this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Let’s say you get to pass a law in the USA that would make it illegal to have more than a billion dollars. How would you formulate this law and what would you expect to happen when it’s passed?
Anything over a net worth of 1 billion is taxed at 100%
And everything above 50 million is taxed 90%
And everything over $10 is taxed at 80%
You'd probably format it as a percentage of GDP per capita, as it's about limiting wealth disparity (and thus protecting social mobility), distributing wealth growth nationally, and limiting the concentration of financial interest as it's a threat to national and democratic security.
You'd probably want it accompanies by various studies that show that that large wealth disparities are detrimental to social mobility (aka the ability to "work your way up" in classes), and probably some political science papers on the ills of concentrations of wealth.
You'd probably want it to come into force along with laws that limit campaign contributions and big money donors in politics... get rid of that whole "political donations are protected as political speech" crap.... and you'd probably want it as a wealth tax that pays into a sovereign wealth fund with rules on what it can be used for.
The better answer would be to just improve antitrust laws
All of the big name billionaires came from the tech industry
There wouldn't be an immediate law to just have a roving gang of enforcers knock down a billionaire's door and send them to jail .... that is just wishful thinking.
Billionaire's would still continue to exist except that anything beyond a certain level of wealth is just taxed either completely or near fully. It would remove the incentive for anyone to own or gain billions of dollars. And it wouldn't occur immediately, it would take years, decades or even lifetimes to make a difference.