frezik

Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth

Then true capitalism will never exist. At best, it's a Platonic Ideal.

There are ways they can work around it, but their lead developer was drafted into their country's military. Ultimately, they're going to have to make their own phone, and it looks like they're making plans to do that.

For now, it's fine.

And they purposely hobbled certain things people want, like inline links and images. Some clients will do it anyway, but it's against the collective wishes of the developers.

If I wanted to track people on Gemini, I could totally do it. It'd just be in a more server-to-server way than how its evolved on HTTP (pixel trackers and such).

Some people haven't lived through the time when HTML layout was done through nested tables, and it shows.

Maybe we could have No-JS and No-Client-Storage (which would include cookies) headers added to HTTP. Browsers could potentially display an icon showing this to users on the address bar.

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the engine is too tied into the code of modern browsers for that to work.

Let's not. It's a terrible protocol with amateur design errors.

So I'm aware there is a right-libertarian argument at work here that frames all taxes, always, as "stealing". However, there's an argument here that can be used along more democratic socialist lines.

Taxation in representative democracy is legitimate when the democracy itself lives up to the terms. We have come to some kind of consensus as a society on the level of taxation and where that money should go. When we do that, and we say the road is "our road", we mean that in a literal way. A part of the fruits of our labor were diverted to build that road, and we get a say in how it works.

The US is not a democracy that lives up to the term. "Taxation is theft" is correct in this context.

Since 1970, productivity has increased by 86%. That suggests the output of a 40 hour work week in 1970 could be done in under 22 hours with the same inflation-adjusted wage. That's not even considering the productivity increases caused by industrialization in the century before 1970 (though the 40 hour work week in the US wasn't set until 1938).

Admittedly, this is a bit of a naive way of looking at the numbers, but it gives ballpark ideas of how far we might be able to go.

Note that real (inflation-adjusted) pay has only increased 32% in the same time period. This, BTW, is a much more robust argument than saying real pay has flatlined since 1970. Real wages are, in fact, up during that time period, but it's possible the numbers will shift again over time and return to being flat or down. The pay-productivity gap, however, has only been widening with time and isn't going to be fixed without drastic changes in policy.

JS does a lot of crap that didn't need doing in the first place. It can be used in a way that improves performance and user experience, but what's out there is so far from that.

HTML could maybe be replaced by a specific form of Markdown (one with a real spec), but meh, whatever. Gemini did that, but its limitations are a little too much.

Was never part of the standard.

You want to do what Gemini did. Take Markdown, add some specific features to make up for some blind spots in the original, formalize it, and give your version a specific name.

Someone will thank you for your service. Not me, but someone.