Over the window

The Overton Window assumes that, on any specific political issue (that is, an issue that influences the way people vote) that all opinions are spread like a normal gaussian, with the X axis being the degree of agreement or otherwise, when the political matter is posed as a proposition.

Today I would argue that this assumption is broken.

Back when, what kept people in a tight gaussian distribution was that they were mostly using the same sources of information, ie broadcast media, to which they had a level of agreement or disagreement response.

Now the number sources of information have exploded, mainly through the web. So the glue that create the Gaussian, broadcast media, had been displaced. So we have pockets of people all over the curve; it’s multimodal now and not a Gaussian.

Which is why I guess you see perfectly sensible politicians contemplating policies that, on the face of it, would be outside the classical Overton Window.

For example, Albo is pushing the Voice, when clearly it’s not politically smart to do so.

Woke engine

ChatGPT could only get off the ground right now, in an era where political correctness means one rarely hears an argued opinion. What you hear is wordy discourse masquerading as considered content.

And that’s what ChatGPT gives us. It’s like having a politician in your pocket, never directly answering the query as posed and certainly never getting off the fence.

Boats and clouds

You step into a boat and onto a ship.

Similarly, you login to an app and logon to a mainframe.

Tax

I’ve just read an article that highlights how the top earners in the US have slowly gone from tax payers, with the highest tax rate pealking at 90% under FDR, to govt lenders today.

That is, rather than pay tax, they now lend the govt money and get the bond rate as interest.

What an interesting idea. Remove taxation altogether and get everyone mandated to lend some percentage of their income to the govt.

The percentage of income to be lent would be higher for higher income earners, or the interest rate would be higher for lower income earners.

People might stop avoiding paying tax if there was a financial return.

And the govt might need to spend it more carefully if they needed to pay all that interest. Of course they could print the interest but only if they were incentivising enough growth to absorb said printing without causing excessive inflation.