No taxes on overtime extra pay: overtime is the 'worker sacrifices when they work less' possibility in https://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2026/04/encouraging-people-to-work-less-in-way.html.
Criticizing people who want to raise taxes: maybe the conversation is wrong. Instead of saying the purpose of taxes is to avoid more borrowing, people could change to saying that the purpose of taxes is to destroy money that would cause inflation, by taking money from people as fairly as possible. Any conversation about taxes that avoids the topic of inflation is vulnerable to people criticizing the taxes because they don't connect the issues.
Why care about inflation at all? Any government that issues its own money could just eliminate all taxes and accept higher inflation each year. For example, the European Union could give the governments of the 21 countries of the Eurozone money each year so that they would not need to have any taxes. (I was not sure if any states of the EU did not use the Euro after the UK left, until I just looked it up. I am just using information that I learned in the process of writing that sentence.)
(One reason is the cost of making new currency. If there is 2500% inflation over the course of a century (25^(1/100)=1.033 increase per year or 3.3% inflation), so that a US quarter has the purchasing power that a penny once did, do we get rid of all coins smaller than a quarter and use quarters the way that pennies were once used? Quarters are physically much larger, and using a large coin instead of a small coin is a waste. But let's disregard this reason and say that everyone uses digital currency.)
The reason not to do this is the difficulty of determining how to fairly distribute printed money. The EU is a good example. Maybe some countries currently tax 50% of all private income, while others only tax 20%. (Search for "eu tax burden wiki list" gives Tax rates in Europe and List of countries by tax rates, which don't seem to give the overall tax rate. Best would probably be to just look at government spending as a percentage of all spending: Government expenditure, percent of GDP, List of countries by government budget#International_Monetary_Fund. Germany 49%, Norway 48%, France 57%, Ukraine 71%, Netherlands 44%, Bulgaria 37%, China 33%, southern Korea 23%, Thailand 23%, Indonesia 17%.)
So if one country taxes 60% of income (let's say $30k per person, so I don't have to type €), and another taxes 20% ($10k per person), is it fair to give one country $30k per person so they can reduce taxes to zero, while giving the second country just $10k per person?
You could say, "give every country the same money per person. They can still have taxes if they want, on top of that." Like how individual US states cannot go into debt ("Most U.S. states are required by law to balance their budgets. Vermont is the only state without a balanced-budget requirement. States cannot run fiscal deficits like the federal government. Raising debt typically requires legislative or voter approval."), so if they want to spend more, just printing money is not an option.
But this removes effort. With taxes, and no equal distribution by a money-printing bank: a country that manages to produce five times as much can afford to consume five times as much. If every country gets $100k of printed money per person per year, then a country that produces $50k in value per person per year can only consume 50% more than a country that produces $0 value per person per year.
Try to measure the value that people create, and award money based on that: countries have an incentive to lie. Make up some statistics and say that each person creates $1 million in value per year. Without taxes, rewards become disconnected from reality. With taxes, if $1 million of value is being measured, then $1 million is subject to tax.
To people who don't do much thinking, this may all seem somewhat abstract: we are not in a situation where there are no taxes. This is all about explaining why are aren't in that situation even after money stopped being supported by gold (allowing governments to print unlimited money), and why there is a need to destroy money with taxes even though everyone complains about taxes.
I just overheard a sound bite because I wasn't focused on writing, and someone was just saying that stopping commercial traffic is piracy. VENEZUELA OIL TANKERS MUCH? If Iran stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them is piracy, how is the US stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them not piracy?
With something like this, it's important to realize that the contradiction is not noteworthy; it's just people being inconsistent and not thinking about all possibilities. Just like people who are not good at chess not seeing all the possibilities from a move and therefore not playing as good as a better player.
Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/InnaVishik/status/2044537696576803056
There are plenty of people who studied computer science on their own and became good at it.
These pages look like they will change in the future, to update to newer years:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm
If the only job you can get is as a Home health and personal care aide (14% of net new jobs, or 3.4 times as much as the next largest category, Software developers), it doesn't matter if you spent three years learning differential calculus from online resources.
Why do people care what college someone went to? What skilled job is in a shortage in the US that does not have countless people from poorer countries who would want to come to the US to do that job?
In the linked tweet, Inna Vishik said, "the structure/accountability of a college environment is crucial for learning anything challenging". The existence of self-taught CS workers is a counter example. CS has historically been a rapidly changing field: there was a joke post I read a few years ago about all the new things someone would need to know in order to do a simple web-related development task. So it can be hard for colleges to keep their curriculum relevant, and so a degree becomes less valuable as an indicator of knowledge.
Whereas math does not change. The joke with physics is that Science Makes Progress Funeral by Funeral: it changes, but slowly. So a degree will definitely be relevant, and so it's easier for employers to make the decision to disregard applications that don't come from someone with a college degree.
For other difficult things, like learning a new language, plenty of people are successful without spending most of their time in formal education.
The quoted tweet, from Dmitrii Kovanikov, is implying that people who do not learn all the free knowledge are less capable. It is not a very useful observation; someone might, at best, use it to convince themselves that it's fine to ignore problems that affect stupid people, the poll that Greta probably did not create.
