Do you want to talk to your representative or AG in this case? I also have a wild idea: software engineers can actually lobby this change. They form a non profit organization, make contributions (say 10k each) and go talk to the right politics. This what corps do, but thus is what people can do to.
This is an attempt to divert attention from real monopolies like Comcast and healthcare monsters. What we really need in the tech space is UK-style laws to enforce competition between ISPs, GDPR-style laws to protect personal data and CA-style prohibition on NDAs. But politicans won't get paid for any of this. Instead they go for easy and profitable targets, such as pretending to care that Amazon is a monopoly.
I disagree. People have less sex in our society for about the same reasons they don't have kids. Contraception makes no difference when men and women don't bother to date each other.
Simple solution: 1%/year tax on wealth and give these money to families with kids. The tricky part is wealth is often stored as shares and if you tax Bezos, he'd have to sell 1% of his shares, thus driving the price of those shares down; then if some hedge fund keeps buying the shares he sells, eventually he may lose control over his company, which is unfair. We might want to define wealth as savings above 5M dollars. This would be easy to work around: register a few companies with highly complex structure of ownership and spread money across them.
Subsidies can be tied up to mortgage: the entire cost of housing can be made deductible from taxes, all expenses related to kids can be reimbursed (by IRS in April: you show checks and they give you money back). On top of that your income can be backed by the government for an extended period of time in case something happens to you, while you still need to pay for everything. You may ask where do we get money for all this? Tax on wealth. Many countries tax investments at 1% a year, not income, but investments. This won't bankrupt the rich people because investments usually make 5-10% per year and the government can take a small fraction of that. And no, the rich won't move their money abroad because safety that the US gives is worth a lot.
This is a very smart way to organise society, if we think about it: people have to do more and more work to bid against each other for the limited amount of resources. The only flaw is that this reduces birth rate to unacceptable levels. I don't believe that this can be fixed: this very smart ratchet mechanism won't let us work less. Rich countries like USA counter this problem by immigration of qualified individuals. Not so rich countries like Europe have to let everybody in. But this solution won't last for long and eventually the so called advanced countries will be replaced by people that don't give a s..t about women's and anyone's rights and don't have troubles with birth rate. Oh well, maybe this can be fixed, but nobody likes the solution: reimbursement for all kids related expenses and extra to compensate for time - schools, universities, healthcare are free for anyone under 25; better laws related to marriage, kids and divorce - it makes no sense to give up half of your earnings and the house, and this alone deters a lot of otherwise qualified men from starting a family; and there should be an option to delegate raising kids to those who are good at it - the best age to make kids is early 20s when you're healthy, but in our modern society it's a financial suicide to start a family until you are well off (35 if you're lucky) - this type of advanced childcare would be a big shift in our society. Or keep extracting profit from full time working men and women and watch the sunset of the modern civilization in 50 years.
> This is a very smart way to organise society, if we think about it: people have to do more and more work to bid against each other for the limited amount of resources.
It's a very smart way to organize a society if you're a landlord using artificial scarcity to extract rents equal to the productive value created by everyone else. For everyone else it's warm dung.
It's not even economically efficient because it undervalues non-wage labor, of which child rearing is a prominent example that we are now under-producing as a result.
> reimbursement for all kids related expenses
Reimbursement overcomplicates things for no good reason and creates a lot of perverse incentives to overpay for services etc. Just choose an amount per child and make that the amount of the child tax credit.
But that's somewhat separate from the main thing driving the competition, which is artificial housing scarcity (and artificial scarcity in general). That may be the single most pressing problem facing us today, outside of climate change.
What would that fixed child tax credit be? 75k/year to cover education, healthcare, food? Probably not and it would be closer to 15k. It all depends on what kind of families we want to support: some may be happy with 15k.
Not only housing is expensive, there is a good chance to lose this expensive house over a divorce.
Perhaps you know better, but my uneducated guess would be that just an ambulance vehicle costs 15k/month, then every medic costs 10k/month at least and there will be expensive weird things like commercial insurance that costs another 5k/month. 100k/month might make you break even in the long run.
I can't use most of the sites at work because of ads and I can't install an adblocker because it would have access to corp data. When I search for something related to work, I know that most of the sites would display inappropriate junk on half screen with my colleagues probably watching behind. The solution I use us to search on stackoverflow only, but it too displays some garbage, and I have to scroll the page so the ads won't be in view. It's a hilarious situation.
It depends. Your credit card company knows what you bought and when, while the ad network knows the phone number linked to the PC where the ad was shown. Join the two tables and we can track you to the grocery store.
Even if this were done (I don’t think that either of the involved companies would or could share this detail of data) you still have a problem. What about ads that don’t work?
I have put an ad on your site, it took up space for some time. The ad was bad and nobody bought anything even though a hundred thousand people saw it. The publisher is still owed money because they did their part.
