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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Tried to answer, but it got very convoluted, here it is anyway as I typed it out…

    Because that’s a less useful metric basically, to change their budget a government can:

    • increase existing taxes
    • add completely new taxes
    • print money (depending on the level of government)

    This means that a budget can swing quite a bit in value quite quickly if needed (or if something goes wrong). This means the % could swing quite widely.

    GDP on the other hand is effectively the value of the economy, so moves slower and is a better metric to compare different countries with different economies and tax systems (assuming they tell the truth about their GDP…)

    Ultimately, if a government needs more money, most of the time it can get it… But whatever they do will have side effects. But those side effects depend on the size of the economy, the bigger the economy (measured by GDP) the more can be done/taken without causing a large effect.

    Both of these fail to highlight countries that already have a high tax load though, so in practice a wide range of metrics will be used.








  • It’s not X turning into Y when it comes to evolution. There were all kinds of different dinosaurs, that evolved I to all kinds of different niches. Most of those then went extinct due to rocks falling from the sky, or the entirety of India turning into a huge volcano etc.

    So it’s not that a T-Rex turned into a chicken, it’s that T-Rexs lived alongside other dinosaurs that developed feathers and filled more niches etc. those that survived eventually became birds. (Have you ever seen an Emu up close?!? No wonder the Australians lost to them 🤣)

    Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge. Also, remember this happened over (billions? hundreds of millions) of years.

    Other comments about just not noticing feathers are valid too.