ruin your life after trying it once, at which point you’ll be a burden on social systems for years to come. So we ban it.

I think for outlawing, the cat’s already out of the bag. Too many people are addicted, especially young people and teenagers, and the tobacco companies would sue every single EU nation with the public opinion support of the addicts if we tried that. Much better off increasing the taxation steeply (also for cigarettes of course).

Motorcycles are already taxed by fuel and the necessity of a somewhat expensive extra license that you only use for motorcycles (though that mostly goes to a private company) to discourage large-scale adoption, plus they are lower impact (pollution and traffic) way of getting around than cars. You pay tax on the fuel, tax on the motorcycle, tax on all the work you did to earn the money to pay for those things. Etc.

Skiing - I see a small tax on mountain passes as a completely reasonable solution. Small enough that it doesn’t encourage people to go find their own quiet mountains with no local medical assistance, but big enough to at least partially offset the injuries sustained by the sport. Of course every country can decide on their own taxation here, mine doesn’t have mountains so not much to worry about.

Cycling every time I travel 3km is encouraged by the the excise tax on fuel, which accounted for half of its cost before Trump went crazy and nearly doubled our diesel prices here in Estonia. Just like drinking less is encouraged by excise tax on alcohol and of course nicotine products have their own excise tax, but it doesn’t appear to affect snus as much, since at least the ridiculously strong pouches are actually super affordable since they contain so much nicotine that just one an hour is equivalent to chain-smoking cigarettes.

You also need to be 18 to drive a car without an adult present and you have PE classes as a teenager, whereas you can easily get started with snus at 14 or hell probably 7 or 8 because nobody checks if you’ve got a pouch in, unlike driving a car where they check your driver’s license. I smoked in 6th grade (and then gave it up and later picked it back up again), but that was a whole ordeal and you could sneak in a couple of cigarettes a day, with snus you can go all day every day in school without getting caught. It’s just so easy to start ruining your health from a much earlier age, making the tail end of your life more expensive to the people who actually have to work for a living while you’re retired already.

Like, I’m pro socialized healthcare because absolutely nobody should be bankrupted by medical bills, but that implies people being responsible and since people can’t be trusted to be responsible with health things, laws have to be used to force it.

Yes, and that’s why we’ve taxed alcohol and tobacco products, some places tax added sugars, and we’ve also banned most recreational drugs (admittedly, some of those aren’t even that unhealthy and should be reconsidered). Because the system stops making sense when everyone’s making shitty decisions. Snus lets you ingest ridiculous amounts of nicotine, it should at the very least be taxed significantly more heavily. Right now it doesn’t really matter how strong the pads, they cost the same (and are WAY cheaper per gram of nicotine than smoking at the high end).

Because I’m paying for their health when they start having issues.

If you smoke a cigarette in class, that’s pretty noticeable. If you put in a pouch, most teachers won’t notice. That’s why snus got hella popular here to the point kids were having their friends import it from the Tallinn-Stockholm cruises, where it was legal and cheaper - before it started being sold legally here. Go see Stockholm, get a bunch of snus, sell it to your friends so everyone can have their nicotine feed all day in school rather than having to wait for breaks.

Partner’s 1st class upgrade was not having to sit next to commenter

Oh yeah, Firefox used to take years to change major version number, then they changed to… what was it now, a 6 week schedule? To keep up with Chrome’s versions.

Release engineering team lead at FreeBSD commented on reddit that Sony would actually fund a bunch of development work that went into FreeBSD proper rather than just their fork, but do it super under the radar (mostly because they don’t want competitors knowing what they’re up to in future versions, particularly in terms of hardware support). Netflix contributes tons to BSD and uses it not because of the license but because of the networking stack, as they wouldn’t have to disclose shit if they did run Linux, it’s all on their servers. Apple funded development of LLVM (which many other large corporations have also contributed to).

Source on the Sony and Netflix part, can’t link directly to the comment because new reddit ui sucks and I can’t access old without logging in anymore

Either they have a monthly salary and work a set schedule, or they’re hourly and get paid more if they work more hours. At least that’s how it would work in any first world country. I do know there’s a pretty big one where you might have a salary and have to work unpaid overtime, but we don’t consider that to be a first-world country in the modern sense of the word.