A Supreme Court judge (Scalia) made the case that torture was legal under the US Constitution, as it only prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. So, torture for other reasons is obviously fine.

I think, never stopping to consider the implications must count as an example of “white privilege”.

They called it. I had already forgotten about that, so thx for the reminder.

A year as cool as the one they were born in

You should probably hook up with the SillyTavern crowd. It’s a frontend to chat with LLMs that will do what you want. Its main purpose is chat role-play. You can assign a persona to the LLM and ST will handle the prompt to make it work. It also handles jailbreaks if you want to use one of the big ones (no idea if it works well). You can also connect to other services that run open models, including aihorde.

https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern

https://www.reddit.com/r/SillyTavernAI/

If you want to host your own model you can find more help here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

!localllama@sh.itjust.works

A tax like this will make the prices of some goods go up. Such price increases are measured as inflation.

This is a highly regressive tax. It’s 50% on certain items below 5 EUR (soon 10) and less for items above that. Over the price, the rate goes down. For items at 50 EUR (100 EUR), it is only 10%.

Making cheap clothing in particular more expensive doesn’t sound much like looking out for the 99%.

Und wie viel kostet das denn nun?

Da projiziert du einiges rein, was ich nicht geschrieben habe.

Die normale Infrastruktur wird ja auch schon subventioniert. Ich kenn mich nicht genug aus, um hier intelligent über Kosten zu sprechen.

Ich kann aber sagen: Um so länger (oder dünner) ein Kabel ist, um so weniger Information (also Mbit/s) geht durch. Das Signal wird schwächer, und die Störeinflüsse größer. Das ist ein bisschen, als wenn jemand leise redet und es im Hintergrund laut ist. Der muss sich öfter wiederholen. Ich weiß nicht, was man verbauen muss, um aus den alten Telefonkabeln einen Breitbandanschluss zu machen. Signalverstärker, zusätzlicher Stromanschluss, um die zu betreiben, … Mit dem alten Kupferkabel bist du jedenfalls nicht fertig.

Du brauchst trotzdem zusätzliche Elektronik, die auch gewartet werden muss.

Soweit würde ich zwar nicht gehen, aber für die Leute, die da reflexhaft runter wählen:

Ländlicher Raum heißt geringe Bevölkerungsdichte. Das heißt pro Nase mehr Meter Straße, Kabel, Wasser- und Abflussrohr, usw. Das ist einfach viel teurer pro Mensch als die Infrastruktur für dicht gebaute Apartmenthäuser in der Stadt. Dafür sind die Mieten geringer und man hat schön viel Platz. Was hier fair ist, ist nicht eindeutig.

Eins ist klar: Wenn Internet für jeden gleich viel kostet, dann subventionieren Leute in winzigen Apartments, Leute in riesigen Einfamilienhäusern.

Womöglich geht es hier um ein frei stehendes Einfamilienhaus, für das viel Aufwand nötig ist?

ein neue Studie der IG-Metall-nahen Otto-Brenner-Stiftung

Das Finanzieren von solcher Forschung halte ich für eine enorm wichtige und unterschätzte Funktion der Gewerkschaften.

Die Volkswirtschaftslehre/Makroökonomik hat nur eine Anwendung: Das Steuern von ganzen Wirtschaftsräumen. In der Praxis also Politikberatung und Lobbyismus. Wenn das alles nur von der Finanzierung durch reiche Leute und Unternehmen abhängig ist, dann…

Der DAX sagt nichts über Wohlstand, sondern nur über die Gewinnaussichten der größten Firmen. Wobei der Gewinn nicht unbedingt in DE erwirtschaftet werden muss.

Das BIP taugt schon. Wenn du den Ländervergleich oder die historische Entwicklung betrachtest, dann stellst du fest, dass die Länder mit einem hohen BIP tendenziell die sind, die wir als “reich” empfinden. Das sind Länder, in denen man meint, gut leben zu können. Ohne Hunger, mit guter Krankenversorgung. Man muss natürlich im Kopf behalten, was so eine Kennzahl aussagt und was nicht.

Austerität ist ja eben schlecht für das BIP. Indirekt geht es im OP darum.

Productivity because it’s in the OP.

I used to argue with climate change denialists, so I already know the pitch. I can’t be bothered anymore.

Running anything means understanding the facts you are facing. Running a society means looking at statistics. You must know what they say or do not say. Someone who does not know what “productivity” means is not going to be part of the solution.

No, that doesn’t assume any of that. I don’t even know why you would think that.

AFAIK, the Irish situation is because multi-nationals get to pretend that they make their profits there for tax purposes. On paper they produce stuff there and pay the low taxes. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting

It’s a known issue and has been for years. But you can see the problem. It’s a complicated issue. People who might care aren’t even able to get their heads around the very simple textbook definition of “productivity”.

Yes and no. Productivity is not measured in physical output. It’s measured in how much money people pay, which has problems, of course. If it really goes straight to the landfill, then nothing has been produced. Countries may pay for that sort of thing with taxes to create jobs, but that’s not a neoliberal thing at all.

Eventually, the only reasonable way to measure productivity is in terms of what people want. That’s what you do when you look at what people pay for something. Any other way would also have problems.

Failure to consider environmental degradation and resource depletion are indeed problems. Norway is a better example for this. They have a very high productivity on paper, because oil. But that basically pretends that they literally produce the oil, rather than pumping it out of the sea floor. In reality, that’s more like selling off an inheritance. And that’s not even considering the damage done when fossil fuels are burned.

On a national level, in macro-economics, productivity is GDP divided by total hours worked (for money).

I’d say that a high productivity generally means working less hard, because machines do the tough bits. A high productivity requires a very high skilled labor force, using a lot of machines and robots. It’s by definition an efficient and effective use of labor, though one could ask pointed questions about environmental degradation.

Those are not the assumptions, but there are indeed a great many problems with measuring productivity.

Usually, you only count work for money. Cooking dinner at home does not go into the statistic. Ordering dinner from a restaurant does. I would say that it is a problem that the “production” of leisure time is not counted. Of course, it’s not clear how this could be reasonably done.

“Productivity” already goes some way towards addressing such problems. It is usually GDP divided by hours worked (for money). US Americans work far more hours than their European counter-parts, so that their average incomes are much higher. Whether they are actually richer, depends on the value of “free” time. “Free” in quotes because it does not include necessary work like housework or healthcare visits.

If you look at a list of countries by productivity, you will find that it more or less matches common intuitions about what the rich countries are. That’s where people want to migrate to, so it does tell you something.

“Productivity” is how much a worker produces in an hour. Lower productivity means either that a people have to work longer hours, or make do with less. So, who cares? Pretty much everyone.