> The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold
Neither of your two points covers the reason I feel more threatened by e-bikes, which is that the last time I was in Manhattan I stepped out into a one-way street without looking the other way (my bad) only to be nearly hit in the bike line by an e-bike coming the wrong way at max speed.
The person you were responding to pointed out that the operators of bikes simply don't obey traffic laws (perhaps France is different, but I doubt it). That is at least forgivable if you're trying to conserve hard-pedaled momentum but not if you're operating a 75-pound motor vehicle at 28mph.
Perhaps my chance of being killed by an e-bike is still lower than it would be for a car, but it's not totally irrational for people to prefer things that are higher risk, but more predictable, to those that are lower risk but still dangerous and aren't at all predictable.
I think these conversations are inherently tainted by our culture of widespread acceptance and subsidizing of motor vehicles. Cars are held to a much lower standard of behavior in just about every regard, and they're frequently the number 1 most prioritized from of transportation when we build, well, anything.
It's easy to say that cars obey laws but really they don't, that's part of the reason why cars are orders of magnitude more likely to kill you. That's why, despite cars being the golden child of transportation infrastructure, they're still the most dangerous. Because people don't obey laws. They speed, they follow too close, they roll through stop signs, they stop on crosswalks, they turn right as pedestrians are crossing, and on and on. And, when they do disobey laws, it's much more difficult for them to abort.
As a cyclist myself I can't say that cars are terribly predictable. Especially not when parked. I've had my fair share of near-death experiences with doors randomly opening right onto the (mandatory) bike lane.
Income tax percentage in the U.S. ranges from negative counting credits (for the bottom 60% of taxpayers in states with no income tax) to a marginal rate of 52.7% plus a 1% surcharge on all income combining federal, state, and local for incomes over a million bucks in San Francisco.
Low income tax states tend to make up for it in other ways (sales tax, property tax, or both) but basically UK taxes would look extortionate to an Alaskan, painfully high to a Texan and probably pretty normal to a New Yorker or Californian.
> Social Security in the US is definitely not enough for a "nice retirement".
A two-retiree couple who contributed at the tax limit for long enough would get $122,592 in Social Security benefits in 2025. Not beachfront living in the Hamptons, perhaps, but not cat food eating money either.
It's precisely what Keynes meant. He meant that 15 hours of labor now will buy you what 40 would then. How could he have meant anything else?
How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or proles being able to afford intercontinental flights more than once in a lifetime?
He postulated eightfold increse in economy, though not clear at what working hours. If he assumed 40 hours then and eightfold productivity increse, with 15 hours that would still be threefold increase in living standards. The productivity has increased even more than eightfold.
Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.
Yes. That's math, the rule of 72. At a 2% growth rate the economy will be 8 times larger in 108 years, more or less. The rate is a bit higher, so we're a bit over 8 in the 95 years since that's been written.
> Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.
But that's not anticipating things, that's projecting an existing growth rate out for another century. Improbable really that it would neither rise nor fall, and one of the reasons it hasn't fallen is that we didn't cut our work week to 15 hours. So the only thing (in this context) that he really anticipated was wrong.
"Democratic Socialists" in America aren't socialists. Even Bernie Sanders doesn't advocate seizing the means of production. You can argue we use it wrong, but we can argue it's our language and we evolved it.
But I don't think even all the nominally socialist parties in Europe are really socialist either.
A realistic wealth tax probably caps out and around 2%, remembering that the net worth of very rich people is generally not liquid and can be difficult to mark to market. Any higher rate risks forcing the rich to have an asset fire sale, which liquidates productive assets and isn't really good for anybody. At six to seven percent you would force them to be entirely liquid and would begin to shrink their wealth, killing off the tax base in a few generations. Even this is absurdly optimistic since a globally standardized wealth tax is a pipe dream and without it you get capital flight as a result of any wealth tax at all, but let's ignore that.
To steelman this as much as possible let's say you can charge 6%. The top 0.5% are worth $30-$40 trillion in the U.S. (which is just an easy example because the statistics are available) which gives you a probably unrealistically high max annual tax revenue of $2.4 trillion. Social Security and Medicare in their current form cost $1.35 trillion a year; Medicare for All would double to triple that or more, depending on what estimate you believe.
Europeans pay for their social safety nets with very broad taxation while America instead charges negative income tax (after credits) to the bottom 60 percent of the population (even after inflation, excise taxes, state tax, payroll tax and tariffs the total tax burden is pretty slim at the bottom end by European standards). There doesn't seem to be a mathematically feasible way to give benefits to the working class that the working class doesn't pay for.
You're probably right, though U.S healthcare costs per capita are much higher than they need to be, and would be much lower in a "proper" single payer system like in Europe. In any case, a wealth tax would still help a lot with being able to fund these programs. Yes, the working class does have to pay as well, but it'd be much less if there were a reasonable wealth tax.
But yes, global co-operation to enable a large enough tax on wealth is not going to happen any time soon. A more likely scenario is that as automation develops and as the share of income that capital gets grows, the working class will end up in a position bad enough that capitalism will collapse and be replaced with something else. Hopefully with something better, but could also be worse.
> In which case that is just "reduce your budget and spend less" with extra steps.
I'm pretty sure the extra steps are the point, in that I simply don't believe the MMT folks expect them to ever take place.
It's not a coincidence it's an American theory, from a country where it's politically almost impossible to raise taxes. Otherwise it would just be a roundabout way to raise taxes and pay for stuff in reverse order. But in fact it isn't "buy now pay later". It's "buy now YOLO LOL". But hey, maybe I'm missing something.
> Let's see which tech stack and which customer support organization survives the merger, respectively...
I have no inside experience of either company, but I have been through a lot of large financial industry mergers and I know what's public about this one.
I'd bet heavily that it'll be some of both, but tech especially will be Capital One. Because it's larger, because it's the acquirer, and maybe above all because it's newer - a younger company with a younger tech stack that's known to be entirely cloud based.
