SasaS

Sign Mbappe and I will be calming done my hardness for months.

Finished all six volumes of My Struggle, back to back. Well worth my time, for the most part.

What are they doing to that poor tree?

What is AO?

Sounds a bit like his first film The Town. Except those were armed robbers.

Look, one ayatollah is as good as the next ayatollah.

And then hurry back and get another one in French.

He wouldn't stay for all the tea in China.

He's some kind of New Labour.

I may be mistaken. Although "Estonia was the first Eastern European nation to introduce a flat personal tax regime in 1994. This was followed by the other Baltic states; Lithuania (1994) and Latvia (1995). Russia flattened its personal income tax rates in 2001, followed by Serbia (2003), Slovakia (2004), the Ukraine (2004), Georgia (2005) and Romania (2005)." https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-03/04_Flat_taxes.pdf

I think Slovakia has flat rate and it has been one of the most successful new Europe economies so far, with the biggest average wage growth (they are now the level of Czech Republic they were lagging seriously behind after they split). Progressive tax rates are not the problem as such, it is how high you set the tax rate. If the rate goes to 75% (who introduced this into the conversation?) or 90% you are actually telling the earners in that bracket that you don't want them earning that much, or that you thing earning that much is immoral. It's primarily a prohibitive rate, not a fair rate.

I think the GDP is a conventional measure of economic output, not success as such and is always analyzed in context, structurally or what is it made of. I don't know in what way do you think it's "completely flawed", it's not considered perfect since everyone knows it's based on statistical reporting and set of components.

Interestingly, when you look at data on the Internet, there is little correlation between taxation and economic prosperity or growth between nations, other than Denmark being the happiest and the most taxed place in the (developed) world. UK is, as expected, mostly somewhere in the middle, but it's interesting to see it already has the above the average profit / gains tax revenues to GDP ratio. Also, overall tax-to-GDP ratio seems relatively stable and has been growing steadily over the past years. And the pre-neoliberal years don't have particularly higher levels of taxation revenue, quite the contrary. Even when you look at public spending, the only year where it stands out (as the share of the GDP) is 1974-1976 period, even through the early Thatcher years, public spending was higher than in the most of the '60s and '70s (admittedly some if it may have gone to Falklands related "shipbuilding"). https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/9409920/2-28112018-AP-EN.pdf/54409e5e-6800-4019-b7c1-580797a67001 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IUj_AGJS5WywibuptGr4lZVP9M0QCTvkZQ0Q_Pp9CHw/edit#gid=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1900_2010UKp_17c1li0181664_822cs_F0t_UK_Public_Spending_As_Percent_Of_GDP

Yes, I though at first watching the first half of S1, this has not aged well, but it's a type of narration that is in no hurry to impress you, it wins you over slowly, building great characters and pacing itself to meaningful scenes and great lines of dialogue, rather than feeling obligated to deliver zingers all the time. Even the basic set-up of taking place in a funeral home and around family of undertakers and dead people is not overused to make it quirky just to be quirky. It's really not, I don't know, ostentatious in any way, I may be stretching the comparison here but it's a bit like some slow-burning classic Scandinavian or Japanese drama you thought you'd never going to like and you are watching because your date has pretentious taste but surprisingly find yourself getting it after a while. After Six Feet I'll be most likely watching Deadwood again next because of the film, so we can compare notes.

Watching Six Feet Under again, on S2 now, 9/10 (10/10 when it came out) Not quite as sharp and clever as I remember it, but still better than 90 percent of stuff around now. Goes straight into the title race in the my-old-favourites-that-aged-best league, with Northern Exposure still the race favourite (current enjoyment weighted against age). Twin Peaks drops to mid-table, Dead Like Me in a hopeless relegation battle, about to sack the show runner.