You are right, I was a cynical ass. I apologize.

What I should have said is:

Adding more or taxes or higher taxes is likely to primarily hit the working upper class. It will not affect the super rich. If we want a tax system that actually makes the most wealthy pay their fair share, we need to close tax loopholes and creative accounting schemes.

Tesla, SpaceX, etc., earning money would be taxed and that would impact Musk’s value. They hide their money in individual compensation, you tax the individual, they hide it in corporate compensation, you tax them there.

You are not going to hurt them taxing corporate income. Business are even better at hiding their money. All revenue is channeled through 4 subsidiaries and a couple off shore accounts. Technically, all branches, except the one in the country with the lowest corporate tax rate, operate at a “loss”.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

You could try taxing revenue, but that will hurt businesses that are based around high volumes of low value transactions, such as discount retail.

You could try to tax business based on their asset value, but that will murder traditional businesses like farming and manufacturing, which rely on making a large investment in durable assets and then deriving profit over a long period. More importantly, it will not get any taxes out of tech companies, since most of their value is in intellectual property, something that cannot be accurately priced.

The airlines are right, pilots should not have to pick between flying a plane that they don’t think is safe and having to authorizing refunds for passengers… they should be able to call an airline safety whistle blower line so that an independent safety officer can take a look and ground the airline for not maintaining their airplanes.

Seriously, how can airlines argue against it? They are saying that they will pressure pilots to fly death traps? I think airlines would be ashamed to have airplanes in such condition.

I have found sorting by “active” to be the best sort order. It seems to be mostly immune to concentrated clumps, though it is very slow changing.

I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.

I don’t care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.

I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.

I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing

I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.

My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).