I wouldn't call people working for a salary rich, which most of the people in those groups are. They pay plenty of taxes and many of them probably support funding public services as well. I meant the actually wealthy, who use their political power to reduce those services and the taxes they need to pay. They don't help fund them unless they are forced to, and currently they are not because the political power of their wealth has become larger than the political power of regular people.

So their after tax income is far higher than their share of the population? Give me 50% of a country’s income and I will be more than happy to pay 60% of the tax.

The percentages really don't tell you that much. To illustrate with an extreme exemple, if the top 0.1% earns a million, and the government taxes a single dollar on them and nothing on anyone else, the top 0.1% would pay 100% of the taxes. But it obviously would not be enough to help people in need.

I don't know the particular situation for Canada, but I know that welfare benefits are getting worse in my country (France)

when you calculate their share of wealth you only include income. when you calculate their share of taxes do you only include income tax?

Try for just one minute and don't think about this in terms of money, and you will see why your argument is completely failing.

It is clear that one rich person who leisurely spend their morning getting ready for a business meeting does not provide any care to any elderly.

Your comment is clear example of the type of misinformation that got us here.

In the end money is an institution. You can only get things done, I if someone are willing to take money for work. And that only works when there is a certain level og equality.

>> How is it that because liberal democracies "control the world" that Egypt is forced to be an autocracy? Do they have no agency?

This is exactly how I would have responded to the above comment. I'd just add that there is tons of evidence for liberal democracies attempting to help or entice those countries to become less corrupt, more transparent and more democratic. Saying that countries that have been independent of colonial rule for a hundred years, which incidentally were mostly handed democratic systems, have become autocracies because of liberal democracies want them that way is sheer insanity.

Your point about agency should be the standard rebuttal to all forms of third-worldism that attempt to blame homegrown problems on external actors. But having someone external to blame for homegrown repression isn't just post-hoc rationalization. It actually serves to reinforce the oppression in those states, both as a pressure-release valve for autocrats, and the failure to evaluate internal problems serves as an underlying reason why they have not successfully overthrown those regimes and transitioned to democracy.

Mostly, though, that type of talk comes out of the mouths of Westerners who know nothing about the situation in, e.g. Egypt.

Specifically about autism, I don't. There is an academic literature on trolling and social media, which you can find on google scholar or talking to ChatGPT or Gemini for introduction points. The papers I've read haven't been outstanding, but it's better than nothing.

I thought about building tools to track it on Reddit, but with the API changes most of the existing tools have been shut down.

There also used to be sites that tracked foreign influence activity but they've mostly stopped from what I can tell.

I did use some of those tools to track inorganic activity in other forums (not autistic spaces at the time) and got a feel for what inorganic activity looked like. Then when I saw the changes in autistic spaces I was able to see the patterns I had already seen elsewhere.

On Reddit at least, what usually happens is trolls try to become moderators. Or, failing that, they complain about moderators and fork the subreddit to a new sub they can moderate. Typically they'll show up as unproblematic power users for a few months before it becomes clear they're trolls. Once they have moderation powers it's basically over.

At any rate, with LLMs it's impossible to track now. Your best bet if you're interested is to study how it works in known cases and then use your own judgment to decide if what you're seeing matches that pattern.

It can include that. But we also don't have a carbon capture method that scales to the point that it could balance out all our emissions, so tree-planting doesn't scale either.