• 0 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 18 days ago
Cake day: July 28th, 2025
  • bryndos@fedia.iotoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Where has the tax money "saved" in uk austerity gone?
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Also to prop up house/property prices in general and pension funds which is a bit wider of a group but generally still the people on the upper end of the wealth rank.

    Stupid thing really is when you have an asset bubble it does crowd out other investment. It needs to burst for the good of the economy. The QE and such stopped the opportunity for investors to learn that they should inves government to force investors to invest in productive capacity rather than asset bubbles.

  • bryndos@fedia.iotoFuck Cars@lemmy.world•Fuel taxes should be seen not as a fair way to pay for road construction and maintenance, but as a charge on drivers for the pollution their vehicles produce
    1·
    10 hours ago

    Interestingly from a ‘Pigouvian’ tax viewpoint - i.e. polluter pays for externalities they impose; drivers should also be paying the price for any contribution to congestion that causes extra delay to others.

    From this perspective, reinvestment in high capacity public transport in congested areas becomes pretty obvious. Or course that logic won’t stop many from wanting to widen low capacity roads instead.

    Of course fuel taxes are not very localised in time and space, so they don’t really reflect congestion - not as as closely as they do pollution and noise.

    If they cut fuel tax a bit and raised road prices targetting congestion, then reinvested in public transport that’d be good i think - because its closer to delivering the viable alternatives that might actually lead to some mode switching - that’s what you actually want to improve pollution, tax revenue can just be wasted, so rather have the actual switching and less tax revenue.

    The problem with fuel taxes is they’re fairly invisible and many people just treat them as an overhead or sunk cost. Fuel tax is just a lot easier to implement than road pricing. But road prices can (should) simply be set a bit higher than the bus /train fare - giving a clear marginal price signal to use public transport as often as possible.

  • bryndos@fedia.iotoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Every damn time.
    11·
    2 days ago

    A researcher should offer a sufficient compensation package to get enough volunteers after explaining the risks. They should get independent medical advice too.

    They can still randomize within the volunteers with treatment / placebo, and maybe use quotas, but they’d just have to extend their trial period until they’d achieved a measurably representative treatment and control group and enough volunteers to test the hypothesis to the required level.

    This type of non-random sampling may very well have to be done anyway, for example if they needed the power to test efficacy and safety in all the potential dug interactions or co-morbidity scenarios. Not to mention any diagnosis requirement will also screen the sample which could be influenced by health care system resources and policies, not necessarily pure morbidity. So I think they can deal with non-random sampling in med research perfectly well.

  • bryndos@fedia.iotoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Every damn time.
    310·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know much about nazis but I thought an important part of their rhetoric was to draw distinctions between types of human.

    So they’d not see “10bn humans”, they’d see maybe 100m aryan and 9.9bn “untermensch”; the latter being equivalent to rats available to be experimented on.

    I just find rats to be much more preferable, pleasant and considerate creatures than humans. I see humans as a single tier of unterratten; totally different hierarchcy.