I was in the same position until a few weeks ago; mainly used YT for podcasts, downloading videos to watch while travelling etc.
If you have an Android phone, get the NewPipe app from F-Droid. It has pretty much everything that YT Premium offers, but free. It’s been working really well for me.
Just read the German article.
It’s interesting, but I have to point out that some of the evidence they use is stuff like manufacturers relocating to China, which happens regardless of tax rates.
The stuff about energy costs is also nothing to do with taxes but rather Germany’s energy policy missteps.
Also the author randomly referring to “Genderforschern” und “Gleichstellungsbeauftragten” at the end damages the credibility of the article a lot - seems very culture-war motivated.
I agree that the way in which the taxes are implemented and how the bureaucracy works has a major impact though. But this doesn’t mean taxing the rich is imppssible, just needs to be done right, like all policy.
I do. Because you are still here. Arguing on the internet, a cesspool of morons, you and I included.
Rich people waste time arguing with morons on the internet all the time! Have you seen Musk’s Twitter feed lately?
In fact the only reason I am doing this is because I have time to kill; and that’s only possible thanks to the fact that I am wealthy enough to take days off work pretty much whenever I want, without fearing starvation. Unlike ~90% of people globally who live paycheck to paycheck.
The idea that rich people are always busy being productive is simply wrong. I know enough of them personally to know that most of their ‘working’ hours aren’t very strenuous to say the least.
https://www.readthemaple.com/i-was-born-wealthy-and-know-rich-people-dont-work-harder-than-you/
Because events, such as Corona and the ausraube war temporarily lower the estimated gains. Losses are expected. So the value weds to be corrected according to those losses.
Have you heard of the 2008 crash? Dot com bubble? SVB, FTX and other crypto crap, etc? Markets crash regularly regardless of Corona or wars.
Also the fact that markets fail to consider wars and pandemics, whereas experts were warning about these for years before they happened, is further evidence that we can do better than relying on markets for everything.
There must be some way to develop a system of knowledge aggregation, decisionmaking, and resource allocation that isn’t prone to ignoring very obvious risks.
Greenwashing is only done in media. Company winnings and numbers don’t lie. (Except if they do. Fuck wirecard)
Company winnings and numbers lie all the time. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Wx51CffrBIg https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Y9KPcQqG0ao
There are countless cases of companies making shit up and markets and investors falling for it.
The rich would just leave the country and some other country would profit from their taxes.
This is an oft-repeated talking point but usually contradicted by data. Sounds smart but isn’t smart.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/11/20/if-you-tax-the-rich-they-dont-move-they-just-pay/
Rich people are people and most people don’t just up and leave behind places they’ve built their lives in unless under extreme pressure. A few billionaires might relocate to the Bahamas but they’re not going to be able to take their mansions and penthouses with them - and they lose out on the markets, infrastructure, and other benefits of their home countries. That’s a major incentive to just pay the taxes.
If you believe to know which ones are overvalued, then you should try to go buy short positions in them. Maybe you become rich then?
Who says I haven’t done that already?
The stock market is relatively precise, it also projects potential into the future.
The stock market is not precise. I have data and papers discussing this - but there’s no need for them. I’ll instead leave you with a simple question: if the stock market is so precise, why is there a major crash every decade?
Due to that many stocks to combat climate change have risen in popularity and a lot of money has been brought to said companies by purely capitalistic driven motives.
Sure, purely capitalistic motives, which is why a lot of these are impractical venture capital BS and outright scams. It is currently more profitable to greenwash than it is to actually solve the problem.
You don’t have to take my word for it: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/chamath-palihapitiya-esg-investing-is-a-complete-fraud.html
Did you read any of those links? 10% of world GDP. That’s not relatively little. That’s insane.
And stocks doesn’t automatically mean good. How much of that is speculative bubbles and hype-driven overvalued stocks?
btw they do store a lot of their money in vaults where it doesnt benefit the economy at all.
This is in the form of expensive art that stays in containers in tax-free zones, and offshore accounts in tax havens.
Please educate yourself.
https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-wealthy-sell-treasures-tax-free
https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2017/09/7-charts-show-how-rich-hide-their-cash
what’s your favourite type of bollard and why?
Sharktopus, bad in a fun kind of way though
Thanks very much for recommending this! Tried it and am quite happy. Also just tried NewPipe on my phone and it works really well. Bye bye YouTube
We should crowdfund some Lemmy ads
Modern billionaires developing that Roman Emperor urge to fight in the Colloseum (as long as they’re never in any actual danger of course). Absolute joke
Same Literally never posted on Reddit in my decade of lurking. Lemmy is more welcoming and ‘charming’ IMO
Same; I’ve been trying to disengage from anything big tech related recently, not just social media, even Amazon etc. Can’t take it anymore. It’s all so blatantly exploitative and fucked up. Cancelling subscriptions feels good; hope I stick to it. Can’t shake YouTube yet though, need my Rossmann fix. Hopefully we can figure out a viable FOSS alternative; tried PeerTube but it doesn’t quite do it just yet.
The Internet can still be a beautiful positive thing.
BezoSpez Zuck-Musk can fuck off.
Feel you with being unable to keep up. The thing is, most of the outrage is artificial; have to remember the incentive structures of media etc.
If its any consolation, I reckon the average person being unable to keep up with stuff during periods of rapid change has always been the case historically. Most conversations, discourse, etc that have shaped society have been either among small groups of powerful people motivated by various interests, or stuff like pamphlets, polemics nailed to church doors, talking points, buzz words. This riles people up and is effective at getting stuff done but not effective at all at having an actual conversation. So the average person just gets swept up in the tide.
I am not an expert in political history by any means but I can’t think of a single example in which people just talked to eachother to decide the direction of society. Seems like it has always been ‘waves’ or ‘trends’ or ‘forces’ and then ‘backlashes’ driving things. Historical developments and transformative change seems to just ‘happen’ and suddenly you live in a fundamentally different world.
Like, did we ever have a conversation, as ‘a society’ (if it can even be considered a singular entity) which resulted in the decision to put big tech corps in charge of running the main platforms we use to communicate with eachother?
Of course not; it’s like we woke up one day and suddenly heads of state are issuing diplomatic communications via goddamn Twitter so we all just use that now. Again, not a historian, but I think it was a similar thing with major historical shifts like industrialisation etc.
And then we get hit by the consequences, and are totally unprepared, as if they were unexpected. A small group of random people having a conversation over drinks could have anticipated pretty much every single issue we now have with big tech running our social platforms, and probably could have anticipated many of the pitfalls of industrialisation or globalisation (not saying these don’t have positives; but we’re dealing with the pitfalls now so it is what it is).
I think this kind of approach to discourse and societal decisionmaking is very vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in the modern world.
I recently read ‘The Word for World is Forest’ by Ursula Le Guin, and am reminded of this part in the introduction: “They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics.” (Context: the Senoi people of Malaysia).
We haven’t developed our ‘social technology’; we’re operating on the same kinds of social tech in the past, which is simply not equipped to deal with a connected globalised world. I think this extends to stuff like academia and journalism. We desperately need an approach to making sense of the world in a calm and thoughtful manner; but since our social tech can’t really facilitate that, we’re doing… whatever it is we’re doing rn.
And coming back to capitalist incentive structures: inflammatory stuff generates more engagement, ad revenue etc.
I am holding out hope that smaller, FOSS alternatives which do not have such incentives will lead to better conversations
This is entirely my observation but the conversations I’ve seen on this platform seem more like actual conversations vs the almost-artificial ‘talking past eachother instead of talking to eachother’ I used to see on Reddit and Twitter.
Sorry for the ramble. My first post on any public-facing online thing since I quit posting on random forums like 15 years ago. I always lurked on Twitter and Reddit but feared that actually posting and/or getting into arguments would drive me insane so avoided it. Hello everyone; let’s be humane to eachother and enjoy eachother’s company. There’s enough alienation in the world as it is. Thanks for reading to whoever is still reading.
Idk about the tax rates but Germany also decided to become dependent on Russian gas, which is a major factor tax or no tax.
If you want to believe his shitposting and constant man-child meltdowns are part of a galaxy-brained plan to convince conservatives to buy electric cars, have fun with that. In reality, he’s just a self-obsessed guy seeking more and more attention and that’s plainly obvious.
You’ve never heard of self-employed contractors? If you have a valuable enough skill, people pay quite well for specific projects. Once the project (or your part in it) is done, you can just chill with your money, or accept a new one. It’s pretty straightforward. Won’t earn me billions but is good enough to have a chill life.
Who said anything about an ideal system? I want a better one. Mainly one that doesn’t burn down the planet I live on. We need to be working on developing new systems, but that won’t happpen if we keep chanting ‘Capitalism good, Communism bad’.
Resilience is not a binary. We could make a system that’s relatively more resilient against fraud and/or short-term thinking.
I’m sure it’s within the capacity of humanity to improve upon Capitalism. The only question is: will we do it in time to survive the 21st Century?