FredPret

You then still have the issue of standardized advertising prices.

Right now, a company can say they sell gadget X for $999, which would not be possible if they had to work out item taxes.

The other possibility is that they now have to mark X up to take into account the most pessimistic possible tax rate and advertise the marked-up rate.

That would centralize power to the larger taxing authority.

Right now, there's a huge number of elected people in the US who wield real local power through these taxes and other rules that they can make.

It's a headache but we live in the computer age and we can automate administrative things like tax calculation at checkout; we should be using systems to aid decentralization and democratization instead of the opposite.

The US has too many tax permutations for this to be practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in some or other jurisdiction.

There's a small industry that specializes in knowing what the sales tax for a particular transaction should be at the moment it goes through.

Until we mass-scan people’s brains, there will never be reliable data on this. Facebook-tier research and anecdote is all we’ll ever have on happiness.

When “the larger consensus” is built on nothing but bullshit soft science coming out of the hard-left humanities departments and old Soviet propaganda that’s still echoing in people’s minds today, I’m just going to ignore it and form my own impression.

Not even Erlang can beat Gauss

> “Europeans… so much happier than… Americans”

Citation needed, and not to a Facebook Quiz-tier “how happy are you on a scale of ten” questionnaire.

My experience is obviously anecdotal, but it is quite varied, and the exact opposite.

I would add exercise and sunshine.

But yeah, our ancestors lived in constant danger of getting eaten by sabre tooth tigers, freezing in the snow, catching maalria, and, in general, watching terrible things happen to their tribe.

They had no therapy, no supplements, no self help section on the cave wall art.

They were forced into a continual outward focus with no time for navel-gazing.

They carried on through all exigencies, and succeeded mightily.

I have learnt to love and embrace the BEAM.

Wikipedia says "Originally BEAM was short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, named after Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman, who wrote the original version, but the name may also be referred to as Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine, after Björn Gustavsson, who wrote and maintains the current version."

Whether the B is for Bogdan or Bjorn, there's something really fun and Space Quest-y about it.

This is also the argument against overregulation.

A little bit can be very good, a lot can strangle everyone but the biggest players

That I can agree with.

But there’s a lot of daylight between that and fining newspapers with extra taxes because the regime considers their opinions verboten.

> "You may have noticed that the traceroute progressively loads in lines above the bottom line. Web pages can only load forward. Since I didn’t want to use any JavaScript, I did the hackiest thing possible: every time I update the traceroute display, I embed a CSS block that hides the previous iteration! Since browsers render CSS as the page is loading, this made it look like the traceroute was being edited over time."

Love this

After the great success of centrally-planned economies over the last century, now comes the next thing they'll try:

Centrally planned information environments!

It's sure to work great.

- "I'm from the government and I'm here to tell you what's Good and True."

- "Do you have a loicense for that opinion?"

Red tape spilling into society kan be more damaging than oil spilling into the ocean.

Almost any problem is better than that solution

Awesome - are you on an Android?

I tried to do something similar on my iPhone, but couldn't get a reliable (or any) way to get an rsync script running.

I ended up with pen and paper though, which is best for me all things considered.