shoubidouwah

The fun thing is that IRL my elderly neighbour keeps sheep: he keeps adding higher fences, electric bands, a second dog... Every day he messages me about how this time he guarantees the beasties will stay in his pastures; and every morning I find them grazing in my arbour, having found yet another hole in the fence.

This is a true story, but may also be a fable.

"your sheep haven't escaped, you just built too low a fence"

and hope for a president that can do both

I eat them fairly often, but tend to get "nettle fatigue" quite early on due to their strong fishy smell - ammonia-like. Anyone got a recipe / way of getting past it, or masking it efficiently?

I am actually advacating for something different: I am not taking your money, I am saying after some level, what you accumulate is not - your kids - money. It realigns incentives (do something with it before you die), helps your kids (unearned weath corrupts, enormous unearned wealth corrupts enormously), and actually enables opportunities through investment and redistribution at a time when most people need something like a downpayment or school debt clearing.

I am talking inheritance, not weatlth tax, and have actually written I'm for reducing said taxes. you truly do not need the extra million when you're dead. Maybe read my comment again with more charity and re-engage?

it is already more or less the case, but I argue that it's for the benefit of the living holder, not the heirs. A lot of the incentives to have huge, untouched inheritances revolve around dynasty effects, exactly the kind of behaviour we want to curb.

I'd go further and say that "unearned wealth corrupts" is a well known effect, and (apart from the small subset of rich people who do not care about their kids corruption and intrinsic worth apart from them being the vehicle of their dinasty) we see that divestment into charity / foundations are the modern preferred way for inheritance management, both sparing the kids somewhat (being downgraded to a multimillionaire is not a hellish situation) and gifting them cultural influence. A sovereign fund could scratch that itch somewhat.

incentives. It's okay to be successful and enjoy the fruits of your wealth, and you want people to strive towards wealth. but transmission across generations is a true societal poison.

> I would also not trust the government or any political body to handle income from the inheritance taxes

thus the importance of the sovereign fund.

1) set a generous threshold over which your inheritance gets taxed, inflation adjusted (e.g, 2M not including the principal residence) 2) tax 100% above it. (should only concern a fraction of a fraction of cases) 3) put all this tax's proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund 4) at 21, a citizen gets access to her redistributed generational wealth 5) profit

This is actually one of my own fears for efficient organization at state level and above: - any new technology, any new opportunity either has checks and balances or gets exploited by smart optimizers with no regards for the commons or human flourishing - checks and balances are as you say a constant drain on public attention and resources: you need smart people doing the checking (finite resource), and receptive eyeballs (finite also) - it is thus an optimization problem. attack_surface - check_capacity = societal_explots I worry that the check_capacity term is constrained, but that the attack_surface keeps aexpanding with new technologies. At some point, we started playing whack a mole, frantically jumping from one check to another, and we're holding the fray stochastically. but at some point it's going to become extremely adversarial.

> Too much land to manually manicure a lawn on top of > too little land for john deere to be of any practical help I feel you.

Mosquito nets are best: put some as canopies above beds and enjoy sleeping without the dreaded ear buzz. If you live in a badly infested area, put them around doors / windows (there's retractable ones, you can fit them yourself). And finally, the superpower of just doing things: do some door to door / enlist your neighbors and hunt down the neighborhood stagnant waters.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is definitely one, as well as a bunch of the "big epics" like the Malazan empire / The annals of the Black Company?

It may be less common than "high castles", but that is either because of opportunity cost (non-special characters do not survive well this kind of world, so their stories are either short or picaresque) or feature creep if they start from the bottom: if you want an uplifting tale, upwards mobility is needed and at some point only the king is up...