No, dude. Spoiler tags exist for a reason and this episode didn’t air that long ago. They are completely justified with their reaction. Moreover, you’re acting like the person specifically came to this community and started browsing. You do not know that. These posts show up on stuff people are subscribed to but also under ‘All’ new posts.
I’m not criticising you in any way, but I’d like to protect you from future spoilers and suggest not using the card view on your app. You can set post size to compact in Voyager
I adore this episode, especially later on when the SNW crew go fan crazy over the NX-01 crew with those Boimler and Mariner grinning in the background. That and Boim’s Section 31 fast walk
I like to think of $1 billion in terms of how much money you need to spend. Let’s say you’re given $1 billion at birth, never earn another cent in your life, and live for exactly 75 years. To spend all of that money, you’d need to spend $36,500 per day, every day, for your entire life. Even then, you’d have nearly a million dollars left to pass down to your children.
If you only spent 36,500 a day, you'd probably die far far richer (like, 10s of billions) than you were born assuming you have it invested. You could spend more like 100k a day (adjusting up for inflation) and you'd probably almost certainly die a billionaire.
It feels elusive how anyone could spend so much, but controlling the content of mass media has been of great service for the interests of the Kochs and the Wilkses.
My wife got into that lularoe shit. We set a limit, which she promptly blew past. You just had all these people, including the owners, telling you to buy buy buy.
They prey on people's insecurities. They take advantage of them.
Call my wife stupid, I'm sure someone will because this is Lemmy where everyone is self righteous, but I think you don't really understand the power of manipulation these companies wield until you see it firsthand. It's actually really sad and dangerous what they do to people. And my wife has a successful career and makes 6 figures, we don't need the money, but they still had her convinced she had to do this. I thought it would be a side hobby for her, but they were not kind to her. (Well, they were, but only to get money.)
I remember trying to warn her that the company makes money when she buys, not when she sells. I don't think it sunk in, and let's face it, that's how retail works in general. But with regular retail, you control what you get - Lularoe just sent whatever quantity of leggings, blouses, dresses, etc you ordered. You had no control over the patterns. I'm not sure if you even got to pick what sizes you received.
Early on I helped, but I got tired of spending time and energy so she could sell one pair of leggings. She went to a few group sales things and would spend hours sitting there, plus all the prep and tear down time, plus gas, all to sell like three things. She only went to two of those.
A host of other companies jumped in to help, for a price. Website. Square. Stamps.com.
We still have some in the basement. I want to burn it, but we donate some to charities now and then, and occasionally neighbors and friends will come raid it (we give it to them free). We started watching the documentary on Amazon about it, but never finished. My wife was just too angry.
One meeting we went to before she got into it had the head of Lularoe on video conference. She talked about having "600 new arts each week", ie 600 patterns. That comment runs through my head every time I see a particularly ugly lularoe pattern.
Ehhh at least I got a new camera out of it, for taking pictures of the stock.
I joined the antimlm sub on reddit for a while hoping for advice and info, but it was just a very negative sub, mocking people and no helpful advice. I unsubbed after a few weeks. Fortunately my wife eventually figured it out.
You're not going to stop people from doing this by showing them numbers. You have to realize it's an emotional thing. They are preying on emotions. You have to find a way to fight that.
Most people are susceptible to scams like MLMs otherwise they wouldn't keep running the same scam. It doesn't mean you're smart or dumb, you just may not be aware of the social engineering and manipulation tactics they use or lack an effective skeptical epistemology to avoid accepting claims without good justification. Most people who are in a cult don't realize the organization they are in is a cult. I have an otherwise very intelligent sibling who fell for the essential oils MLM scam. They often use tactics and language similar to cults: in group/out group tribalism, indoctrination, isolation, love bombing, fear and hate mongering, etc.
It really is hard. A guy I used to work with is in one DEEP. He hits up former coworkers and even their friends on Facebook trying to lure them in. I had a few conversations and genuinely tried to reach him but it's just impossible. It eventually came to the point that, when he was talking about all the money he made (2k in a few hours work (this one time)), I told him to send his 1099 and if it beat my W-2 I would join him.
I’ve been fussed at by my ex and a few of her friends for NOT supporting the “insert product” sold by friend x. Last one was Wine. This nasty ass shit gave me a headache from the taster, and you want me to spend $25 a bottle because, and i quote, “love red wine and it all tastes the same anyway”. Its a horrid spiral of preying on emotions and hopes and dreams, worsened by that one friend who happens to be up high enough in the mlm foodchain to make a ton of money “first” on all current and new mlm ventures.
I don’t have the wife anymore (unrelated) and I’ve dropped the friends that force mlm. I don’t miss them.
Ironically, it takes a lot of courage to quit your job if you don’t have something else lined up. And if you do have a better job to go to, well, that’s on your old employer.
Percentages don’t scale well into the billions, you will still need brackets.
A billionaire can give away 98% of their wealth and still comfortably be a multi millionare.
A full time cashier on the minimum wage can barely even survive on 100% of their wage. When it comes to living a healthy fulfilling life, If they contribute just 5% of their wage to tax they are sacrificing far more a billionaire paying 98% tax would be.
There is – the income bracket isn’t what all your money is taxed at. It’s a graduated scale. I’m going to make up numbers here just for an example.
I make $125,000. The first $5000 has no tax on it. The next $20000 are taxed at 5%. The next $25,000 are 10%. The next $30,000 is taxed at 15%. The next $30000 is taxed at 20%. And the last $15,000 are taxed at 35%.
So my total tax is 20000(0.05) + 25000(0.1) + 30000(0.15) + 30000(0.2) + 15000(0.35) = $19,250. My effective tax is 15.4%, even though I’m taxed higher than that on $45000 of my $125000.
It’s a piecewise function basically. And it works really well here because you start getting into very discretionary spending when it gets high, you’re not buying the essentials. You could have a bracket that has 75% tax on everything above a million for instance, and poorer people would be completely unaffected. This is why the myth of “if I get a raise I’ll be in a higher bracket and pay more in taxes” is incorrect.
Yeah so everyone is saying that the issue is that this system stops at the last bracket at 35%. If there was some continuous way to calculate the percentage, this pattern would be able to keep going.
When you say continuous, do you mean the tax rates? I assume so, because those are discrete numbers. You’re basically saying then what whatever the last bracket is, it needs to scale from 35% (in this example) to 100% at a certain income?
I don’t dislike the idea necessarily, but I think the problem with the wealthy not paying enough in taxes isn’t the highest rate, but what is taxed and how. Selling stock for instance is taxed at a lower rate than income, so we’d need to add a stipulation that if you make more than X, it’s taxed as if it’s normal income. (You’d have to make some exceptions for retiring people but that’s easy enough)
The Inflation Reduction Act had an idea that I think is worth pursuing, or at least calculating how it would go for the rich. Companies making a certain amount of profit in a tax year have to pay some % (maybe 20?) if that’ll be higher than their taxes calculated normally. It stops the loophole that lets corporations get away with paying no taxes. If we did that for rich people, I wonder how it would go. My gut instinct is that it would actually help a lot.
Edit: I just described Alternate Minimum Tax, which is a thing already. We’d just need to close loopholes around it by not letting anyone claim a deduction on it.
Probably not to 100% (because then the net income would go down) but yeah something like that. And yes you’re right, there are still many loopholes for rich people to avoid taxes so those issues should probably be fixed first. But to be fair I don’t know much about taxes or economics, it’s just an idea I had.
because then paupers would pay the same rate as billionaires. At the same time brackets make sure eveyone pays the same for the set amount. So even if more brackets were introduced billionaires would pay the same rate on their first 100k as millionaires. People of wealth only pay higher on the actualy high level. Whats crazy is we have several brackets that basically run through the 5 figure range and just into the 6 but none higher were 5 figures should just have one lowest rate.
It’s a percentage that nominally increases as wealth goes up.
Poor people need to spend a higher percentage of their income meeting basic needs, so having them pay the same percentage as the wealthy puts a higher burden on the poor.
In top of that, the wealthy are able to put a higher percentage of their income in things like investments, which are taxed at a lower rate (to encourage investing in the economy over hoarding wealth), so a flat rate tax would be effectively a regressive tax.
The problem is investments vs income. It’s not a super straightforward problem to solve. Having said that other countries have implemented a wealth tax, so it can be done
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