PonderingPotato

joined 7 months ago

I hadn't thought about tube/metro etc. but honestly, I would want this for all public transit including buses. Just depends on how much we'd have to raise to fund it all.

 

Assume every tax rate except for the “personal allowance” was increased by 1% to fund free train travel.

Would you be in favour of this?

I've not done the math for this (though did look up some stats for a Scotland specific post, and it seems to be feasible: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/44818305). So for the UK it may require a lower or higher increase (and to be fair my Scotland "calculations" were very rough and likely entirely wrong). This is more just a question about whether people would be in favour of something like this in general.

 

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/44818223

Assume every tax rate except for the "personal allowance" was increased by 1% to fund free train travel. That would mean someone at the median annual income of £38k would pay about £254 extra tax per year ((38000 - 12570) * 0.01)

Would you be in favour of this?

Some numbers for context:

The government raised £17.1 billion in 2024.

The ScotRail revenue for 2024 was £351m (page 17).

So to offset the cost of tickets, the government would have to raise £351m which divided by the 2.46 million people in work would be an average cost of £140 extra per person collected per year, so I believe 1% may be able to pay for it comfortably, and even improve the service, to compensate for the extra demand on free travel.

 

Assume every tax rate except for the "personal allowance" was increased by 1% to fund free train travel. That would mean someone at the median annual income of £38k would pay about £254 extra tax per year ((38000 - 12570) * 0.01)

Would you be in favour of this?

Some numbers for context:

The government raised £17.1 billion in 2024.

The ScotRail revenue for 2024 was £351m (page 17).

So to offset the cost of tickets, the government would have to raise £351m which divided by the 2.46 million people in work would be an average cost of £140 extra per person collected per year, so I believe 1% may be able to pay for it comfortably, and even improve the service, to compensate for the extra demand on free travel.

A gravel bike is a type of bike for "gravel" conditions, so dirt roads and stuff

Ah yeah I completely forgot about "magic pixels" and image based trackers. I was just considering special links. That make sense. Still I do recall hearing Proton saying they block those things, but maybe /e/os doesn't realise they are being blocked somehow.

 

Any idea what this is about? I doubt Proton has that many trackers, so I was thinking maybe the individual emails? But those would just be triggering when I click on links, which I thought Proton stripped anyways, and I wouldn't think /e/os would attribute those to Proton either.

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Absolutely. I don't blame the children of Israel at all for what's happening, and they shouldn't be punished for it in 10 years (or now) because of the mistakes of their parents. My reasoning for the distinction is that if we focus on blaming the current administration, the "solution" will seem like we just need to replace who's in charge and that everything would be good. But I very much doubt that would help, since hate for Palestinians is very much ingrained in Israeli society and that needs to be taken very seriously when considering how to move forwards.

That's why my proposal doesn't require you to create an account or do any form of age verification. By default you can access porn without logging in or anything. Most common things people watch will be available there. The only restriction is that if you want to watch things that are inappropriate for teenagers, you create an account. Even then it's just a username and password and you click a box that you're over 18. It's so little friction and no privacy invasion, that nobody is going to bother setting up a VPN or finding a dodgy site, that's way more limited than the mainstream ones.

But that tiny bit of friction is enough that unless teenagers are explicitly seeking out content with exploitative themes, they aren't going to bother creating an account, since what they want is available in the open anyway (i.e. fairly vanilla porn)

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This is probably a very controversial view, but I think we need "teenage friendly" porn (by which I absolutely do not mean teenage actors! Just intended for viewing by teenagers as well).

If you have porn which shows no exploitation, is always fully consensual, no violence and closer to reality, then I think the harm it does to teenagers will be much less severe.

You don't really need an age verification system (although I'd not be against a truly anonymous one, e.g. the verifying site doesn't know what service you're signing up to, and just provides a token with proof of age), but by default if you're not logged in you get the safer kind of content. And when creating an account it asks your age. If teenagers know they are allowed even when underage, they'd have little incentive to lie.

Ah thanks! I wasn't actually aware of that distinction.

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Yeah this is a big distinction I always try to make clear. I blame Putin for the war in Ukraine, I blame Israel for the genocide in Gaza.

Whilst I believe you could arguably replace Putin with someone who would be better and over time undo what Putin did, I think Netanyahu would likely be replaced with someone just as bad.

Not quite as black and white as that, but in general that's the sentiment.

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Wait, if you ban private and public schools then what's left?

I'm pretty sure it's not. It's not common for women to ever be topless in Scotland, but it's not explicitly illegal to be naked (men or women). Only more vague public decency and harassment laws. If a woman in Scotland was topless sunbathing, they'd definitely get some looks, but I think it's very unlikely the police would intervene.

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Then vote for a third party, and make your voice heard. If 10% of the vote went to an anti-genocide party, at least next time Democrats would realise that being pro-genocide is bad for them.

I quite enjoyed a couple of episodes. I'm not from the US, and didn't find too many to be too US centric. But yeah, a few of the jokes and hosts/abolishers were not that funny unfortunately.

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