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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • Both systems are purposefully inefficient and byzantine because it increases tax revenue for the state (and bribes for the state government).

    The 3 tier system is where alcohol must be sold by the producer to a distributor, by the distributor to a bar/liquor store, and by a bar/liquor store to the consumer. This effectively allows the state to collect tax 3 times on any one serving of alcohol. Unfortunately, it also results in higher prices and less choice for consumers. You can’t just buy liquor on amazon and have it mailed to your home, you (sometimes) can’t just buy from a local distillery, and you have to pay extra for the distributor to do a lot of not very much.

    The dealership system allows local government to collect sales tax on resident’s cars and allows local government officials to collect bribes from car dealers whose entire business relies on their competition being illegal. Without dealerships, you could just order a car from a manufacturer to be shipped to your home and you could buy it without cutting a dealer in, but the local government wouldn’t get the sales tax income and your mayor or whatever wouldn’t get to collect as many bribes.

















  • Reddit has an absolutely massive wealth of community knowledge. If you want to find a community for $thing or gain obscure knowledge on $thing, that’s where you go (assuming there isn’t an old forum post from before Reddit killed forums).

    Twitter is where a lot of people still are. If you’re the kind of person to care what a particular person says, that’s where you probably want to be.

    Instagram is used by young people who have friends on Instagram.

    It isn’t a great system, but it is the system that we have today. This is why legislation compelling Meta/Twitter/whothefuckever to act in an ethical manner is important. Social media is to some extent a natural oligopoly, and unless we get extremely, extremely lucky, the fediverse will always be a niche community.