I had teachers that cared a lot. It was everything else that I hated. The other students, the schedule, the mountains of rote work.

High school had this nasty vibe that made my skin crawl all the time I was there. I didn’t want to go to class anymore. I stopped going and eventually dropped out.

Decades later I finished high school through online courses and then went to university and got my degree. Wish I’d taken that option earlier.

Not exclusive to the US. I’m Canadian and I found high school awful and traumatizing.

FOPS isn’t going to help if one of those violent criminals tomahawk-throws a framing hammer at your head!

The rich aren’t paying the inheritance tax because they don’t own farming capital, just a homestead on cheap land. This is an inefficient tax if it’s meant to target the rich. It’s catching family farmers (working class people) in the crossfire and driving the process of farm consolidation (corporations that own many farms and don’t pay inheritance taxes because corporations never die).

Because farming is notoriously capital-intensive (the equipment costs millions of dollars) and low margin (the supplies you put into each year’s crop cost a fortune as well and the price you can sell your crop for is highly sensitive to supply and demand; have you ever noticed how food at the market goes on sale for extremely low prices? That was a huge crop that came to market from many farmers at once, for very low profit). This means a farmer has very little liquidity because most of their wealth is tied up on equipment and seeds and fertilizers and everything else. On top of that, there’s a huge element of climate and weather risk where an entire year’s profits can be wiped out by a few days (or sometimes a single day) of bad weather at the wrong time. Many farmers go out of business after one bad crop causes a huge loss and they can no longer afford to buy more seeds or they miss a payment on their tractor or their mortgage or whatever.

Compare with something like the restaurant business where the equipment is vastly cheaper (hundred dollar frying pan vs million dollar harvester) and so are the supplies (hundreds of dollars worth of food vs tens of thousands worth of seeds and chemicals). Restaurants are also much shorter in turnaround, as you’re generally aiming to sell out all your food the same day it arrives, whereas a farmer is waiting for their crop to grow all summer long.

And it’s really not wealth hoarding. The capital equipment (tractors, harvesters etc) costs a ton of money but depreciates in value rapidly over time and costs huge amounts in maintenance as well. Furthermore, the maintenance element for equipment can add another risk factor to your crops, as an equipment failure at the wrong time can result in a total crop loss if you’re not able to get it fixed right away.

That harvester can be sitting in the shed all year in perfectly working condition and then break down 2 minutes into harvesting this year’s crop. Unfortunately, all the other farmers are harvesting at the same time and so the harvester mechanics are overloaded with work and can’t get to yours in time to save the crop. Too bad!

Anyway, the other reason farming is different than other businesses is because farming produces the food supply that feeds everyone. Governments are acutely aware of the importance of food security and so they provide subsidies and other support programs for farmers. However, these programs can often be a double edged sword because they make it even harder or more capital intensive to get into the business (for example, by requiring new farmers to purchase quota to be allowed access to the market).

Lastly, I should point out that none of these issues matter if you’re just a rich person who wants to retire to the countryside. You can buy agricultural land cheap (far cheaper than land in the city) and you don’t need to buy any fancy equipment or quota, you just move into the farmhouse. When you pass on your inheritance to your children, the lack of capital equipment means they pay a lot less in taxes than a farmer would.

Inheritance taxes for real farmers (as opposed to people who just buy farmland to live in the country) are much higher because they include capital expenditures. Modern tractors, harvesters, ploughs, seed drills, sprayers, barns, equipment sheds, silos, fences, irrigation systems… all of this can add up to millions of pounds. Having to suddenly pay a large inheritance tax for a cash-strapped (high leverage) working farmer because their parent died could absolutely force the sale of everything.

Providing for one’s own children, passing on family traditions and ways of working, preserving the spaces where childhood memories are created; these are among the most fundamental of human desires. Take those away and your society gives way to nihilism. You make an enemy of every parent in the country.

On the other hand, a strong society understands this at a cultural level and the preservation of family traditions is deeply rooted in the society. This is where you get family farms, family restaurants, family workshops and small businesses that last for hundreds of years and produce some of the best products life has to offer. Japan, France, Italy, and Spain are some examples of countries where this is the case.

As for arbitrary restrictions on corporations: ad-hoc solutions like that rarely work. People find ways of circumventing and undermining such efforts. Instead of one corporation, people will have hundreds, each with its 10 hectares of land.

The more regulations you create, the more you reward people with the money to hire accountants and lawyers to navigate them. On the other hand, traditional farmers and other small family businesses will simply give up trying to navigate the red tape and bail out.

If you want to tax unearned wealth, you should implement land value tax which taxes the increase in value of a piece of land, not inheritance. A child who grows up on a farm and helps with all of the farm tasks their parents do every day has earned their inheritance. A suburbanite who has watched their house go from $200k to $2m in 20 years has not.

If I’m a parent in the twilight of my life and I own a big farm or a factory or some other productive asset and I’m facing steep inheritance taxes do you think I’m going to just accept them? No. I’d rather sell off all the equipment, burn the factory to the ground, treat the family to lavish vacations and parties for the rest of my life, and have them inherit nothing. If there’s no future to plan for, then live like there’s no future.

If the inheritance taxes are the reason his parents had to sell then it stands to reason that the people who introduced the inheritance taxes in parliament are to blame, no?

No, I’m pro-actual-farmer keeping their family farm in the family. People dodging taxes need to be taxed but catching real farmers in the crossfire is not good. It’s very bad.

Right, because if (guy I don’t like) supports something, I’m obliged to hate it and fight against it!

This really tells me all I need to know about your politics. You’re not interested in making life better for anyone. You’re filled with bitterness and resentment and you just want to watch the world burn. You don’t see taxes as a tool to bring prosperity to more people. For you, taxes are a weapon to bludgeon your enemies with. Enemies you’ve never met that a man on the television taught you to hate.

So you support the consolidation of small family farms into large corporate farming operations. Interesting take.

I’m not even British (I’m Canadian) and I don’t like him. Why’d he go after family farmers with aggressive inheritance taxes? That seems like a political dead end. Absolute foolishness.

Farmers usually have a lot of money invested in capital equipment but their lifestyles are anything but lavish. They live a working class life but get taxed (on inheritance) like millionaires, preventing them from handing down the family farm through generations (and allowing wealthy corporate farming operations to consolidate them).

3 master’s degrees is a red flag. It tells the employer you don’t really know what you want to do with life.

Try just putting only one of the degrees on your resume when you apply (the one most pertinent to the job). Same goes for past experience: don’t list everything, only list what is relevant.

Employers these days can get hundreds or even thousands of applications to a job posting. They filter these down to a manageable number with AI looking for keywords. Then they look through the remaining pile by hand to try to get down to just a few they can interview.

It’s easy to mess up a resume in a way that kills your chances of getting a job. One of the sure fire ways to do that is to clutter up your resume with irrelevant (to the job) experience or education.

Wow thank you for the very detailed reply! I’m saving this!

Yes I’m serious. I think my issue is that I use hot water to brew the tea and then ice to cool it down which makes it too watery!

But that’s the case even for home made bacon (or any home made smoked / cured food for that matter).

Every time I’ve brewed iced tea it always tastes super weak sauce. Canned/packaged iced teas taste wayyyyyy too sweet to me. I just want ice cold flavourful tea with a tiny bit of sweetness. How do you do that?

I’m sure Lipton iced tea is full of artificial colours and emulsifiers and possibly even fats for some reason, in addition to excessive amounts of sugar. I’m not going to defend that crap. No one should drink that stuff.

They’re not. I was just trying to give an example of something you could swap out the Lays for that would not be “ultra processed food” but still be just as unhealthy.

So instead of Lays they’ll start serving the kids fresh cut fries, double fried and generously salted.

The problem with those is all the additives, such as nitrates. You can also get nitrates from eating bacon which is not nearly as processed.