Muzza

> There's no excuse for not contributing.

My effective income tax rate is 50%, and then there is an additional 25% VAT on everything I buy. How much more of my income does the all-knowing Eli Gottlieb suggest I "contribute"? Perhaps I should give away the remaining 25% and go live on the streets as a declaration of solidarity?

> "Here's a thing," young white dude founder blogs...

If he would've said black instead of white or dudette instead of dude, Hacker News would have had this guy's header on a platter. Racists, the lot of you.

I just want to take this moment to point out to all the good little leftists of HN that we can learn so much from tribal life in Papua New Guinea: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-...

This is not the answer HN is looking for, but Iceland is safe because it's full of Icelanders. England was safe when it was full of Englishmen. Not anymore. Sweden was safe when it was full of Swedes. Not anymore. Etc.

Yes, we do enjoy our 50-60-70% tax rates here in Europe. Thankfully Sweden recently stopped pissing away the Swedish taxpayers' money by paying for the university education of foreigners.

I used to do this when I worked for the post office (not in the US) and it was by far the dullest thing I have ever done. Truly loathsome work. It was referred to as "coding".

There were rules in place so you could only do it for 20 minutes at a stretch and only a couple of times (three?) per shift. Presumably this had to do with the fact that the quality - which was a problem - would collapse otherwise. You needed to keep a low average time per letter or you would get booted off coding duties. I can't remember exactly how long, but you needed to be able to code a letter in a matter of seconds.

The American setup looks a lot more hardcore (six screens?!) than the one I used though. Pretty sure the application was written in Visual Basic.

The machines which sort mail are pretty bad-ass. Not only can they sort by postcode, but also by address so the mail comes out in the order in which the mailman visits each building on his route.

I don't think you've thought that through. A straight-out bachelor tax would simply make bachelors work less. Tax revenue would fall, and there would be even less money for you leftists to redistribute to women.

I see I hit a sore spot. I don't really want to remove childbearers from the workforce, but I do want a frank discussion about who bears the costs. Actually, just an admission of the inherent injustice of the system would be nice. Ten bucks a year? Screw you. I pay roughly 70% of my income in taxes every year.

And holy thoughtcrime Batman! Despite paying tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, all government services should be denied to me just because of my opinions?

http://mises.org/daily/2485

> Women should have the right to take lengthy maternity leaves

And the cost should be borne by single men.

Presumably a propaganda piece designed to win over the remaining 50% of the American voters who still haven't bought into the idea that the Democratic party can turn the US into a leftist utopia.

"Democracy will cease to exist when people realize they can vote themselves more money." Does the article mention that 15% of Swedish, female voters work in (government) health care? Add a couple of more percentage points for teachers and other government workers... Is this sustainable?

Does it mention the injustices of the welfare system, where fresh-off-the-airplane "refugees" can receive more in benefits than I net after taxes in my work as a software engineer?

Does the article mention the great Moslem slums of the cities? There are places in Scandinavia which firemen and postmen can no longer go into unescorted for fear of being pummeled by rocks. Does it mention the occasional "youth" riots? (We just had one a few weeks back in Gothenburg). The Sahlgrenska university hospital in Gothenburg must now keep its emergency entrance locked due to recurring fights breaking out between various clans.

Really now. He doesn't blame "the Chinese" as you would have us believe; he blames one particular Chinese.

> Yes, if proven they would cease to be sexist, because they'd be discriminating based on facts, not based on his apparent prejudice. (However, since the conjecture does seem to come from a combination of sexism/ageism/confirmation bias, it would be surprising if they were proved.)

I see. It's good to know that employers are now free to throw out all applications from Ethiopians, because of the fact that the average IQ in Ethiopia is 63.

> BTW: Are you proud not to be in the politically correct "lot"? All it really amounts to is trying not to be unnecessarily hateful or demeaning to one another.

Please. Political correctness amounts to much more than that.

> No, he should disregard them because as written they're sexist, and don't even have good methodology to try and stand in their defense.

So... If he had a sufficiently good methodology which proved his assertions, they would cease to be sexist and you politically correct lot would approve of them? Somehow I doubt it.

> Imagine if those 2 million kids that get saved by the Gates Foundation instead of being forced to remain in conflict-prone Northern Nigeria or Kenya or Uganda were given the chance to come and work , legally, in Europe.

And I suppose the EU taxpayer will be footing the bill for all this imported poverty, and at the same he will be forced to endure a marked increase in social friction (ultimately ending in complete social chaos a la the no-go areas in the banlieues of France, Britain and Sweden).

Those are not the only choices.

Funny. Larry Summers was fired from Harvard for saying something very similar.

> System admins even more so.

Really? Honest question.

> Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy is a fine thing.

Please. There is a difference between criticizing what passes for art these days[1] and believing that arts don't have value.

[1] E.g. going around switching prices on items in a grocery store, or acting mentally disturbed in public in order to get committed to a mental institution (both of those where graduation projects at Konstfack in Stockholm).

Your point is not complicated, but on the other hand you didn't actually make it until now. You relied on me understanding that you consider you consider judgement-by-Github to be equivalent to judgement-by-terminology. But honestly: how was I to know that "hey yer Github sucks" was actually an exemplification of what the next sentence in your post said not to do, and not just an ordinary internet insult?

Nota bene: I actually agree with you.

cynicalkane didn't say that you said that ezyang was incompetent.

> Looking at your GitHub your resume is nowhere near as illustrious.

There is a great deal of absurdity in modern society, which demands that everyone have spaces which they can call their own - except whites/white males, whose spaces must be open to everyone. Tell me, do women-only gyms also have bad connotations for you? What are the connotations of the "no whites allowed" workshops during the recent(ish) gay-pride idiocy in Gothenburg?

Using the same logic, a company can never be said to "do" anything. Everything is (ultimately) done by a real person.

Surely the set of all .co.uk domains is a proper subset of all .uk domains.

> (Dare I guess it was written by a white affluent young male?)

Yes, us awful young white males are never sick.

Strange. A common complaint among Swedes is that we don't talk to strangers... like they (supposedly) do in Greece (or Spain or France).

I don't get it. NetAxept appears to be some kind of payment processor for web shops; certainly not something a bank would use for its internal processing.

It would be the height of stupidity for Mastercard and Visa to allow banks to issue cards with their labels and then have these cards be part of some secret "strictly Northern Europe" Mastercard/Visa network. Talk about confusing the customers.

But this is all moot: I have both Mastercard and Visa debit cards issued in Sweden. They work perfectly well outside of Europe...

Both! I think the the complexity stems from the fact that an order (or an invoice) is a "human" and "fuzzy" artifact, while a relational database or TCP/IP stack is a mathematical-technical artifact and therefore much more amenable to the computer model. (I don't want to imply that a database isn't complex, but as Intuit shows: modeling accounting on a computer is also pretty damn complex.)

Yes, it's a common flaw among those who don't have any experience with this kind of business software to think that anything "purely technical" (like an operating system) must be more complex. I work on a piece of business software and the database layer, interprocess communications layer, etc all pale in comparison to the code dealing with such mundane items as orders and invoices.

All mandatory school systems are despicable and horrendous. The first major issue is the coercion involved: they control a child's life for 9 years (or even 12 years in some countries). It's absurd. This alone should be reason enough to dissolve the entire public school system (and possibly put various Ministers of Eduction to trial).

The second major issue is that they are a tool the state uses to indoctrinate children (naive by nature) with whatever the correct values of the day are. Prussia (where public schooling originated) needed obedient soldiers, modern-day Sweden needs a large underclass of socialists willing to support various hare-brained political schemes. The schools reflect this. What happens, for instance, if you call homosexuality "not normal"[1] in a Swedish school? It gets you an F in biology and a label as a "homophobe" in the state-run media[2]. One wonders what happened to students who questioned communism in the Soviet Union.

See "Deschooling society" by Ivan Illich, "Underground history of the American school system" by John Taylor Gatto.

[1] Which is surely true, statistically speaking.

[2] http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/abc/homofobi-gav-underka...

"Status: Virtually illegal"

Yeah, you got me (insert rolleyes).

Car insurance also doesn't operate on a free market, for the reason you cite. I don't care that "few people" would argue it (appeal to authority; you like fallacies don't you?). You seem to think that something is either a state monopoly or a free market, but it is not so.