Hmm, I guess theoretically. I bet towns or businesses close to eachother over a state border do something to equalize prices. Or I guess the businesses in the lower taxed state would just raise their prices because they can and still get business.

Yeah, that was definitely the rationale. Satoshi added the message, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” to the first Bitcoin block. In the early days, most of the community were Tea Party, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, “abolish the Fed” types. There was a lot of anti-Fed propaganda floating around at that time. There was a big overlap with gold-bugs and Bitcoiners, and Bitcoin’s “mining” decay curve was inspired by gold’s.

You still pay taxes in those states, just not income. Most people will pay more taxes in those states compared to places like California (not the rich, of course). Texas chose a system of sales taxes (state and local), which act like flat-taxes, which put more burden on lower income people.

General strike with clear, specific demands would work. Easier said than done, especially since most workers in the US aren’t already organized; but it would probably work. It would probably even work if all current major unions striked (a lot of union members are “conservative” though, so if it was seen as political rather than practical, it could break solidarity).

Pocket guns are harder to shoot accurately because of the short distance between the rear and front sights, and recoil is worse. But yeah, should be fine. I really like the compactness of my P938 (discontinued now). P365 is probably also good (higher cap).

1. It’s always better to spend the money of others.
2. It doesn’t appear that bribing congresspeople is all that expensive. IIRC, it only took $60k to bribe that one congressperson who got caught.
3. Just the threat of financing primary challengers appears to be enough to control Republican congresspeople. He’s probably privately doing the same with some Dems too (offering not to finance challengers; he’s already said he will finance challengers to all Democrats).

For me. I think everything is physical, and there’s always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the “choices” you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.

Communism is a stateless, classless society, and more like a utopian end-goal to strive for. But, yeah, parties that label themselves communist tend to be of the authoritarian type. Failure of certain strategies and implementations doesn’t mean an entire ideology is bad. Democracy failed with Rome, and wasn’t implemented on a large scale again for ~1800 years; and I think most people consider democracy a pretty good system now.

Lol. This comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I still don’t know if it’s logically correct from a non-physicalist POV, but I did come to the conclusion that I lean toward eliminative materialism and illusionism. Now I don’t have to think about consciousness anymore because it’s just a trick our brains play on us (consciousness always seemed poorly defined to me anyways).

I guess when AI appears to be sufficiently human or animal-like in its cognitive abilities and emotions, I’ll start worrying about its suffering.

I actually think it’s more targeted toward the Andrew Tate and Fresh and Fit follower types, and the propaganda does appear to be working on younger men, who are rapidly becoming more “conservative.” They’re extremely insecure in their masculinity, and think the subservience of women would be affirming.

Of course, it actually just hurts everyone, barring the people that benefit from keeping the working class divided.

I recently went back to pirating and transferring music to my phone like it was an iPod, lol. VLC is a good player (and works with Android Auto), and Strawberry is good on Linux for listening and library management. The SoulSeek network has a lot of hard to find stuff in flac (I use the Nicotine+ client).