Hauldren Collider posted:

I don't want to derail the thread with econ so I'll just drop this link for your reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_wedge?wprov=sfla1

Arglebargle III posted:

Look out everyone, this guy took econ 101! We've got a big expert here!

Vahakyla posted:

While Denmark surely has its own issues, as do other Nordic Countries, as a resident of both continents, multiple nordic countries, and then multiple american states, it is disingenuous as all loving hell to talk about Denmark like that. The type of poverty in Prince George's County, or North Charleston, or eastern side of Pittsburgh, like Pitcairn, or other paradises have actual people dying in the streets, and would be beyond anything any person complaining about Denmark can fathom. I haven’t even been to Skid Row, NYC. So yeah, no.

If Denmark should fix it's societal issues before playing NATO, there would literally be no other countries allowed in NATO.

shame on an IGA posted:

How'd you hear about North Charleston? You're not wrong about it at all but as a relatively obscure place I'm really interested to see who's covering it in Finnish? media.

Arglebargle III posted:

Making extrapolations about the behavior of real people in response to government policy, based on a graph from the second quarter of econ 101, doesn't make people think you're worth engaging with. Quite the opposite.

Hauldren Collider posted:

I think most actual economists (a category in which I admittedly do not qualify) would disagree with you. People make decisions for complicated reasons, very true. That's why in economics the discussion is always about people who are on the margin. If you move the tax wedge, people on that margin make different decisions. This is consistently borne out in both macroeconomic and microeconomic data.

Arglebargle III posted:

Did you read any of that page of links or are you comfortable imagining that economists agree with you?

Hauldren Collider posted:

To make up for my econ shitposting I offer these pictures of aerospace things I took when I was in LA as an offering to the forum gods, in the hopes that they in their mercy will not smite me for my terrible

CSC still, f-20 tigershark and an f-104 starfighter.

Hauldren Collider posted:

I dunno what the UN standards of poverty are, maybe they are strangely high, but compare Denmark to say Macedonia (apparently it is North Macedonia now? the whole FYROM thing is very stupid) or Moldova or something and Denmark seems pretty nice.

quote:

I dunno what the point of this is. There are neo-Nazis in the US too, last year one of em ran over some people in my state, but it's not like they are terribly influential. Mostly they live in mom's basement and post on stormfront, and very occasionally they get out of the house to rally around monuments to confederate leaders in and from states in which they do not, themselves, reside. Am I wrong in suspecting the situation is much the same in most of Europe?

quote:

The F-16s you have are some of the oldest in NATO and are just gonna fall apart eventually. But also you aren't getting the F-35s for bombing dirt, you're getting them to participate in collective defense of western Europe against those fascists you dislike so very much (i.e. Russia).

StandardVC10 posted:

That's a T-38.

Tias posted:

As I have previously told you, that other people have it worse does not mean our social system is not under attack.


Yes, you are wrong, very much so. Our fascists burn asylum centres, send mail bombs to labor activists and stab people on the regular. The "point" is that unless they're confronted, they will keep riding the wave of racist sentiment currently gripping european governments. The reason they travel to Ukraine is that no one there prevents them training with firearms and military personnel in preparation for what they think is a coming race war.


True, but a) there are much much cheaper options than the burning cash dumpster fire that is the J-35 and b) if Russia attacked, our contribution would mean exactly jack poo poo.

Hauldren Collider posted:

If Russia attacked you could argue that Virginia's contribution means jack poo poo and Wyoming's contribution means jack poo poo and so on but when you put all 50 states together it's the most powerful military in the world. Same goes for Europe. Everybody fights.

Also, is your notion that you're just not gonna have an army until you have universal prosperity? You need to be able to defend yourselves against aggressors.

Hauldren Collider posted:

Also, is your notion that you're just not gonna have an army until you have universal prosperity? You need to be able to defend yourselves against aggressors.

mlmp08 posted:

And the NATO vs EU military force are not just redundant or competing entities.

Hauldren Collider posted:

I don't know if there's any lazier rebuttal to an economics argument than a link to a google search on the subject. I'm not gonna indulge that. Sorry. Imagine I said "astrology is wrong" and you sent me a lmgtfy link on "is astrology wrong". Oh yes, I am surely going to spend my Saturday poring over all those rebuttals.

Platystemon posted:

Platystemon posted:

FrozenVent posted:

You ever have somebody come up to you and offer commentary on an aspect of your area of expertise that was so naive, Ill advised and... honestly just dumb... that all you can do is just say “no, that wouldn’t work.” and walk away? You basically just pulled that for economics.

This is like saying “if they don’t want ships to sink, why don’t they make them out of the same stuff they make lifeboats out of?” level of dumb. Yes, there is a valid point. No, your idea is no loving good in the real world. Yes, your affirmation can be refuted, but it’s going to take way too much effort to be worth it so I’m just going to walk away.

Hauldren Collider posted:

I don't know if there's any lazier rebuttal to an economics argument than a link to a google search on the subject. I'm not gonna indulge that. Sorry. Imagine I said "astrology is wrong" and you sent me a lmgtfy link on "is astrology wrong". Oh yes, I am surely going to spend my Saturday poring over all those rebuttals.

Platystemon posted:

Tias posted:

E: pearls before swine

Arglebargle III posted:

There is a lazier rebuttal, and it's flat out asserting that experts agree with you. That's all you've done.

You should be aware you're kinda walking into a buzzsaw on this one because, unlike much of the economics field, there's a lot of good data on the mobility of the wealthy in response to state income tax changes. Since you don't want to read articles, I'll just point out that millionaires and billionaires tend not to move from California and New York to Delaware and Mississippi.

The mobility of billionaires is a common talking point on the right, and I'm not surprised it has entered common knowledge. However it's one of these not even wrong areas of discussion, because capital is so frictionless in the modern regulatory environment that there's no reason for the ultra-wealthy to move into low-tax environments. They can simply move large portions of their capital there. If you don't believe me, then please explain why Luxembourg and Cyprus have such high GDP per capita when their economies are based on pigs and tourism respectively. The whole argument is founded on very stupid premises.

The real reason this not-even-wrong piece of wisdom has entered the common knowledge is that it argues against raising taxes, and therefore is very appealing to people engaging in motivated reasoning.

Hauldren Collider posted:

Ukrainian....Nazis? What? Genuinely not trying to be mean here but this kinda stuff sounds like Russian bot posting I've seen on other boards so can you maybe clarify?

Platystemon posted:

monkeytennis posted:

That’s the gate guardian at Wittering I think. The Harrier, not the Renault.

Tias posted:

Sure. In Ukraine, like Belarus, Russia, Poland, and a lot of the former eastern bloc, there are many strong neo-nazi organizations. It's not meant to poo poo specifically on Ukraine, just that their particular groups give volunteers from Denmark, Sweden and the UK a place to train with weapons and practice tactics. It's not really a controversial statement, and has been going on for years now.

AlexanderCA posted:

The European welfare states were built during the cold war while maintaining militaries much larger and more expensive than today. Both have since shrunk.

I don't get this idea it's somehow become impossible to do both, which we did for literal decades.

Hauldren Collider posted:

The third MER that never launched and is used to test the functionality of the two that are on Mars (Spirit and Opportunity). Also JPL.

Kesper North posted:

All this. Ukraine is particularly attractive because of the chaos driven by the Russian invasion.

(WARNING: SPECULATION INSIDE)

There's probably (ugh) opportunities for 'live' training in Ukraine. A big reason they might have going to Ukraine is to train with the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenaries who are now in Syria. Dmitry Utkin, leader of the Wagner Group, is a massive Nazi sympathizer according to a variety of sources inside Russia, and he's tied directly to Yevgheny Prigozin, the oligarch in charge of the Internet Research Agency. Radicalizing and training violent agitators who return hostile foreign powers is part of the playbook - we did and do the same thing, and of course ISIS and al-Qaeda are famous for it.

So we have a Nazi sympathizer in charge of a PMC working at the behest of the Russian government. It follows that there is probably some sort of network or pipeline for getting committed sympathizers training similar to what other terrorist groups (did I just classify the Russian government as a terrorist group? How is it not?) use. More than that, though, we know that the Russian government has been cultivating populist groups that share Nazi philosophy and white supremacist beliefs. The Russian government's anti-Nazi stance is growing increasingly difficult to credit. It's increasingly hard to tell the difference between the ethnic and social policies of Nazi Germany and those of modern Russia, and they employ guys like Utkin. Nazi propaganda may be banned in Russia because of its association with the Great Patriotic War, but the actual regime policies are increasingly equivalent, and the backing they give to populist white supremacist groups throughout the world sure makes it look like Putin thinks that maybe the Nazis had the right idea.

Not that there's some sort of crazy national populist conspiracy backed by the resource extraction economies and organized crime networks that depend on oil and opacity to maintain their regimes going on or anything.

Proper Kerni ng posted:

Is that the one they use to talk in hexadecimal to the astronaut they left behind by mistake? I saw a documentary about that once.

Boatswain posted:

By describing governments as terrorist groups you dilute the meaning of the latter term to a point of uselessness.