I migrated from Firefox to Brave years ago, and it's been incredible. It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff and turn on more advanced privacy protection. Then it's just a fast browser with awesome adblocking.
My favorite recent feature has been Brave Scriptlets, which are just little javascript functions you can run on specific sites. I've replaced most of the add ons I used with small scripts. Pretty nice.
I would prefer an engine not built on Chromium... but I've lost faith in Mozilla. I'm glad that Firefox added a built in adblock engine, but it seems too late too late. Brave has been awesome, and being Chromium based gives them time to keep working on stuff that matters.
I agree that helping the elderly, homeless, and hungry is good. Everyone does. The question is: Is the government making a better use of that money than you would? I believe the answer is a strong "NO". You do not get to keep the good and ignore the bad.
Lastly if you've ever walked around any major US city you'll see plenty of elderly, homeless, and hungry folk. So I'm not convinced any money going towards that goal has helped much. Haha
I understand. And I get it. I also want the best infrastructure and economy possible. The theory is getting taxes and master planning a big project will eventually pay off more than it costs. But you have to remember, when taxes are involved you're really talking about how to spend other people's money. I would argue that the best way to help people is simply to not tax them and let them spend on the things they value the most.
The same argument you're making is commonly used to build tax subsidized sports stadiums. I'm curious if you agree with that as a valid use for local taxes.
In my previous message I mentioned "back door deals with giant corporations and insider trading" as a bad thing. Well, the bigger the master planned project is, the more incentive there is for shenanigans.
The original post is about ALL federal spending (funded by taxes). Not just the social safety net. You can't hand wave the bad stuff away. If you want to argue that "fewer people going hungry, [and] dying from treatable conditions" is good, that's fine. I agree. But you can't ignore "inflation, etc." that are caused by the same federal government and wars funded by the same taxes. Saying it "has essentially nothing to do with the matter" is simply not true. It's all related.
Even if you ignore ALL other tax spending (which is a huge ask) the best possible outcome is $1 in = $1 out. That breaks even at best. The government isn't creating value it's just moving money around.
Now add in other wasteful spending. Add in inefficiencies. Add in the deficit. Add in inflation and money printing. Add changing administrations with their own goals. Add wars and other foreign affairs. Add in spying on citizens. Add in back door deals with giant corporations and insider trading.
Saying "If you ignore all the bad parts, the government is beneficial" is not a strong argument.
There are SOME people who benefit from the social safety net. But as a whole it's largely a drain on everyone else.
This is amazing and depressing. Most people will never get any benefit from this spending, definitely not of equal value to what you contributed/lost/spent. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum you should be disappointed by the federal governments reckless spending. Yet it never gets better. Likely never will.
I see other people recommending taxes that are missed, but with people being taxed from every angle it's impossible to accurately measure tax burden. That's by design.
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
I recommend reading the book first, then watching the series. They're both great but the book has a lot more details and explains the events better than the series. It will make watching the series even better.
The audiobook is great, but the sound quality for the first few chapters wasn't the best. That gets fixed though. If they ever do a "full cast" audiobook for this one I would definitely buy it.
I recently read the book for the first time. Fantastic story! The best western I've ever read. Then I watched the miniseries with my wife (also for the first time). Westerns aren't her favorite, but she loved it too. Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones were incredible, the whole cast did a great job, and the costumes and scenery were beautiful. We still make jokes about "We don't rent pigs." :)
We only watched season 1 because that's the one based on the original Lonesome Dove book. They make some changes, but generally only one that makes the show easier to follow. I'd highly recommend anyone to watch it. If you stick with only season 1 it tells a complete story and it's not too long of a commitment. It has everything.
RIP Duvall. You've had many roles, but this is the one I'll remember you for.
I want you to know I took some time research and educate myself on these claims.
From my findings, I could not find anything directly correlating the 2017 TCJA to total donations. The TCJA did change how deductions are treated, and more people opted to go with standard deductions instead of itemized deductions, but this is not the same as total donations. It is possible this incentivized people to donate less because they couldn't get as much of a tax write off.
For total donations, it has continued to trend upward despite some fluctuations, and a $20 billion swing is not a large deviation. The numbers I saw were $400+ billion during that time. Again, this has many more factors than the TCJA.
Most importantly, I'd like to reiterate that libertarians do not claim that cutting government will "solve" problems like open source projects getting enough funding. Just that it will give the free market an opportunity to find a balance. No big bill is going to solve these problems either, it will only make it worse. The end does not justify the mean. Stop taking people's money, and let them spend it on the things they find valuable even if you disagree with it.
Libertarians don't claim that they have "the solution to the world's ills". Just that the government is causing worse problems than it solves, and generally those problems can be handled by a free market.
We're already being taxed like crazy while that money subsidizes things almost everyone disagrees with. The libertarians believe that if people weren't taxed as much they could voluntarily spend money on things that are valuable to them. Some people would donate more and others wouldn't donate at all, and that's okay. I believe we would see a lot more voluntary donations without the burden of high taxes.
Claiming "libertarians haven't solved this yet" while continuing to take everyone's money is not a fair argument.
To stay on topic, this thread is about a private individual donating to a project he supports. That's something everyone should be happy about. And he did not do it as a political statement.
Very helpful article. I recently went down the TOTP rabbit hole and this article would have been great.
I run a suite of servers and setup scripts that go with them. I can create users and secret keys easily enough using our APIs, but I needed a way to generate TOTP codes on the fly. I got it working on my machine, but sharing it with others was a bit difficult because really the only "logic" was generating the secrets while everything else was static data and storing responses from the APIs.
I ended up making my own API to generate TOTP codes from secrets, <https://totpapi.com>. I try to make it clear it should only be used for testing, but it makes this kind of thing much easier for me. Maybe it will help someone else as well. :)