• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • hmmm I wonder if that is considered in the thousands of words of this article…

    It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.









  • Often as different benefits have different qualifying conditions. But the larger point against means testing (IMO) is that universal benefits are far less likely to be attacked and devalued over time. If something is just given to a small section of society, often a relatively powerless one, it is easy for politicians on the right to scrap that benefit or daemonize those who receive it. On the other hand universal benefits (like this one) see huge pushback when politicians try to take them away.

    The better path forward is to make benefits universal, but make them taxable income and raise higher rates of income tax, that way most of the money given to higher earners naturally flows back to the treasury.