> Oxfam’s perspective is global, but we don’t have a world government, so all wealth taxes would have to be national. Very few countries have wealth taxes of the kind Oxfam seems to be seeking. One which does is France. Its imposition – at much lower rates than Oxfam seems to be advocating – raises comparatively little, and has driven many rich people abroad. And as in any country the super-rich are a vanishingly tiny minority, wealth taxes will inevitably catch people who are very far from being billionaires. The French wealth tax hits assets in excess of just €1.3 million. The most recent figures suggest that, of 350,000 households liable to the tax, 250,000 paid less than €5,000.
> If taxes could be devised which would catch much larger amounts of billionaires’ wealth, how would it be redistributed, with no world government in prospect?
> Without a plausible plan for practical redistribution, the annual Oxfam report has become simply an opportunity for the left’s performative outrage, as pointless in its own way as the World Economic Forum which they bemoan. No political party in Britain should take it seriously and neither should the public.
> The ISF was controversial; critics claimed it drove away wealthy individuals from the country, resulting in financial loss. A report by senator Philippe Marini estimated that 843 people left France in 2006 because of the tax, resulting in a net loss of €2.8 billion.[2][3]
> South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.
> This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.
That would surprise every court that’s convicted someone of coercive control, stalking, or psychological abuse. None involved broken bones, yet all involved measurable harm and loss of agency.
Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon. I’m sure there are many others in creative industries since you have to delight customers at least some of the time there. A large part of the reason Nvidia is a big deal is that they were willing to make the best drivers, that they just cared more about making a quality product. Lots of companies well exceed minimum quality necessary to keep customers from switching.
Nintendo is changing. Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware with super expensive games. Not to mention always being extremely hostile to fans and draconically enforcing their copyright. With their recent software patent trolling they are on their way to become the Japanese Oracle.
Nvidia has garnered a lot of hate from the gaming community. Completely dishonest marketing, purposefully gimped hardware that barely gets enough RAM to function. Everyone wishes there would be more competition in this space.
Sure some studios still care about their customers but any huge corporations is bound to become a rotting corpse of its former self over time.
Per most reviewers (e.g. Digital Foundry), the Switch 2 is expensive but not over-priced for what you get (unless what you get is motion sickness from the overdriven LCD display).
There's a stark difference between "expensive" and "overpriced". A lot of people have said over the years that Apple's laptops were "overpriced", when what they really meant was that they could get something good enough for their needs for lower prices. Lots of people still bought them because it was worth it to them.
Likewise, the Switch 2 is expensive, and it is not worth it to everyone, but for a lot of people it's not "overpriced"; I would point to the Switch 2's sales numbers as the fastest selling console in history to indicate that most people don't seem to feel the same way.
> with super expensive games.
Correction: every other gaming platform has super cheap games. If game prices had kept up with inflation since I was a kid playing on the NES, we'd be paying well over $100-120 for games these days. They're definitely more expensive than other games, but (as one example) if I play Mario Kart World half as much as I played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe then I'm getting better value for my money than almost any other entertainment I've ever paid for.
Again, not worth it to everyone, but not unreasonable also. It sucks, but still.
Gaming being a relatively cheap hobby doesn't change the fact that Nintendo is using its market position to raise prices in a coldly capitalistic way that obviously saps some of the "delight" their customers would normally experience.
> Kirk’s legacy is real. TPUSA lives on. The Arizona GOP has been remade in his image. Donald Trump won the popular vote. His administration is staffed by dozens of men Kirk handpicked. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousand—of young Republicans have the courage to be young Republicans because of him. The Republican Party is now a populist, nationalist institution. Save for the life and labors of Charlie Kirk, none of this would have happened.
> A reckoning is due. Justice must be served. But we should not forget why Charlie Kirk was assassinated: he figured out how to make conservative populism work. His conviction that nationalist populism could win in America has been vindicated by events. His strategy proved so powerful that his enemies were left with no recourse but to murder him. It is up to us to decide whether the victory-path Kirk cleared dies with him.
> he also wasn‘t European looking (should be obvious).
Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines all look very similar and Jesus was definitely of the Levant. I hope you won’t deny Spaniards and Greeks are European.
In this context, "European" means "white." Jesus probably did not look like the bearded white hippie commonly depicted in Western (primarily American and British) iconography.
Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines may or may not look similar (seems a bit broad, like the geographical definition of "European") but they also don't often look like "white people." Especially not in Egypt or the Levant.
Generally the matter is one of blood purity, as with all racism. Southern Spain, Italy, and Greece were all occupied at one time by Arabs, which contributed certain hair textures, skin tones, and facial features to the local gene pool. Those with no knowledge of history or civilization tend to be terrified of acknowledging the artistic and cultural contributions of al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire. As you probably know, the northern reaches of Italy are more German than Romance, on account of those pesky invasive Lombards.
Of course the true absurdity of all this comes when two people from the same parents end up with different physiognomical and racial labels; since these traits are rarely as simple as idealized Mendelian characteristics, it is entirely possible for them to be passed on a couple of generations before re-coalescing. (The case of Summer on The Sopranos comes to mind—while her parents both have fairer skin than she does, the result is otherwise not all that unrealistic.)
>As an European, I find the definition of European that excludes Spaniards super weird.
Because you are, as I suspect many people will, intentionally misreading the context of my comment.
I am implying that the use of "European" herein does not literally refer to the geographic region known as "Europe," but rather that in the context of a statement about the likely physical appearance of Jesus it should be understood as a statement about race and ethnicity whereby "European" is a politically correct descriptor for the common set of physical traits often described as "white," as is represented in Western depictions of Jesus, particularly where traits like skin color, eye color and hair color are concerned.
1.) Look, Spaniards are Europeans by any reasonable definition. They are part of Western Europe.
2.) Traditional western depiction of Jesus looking like Spaniards would be no exception. Traditional western depiction of Jesus tend to look sorta kinda like locals do.
3.) Europeans do have wild range of eye colors and hair colors. The eye color and hair being some specific colors even for whites is weird, because even whitey whites have all kind of hair colors and eye colors.
> "European" is a politically correct descriptor for the common set of physical traits often described as "white,
No it is not and to the extend it is, it is absurd whistleblowing attempt - the one that ends up redefine Western Europe as a place that excludes Spaniards.
99.99% of the population of the Mediterranean basin at the time Jesus lived were white, almost certainly more given that the trans-Saharan slave trade was a creature of the camel and post dated the Arab conquest of North Africa.
“White” didn’t exist at that time and the people of the Mediterranean certainly didn’t think of themselves as one homogeneous group. The various peoples had prejudices about each other which only consolidated into a hierarchy when the trans-Atlantic slave trade needed to legally define who couldn’t be property. Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.
> Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.
Which is a bit funny, considering how they asdmired the ancient Greeks and Romans. Why did they consider their culture and statecraft as so ideal, if they considered the people that originated them as so inferior?
From what I’ve read, there was a lot of thought about them having fallen from their ancestors. Some of the eugenics types wrote about this as a cautionary tale about mixing with other races or letting them share power. The reasoning only makes sense if you start with the conclusion and work backwards trying to make it fit.
Just because you never heard it doesn't mean it didn't happen. For example, Irish people were heavily discriminated against in the US and were considered at one point to not be "white"
> I wanted to read Henry Kissinger’s 400 page undergraduate thesis (it has an incredible first page), but really didn’t feel like dealing with a scanned PDF that’s annoying to read on a phone without constantly zooming and panning.
> So I decided to convert it to a nice markdown format using OCR and LLMs. Then I thought it would be nice to fix the footnotes and get rid of the page breaks and to fix the line breaks and other things like that.
> I was already working on some other coding projects, so I had the idea of loading up the draft markdown file in Claude Code and having it work on fixing these issues using a swarm of 20 sub-agents, which worked well.
> Then I thought it would be cool to link to the full sources for all the many references on sites like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, so I had another swarm of sub-agents do a ton of searches to track the links down and insert them into the footnotes and bibliography.
> Then I figured that I might as well run it through my mind-map generator and summarization code to see what it comes up with, so I tried that. But now I had a few files to present, so needed some kind of index page.
> So I asked Codex with GPT-5 to whip up a slick looking web page to present the stuff nicely, which it did a yeoman’s job with.
> Note that I was already working with these tools in a bunch of other sessions on other projects, so my work here was occasionally giving some instructions to the coding agents and letting them crank away. I really didn’t spend much active time on this!
> Anyway, the net result is clearly the premier way in the world today to consume Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis electronically. I’ll post the link in the next tweet to avoid getting punished by the algorithm.
> As for the thesis itself, it’s wild how erudite he was as a young man, and also what a great writer he was. And even more impressive considering that English was his second language.
> The thesis is basically him trying to come to grips with, and to mentally organize in an internally consistent way, a vast swath of Western thought. From what I’ve read so far, I think he did a pretty good job.
> Incidentally, his thesis is the reason Harvard changes the rules to limit the undergrad honors thesis to a maximum of 35,000 words. Good thing they didn’t apply this silly limit to Henry!
https://iea.org.uk/media/impractical-outrage-iea-economist-r...
> Oxfam’s perspective is global, but we don’t have a world government, so all wealth taxes would have to be national. Very few countries have wealth taxes of the kind Oxfam seems to be seeking. One which does is France. Its imposition – at much lower rates than Oxfam seems to be advocating – raises comparatively little, and has driven many rich people abroad. And as in any country the super-rich are a vanishingly tiny minority, wealth taxes will inevitably catch people who are very far from being billionaires. The French wealth tax hits assets in excess of just €1.3 million. The most recent figures suggest that, of 350,000 households liable to the tax, 250,000 paid less than €5,000.
> If taxes could be devised which would catch much larger amounts of billionaires’ wealth, how would it be redistributed, with no world government in prospect?
> Without a plausible plan for practical redistribution, the annual Oxfam report has become simply an opportunity for the left’s performative outrage, as pointless in its own way as the World Economic Forum which they bemoan. No political party in Britain should take it seriously and neither should the public.
If you want critique from a committed Democrat look here. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/oxfam-serves-up-a-lot-of-dodgy...
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