You still pay taxes in those states, just not income. Most people will pay more taxes in those states compared to places like California (not the rich, of course). Texas chose a system of sales taxes (state and local), which act like flat-taxes, which put more burden on lower income people.
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joined 3 weeks ago
I've never noticed idolizing of Texas or Arizona for their weather. I hear Hawaii has mild summers compared to those states.
I've lived in both cold climates and hot climates. It's pretty much the same, but the seasons are reversed. I.e. it's very uncomfortable to spend too much time outdoors in winter in cold climates, and very uncomfortable in summer in hot climates.
Also, it's more energy intensive to heat than it is to cool (at least with the most common HVAC systems). And warmer climates are more productive for food.
Yeah, I've been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don't recommend using it and it's turned off by default. Haven't tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.
General strike with clear, specific demands would work. Easier said than done, especially since most workers in the US aren't already organized; but it would probably work. It would probably even work if all current major unions striked (a lot of union members are "conservative" though, so if it was seen as political rather than practical, it could break solidarity).
- It's always better to spend the money of others.
- It doesn't appear that bribing congresspeople is all that expensive. IIRC, it only took $60k to bribe that one congressperson who got caught.
- Just the threat of financing primary challengers appears to be enough to control Republican congresspeople. He's probably privately doing the same with some Dems too (offering not to finance challengers; he's already said he will finance challengers to all Democrats).
Communism is a stateless, classless society, and more like a utopian end-goal to strive for. But, yeah, parties that label themselves communist tend to be of the authoritarian type. Failure of certain strategies and implementations doesn't mean an entire ideology is bad. Democracy failed with Rome, and wasn't implemented on a large scale again for ~1800 years; and I think most people consider democracy a pretty good system now.
Yeah, that's what I mean, the workers could go in the factory, produce the goods, and sell them, if the company did not use violence. It's not clear where the factory came from in this hypothetical. The community could've built it, it could have been abandoned, or the company could've claimed they "owned" it (which is not possible in the society, so it would be seized).
Don't know what sillage tarp is; if it's not compostable, I wouldn't use it. I don't think just covering would kill the grass in time. Maybe it would, but it seems like if grass can survive a longer time under snow cover, it would survive under a tarp. I don't think anything would grow well just in compost and woodchips (I've heard some things do, but plants usually do need actual mineral soil). 4 inches of woodchips seems extreme for annual beds.
Could just till with a tiller or double-dig (hard work) and mix some compost in. Some grass will still probably come up, so will have to hoe every so often. After the first growing season, there'd be much less grass. And you can start using a no-till method.
Yeah, that was definitely the rationale. Satoshi added the message, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” to the first Bitcoin block. In the early days, most of the community were Tea Party, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, "abolish the Fed" types. There was a lot of anti-Fed propaganda floating around at that time. There was a big overlap with gold-bugs and Bitcoiners, and Bitcoin's "mining" decay curve was inspired by gold's.