yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
We have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???)
It has gotten to the point where I now almost exclusively associate the use of emojis outside of social chat with LLM output. They are on the same level as all the "useful comments" added to my code: trash that the prompter was too lazy to remove.
Hard disagree. Compared to the OECD average, we collect almost double in personal tax revenue as a proportion of total tax revenue. What's more, historically personal tax revenue as a % of GDP stays roughly the same - regardless of active tax rates.
Where we fall dreadfully short compared to other countries is corporate tax revenue. In 2021, corporate income tax revenue in the U.S. was 1.6% of GDP, compared to the OECD average of 3.2%
It's messed up from first principles - hard work should be valued as a society over investment gains, and reflected at the individual level in take home income. Obtuse measures and comparative aggregates are irrelevant.
“Should be” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I have heard reasonable arguments either way - but it misses the point: whether the personal tax rate was all-time high or an all-time low, personal tax revenue stays roughly the same historically. In other words it’s a trap - raising the rate might make you feel better, but if history is any indicator it won’t change anything for everyday citizens.
We already have Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and have since March 2018. These new tariffs exclude steel (since we tariff it already).
The argument is that increasing government revenue doesn't automatically mean We the People benefit; it usually means more pork and other ways of funneling money to benefit the people with the power to funnel it.
> taxation and wealth redistribution remain an effective way to bolster a societies resilience
Tangentially:
It’s wild how inconsistent the public and political reactions are to different ways of getting revenue. Take this common pattern:
When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often: "That’s only 0.01% of the federal budget. It’s nothing!"
But when someone proposes a tax on billionaires that would over time raise a similar amount suddenly the reaction flips: "We’ll solve inequality! Fund healthcare!"
This contradiction is everywhere. How can $20 billion in government savings be "nothing," while $20 billion in new tax revenue is "transformational"? It's the same money.
>When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often
Did DOGE actually identify significant levels of any of this or is it simply labeled that for the expedited purpose of shrinking the federal government's effectiveness by any means possible?
They've been far less than transparent with the data that supports their findings and have been called out numerous times for misrepresentation[0][1][2][3] and lack of transparency which took a lawsuit to at least partially recitify[4]
I don't know who these people are that you're talking about, who only propose taxes on billionaires and not the rest of the upper class, or who have compared those two numbers and seen they are different. I would imagine you're talking about two different groups with different figures.
Regardless, "taxing the rich" is not one mediocre policy, but several interdependent policies. It's not just picking the 5 richest people in the world and taking their money. The transformation doesn't come from redistributing $20 billion (wherever that figure is from) but encouraging executives to reinvest into their company instead of trying to suck as much cash out as possible.
Bobby Kotick making $155 million a year while Activison lays off hundreds of employees is insane. What on God's earth could you possibly need more than $20 million a year for? That is not right no matter you slice it. That money needs to be aggressively taxed so it is instead used to keep people employed at a much lower tax rate, not in the hopes that the government can use it for spending.
I don't think anyone would scoff and the discovery and elimination of waste or fraud. I think the vibe you're describing is doubt that these supposed billions in waste/fraud/abuse live up to the hype.
Surely there's plenty of waste in federal spending but I suspect the vast majority is not going to be blatant and easy to identify
NPR did in their February article about DOGE; their story is ostensibly that out of everything claimed, NPR could verify “only” $2B in cuts which they present as meaningless:
> NPR's analysis found that, of its verifiable work completed so far, DOGE has cut just $2 billion in spending — less than three hundredths of a percent of last fiscal year's federal spending.
> "Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way," Riedl said. "It's great that he saved $2 on gas, but I think his wife may be more concerned about the $250,000 car."
> they are just using a "normal" BLE address and then reverse-engineering a key from that.
It's really clever - the BLE spec limits message size, so Apple uses the BLE address as part of the message (the first part of the public key).
But since the public address of a BLE chip has 24 bits of "Company ID" (similar to MAC addresses I guess?), and the registry records are public, they were able to precompute a bunch of public/private keypairs.
Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected.
If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...
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