Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
That FreeBSD machine from the other day has shipped!
I'm always happy, whenever I do BSD installs. So much nicer and cleaner than Linux. I sell ThinkPad T440p and X230 with coreboot preinstalled, which replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI.
I normally install Debian, but I also offer FreeBSD and OpenBSD installations.
My store: https://minifree.org
I sell coreboot, BSD and coreboot/BSD accessories.
SuperDicq
@libreleah@mas.to @maxxcan@mastodon.social Your proposed solutions would work with a demand problem, but I think we are currently living in a supply problem.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan Again UK example: the UK has a "retail goods and services" economy - one way to tackle inflation might be to cut VAT in half. Get people spending, shore up sales of goods and services, for businesses, most of which charge VAT.
Cut council tax, for low earners.
Then cut corporation tax, allowing businesses to invest more. Combined with VAT cuts, this would enable higher employment and less poverty... without raising wages.
Tax yields will probably be similar, but with more enterprise.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan You really just have to get a feel for the statistics, and those statistics will change depending on what type of economy your country has.
I've concluded that economics is pretty much fair in the UK. I haven't looked at other countries. Though, people are rightly complaining at the moment about pay and living standards due to inflation and energy bills etc.
There are multiple ways to deal with this. I prefer a deflationary way: tackle inflation and try to make cost of living cheaper!
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan Well, per current stats, the combined wealth of UK billionaires is 653 billion.
35% of GDP, but the won't be profit. "Wealth" includes accumulated wealth over time.
I'm fundamentally not against the billionaires. I think people should make as much money as they want.
Avg wage 30k, 32 million workers.. 1 trillion in wages. 2tril GDP, but GDP doesn't mean profit, it's basically turnover (it's more complicated than that, but that's a useful way to think). I bet 1-1.5 trillion is profit.
Nyan Max
@libreleah in my country isn't the same way. Here the billionaires pay too low taxes. That is the problem of being a semi-Democracy and it's a problem in many countries
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan Take the UK for example: roughly 2 trillion GBP in GDP every year. About 800 billion in tax receipts, representing a state that is 40% of the economy.
The historical norm, for the last 100 years, has been that the state is about 35-45% the size of GDP, in terms of spending. The UK has vast public and private sectors providing very high quality goods and services.
Of course, targeted assistance to help the most vulnerable is the good and proper thing to do, regardless of your politics.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan Well, this is a very binary way of looking at the world.
Take rich people for example. The reality is that their wealth accounts for a very small percentage of GDP, in most countries, which, when you analyse the statistics (in any major capitalist country), the average worker actually gets a pretty fair deal.
If you took every billionaire in your country and divided all of their money among workers, those workers wouldn't actually get much extra, when you do the maths.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan In the most extreme example, you could take the wealth of billionaires in the UK and give everyone a +20k pay rise - for 1 year.
1 year, because after, the billionaires will move all of their wealth and assets overseas (it's called capital flight).
When you look at tax statistics, in most western countries, the very wealthiest pay a huge portion of the tax burden.
Hiking their taxes would only send the signal: this country is not open for business. GDP and tax revenues would plummet.
Nyan Max
@libreleah I know the GPL vs BSD controversy and I am thinking to much time about it. But my conclusion is for now that the GPL licence protects developers better. Maybe not now, but maybe in the future. And I am very clear that absolute freedom is neither possible nor advisable, because your freedom may go against my freedom. For example, if there are rich people, there must be poor people, and not because they are worse or work less.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan It is done out of philosophy; specifically, the ideology that says all software should ideally be libre.
I merely go about it at a different angle than that of the FSF or GNU project; I used to be part of the FSF/GNU dogma, but not anymore. I drifted away from their way of thinking.
There is a lot of nuance to the BSD philosophy, that a lot of people in Planet GNU don't grasp. We're just as pro-freedom, in fact arguably more pro-freedom; copyleft is a curtailment of your freedoms.
Nyan Max
@libreleah Here I see few problems. Many people thinks that your life and your work is out of political o philosophy. But no, humanity is closely related to politics and philosophy as it is intrinsic to us. It the critique to the GPL is that is a political movement I think is a bad critique.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan I basically agree with everything the article says. I switched sides in recent years, and I no longer rigorously campaign for adoption of copyleft.
I'm not against using copylefted software, or contributing to it, but I prefer MIT/ISC or other BSD-style licenses these days. All of my most recent work has, where possible, been released under a permissive license.
I do still contribute to and/or maintain copylefted software, and that's totally OK aswell.
Nyan Max
@libreleah thanks I'll read it and if you want I say my opinion about.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@maxxcan https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-problems-with-the-gpl.html
Nyan Max
@libreleah I'd like try FreeBSD but I don't like that they don't use the GPL license.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@SuperDicq @maxxcan I think that the hardships we currently have are temporary. Things will sort themselves out over the next year or so probably.
Unless the world shuts down again, for no reason, like last time.
(lockdowns were a mistake. thankfully we got the vaccines, otherwise we might still have worldwide lockdowns)
SuperDicq
@libreleah@mas.to @maxxcan@mastodon.social I think that the hardships we currently have are temporary. Things will sort themselves out over the next year or so probably.For most of goods and industries, yes I think so too. However, there's two key things that currently make the cost of living unbearable and I think they are unrelated to corona. That being housing and energy.
I'm personally not sure if lockdowns were a mistake. I wonder what would've happened if the entire world just continued operating as it did. Like how many people would've died from corona, the impact on the healthcare system, etc.
Some sort of lockdowns were probably necessary, I do agree that a lot of countries did lockdowns in a dumb way by restricting the wrong things.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@SuperDicq @maxxcan "Supply" is just another word for growth. If people are able to, they will make more things that people want to buy.
The reason we're in this mess, globally, is because governments took massive control over the private sectors in each country, for over a year in some cases.
The whole world shut down because of the philosophy they have that I mentioned: "this is how it's going to be, because I say so".
The solutions will be implemented by all of us, not our governments.
SuperDicq
@libreleah@mas.to @maxxcan@mastodon.social But maybe they didn't do lockdowns because they figured they didn't need it?
Also the main reason countries did lockdowns is to save the healthcare system from being overrun, not to save deaths. Countries that are well prepared and have good healthcare systems don't need lockdowns. If your healthcare was already struggling with shortages before the pandemic, you probably need lockdowns.
Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot
@SuperDicq @maxxcan If you look at the places that didn't have lockdowns, their death stats are about the same as everywhere else.
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