In early Soviet Union, there was indeed a maximum salary, called a partmaximum.

Wesley Lloyd representing the State of Washington proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have limited annual incomes to $1 million

Another colleague John Snyder introduced another amendment proposal that would have limited personal wealth to $1 million.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of $25,000 Also proposed a 100 percent tax on income over 40,000, yeah, I know those two numbers don't add up quite right, probably after the 25,000 was taxed.

Until it was fixed, people in Sweden occasionally faced a tax of 102 percent. Talk about a positive feedback loop. Astrid Lindgren was an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So there are plenty of people who demand a tax rate of 100 percent on any income over (x), which is exactly a maximum wage.

I think people call it a better distribution of wealth, that doesn't need a level field but when there is too much concentration of wealth there is also too much concentration of power (capitalism by definition?).

Well, I do suspect that if you create a maximum wage, and just give that money to everyone else, and keep doing it until there is a standard salary. That's a level playing field, where everyone makes the same wages. And then the question becomes, If I make the same mopping floors as I would in stressful dangerous jobs, what would be the reason to do those jobs?

What help was that, since you appear to be claiming I am dissembling? My family told me that I was on my own after graduating high school. And what kind of background makes for success. We lived on surplus food (no food stamps at that time) I wore clothing from second hand stores, or hand me downs from relatives. The only "help" I got was marrying a woman with similar values. Which means she didn't overspend by nature.

Sigh. If there is one thing I detest, it is people playing victim. No, I'm no victim. I find people pulling out replies like you just did rather unbecoming. and really, like uno reverse victim claims.

I hear people working very very hard to cast me as the mortal enemy. If you noted, I support the social programs we have her to help the poor people in teh country - but kind sir, I see this all the time. You need an enemy, someone to be everything that you believe is wrong. Your hatred noted, may it serve you and your narrative well.

I know, right? Success for me is having enough money to do the things that make life worthwhile. Money in and of itself is very boring. And many people on both sides of what was once classed as class warfare are consumed with money.

I even enjoy paying it forward. Success is living well, So I take vacations pretty often. I live in a decent but not ostentatious house. Now to paying it forward. When I go out to eat with the wife or friends, I tip 75 to 100 percent. My woodworking "hobby" allows me to donate a lot of rather fine bowls and flatwork to various charities that have auctions and they generate a lot of money for them. I’ve been the CEO of two 501(c)3 charitable organizations, one youth sports oriented, and the most recent one a public education and public service organization. Wife and I contribute to food banks. Do I have money? Sure. But my definition of success isn't just the number of dollars in my checking savings, and investment accounts.

In stark reality, all of the eat the rich people are just practicing their own version of hatred. And your narrative is just an attempt to cast me as that privileged class, who leech off of society, while stomping everyone else.

Regardless, since you have already accused me of lying, you. are likely just going to be saying all the other things I say do that don't align with your narrative are just some rich person lying.

I thought we might have a fruitful conversation. I was completely wrong about that part.

It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

I do not know that what I have posted qualifies as any "least" situation. What is your solution, tovarisch? A real solution, just not more of the incitement to eat the rich.

Never said it was, you just saw something you didn't like, and stopped taking input. to clarify, I'll repeat - I wrote:

"Well, to clarify, since we're. worried about communism versus capitalism, the US is in no way shape or form capitalism. It is a mixture of corporatism and (cover the kid's ears folks!!) socialism."

We have quite a few socialism based benefits for people of low income. I already pointed that out, but by that time, you were freaking out.

There is a reason why section 8 exists. That reason is the failure of the so called "projects", where apartment buildings were built for low income people. Ironically, one of the reasons they failed was that they would not take working class families, but only the poorest, most needy, and oftentimes most troubled. They were also built in the poorest urban areas. They also had rent control caps, so maintenance often couldn't be made - there was no money for it.

Section 8 is not perfect and has its issues, but it does a couple things the projects did not. Section 8 has mixed income housing, the poor are living in the same places as middle income people not on section 8, and mixed social integration.

People make the decisions. Money indeed does play into it.

That said, with your apparent desire for the poor to make decisions, we do have to deal with some unfortunate truths. Wealth, or the lack of it, does not translate to worth. Some people are born to wealth, some achieve it via hard work, some achieve it through unethical means. It is a mix.

And the poor - it is very similar, some is bad luck - think the handicapped, some of the mentally challenged. Some is drive - not all people have drive. This is also a mix.

We have other things in the mix. Wealthy people who believe all poor are deserving of it, and poor people who believe that worthiness and ethics are inversely proportional to the amount of money a person has. Both are abysmally brain dead ideas, and leave the believer in a highly manipulable state.

I might have a viewpoint based on my personal experience of starting out in poverty, and working my way many rungs up the social and wealth ladder.

Asshats and good people are on each level.

And I do judge. I do it based on character, not the contents of the wallet or amount of melanin in the skin, or country of origin.

Pissed off a comrade, did I?

I remember the Internet before Eternal September. You need to go back at least that far.

If you think about it? Most arguments against mergers have to do with it being bad for consumers because they lose options and prices for the service are free to go up. In this case, DoorDash can make a strong argument that grocery shopping for people was never really their focus, so they're expanding their offerings, vs creating a monopoly on food delivery. BUT, they're creating a near monopoly on the gig worker! Not that long ago, we had other players in the space like Postmates, but they were bought up since then.

Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?

I'm surprised that Reddit, of all places, is emulating twitter?
As far as I can tell "for you" is just a firehose of shitty people that disagree with me politically.
On the other hand "following" is (I guess?) derived from the posts I've actually followed, and that's a firehose of shitty people that I ostensibly agree with, politically, but clearly don't in nearly every other respect.

I think the intent is that one feed will engage me angrily, while the other will engage me affirmatively.

In fact, together they've made it astonishingly easy to never check twitter, ever. Kinda like facebook and reddit.

I'm old enough to remember the computer bulletin board system (BBS) days fondly. I ran my own BBS for over a decade, in one form or another. At the end, I moved it to kind of a hybrid setup where I had 4 dial-in phone numbers for modems, but also a 128K ISDN circuit to the Internet. Most callers used it as a way to access some Internet resources while others started connecting to the BBS itself via the Internet.

Ultimately, BBS sysops (the jargon for system operators) realized we were at the end of an era. The Internet simply made the hobby of BBSing obsolete. Why limit oneself to using a specific bulletin board system and whatever limited options it has on its menus, when a raw Internet connection allowed hopping all over the world to content of all types -- even accessing multiple screens of it simultaneously?

Even back then though? I think many of us mourned the lack of personal connection that caused. On a BBS you used regularly, you had typically 100-500 or so somewhat regular users to interact with. Most were in your same geographic location. It wasn't uncommon to organize gatherings so people could meet the real humans behind the screen names/handles.Message topics were more relevant to where you lived. People could actually request 1 on one chats with the sysops, and most people got to know them pretty well.

The Internet doesn't "need to die", but maybe more people should make the effort to seek out and use web sites offering quality content, vs a habit of spending most of their time on big-name social media sites? I know for me, a good example for this is cars. I've always been kind of an auto enthusiast, and I used to always seek out a web message forum for any vehicle I purchased, and immediately join as as new member there. These days, I see all these enthusiast type groups popping up on Facebook -- but none of them offer the depth of information the dedicated web forums have. You just wind up with thousands of people in the Facebook group asking the same questions and wanting to show off photos of whatever they did cosmetically to their ride. The message forums always seem to have a few regulars who REALLY know the car inside and out. I'm talking master mechanics who have taken the whole vehicle apart and put it back together again, in their own garage. And they post a LOT of "how to" type message threads and more.

Wait, you believe that government builds sewer pipes, gas systems, plumbing, roads? All of these things were and are built by private companies and should be built by private companies, not governments. Nothing should be done or built by governments, there shouldn't be any government employees, all government employees should be fired, all government regulation need to be abolished. People will rebuild everything, there shouldn't be even such things as government enforced zoning laws.

Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.

The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.

1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

I know of no one who uttered the word that "capitalism is the root of all problems"

However, is that an actual point making the many posts speaking of end stage capitalism, or is from OP "With capitalism we are rushing off the side of a cliff."

not If you demand specific wording, no - I saw no such exact wording. But unless you are new here, there is a lot of hate heaped on "capitalism" Especially towards one particular country where there is a narrative that said country is run by capitalism. It isn't

Well, let's look at the country in question. Here in the USA we are not living under capitalism. We have a combination of corporatism, with a lot of socialism effects tossed in.

There are many benefits for people of low economic means. Free phones, free laptops, Heating oil assistance, low cost internet, section 8 housing (if you are not an American, Section 8 is a program where a low income person pays a small amount, perhaps a couple hundred dollars a month for their apartment and the Government picks up the rest) WIC- Women, Infants, & Children program giving free food. Medicaid for children and many adults. Medicare, Social Security disabled benefits for adults, and children, even Social Security benefits for children of older parents. We have food Stamp programs, we have free transportation for poor and retired people, including personal pickup and delivery for people living in areas not served by regular public transportation.

This does not sound to me like Capitalism in any shape or form.

These are things that don't get mentioned much. At one point in the past, I provided cites and links to all of this. It varies by state, but even deep red states have these programs.

You tell me. Should there be a maximum allowable salary? How do we make a completely level playing field? Force the driven not to work?

I have to note, I was born in poverty, and worked myself up to around top 10 percent. Zero help. Put myself through college, built a salable skillset. Doing 6 figures in retirement. So I'm probably in the group who need penalized for success.

So how do we deal with the driven vs the non-driven? How do we deal with those who build something? I built my money through frugal living and saving while young and then at around 50, really hit my stride. Waited until interest rates were down, then bought a house that's below what I was approved for, and paid it off in less than 15 years. Kept saving and investing. Don't want to turn this into Ol's financial classes though.

And I'm astute enough to know that not everyone is going to do that. But in the modern parlance, I am the bad person, and they must have the same economic resources as I do. So yes, I've been told I was part of the problem.

Now I might not be the brightest person in the room, but my experience has been that while some are whining about how bad it is that only some people have money, that the proper gestalt is a level playing field, I would propose that it really isn't possible to make that level playing field. Mainly because of different abilities and individual drives.

What do we do with the "obscene" rich, and the poor that are not driven or mentally capable on the other end. I've personally shown that with drive, a very poor person can work their way up that ladder. Takes hard work and financial smarts. No, not everyone has that combo. And here in the land people love to hate we have a way to help the people that might be stuck on the lower end of the economic scale, and don't really care about rising any further. I support such a system.

Now your solution for a level playing field?

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(