🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@trinsec Its mostly out of spite at this point.

@robryk It is only incentavized for a person to be a refuser IF the remaining people can fund the bathroom and not loose money, in fact they would have to save money as even breaking even wouldnt be worth while. So the incentive to be a refuser has a threshold, beyond a certain number even one person refusing is decentavized (since they would only save money if they dont refuse).

Now youa re correct that if one person refuses, assuming it is still beneficial for 19 people, that the project goes on and the refuser gets the benefit for free. But how is that any different than the general public. The general public is getting a bathroom for free, that they would otherwise have to pay for, and is getting a benefit in doing so.

The whole point of the argument here is that yes, even though its providing something for free and certain people benefit from others, thats ok because everyone is winning and no one is loosing. So isnt that true of the refuser too? Yea they are getting a benefit for free, but even with 19 people remaining everyone benefits so whats the problem.

You kinda proved my point, you dont NEED all 20 people to agree for the benefits to be there. Even if the maximum number of people refuse the equilibrium point ensures that everyone, include the small minority who pay for it all benefit.

There is another side to it too of course. This means that the people who do pay for it get to optimize things in their favor for example 1) they might place the toilet closer to their stores than the person who refused, giving them more traffic to their stores 2) might place advertisements int he bathrooms for their stores, again giving them a benefit the refuser doesnt get.

@robryk Why does this need the complexity of 20 different owners. We are talking about a train station. There is one owner, the train station.

If we do want to talk about multiple owners where it isnt the simple case of a train station then we dont have a set of walls with 20 owners we have 20 owners that each own different walls but own each wall 100%, those walls are close to eachother. So how would they fund a bathroom, simple, they agree to pool their money together and pay for one and split the costs.

This is in fact the norm. IF there is a strip mall with 20 different stores and there is one bathroom for all the customers in the location typically its because the 20 local businesses decided to pool their resources and share the cost.

@lupyuen That seems rather unorthodox. I would just fail the kid and let that be its own motivation :)

@robryk Yea this doesnt quite add up to me because it assumes the taxes are needed to maximally clean the toilets.

The axiom however is that providing free toilets to people (that means the cost of cleaning and maintaining it) lowers cost because clean toilets are cheaper than cleaning walls of urine. If cleaning toilets truely does represent a reduction in cost then there is no need to get tax payers to pay for it in the first place. In fact it means you should **make** money by cleaning them and thus their expense should not be an issue in the first place.

@iankenway I agree with the notion that binary choices are short sighted and generally wrong... I strongly disagree with the notion that capitalism is an inherently harmful form of government. In fact most things that people blame as hallmarks of capitalism are in fact by their nature a quality that is anti-capitalism. For example corruption caused by greed, when that occurs you no longer have a capitalism because corruption implies manipulation which implies you dont have a free market, which is what defines capitalism.

@robryk I am refering to the fact that someone has to pay for those toilets. When we talk taxes, specifically progressive taxes, then you are forcing rich and well to do people to pay for the toilets for other people to use. In the case of a free-market scenario those toilets must be paid for by the train company and ultimately the funding comes fromt he passangers who use it.

The point is you arent "providing something for free".. one of two people are paying for it, the people who ride the train (in a capitalist/free market situation) or random people, mostly rich, who may or may not use the train (taxes).

The issue here is not if the access to the toilet is provided without a cost-per-access. It is if your holding a gun to someone elses face to fund it or if you get that funding through the people who use it. Either case it is not free.

@robryk So you are still holding a gun to one persons head (toilet manufacturers or the rich paying for them) in order to benefit someone else who is getting the service for "free" (in this case the people operating train stations).

Now you eliminate taxes in the situation and you get the same benefit but without the moral problem of taking from one to pay for another. For example without taxes now the train company is commercial and pays for those same toilets, and still makes them open to the public, because the expense of the company saves the company money.

The key here is optimizing a situation at gunpoint still generally fails considering the same optimization occurs when you eliminate the force (collecting taxes).

Not that im against taxes overall, I'm not. Just saying "it saves money overall" isnt a good reason on its own.

@robryk not sure I follow, what do you mean?

@hackaday@botsin.space @lupyuen this reminded me of you...

@swiley

That just sounds like gentoo with extra steps

@valleyforge

If you use Spacemacs here is a fairly generic cheat sheet I wrote a while back that covers pretty much ever major subject. Enjoy.

https://jeffreyfreeman.me/files/spacemacs-ultimate-cheatsheet.pdf

#Emacs #Spacemacs #Vim

@pthenq1 aruging about two horrible choices isnt useful IMO. There is a good middle ground, one where we have a well funded military but dont use it for unethical purposes.

China is unethical, so are we. If any future war came the the USA winning would be no more a good outcome than China winning honestly. Both governments have long since past anything resembling ethical.

@pthenq1 Ahh so you mean mostly just the medical assistance the government gives the poor and military, yea thats fair. But without universal healthcare overall the governments healthcare expenses are really a very small drop in the bucket compared to the overall cost of universal healthcare. So small its almost not worth talking about.

@pthenq1 If it werent for the fact that the USA is all around the world oppressive people and pushing a military presence rather than just preparing with tech and defense I might agree with you. But the fact is the US military engages with the rest of the world unethically. I cant fund something like that.

@pthenq1 The USA health system isnt a governement expense. So sayings its expensive is a bit out of scope of the point here of government spending. That said I do agree the US system of healthcare needs to be reformed from a price perspective, just as the european healthcare system needs to be reformed from a quality perspective.

The rest I largely agree with yea.

@pthenq1 I certainly have no love for what Trump did with my taxes. Then again Biden seems just as inept with how he is spending them, in fact more so. Biden has **increased** military spending over Trump's military spending by 12.3 billion. The guy is bleeding money.

@pthenq1 Agreed. Also keep in mind how much taxes I pay depends alot on the country and how well their government spends it.

In the USA the government taxes the rich, and the poor as much as europe, in fact more in some cases. Yes so much of the money is wasted on the military or doing a shitty and inefficient job at solving most problems that I can easily argue that based on the current output of the government we should be paying half what we do in taxes, less if we cut our military spending.

On the other hand the Netherlands has some of the highest taxes in europe. Yet their cities and roads are as clean as they come, technology invesments are made for all sorts of public services, the infrastructure is amazing. Despite paying about the same as I would in america for the most part I dont mind spending the money on taxes because I feel im actually getting a good value in return.

@pthenq1 Yes people paid for it, but not through force and not through taxes is the point. It was voluntary.

People tend to underestimate just how little we need the government to organize and fund things. Not that I'm saying we should do away with taxes overall, but for the most part people think they can solve problems by throwing more and more taxes at a problem that just results in waste and very poor solutions, if they be solutions at all.

I generally feel taxes need to be minimized to just the absolute essentials. Though keep in mind I consider things like open-access education an absolute essential too :)