psycotica0

Sorta, but despite what some governments have decided, corporations typically aren't people. Most companies don't want to accumulate savings, the way humans do. Profit is cool, for sure, but companies don't save up for retirement, or go on vacations, or have kids. So some buffer to survive a less profitable year, or a costly watermain break or something, is prudent but that's where it might end.

Anything more than that, and maybe you hire some new staff, in which case that expense to you becomes income for your new employee, which they pay income tax on. Or you buy more merchandise, which the government may collect sales tax on. Or you may expand your office, and the government collects tax from the construction company and property tax on the new unit. Or you may offer a bonus to your existing employees, which is again income tax for them. Or you could issue dividends to shareholders, which they're taxed on when they receive them.

So the logic is that the things a company spends its money on are taxed in different ways, and the corporate income tax is basically the catch-all for "and then the rest of the money you didn't spend some other way"

Now, do we lowly humans typically get double-dipped when we have our income taxed, but then after that also sales tax when we buy stuff? Yes. Yes we do...

Not at all, but due to the chart it "doesn't matter". We don't actually need to relate the temperature of the oven to the temperature of the house. Sure they're both temperatures of a volume of air, but they're not related temperatures. One is essentially just an abstract number you set an oven to without thinking about it. 350 for "cold", 400 for "medium", 425 for "hot", and the rest are whatever the box or recipe says.

I remember one day being like "wait, if 212 is boiling in American, what temperature is 350?" and being surprised that ovens get way less hot than I intuitively thought they did, but it didn't really matter, because it's just a number on the oven and nothing else.

Or, like, yeah I know my height in feet and inches, but given that I don't typically measure distances by laying down and using myself as a guide, it doesn't really matter that this isn't how I'd measure a room. Or I know my weight in pounds, but that doesn't help me weigh butter.

I'm not justifying it, I think it would be better if we switched more fully, but it's not as detrimental as you might think. Most people don't use the temperature of their pool, their own weight, and the length of a sheet of paper in the same formula very often.

Up to no good???

In related news Israel is causing some mischief in the West Bank, and the Germans were real troublemakers in the early 40s. Some reports go so far as to call them scoundrels!

For sure. Or put a more direct way, someone needs to be making drinks at Starbucks when the rich-enough-to-survive go there, someone needs to be boiling noodles and chopping onions all day for when they want pasta at a restaurant, someone needs to stand in the sun next to hot asphalt and lay it so they can drive over it.

And if it's not the too-poor-to-live, it's the next wrung down.

I totally get what you're saying... but to be fair if you did allow people to deduct all the money they spent in a year from their income, it would specifically encourage a lot of people to spend every single dollar they earned just to avoid the taxes.

They'd be like "hang on, if I spend $3000 a month on rent I get taxed on the $1000 I have left over? What if I move to a place that costs $4000 a month? No taxes? That's what I've got to do then!"

Is that sensible? No. The tax they'd pay on the $1000 is way less than the extra $1000 they're planning on spending to avoid it, but people seem to have a real aversion to a little tax, and many would feel they "got something" for the extra money they spent on groceries or restaurants or rent, compared to the taxes which are simply taken from them.

I'm not saying it couldn't work, I'm not saying there aren't better ways to do it, and I'm definitely not saying there aren't weird cliffs in programs like this that lock people into poverty. But I'd be worried that people who are already wrong about graduated tax brackets, for example, would make a lot dumber choices if they felt they could spend $40 on fancier bread to avoid "$40 of taxes"

We, as a species, have basically failed to build a single one quantum computer that does anything. So... that's why they're not everything yet. It's because there are currently approximately zero.

And the few there kind of are are massive and requires liquid helium to cool them to ungodly cold temperatures. And even then they don't do much, besides allow researchers to test stuff.

A protocol is a shared set of expectations that allow two or more things to communicate. It says "I will announce myself in this way" and "these are the responses you should expect to this request" and "here's the list of all the things I know how to do", and if we both follow the protocol, then we both understand what's going to happen when we communicate.

Not when they met, though

Oh? Was it good?

Dogpiled

Other people have said some things, but I'll say some things too:

1. I think it's easy to look at the titans of success and assume it was inevitable, but in the middle were lots of corporate failures. Google failed to beat Facebook with Google Plus, MySpace was massive and is now basically dead, Vine started up and died, Vimeo failed to defeat YouTube, and while I can't quote their names there were other "Facebook but...", "Twitter but...", and "YouTube but .." companies out there that sprung up with VC backing and died irrelevant. Meta currently has threads as an attempt to compete with Twitter, and probably that'll be gone and forgotten soon. So in a sense the fediverse is beating MySpace and Threads and Vine and GooglePlus by having an alternative that's running at all. Not all victories are assured simply by existing or being "better"

2. A lot of it is Network Effects. People go on PeerTube, there's nothing they want to watch, they leave. Twitter has been around in the tech space for like 20 years, because other tech people at the same conference as you were on it, but most normal people weren't on it until celebrities started signing up. Because otherwise they'd show up on the home page, not see anything they cared about, and then leave. Most platforms these days explicitly prevent interoperability, and the law allows them to, so it's hard to migrate slowly.

3. The fediverse is explicitly anti-control and anti-centralization. This means it's aggressively and purposely fragmented, which normal people don't care about, but does bring a host of UX problems. Any attempt to paper over these will likely be met with hostility by the existing community and projects, because the solutions to these "problems" tend to involve central authority of some kind or another, and with centralization comes power, control, and attack vectors

4. The fediverse, similar to above, is pretty anti-profit. That's why it's an alternative to the big popular ones, but it also means it's harder to have solid paid maintainers and disk storage and stuff, compared to something like YouTube or Facebook which are among the most valuable companies on this Earth. It also makes it hard to buy ads, or airtime, or grassroots astroturfing, or celebrity endorsements, etc, which might reach a broader audience and draw people in. That all takes money that the fediverse simply doesn't have.

5. The fediverse is pretty anti-algorithm, or at least the way the other platforms characterize "The Algorithm" which is to say anti-dark-patterns. We do this both because we are care about our own health as people, so if we're running something for ourselves why would we dark-pattern ourselves, but also because we aren't driven by profit motive, and so usership costs money and gains us kinda nothing, so there's no incentive to "addict" our users. I've seen multiple accounts, and also seen first-hand, people join Pixelfed from Instagram and bounce off pretty quick. And it's not just the network effect, it's also that Instagram and its algorithmic feed is constantly trying to trick you into watching more and more and more. Pixelfed says "what do you want to see?" and the user goes... uh... I don't know. Maybe cats? And Pixelfed says "okay, here's some cats and nothing else. Let me know if there's anything else you want, otherwise bye thanks for coming". Like, people want a firehose of attention, but the platform doesn't want to subject you to that, and doesn't benefit from it, so it goes "that's all I have for you now. Come back later" which other social media never will.

That last one I think is really a big part of it. You have to ask "Why are so many people on Twitter? What do they do there?" and then wonder if them doing that on Mastodon is better? It's obviously philosophically better for them to spend their time on a freedom-respecting platform than a for-profit exploitation machine, but they could also use neither and that would probably be better too. They could go to a library, a cafe, and a park. Is Mastodon essential? Why do you want it to be used by millions and millions of people? What do you get out of it? What does Mastodon get out of it? What do the maintainers of the instances get out of it?

Would the world be a better place if all Twitter users were Mastodon users, or if all Twitter users simply didn't use either?

Also, people today have a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and a YouTube account, and a Reddit account, and each of those services does a different thing. You mention how there's no events built into Mastodon. Sure, but there's no events built into Twitter, Reddit, or YouTube either. There's no marketplace integration into frendica, but there's no marketplace integration in YouTube either, Reddit doesn't have hashtags, Facebook doesn't have playlists of videos, Twitter doesn't tell you people's birthdays, etc.

Just because different fediverse tools use ActivityPub, it doesn't necessarily mean they all must interoperate. It can be neat sometimes, and sometimes it basically happens by accident, but a lot of the time it just doesn't make sense.