"authority" is an overloaded term in English, but "having authority" isn't. The latter implies a set of rules.
14,907 karma · joined May 14, 2012
Saying that they don't have authority to make a decision implies that there's some universal set of rules that internationally lays down what anyone's authority is - precisely the kind of thing you appear to be opposed to, because such a set of rules would likely need a court!
In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.
What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.
The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.
But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.
> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
[0] First Google result: https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
The downvotes are puzzling.
I had a look at the kind of issues that are reported at that project (there's 15k of them, so I can at best assess a couple). It looks like a complete mess: A lot of concurrency and resource mismanagement issues and edge cases that in a better-managed project would have been avoided by construction. They will now will likely be solved by more defensive programming, driving overall complexity ever upwards.
If you really want to check some quantity metrics to try to reason about code quality, look at whether "fix" PRs are overall LOC neutral or negative (not counting tests). In this project, almost every "fix" is an addition. Worse, almost every fix is more branching.
If almost every PR is some sort of fix, and most of them add branching, and there's thousands of them weekly... That leads to only one place and I want to be nowhere near it.
Yeah, if you fall you might hurt yourself, but when you're paying attention to what you're doing you're likely less at risk than when you absent-minded walk down some stairs.
We spent probably hundreds of hours climbing all manner of tall playground structures as children, and I cannot recall anyone ever falling. I do remember some instances of people tripping and falling down a flight of stairs though...
Given the relative sizes of the economies involved, that's still perfectly fine.
Next to the cost of the aviation program for providing the platform to launch those from, it likely hardly registers.
Until this exchange, I hadn't realised I would be doing anyone a favour. I'll have a think about it.
Given you got the nationality wrong 2/3 times in this comment section and they weren't bot accounts either, you might want to adjust that number.
You got the political lean wrong at least once as well. This might be the time to adjust your worldview. Empirically it doesn't seem to mesh with reality.
Also I'm not from Florida or the US for that matter.
Someone got arrested and intimidated by police because they criticized someone with even only a modicom of authority: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group. In a sensible country that might've been a phone call or a single officer stopping to chat and defusing the situation if police decided to get involved at all.
Yes, but I will still condemn both sides, even if one is merely responding in kind. If it was in my power, I'd lock them all up. Hamas' and Israel's leadership, as well as anyone who directly comitted those acts.
Then I'd replace Israel/Palestine with something democratic similar to Lebanon's solution of accomodating multiple major religions.
> If you were really in their situation, what would you do?
I am perfectly confident that the average palestinian would not go through with killing a civilian Israeli woman or child even if you loaded and pointed the gun for them.
The same is true for the other side. The Israeli government/IDF and Hamas represent the worst of both.
Also I can tell just and unjust apart on my own, and I do not need some "international group" or "historical standard" to stand in for my frontal lobe and morals. Thank you very much.
Thank god most of the world has since risen above that.
Maybe something interesting will fall over because of that, who knows?
"Who started it" is a stupid and pointless question to begin with, but now we're reaching new heights.
If both sides are comitting warcrimes, both sides must be condemned and sanctioned. It's not about who is committing warcrimes harder or who was first.
The hypersensitivity to only overly specific areas of skin of some US-based services was bewildering to the average European a decade ago, but we really should be over it by now. The time for frustration and confusion is over, and it ought to be the era of open amusement.