I don’t think it’s cultural. I think it’s republicans repeatedly targeting education for decades. I mean have you ever been in a teachers’ subreddit or community? Modern American education is a fucking dumpster fire.

Remember Trump’s “I love the uneducated”? It’s not because he’s friendly, it’s because they’re more manipulable.

Not just valid, I’d argue important. It doesn’t make the most exciting headlines and doesn’t get funding very well, though, so it’s not done nearly as often as it should be. A big part of science is not taking things at face value and verifying that there is sufficient proof for claims.

Plus, if both results agree, it statistically tightens the probability of a coincidence. The chances of a 5% chance event happening twice in a row is 0.25%, and three times in a row is 0.0125% so repetition can make the results more certain.

To be fair, this isn’t the typical bullshit “look what she was wearing, she wanted it” victim blaming. It’s like watching every single person who walks into a room get punched in the face, then walking in, getting punched in the face, and then being surprised and angry that you got punched in the face. It’s like watching people vote for Trump and then being surprised when they get fucked by his policies that he very blatantly said he would enact.

Is it right that it happened to her? Of course not. Should people have done it to her? Also of course not. Was it extremely, painfully predictable? Yeah, it unfortunately was. It may not be her fault, but… What the fuck did they think was gonna happen? They’d sell porn people actually wanted but nobody would ever ever ever save a copy because they wanted it?

They wouldn’t be able to track the printer to you from the fingerprint in that case, but if you ever end up on their radar, that printer is damning evidence even if all the memory on it is pristine clean.

They don’t follow a standard protocol because the industry is dominated by just a few players, and it isn’t in their interests to do that since they want to make customers dependent on them. The industry is dominated in part because the fingerprint tracking creates extra overhead that’s harder for smaller or starting businesses to deal with.

They don’t just have to maintain a database. They have to handle all of the logistics of accurately collecting and entering the data for it. They need legal counsel to get it right. They need to work with distributors and/or retailers to get an idea where they’re going so a fingerprint can be linked to a retail purchase. They have to deal with the inevitable subpoenas at a minimum, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fulfilled requests without a legal order. It becomes a lot of extra labor beyond just making and selling printers.

We’d have quality printers if it was legal to make an open source one. Unfortunately, every printer is legally required to be a snitch and uniquely fingerprint everything it prints with a discreet dot matrix so the feds can track you down if you print something illegal.

So now, the only companies that can make and sell printers are those capable of and willing to maintain a database of all the printers they sell and the fingerprint they add to all prints.

Your printer is absolute shit because it’s a snitch.

It’s a dying problem, but it’s gonna take a while to finish dying off. Linux is currently mostly used by more technically capable people, so avoiding the terminal has historically been a lower priority compared to getting things to work at all. I think that’s changing as things get increasingly stable and usable with support for popular things like gaming. Once that base functionality is there, more and more attention will turn to polishing the UI and finding ways to hide the terminal.

I installed NixOS a couple months ago, and it’s been my smoothest Linux experience to date. Everything just worked, except I had to figure out how to open the firewall for my network drive on my home server to be discoverable and usable. But that was fairly expected. I game, so I stress test the graphics routinely. No WiFi, though, so I guess that could maybe be flaky.

People are down voting you like your defending them, but you’re not, and you’re right. It sounds like a lot of money, but for Apple, it’s just an adjustment to the profits they made doing this.

Oh god /pol/ is the hot spot now? I can only imagine the cess pit.

Even if legally yes, good fucking luck living through it. If you’re gonna do it, even legally, you better get them all and fucking disappear. At bare minimum, you’re getting an unholy beating by any cop that gets their hands on you. Probably find an excuse to just shoot you.

But then how are they supposed to collect data?

Musk bought Twitter because he fucked around trying to manipulate the stock price and accidentally made an agreement he couldn’t back out of. He tried. He failed. He was forced to buy it according to the terms he previously specified.

I don’t. I’m sure it doesn’t.

When old retired people are able to hold on to houses they shouldn’t be able to afford,

Only because you want to tax them while letting them live on a poverty income. I might see your point if Social Security payouts were substantially increased, but they aren’t, and you aren’t proposing that we change that, either.

In addition, old homeowners paying lower taxes means a greater tax burden on new homeowners, again meaning higher prices.

Once again, you completely ignore that under my proposal, those young people wouldn’t be paying the property taxes, either. So this is a completely irrelevant point to what I’m proposing.

Lower supply = higher prices

Now try applying this to rent seeking scalpers, too, not just people trying to live in the homes they bought with their own hard work. How’s it impact the housing market when the guy buying up homes doesn’t even want to live in them? You think maybe a little more heavily than someone just trying to not be homeless?

The math is inescapable, and no emotional screeching will change that truth

That’s a really fucking bold claim to make when you’re the one who hasn’t done any math here and completely fucking ignored my math. I at least actually did my own research and math on tax rates and Social Security to make an informed conclusion that they are NOT all millionaires. You just keep screeching about irrelevant millionaires even when I already said multiple times that exorbitantly valued homes shouldn’t be tax exempt.

Prop 13 and its variants are absolutely an exception for the elderly. And their heirs, which is just blatant bullshit, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Yeah, you’re 100% right, it is a whole other conversation, one I’m not part of. I haven’t mentioned Prop 13 once, nor did I even know what it was. And at a glance now that I’m aware, it’s not what I’m fucking advocating for. You wanna try actually addressing the points I’m making instead of just ranting at me about whatever pissed you off?

That IS saying people shouldn’t pay taxes. Unless you disagree with the entire concept of taxing wealth.

That sure is a blind logical leap you’re making there. Especially when I already agreed to property taxes on high value homes, multiple times. I SPECIFICALLY said no property taxes on homes of a reasonable value, as defined by semi-local values. I say semi-local because living in a particularly town or area shouldn’t exclude you from taxes just because your neighbors are rich, too, but I’d be willing to make some locality concessions because of how home values vary by region, probably averaging out to at least some extent with the whole state. Hell, you could also do it as a sort of minimum threshold like we do with tax brackets. Properties valued under $XXX,000 get no tax with XXX dependent on region, anything above that pays full taxes on the value above that threshold, double taxes on value above a secondary threshold, and double it with no minimum threshold if it’s not your primary residence.

The same way a yacht is worth money. If you believe those assets should be taxed, then a home should be taxed.

Ah, yes, because a home providing shelter in line with local averages and basic human needs is definitely the same thing as a luxury item that serves no true need in life. Because we should tax luxury yachts, we should also tax basic necessities like homes? That’s the clownest of clown takes.

And I do believe that wealth should be taxed entirely separately from and irrespective of income. The tax RATE should obviously be progressive and not a flat tax. But no blanket exemption, especially not for poor pitiful millionaires, whatever their social security check dollar amount is.

I think we agree here but disagree on implementation. Personally, I see a wealth tax as a means to prevent wealth consolidation at the top, so I do not see it as reasonable to apply to someone who simply owns their home and has a respectable retirement fund because that’s not making a significant contribution to wealth consolidation. I would obviously include an exemption for a primary residence of reasonable value. Extra emphasis on “of reasonable value”, because you seem to need a little assistance with your reading comprehension since you’ve ignored it literally every single time I’ve said it, which has been many times at this point. I’d probably set the minimum threshold for a wealth tax substantially higher than you, though. Norway, for example, taxes wealth above ~$110k USD, I think it is, and they only consider 1/4 of the value of the home. This may sound like a reasonable starting point until you realize the average home price is around $500k, which means you’re already often looking at taxes on an average home. At a first guess with minimal research behind it, I’d say the threshold should probably be 2x-4x as high and with a bigger carve out for homes, again only if they’re reasonably valued. I don’t think you should start getting hit with a wealth tax the instant you actually start getting ahead.

And at the risk of wasting my time by typing out only to have it ignored yet again, I’m going to reiterate that I’m NOT SAYING THEY SHOULDN’T BE PAYING TAXES. People should generally pay taxes. I just don’t think we should be levying taxes on basic human necessities, and even states with a sales tax often acknowledge that to some extent by making basic food items tax exempt. A wealth tax with reasonable exceptions for things like reasonably valued homes and a large savings that still don’t make them rich are fine. Income taxes are fine and should be higher at the higher end of the brackets, probably with another new bracket or two on top.

And these precious poor old homeowner people you keep defending ARE MILLIONAIRES.

I literally did the math to prove that isn’t always the case. This is why I didn’t bother providing more facts, you’re just going to prioritize your feelings over hard facts.

And even if a barely over median home value DID make them a millionaire, that’s a gross condemnation of the housing market, not a literally barely above average home owner. The idea that someone living in the home they bought and owning no other properties might be responsible for the housing problems is absolutely ludicrous because that’s the fucking point of housing. If you think people living in their own homes is the problem with the housing market, I really have no idea how to address the utter void of reasoning required to reach that conclusion.

Lmfao old people living in their homes is a bigger problem than corporate landlords?

SPECIFICALLY concerning the abysmal lack of housing, yes. Not generally. Don’t twist my words.

Yeah, my point still stands. Housing is for people to live in. People living in their own housing will never be the cause of the problem when that’s the whole fucking reason we build housing. I really don’t understand how you could blame someone living in their only home MORE than you blame corporations who buy homes for the express purpose of renting it out for profit, the literal fucking definition of rent seeking behavior.

No exceptions just because they’re old.

I’m not advocating for exceptions for the elderly. You expressly avoided quoting my actual proposal, no taxes on a primary residence of a reasonable value in relation to state home values. That’s not saying people shouldn’t pay taxes. That’s saying that their home shouldn’t be a tax burden so long as it’s a reasonable property.

Lmfao old people living in their homes is a bigger problem than corporate landlords? That’s absolutely ludicrous. And you want to keep harping on these expensive ass houses when I already demonstrated that you can spend half your Social Security on a barely over median value home AND agreed with you that it shouldn’t apply to particularly lavish homes. You’re not interested in facts. You’ve found your enemy to hate, and somehow, you chose elderly retired people instead of the moneyed interests routinely fucking us all over. I’d devote the time to explaining why that’s wrong and providing evidence, but you’ve clearly demonstrated that your clown ass will just ignore it.

You make the extremely faulty assumption that Trump both wants to and is able to help America succeed when he’s incapable and couldn’t care less.

I dunno why you think old people who didn’t save enough for retirement should automatically get to live a good life

Bruh they’re on less than $2k/month. They aren’t living it up. That’s $24k/year. That’s a $10/hour full time job. That’s poverty wages.

by making the housing market worse for younger people.

There are 28 vacant homes per homeless person in the US. It’s not old folks wanting to live in the homes they spent decades in. It’s corporate landlords and bad zoning laws.

When you’re poor, life sucks, that’s how it is.

Only because we let the rich condemn us to it. Productivity is at an all time high. We’ve basically conquered scarcity. The only real reason to continue allowing poverty is to keep forcing us to serve the owner class.

To free up housing stock and keep liquidity and supply in the housing market. To undo the crystallization we see in the market with old people clutching to their houses with all their might. To reduce the overwhelming cost of purchasing ones first home.

See above on how this isn’t their fault.

Sometimes, when you can’t afford something, you need to sell it and get a cheaper version. When that thing is a house, sometimes you need to move away.

But they only can’t afford it because of taxes. They literally managed to afford the entire house and all the maintenance on it. They can afford the house until we decided our elderly deserve to live on poverty wages while being taxed on their housing. I’ve already shown that it doesn’t even have to be that nice a house. It could very easily be a mediocre house that used to be rural and just got consumed by urban sprawl. So now, in their old age, you want to force them out of that home, which means they’ll probably be forced out of their community, which means they’ll lose their support network. Which will really fuck them.

It is mathematically impossible for someone in poverty to be unable to afford property taxes, because if their property valuation is so high that taxes are a burden, they’re not poor.

For someone on Social Security, that home may be the only asset of any real worth they have. Social Security pays out an average of less than $2,000 a month. We can squabble over the technical definition of poverty, but look at the reality of it. A 70+ year old person on Social Security doesn’t have good odds of getting hired anywhere that’s gonna pay him worth a shit. They can’t afford modern rent prices on that sort of check. Their only real shot at staying housed without a bunch of other retired and poverty stricken roommates is to have already paid off a home. Their financial situation is very likely to never significantly improve again for the rest of their lives.

Now, I’ll admit some states have very low property taxes that won’t impact things too heavily, but that’s not universally true. Look at New Jersey. They have a property tax rate of 1.86%. For that to constitute half of the average Social Security check, as mentioned in OP, that’d only require a home with a value of $640k, which sounds like a whole lot until you realize the median NJ home price is $540k. That could be a fairly run of the mill house that used to be rural and got caught in urban sprawl, spiking the value. That could be a modest home on a very little bit, not a lot, of farmable land. That could be a home in a rundown part of town that got gentrified over the last decades. That could be a few critical companies moving into the area and spiking home demand. That could just be our housing market doing what it’s done for the last half a decade and just belligerently raising prices to ludicrous levels.

I don’t think that sounds like he’s living it up. I think that on a $2,000/month budget, even if his home value excludes him from the technical definition of poverty, he’s still gonna fucking feel like he’s in poverty, especially if you fuck with his housing.

And yes, if the housing market happens to be whackadoodle and despite the sale proceeds they still can’t afford rent for some reason, then they’d be eligible for subsidies.

Why not just leave them there in that case? What’s the sense in forcing them out of their home just to push them into a new home that has almost the exact same problem? Now you’re paying for subsidies and paying to manage the subsidy program instead of just… Not taxing them. It’s counterproductive.

Including people whose homes, through no hard work of their own, have ballooned to incredible value.

Sure, but you seem to be drastically overestimating what it takes to get there. ALL home prices in America have ballooned to what should be considered incredible value, especially looking at modern build quality.

A person who becomes a millionaire through property value increase is even less deserving of tax breaks than a business owner who makes a million dollars.

And this is why I specifically said to cut the tax for reasonable homes. Dude in a McMansion can downsize. Dude in a slightly over average value home, though, can stay put and forego some taxes as far as I’m concerned. Set a threshold, but tie it to local property values. An average home should be fine. I might be willing to agree to double, but I’d have to think and research more. But beyond the value of a reasonable home, sure, levy taxes on the excess. Something like full property taxes on any value over some threshold.

At least the business owner probably put some work into earning the money.

Eh, I think business owners get too much credit. The vast majority of value created by all but the smallest companies is created by the workers. Most business owners depend on exploiting their workers. CEOs sure as HELL aren’t working hundreds to thousands of times harder than their lowest paid employees. Someone that’s self-employed, sure, busting their ass and earning it, but business owners on the whole, no.