That has nothing to do with the point being made. The point was about to what level parents are responsible for things they allow their kids to do, regardless of how "addictive" it is. Particularly if they know it's harmful.
Your kids are (and should be) doing all kinds of things you have no idea about. It’s part of becoming an adult. I’m sure you modeled all the right behaviors, and provided every advantage you could. That helps, but you’re influence is waning and their friends influence is building and it’s all manipulated by the thousands of PhD’s working for TikTok and the other social media companies. You’re outgunned.
I think you might be underestimating the level of control that an average parent, especially a working parent, has over a teenage kid. Short of taking away devices, it's tough, especially if they're going through a phase of doing precisely the opposite of what you recommend / demand.
I'm not saying that parents don't have any responsibility, but it's about practicalities. If a teenager can easily buy smokes or alcohol, many will, no matter what the parents say. If you make the goods harder to buy, usage drops. So, shops / software vendors do have some responsibility for societal outcomes.
In a libertarian utopia, anything goes, but kids are... weird in that they often try to push the boundaries of their autonomy without always knowing the risk, and it's in our collective best interest not to let them go too far.
If my kid gets addicted to fent I will get in shit, regardless that Purdue Pharma was found guilty. Point is Purdue Pharma is guilty for hooking people on an addicting substance.
I have doubts most overconsumers of fast food are just getting burgers... like effectively nobody. Is it more likely that people damage themselves with cheeseburgers or the soda that comes with them?
I tried to eat as many cheeseburgers as I could in one sitting (I easily eat double the amount of food of others in one sitting normally), and tapped out at 10 or something, which is impractical and gross, there's a physical limit unless you have certain conditions
If you only go to fast food once a week or less with your kid as a treat, I feel like you could probably exclude soda and fries and tell them to get as many burgers as they want, but they have to eat them all, and it would be more of a lesson than anything lol
Taxing as individuals is kind of unfair to single earner households, since the earner has to support more people it seems reasonable to tax them less. You could maybe accomplish a similar thing with deductions but there will still be some weird cases
A couple each home earns x, each gets taxed on x. Each gets the tax free allowance on the fist £12.5k of the annual income. Each gets the full basic rate slice before they hit higher bands etc.
If one of the couple earns 2x and the other zero, then only one can use their tax free allowance and they get one slice of the basic rate band etc.
They still have the same pre-tax income for the same household.
Personally I think people should be allowed to opt in to sharing taxable income.
Why do we need to push people into the workforce? There are a lot of social benefits to people being stay at home parents (which will be the commonest reason for doing so).
What fraud?
> You will then get the argument of "why should I be taxed more because I'm single"?
You might, but its a dishonest argument. You are taxing households together. You are giving each individual the same amount of tax free income and the same amount in the lower bands.
It is already possible for self employed people to do this by making their spouses a partner or shareholder in the business or similar. This is just extending the same rights to employed people.
Why is taxing households together the correct thing, other than the fact it presumably would improve your personal standard of living (it would also improve mine)? What are you trying to encourage? I could see if you want to encourage families having tax benefits based on children - but universal childcare provision seems more likely to succeed.
And as for not seeing how a tax cut based on 2 people living together could not be abused, you must be very short sighted.
> Why is taxing households together the correct thing
Hypothetically if the household splits up due to a divorce its assets are divided 50:50 (this varies by jurisdiction). Usually (again depending on the jurisdiction) the lower-earning spouse also gets alimony to even up the difference in income resulting from the new situation, at least for a few years.
Clearly then the state believes assets owned and income earned by either one of the couple belong equally to both (something I agree with personally: it's called a partnership). If that's the case, how could it be wrong to tax the household as a single entity?
The fundamental question is whether the primary unit of the society is a household or an individual. If you assume that the society consists of individuals, people should be taxed individually, spouses should be allowed to choose in advance how their assets would be divided in a divorce, and alimony should only be paid to support underage children.
I think the currently prevailing view is that a household (or a family) is the smallest social structure and the individual is pretty much the opposite of society.
> Why is taxing households together the correct thing
its fairer
> It presumably would improve your personal standard of living
I am divorced and remain single so it would make no difference to me
> could see if you want to encourage families having tax benefits based on children
I want people to enjoy family life. Its the same reason I want family friendly working hours, decent paternity leave, a right to home educate and better schools etc.
> And as for not seeing how a tax cut based on 2 people living together could not be abused, you must be very short sighted.
And as for not seeing how a tax cut based on 2 people living together could not be abused, you must be very short sighted.
Please do explain . Also please find evidence it is abused where tax does work like that. Its not a cut either as many households would pay the same tax, and its likely rates would go up slightly to make it revenue neutral. Its also more consistent as benefits are based on household income in the UK, as are things like student loans and educational bursaries and the treatment of finances in divorce.
The concept of a household is not nebulous. It is used by economists for a good reason. People in the same household pool income and expenses. The law assumes married couples do so. Parents are jointly responsible for their children.
Really? There are benefits and tax cuts that allow parents to spend more time with their children? Not that I know of.
As a mostly single earner in a community property state, my spouse earns half the income for tax purposes. If you were going to tax individuals, it's probably reasonable to apply income evenly across marriages for all states.
I supported a non-earning spouse for a decade in Canada and it's always been a bit murky. Like in 2014-2015 there was a concept of transferring up to 50k of income to the spouse ("Family Tax Cut"), but Trudeau's Liberal gov't canceled it when they came into power; I think they correctly recognized that it was basically a handout to families privileged enough to be in a position where there was enough spread between the two earners that transferring that sum would be significant.
CRA is even pretty careful about letting a spouse claim capital gains income; it's always attributed back to whoever earned the original principal (outside of inheritance). I think the only way around this is to formally "loan" the spouse their investment money, but you have to charge them interest and the interest is of course income to you.
Windows 95 has some legitimate problem but one thing that was nice is that Microsoft (and Apple) were doing Skeuomorph, so training users to use it was a joy. It was designed to be easy to learn. Today they don't really care how users are trained, and just assume they'll figure it out.
PS - Yes, Skeuomoric concepts age out, like Floppy Disk-Save Icons, but the concept still has merit. It can help "ground" the experience.
They were not doing skeuomorphism. They were using simple visual clues, like "bevels" on buttons, to convey the existence of a control and its state. They weren't disguising controls as "paint" on "felt" on a gaming table, as Apple Game Center did at the peak of their cheesiness.
The overreaction known as "flat" design (AKA no design) has fortunately started to recede. Still... some derelict "designers" are still deliver Advent calendars instead of usable applications.
I hate to think how much has been written on whether icons need to be updated because the picture isn't literal to the device it uses now, compared that link broken years ago and being more abstract representing a concept. I wonder if in a few years when some cars may be driven by hub motors will there be some moaning that the icon in an engine check light needs changing.
There's so many options on what icons could be for the thing they represent you'll never please everyone, why is forwards a right facing arrow and backwards left facing? (Is this swapped for right-to-left languages?) Why not representing Z-depth away/forwards towards/back? What does reload have to do with rotation?
I have. Blame the drivers, not the OS. Vista wasn't great for the same reasons. Sure, Windows 11 mostly doesn't have driver problems, but that doesn't mean the OS is great. It's largely irrelevant to the point being made.
It was unstable but it was nice to use. It introduced a lot of UI elements that are now taken for granted. I remember starting to build a window manager that replicated the win95 look.
I remember those days. Thankfully Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 had a Windows 95/98-style desktop but used the rock-solid NT kernel. Unfortunately they were not marketed to home users.
I feel similarly about the classic Mac OS: excellent interface and UI guidelines hampered by its cooperative multitasking and its lack of protected memory.
Windows XP and Mac OS X were major blessings, bringing the NT kernel and Mach/BSD underpinnings, respectively, to home computing users.
I have. Also windows 98, Me (I loved it), NT 4.0, 2000, 2003 (as a workstation), XP, 7, (loved 7; skipped Vista, skipped 8), windows 10 is my last one.
I really really liked windows 95. It rarely crashed on me even though I used and abused it extensively. It lived running smoothly, tolerated tinkering and uni files shenanigans.
The i loved 7. To me it was a pinnacle. All comfort, no crap. Win 10 was less convenient (even if safer), and it was a constant struggle with the subversive, hostile vendor.
Windows 95 is closer to the ideal, I agree with GP, although to me the closest is Windows 7 tbh.
I was doing tech support through the Windows 95/98/ME period and it was hell. Everything either crashed the OS or required a restart if you touched it.
When Windows 2000 rolled around and I saw how stable it was, I went out and bought it to put on my gaming PC. Another friend from work laughed at me and told me how terrible "Windows NT" was for running games until he saw how smooth Starcraft ran on it.
This was back when you'd hook up a new printer or other device to a Windows computer, and it would detect it and prompt you for a driver disk. During that same era (and well past it, into the 2000s) if you plugged something into a Mac... nothing would happen. You had to go hunt down a driver for it and initiate the installation process yourself.
I have been working for 20 years and I haven’t really experienced this with any code I’ve written. Sure I don’t remember every line but I always recall the high level outlines.
I had to make a small CSS change yesterday. I asked the LLM to do it, which took about 2 min. I also did it myself at the same time just to check and it took me 23 seconds.
Inflationary policy continues to exist, also it is rare to have a true overabundance of housing. But places like Detroit show prices can go down in the right conditions.
Commercial leases have their own quirks and long timelines that encourage waiting on a better price. Perhaps a tax on vacant commercial units.
I only use GPS navigation if I’m in a in familiar location where I wont have to travel again. If it’s around where I live or my office then I actually look up directions on my phone and just follow them mentally. So I have a really good mental model of where everything is now.
It also helps if you go around via a slower transport like biking or running, since it helps you to get the layout better.
Maybe if you had picked gambling or alcohol…
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