Their customers would take bars that cost the same and are imperceptibly smaller. Or, at least, would take it better than a price hike, I’d expect. Then, the Karens would come out.

Translation:

we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand

People don’t by Mars because it’s a top-tier, gucci product.

alongside considering wider external factors such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa

And if we stayed the same size, it’d be really expensive, because among other things the global climate no longer supports chocolate production.

TBF none of it is a lie. That’s as close as corporate-speak comes to “yup we did that”.

Food products, probably. In clothes or cars, for example, you can’t just make things smaller. With clothes, it seems more like skimpflation - some items definitely had thinner-feeling fabric right after COVID, although it got better again. With cars, they just raise the price, so that’s inflation.

If costs go up you have to do one of the three. You’re probably not getting angry phone calls because your Mars bar went down in size by 1g, but might if it’s more expensive or tastes like shit, so that’s the advantage there.

That’s true, if you had no GUI for an extended period, it’d be worth learning something that could do that. Although, other people are saying there’s a way in nano.

If you’re using a GUI, and working in an emulator, who cares if it’s not “proper”?

There’s lots of history you can look at to see how this works. The same thing does get invented more than once, but sometimes there’s different technologies that could each become dominant, and then there’s a real first mover advantage.

In Russia, they don’t really have highways. Everything is built around rail lines. In the Inca empire, they had highways, but highways with stairs because there was no widespread wheel usage (which itself might be down to limited available wagon pullers and rough terrain).

Lots of things are, decent and not.

The whole idea plastic waste is bad doesn’t seem to have made it over to Asia.

Does this guy actually think the average AI-hater is also addicted to it?

That person probably exists, but they’re nowhere close to the majority.

I’m not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.

He made money, and enemies who couldn’t actually do anything about it.

Ronald should have used a copyleft licence.

So, that means Carney finally put the big threat to him, and he’s tantruming.

On top of it all, Steve Jobs wasn’t even in tech. He was in sales.

Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there’s several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.

What argument are you making here? Government won’t do it because raising any taxes is bad?

Unpopular in practice is different from unpopular in concept (look at cutting emissions, for another great example), and both are different than bad. Other than that, pretty much: The government won’t raise taxes because it’s unpopular when they do. (Thank you for asking, by the way, It’s hard to just insert “this is my thesis”)

Sure, they might be forced to raise taxes eventually. Probably, even; it’s happened before. Or, maybe some socialist firebrand will come in and make extremely progressive taxes their signature policy (meaning they have to go with the flow elsewhere). But, this is descriptively, factually, why hikes don’t happen that much.

Now, normatively, you can make whatever you want of that.

So, that puts the cutoff at 20 million. Most people don’t know anyone that rich, but if you ask someone with just a few million, they might, and they’ll probably be against it. And guess what, they’re going to know a lot of people with just hundreds of thousands, and those are the white picket fence people who vote and donate the most.

It’s slanted, not the original question, in that it passes the buck to some distant third party. Politicians don’t have the luxury of just ignoring that they have one big interconnected populace to satisfy, and none of them are an island. They raise taxes, and the big narrative is that they raised taxes for no reason, and that can cost an election.

It has nothing to do with it being a good idea or not. It’s just politically difficult, and not because of anything spooky. (And FWIW OP was about income taxes; wealth taxes have additional complications)

Really? Go to someone on the street and ask if they want to pay more taxes. You might get a yes, but you’ll get a lot more nos.

Politicians are captured by middle or upper-middle class voters, yes.

Same vibe as the parkinglot princess pickup truck.

Fun fact, the class with the biggest share of the country’s wealth, is also the one most on Lemmy.

Like, sure, that probably is the answer, but let’s not pretend there’s some kind of distant, invisible group of billionares that will be the only ones effected. And that’s why it’s hard for politicians to actually raise taxes.

So how do we keep track of ecology, progress and humanity, in such a complicated system? Maybe we could make some kind of tokens representing it, and then require everyone to maintain a positive flow of tokens. Realistically, there’s going to be an unavoidable shortfall somewhere, but if whatever activity is worthwhile, you could still make it up somewhere else.

Oh wait, that’s money.

Just the materials? That’s unlikely - some guy has to manually fasten together every cubic centimeter of wall and floor, and they need to be paid. IIRC, labour actually comes out to more than the materials. For a remodel, labour definitely costs a lot more.

Modular homes can theoretically do better by shifting that labour to a factory nearby, but it’s still not going to be nothing.

Still, cheaper is better, just like for every other good, even if, as in every economic change, there’s some losers.