Why did you reply again without reading either post?

The post said they are trying to vape and gradually reduce their nicotine intake to 0. I don’t know how it can be made any more clear in stating that their near term goal is not to stop vaping, but to reduce the nicotine dose in the vape to 0.

They are trying to reduce their nicotine dosage in their vape but due to their addiction, are having withdrawals and ultimately re-adding the dose. This is 100% due to nicotine, they are not trying to reduce how many times they inhale the vape.

Dude that guy said very clearly his method was to lower the nicotine dose in his vape to ween down to 0mg/nicotine free vape. He isn’t trying to quit the habit, you didn’t even read his post.

Quietly returning to the status quo is radically different from what happened after the Munich Olympics. What is it that makes you think the mossad and their political leaders are so much quicker to drop a grudge now?

Mid 30s Aussie living the the US. Yes I can drive a manual, yes I do drive a manual and yes I think it should be mandatory for 100% of learning drivers regardless of whether they plan to daily drive an automatic or manual when licensed.

The quality of driving here is considerably worse here than what I’ve experienced in Australia or Europe and I’m convinced requiring people to drive in a machine that forces them to consider the next ~100m leads to higher quality, more mindful drivers.

Sure, it’s not unethical for a kid to accept (necessary) help to survive, though it is to vote for or otherwise institute a society where that is necessary. The point the article is attempting to make is social commentary to draw attention to the fact that increasingly the lottery of inheritance is the only means of owning a home.

The first step to resolving the issue is identifying it. Nobody likes the implication that their success is not earned, by making that uncomfortable point the author is attempting to cause people to support change to correct this trend.

Yes, it’s bad news. That’s the point of the article, to draw attention to a bad societal trend, it’s social commentary. Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it.

What’s wrong with that?

Doesn’t it seem a little unfair if ones ability to own land is dictated by the lottery of what their parents have achieved?

This could be the beginning of a slow slide back towards feudalism and lords with no social mobility for the lower classes.

A policy like this would apply to the entire market. All landlords have vacancies at least occasionally, due to renovations or bad luck.

Wouldn’t it only apply to the local market? A lot of people, particularly higher earning white collar workers have the ability to demand a work from home policy. Could they not move further away to cooler markets if their commute is eliminated or reduced to only a few days per week? Surely that would put downwards pressure on the inflated local market, moreso if a progressive tax system is implemented (eg tax rates increase % after value increases by a certain threshold).

It won’t affect a tenant’s ability to pay more, but a policy that increases ownership costs across the board means that there won’t be cheaper alternatives in the competition, so the tenant will need to either find a way to pay the increase or they’ll have to leave to a cheaper market. The highest rent the market can bear will go up if it’s not possible to compete any further on lower prices.

Unless I’m grossly misunderstanding how land tax works, it won’t evenly apply across the board (even a flat % tax would be a higher burden for more expensive properties). This would drive people towards constructing cheaper housing as the bottom falls out of the top end of the market, which in turn would make housing cheaper for owner occupiers in those cheaper markets. Isn’t that the desired outcome?

Credit card companies spend a considerable amount of time and money trying to work out how high they can optimize these merchant fee rates. A credit card charge is painstakingly optimized to maximize profits. Often credit card companies pay a portion of these fees because the competitive market will not shoulder the burden - customers will move to a cheaper credit card, which is why cards with high fees often try to entice customers with rewards programs).

Without the ability to influence demand, the seller can either eat the cost or remove themselves from the market, my question is how does increasing the tax move the needle on demand knowing that any rational acting landlord is already acting to maximize their return on investment? Are you suggesting that they’ll copy credit cards and increase rates but offer some bonus program to increase demand? I’m not convinced that would work.

…increasing taxes on rental units just increases everyone’s rent…

Can you explain this to me? Surely a landlord charges the highest rent that the market can provide. Why would taxing the landlord increase the Tennant’s ability or willingness to pay a higher rent?

So a less efficient and more complicated land tax? Is there any benefit to this compared to just taxing based on the value?

It’s nice to be able to open up an old computer to add more RAM/Storage/etc., but also get that making everything integrated and soldered improves durability and reliability.

If you’re willing to believe that soldering in a hard drive has anything at all to do with reliability I don’t even know what to tell you. The fact they apple will, with a straight face, charge $300+ to upgrade from 256gb of ssd capacity to 512gb should also be a clue…you can get 1tb for that price. and that price gauging on selling the customer parts at over 100% markup is the sole reason they solder them in.

The reason I asked was because I think there’s a fundamental disagreement between what it actually is that people disagree about.

Your earlier post suggests that your stance on abortion is different than that of the mainstream conservative narrative. This seems normal, based on how every vote on that issue seems to be playing out, there is a disconnect between the ideology that conservative leaders are pushing and what their supporters actually think. The exact same situation is true with affirmation action on the left - voters consistently reject it regardless of party affiliation or self identified political leaning.

I’d hear people identify CRT as being closely related to affirmative action, in that it’s an actual policy that gives out some advantage (or seeks to remove some other existing advantage, if you have a different perspective) vs being some purely academic case study more like what a other response to your response described.

Where I’m going with this is that depending on what you’re describing when you say CRT, it’s very easily possible that your position of opposing it is consistent with a clear majority of people who identify as “left”. The disagreement isn’t about ideology, but about semantics that is being exploited by a political class to drive support.

Ultimately if people want to debate you, you’re not obligated to indulge them. It’s good for discourse to put out your opinion in the way that you have (eg respectfully and without throwing barbs at everyone).

That said, some of your points are hard for me to follow.

I don’t have a perfect knowledge of exactly what’s on the left and right so please forgive me if I put something in the wrong category.

If you can’t articulate the difference, how is it that you came to identify as one? IMO “left vs right” is an intentionally vague and poorly defined concept to keep people angry and identifying with a brand, more than a coherent description of ideology.

I understand that left vs right ideally shouldn’t exist. The same goes for political parties. They do exist so here’s some of my views from both sides.

I don’t agree with critical race theory…

I hear so much about this. What does it mean? Can you give a real world example where someone is trying to implement what you oppose?

Exponentially both ways though I would argue, often, the slower driver is more of a hazard to other drivers!

If someone burns past in the left lane unless someone else does something wrong (like move lanes without looking first) or causes rapid traffic slowdown in the left lane either by merging poorly or being too aggressive on the brakes, they are more or less not a risk.

If someone is driving too slow they are dangerous without anyone else making a mistake - if you or anyone behind you doesn’t have visibility (eg behind a truck, around a bend, glare from the sun etc) then there’s a hard braking event, which is always dangerous. The more slowly compared to prevailing traffic they go, the more attentive other drivers need to be, the more dangerous it becomes.

Socialism is defined by the elimination of the purely capitalist class, wherin workers own the means of production.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that capital isn’t assigned for investment based upon market demand or that “EvEryoNe gEts pAId tHE SAmE” like others claim. Socialism in a modern economy can (and likely would be) market based, it just means that shareholders would be entirely made up of employees of a company (obviously this would lead to better conditions for workers, lower wages for executives and no dividend payments to people who aren’t working). Taking a more academic definition of capitalism, it’s entirely possible to be both socialist and capitalist. Few people are arguing against capitalism in entirety.

I would say that most “MAGA” or whatever equivalent regressive movement exists anywhere is not at all conservative (MAGA supporters attempted a coupe, which is radical, the opposite of conservative), that’s just branding. In much the same way as the people’s democratic republic of Korea is not democratic, “liberals” in the USA political landscape are usually leftists (typically with a lot of illiberal positions) etc.

It isn’t that these people support capitalism (they are often ignorant of what capitalism even entails, the same way they think communism means anything they disagree with) it’s that they vaguely support existing power and class structures, though again, from what I’ve seen they can rarely coherently describe what they support and what they oppose, outside of a few tailor designed talking points like abortion or transgenderism.

No, I didn’t mischaracterize your points (other than the deliberate example where I demonstrated what a straw man looks like). But hey, nothing you’ve said stands up to scrutiny so good on you for stubbornly arguing nonsense for so long despite an obvious inability to engage in any of the points I’ve made along with a comprehensive failure to understand the terms of argument itself. I hope you don’t vote.

It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income.

That is a claim. You have made it in this post, ergo it is a claim you have made.

That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.

You’re claiming it to be a fact, that doesn’t make it so lmfao. Piracy of things that are unavailable for sale robs creators of what income, exactly? “Piracy” including circumventing DRM, including for legitimate license holders, again, what loss income? Y’know it’s cheaper to fly from Melbourne to LA and buy adobe creative suite than it is to purchase it in australia, unfortunately evading geoblocking is considered piracy. Those immoral Australian deviants have no right to circumvent the noble price gauging of multinationals apparently.

There is no fact here. There is a baseless claim that, again, I’d ask you to substantiate. What’s this, like my fourth post in a row where I’ve invited you do to do so. Perhaps a fifth response where you fail to do that will convince someone.

And for your reference, confidently claiming something does not make it a fact. There needs to be actual truth to it as well, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of a claim then nobody is obligated to accept it as fact.

Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.

We established several posts ago that pirated products are typically more profitable. Your (often false) assumption that pirates haven’t purchased the rights to the content they are pirating and incomplete ideas of what piracy includes is failing you here. If there is no opportunity to pay for said content, is it still immoral?

You appeal to holding up the social contract, what about cases of actual theft where legitimate customers are cut off from access by developers and via pirate to have access to content they have legally paid for? How much extra money should should someone owe universal studios if they want to rip a DVD or download a rip to their laptop so they can watch it on a flight? When kids used to record songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, how much money do they owe the record labels for doing so?

Which there is no evidence of ever happening

Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.

Your definition of piracy is inadequate, but even in those cases where piracy meets your definition, you cannot provide any actual substantiated cost for what creators have lost, because no such evidence exists. There is no evidence to support the assumption that a pirated piece of content is a lost sale (there is, however, evidence that leads to the likelihood of pirated content leading to more sales, be it by word of mouth marketing increasing the products sales or by future/parallel sales by the pirate themselves).

If it’s bullshit, link a study and prove me wrong.

And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.

Lmfao I made a point that equating piracy to theft is as wrong as equating murder to speeding and you claimed that was a straw man because nobody is arguing speeding is murder. No shit genius, the point of that comparison is to demonstrate the absurdity of the former claim, because nobody is so clueless as to make the latter.

For your education benefit, a stawman would be an argument derailing the topic of conversation with an entirely different claim (not by drawing a legitimate comparison). Here’s an example, it’s subtly different so try to see if you can’t spot how it’s not the same as the argument above.

Defending the big corporations and the establishment means you’re supporting scumbags who benefit from it like Harvey weinersien and the sexists at activision/blizzard. You are directly supporting abusers of women

You’re so confidently asserting nonsense and making both stupid and irrelevant claims. If you want to lick boots and swallow corporate propaganda equating serious crimes with misdemeanors that’s your choice, but you’d have to be beyond stupid to expect that sentiment to be shared and a left leaning, somewhat anti corporate message board.

The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content

That’s a claim you’ve made. Prove it. The evidence shows that more more pirated content has higher profits. If you can’t quantify that (even if only at a macro level), then it’s a worthless claim.

Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.

That’s the whole point. Not all crimes are equal, not all crimes are even immoral. Arguing it’s wrong because it’s illegal or right because it isn’t is a monstrously flawed position to take.

…We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, …

Which there’s no evidence of ever happening. You’ve presented no case for why piracy is immoral

No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action.

Obviously you don’t understand what a straw man is. That was supporting the previously raised point not not all crimes are equal by pointing out a comparable case that everyone agrees with. Theft, like murder, has definition, both in common language and legally. Neither of those are piracy. The claim that piracy is theft is purely corporate propaganda hammered into the population with this dipshit ads from the 2000s. The fact that you’ve so entirely bought into speaks volumes to your ability to think critically.