Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.

If Miyamoto is succeeded by someone with Gabe’s pro-consumer philosophy, Nintendo could dominate.

Sony and Microsoft are too busy doing the private equity playbook.

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Are we looking from the perspective of the user or the wall?

It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.

If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.

Get involved with Represent.Us, the site that was linked to.

They have a pretty good strategy, and they have been making progress.

Governance is discouraging because it’s complex. And when things are complex, it’s difficult to see progress and it’s easy to predict that there will be problems.

It’s also difficult (and unrewarding) to have serious conversations about this stuff on social media.

The posts get too long, with no satisfying simplistic conclusion, and even if you make an incredible magnum opus of a post that acknowledges enough complexity to be realistic while also being short and snappy enough to catch people’s attention… it drops off of the trending posts algorithm after a day.

For some reason people in art believe they don’t have to compete like every other individual creating a business

If you think art is about selling a product, what’s the point of being alive?

Really bad graphic design overall. They might as well have used WordArt.

Interacting with people whose tone doesn’t match their words may induce anxiety as well.

Have they actually proven this is a good idea, or is this a “so preoccupied with whether or not they could” scenario?

I’m gonna do the most annoying thing in the world here, and just tell you to go watch Finding The Money. I feel like that’s a dick move in 99% of circumstances, but I did explicitly start this thread with the notion that after watching that documentary… I felt like these were misleading terms. So if you wanna discuss whether they are misleading terms given that context, it might be useful to share that same context.

I’m down to talk more afterwards. You’ve been a good pen pal.

I, uh… think we got off on the wrong foot. I don’t see spending or taxation as a bad thing.

I mean, peep the @midwest.social, for a hint. And I did specifically say that I wouldn’t recommend any terms to replace “raise” and “revenue” that have a negative connotation, such as “deactivation” or “destruction”.

I’m also aware of the multiplier effect. The benefits of government spending are actually why I’m so interested in reframing the conversation about spending and taxation.

I will quibble with this:

The spending of a tax dollar is the beginning, not the end, of the benefit.

The spending is the beginning, yes – but not a tax dollar.

Governments don’t need to tax first, in order to spend second. It’s the opposite. That’s why “raise” and “revenue” are such terrible terms. Because they prime you to think that taxes are how we pay for things. We pay for things by just paying for them. The government spends dollars into existence. Taxation is just there to incentivize economic activity to chase those new dollars and keep a stable value.

If you view taxation as necessary to gather the funds to do something, you can have a bunch of resources just sitting around doing nothing and never be able to utilize them because you can’t gather the funds without destabilizing the economy. But if you can just spend the money into existence, you can go ahead and increase the utilization without taxing first and then adjust taxation as needed from there on out.

And it turns out, this is how money has always worked. Taxation has always been a cleanup step to keep the spending productive, not a prerequisite to enable the spending in the first place. The myth of tax as revenue is relatively new.

I’m not sure. I’m not a wordsmith or an economist. But I would expect it to be something that conveys a sense that the money is being decommissioned rather than mobilized, or annihilated rather than gathered.

But the sense of deactivation or destruction is usually a negative feeling, so I would want to find a word that puts a slight positive spin on it. This is a happy conclusion to the money’s journey. Its task is done and the inflationary pressure associated with its work is now relieved.

After watching Finding The Money, terms like “raise” and “revenue” applied to taxes seem deliberately misleading.

He was also depicted as the villain in the Robin Hood tales.

Feels about right.

So any day now, we can expect a custom porn video where the stars make fun of a meme collector’s folders and then delete them.

Steam is so funny.

Buying there instead of pirating is a joy, the ads actually feel like a benefit instead of a punishment, the analytics seem to be aimed at saving me time by highlighting stuff I’ll like instead of gaslighting me into emptying my wallet…

The result is:

I buy lots of games, watch lots of ads — share ads with friends even — go out of my way to give them more analytics data points, and trust their recommendations enough to shell out $2.99 for something on sale after only 10 seconds of research.

Why are other companies not able to follow Steam’s approach?

“Nobody uses hard drives anymore. Have the intern replace all mentions of hard drives with solid state drives.”

Inelastic demand. One of many reasons that the stuff you learn in Econ 101 is pure fantasy.

So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.

• Cinnamon swirl
• Bacon
• French fries
• Toast
• Tea