RockIslandLine

"The government regularly spends more than it takes in from taxes by issuing bonds. [...] That in turn lets the government spend money, which ultimately makes its way into the economy as a whole"

This is straight up nonsense. All currency issuers have the ability to spend which is skew from their need to tax. Taxes do not fund Federal spending. Taxes destroy money, and thus control inflation. That is a fundamentally different role.

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/04/abba-lerner-1943-fun...

Real time sucks, but I'll have to at least check it out.

It's not hard to get that data. The tax rates are public knowledge.

Cook county has just over a 2% per year property tax.

https://www.cookcountyclerk.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/201...

If deforestation is still occurring (net result that we are cutting down more trees than we are planting) then cutting down more trees doesn't solve the problem.

We do in fact need people to just start planting trees.

IMHO, this is a failure of the copyright model. All information required to build software should be required to be escrowed at release.

"it almost invariably winds up with smart programmers insisting that these have to be simple problems that would be easily solved if only we were using the right API"

Because they are. Make the common case fast. There is no reason to expose all possible complexity to every transaction.

"Countless websites were broken because they used popup windows."

I fixed it for you.

"The world would probably enter a depression worse than the 1920s as revenues severely tank because companies are not allowed to advertise their business."

Nonsense. I'm not going to stop buying food or soap because I don't see ads for it.

So what service do I subscribe to so that I never see ads at all?

Ads are pollution, and need to be treated as such. Information providers need to develop business models which do not depend upon advertising revenue. (foundations, Patreon, whatever).

Revenue is an obsolete concept at the Federal level. Currency issuers are not dependent on taxes to fund spending. Taxes have other roles, like controlling inflation.

All currency issuers can always pay any debt denominated in their native currency.

Whether higher education is producing a quality product at a fair price is a completely different discussion.

Whether the degrees being produced align with the workforce needs is yet another different discussion.

Whether jobs actually require the degrees that employers specify is yet another different discussion.

"What are your thoughts on this?"

We need much higher taxes on millionaires.

"Not too many places will straight up ghost candidates that have done on-sites, that's pretty unusual."

It's probably at least 50% of my interviews. Roughly 1/4 of my interviews have any kind of follow up at all.

It doesn't hurt to tell people that someone else was hired. Closure is important to job seekers.

When I worked as a stock trader, all of our chats were logged as a matter of legality.

Sieve of Aristothenes + induction seem most likely to me.

"For every binary sequence of length X, the Collatz iteration ends at 1. Adding more zeros clearly does not change the result, therefor adding more ones is the only path which might disprove the conjecture." Eventually you build up to a catalog of proven sequences that all other numbers must necessarily step into at some point.

Technically possible maybe, politically possible no.

Any ISP could force unencrypted traffic through a deep packet inspection system that looked for this kind of malicious behavior. That would be widely seen as a betrayal of the "big dumb pipe" expectation.

The computation itself is not infeasible at scale. But any ISP attempting this would see swift and brutal political pushback and almost certainly lose customers over it.

"I saw a way out, computers, and I took it. I was able to pivot to a better career by building skills in my free time."

So clearly, everyone can follow that same path, right?

... And the AMA is lobbying for that increased funding?

"It would be hypocritical for Westerners to criticize them for it."

I'm not fully convinced. When you know better, you do better. And we now know better.

"A did a stupid thing to achieve X result, therefore B must be allowed to do the same stupid thing" is not a great argument.

There's more than one way to create economic value.

And yet a ten year timeline is obviously nonsense. When these reactors were built in the 1970s, groundbreaking to power production was often 5 years.

Why is the process much worse now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion_Nuclear_Power_Station

"The sort of interesting thing is it's really hard to be objective about this,"

And beyond that, words do not mean the same things over time.

The following quote from the 1972 Democratic Party platform would be read quite differently in 1972 versus 2019.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1972-democratic-pa...

Family planning services, including the education, comprehensive medical and social services necessary to permit individuals freely to determine and achieve the number and spacing of their children, should be available to all, regardless of sex, age, marital status, economic group or ethnic origin, and should be administered in a non-coercive and non-discriminatory manner.

Perot pulled roughly evenly from across the political spectrum. There is no reason to assume it would have changed any result.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111651?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...

"whoever gets the most votes wins, end of story."

That seems to be a really bad idea if you want minority representation.

How would this play out in a racist 1950s scenario?

"Building nuclear power plants takes longer than that."

So fix that broken process. This is a nonsense result.

"How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WANT to know."

There are several different ways. Demand response is significant. Large users are already paid to reduce their usage during times of tight supply. It should be economical at some level to push that much further down the list. Some utilities today already do time-of-day pricing, so make it much more explicit and allow many more people to participate. The idea that we must allow anyone to use as much electricity as they want at any time is ridiculous.

For seasonal and time of day issues, the intermittency issue is mitigated by the fact that different technologies are strong at different times. Wind is most active at night. So the answer to "what do you do when the sun isn't shining" is in fact "install wind". Similarly, wind is weak in summer. Guess what? Summer has the longest daylight periods. So solar panels produce electricity for many more hours per day. "Use electricity during the day and use much less at night" is a reasonable solution. Again, the bullshit idea that we need to allow everyone to use all of the electricity that they want at any time needs to go die in a fire.

Two things that I've found are helpful for me.

Always make your comments about the policy and not the person.

Try to reference principles which give context to your comments.

+1

"Is inflation really never going to show again?"

What causes inflation?

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services.

When populations are growing, you need to expand the money supply to avoid deflation. What happens when populations stop growing?

Because debt can be valuable.

The Federal government has a unique ability to guarantee that you will hold a certain number of dollars on a certain date. That should sound a lot like "escrow" to you.

Federal debt lubricates a number of economic processes.

Modern Monetary Theory tells us that the important limits are "when you run out of Labor" and "when you run out of resources".

So what nations are facing low unemployment, and what nations are facing resource shortages?

"But of course you have to borrow to roll old debt."

Not if you have your own currency. Currency issuers never need to borrow.

It makes no sense to even suggest borrowing something that you can create at will.