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I don't think we should be missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, because of historical reasons, _technically_ "magistrat" refers specifically to magistrates from the judicial branch and not all judges [0]. This is surely interesting yet administrative judges do the same job of presiding over court proceedings before them and being independent from the political authorities.

Procedure is different between the two branches, but there are also differences of procedures within each branch - for instance between penal vs civil cases.

The Constitutionnal council has ruled that the independance of administrative judges is a constitutional principle in the same way as the judicial judge [1, see point 6].

[0] of course if we need to be really technical, administrative judges are magistrates see: 'Les membres des tribunaux administratifs et des cours administratives d'appel sont des magistrats [...]' https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000... ; but members of the Conseil d'Etat, an administrative court, are not administrative judges - they're conseillers d'Etat.

[1] https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/decision/1980/80119DC...

Note that the court in question is the Conseil d'Etat. Cour de cassation is completely irrelevant here.

> It is not a court

That's weird because the Conseil d'Etat thinks it is the "supreme administrative judge" [0]. How could they not know that they are not a court?

[0] https://www.conseil-etat.fr/decisions-de-justice/juger-les-l...

"Probability of experiencing a heatwave at least X degrees, during at least Y days in a given place any given day" is increasing rapidly in many places (as far as I understand) and is climate, not weather. Sure, any specific instance "is weather" but that's missing the forest for the trees.

Teaching ressources (i.e. prof/TA time) are limited.

The question is therefore not whether lecturing is useful or where does it fit in the overall learning process, but whether those limited hours of prof/TA time are better spent lecturing vs doing something else (e.g. active learning).

There is a trade off between lecturing and active learning, even if you perfectly understand what lecturing is supposed to do.

As opposed to roads, which exist in nature when there is no one paid to build them.

The issue is that there are too many cars (including pollution, congestion, noise), not that there is not enough transit - or at least this is a separate issue.

If you could multiply by 10 the number of people using public transport without changing the number of cars on the road, would the car make less noise, or pollute less, or take up less space? I don't see how.

So the two policies we are discussing really are:

- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars directly more expensive

- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars indirectly more expensive, by lowering the cost of the alternatives and funding this extra cost _somehow_ (taxing everyone whether they use cars or not?)

It seems to me that solution 2 is potentially less effective, definitely way more complex and basically make everyone pay rather than just car users.

Of course if the goal is either to be ineffective (just subsidy transit but don't make me abandon my car) or shield car users from most of the cost (create an expensive solution to reduce car usage by making everyone pay, not just car users); then sure, it's better.

The French higher education system is such that a lot of business students come from somewhat math-heavy undergraduate programs: 9h hours of math class plus one hour of one-on-one oral examination for 2-3 years.

I don't think proponents of the "car-free" or "15-minutes" cities have:

- supermarkets are super close

- everything else is super far (including workplaces)

- you don't have a car

in mind. I don't think that in London (the main example in the article) most jobs are a 45 minute drive from central London nor that most people drive to work.

Isn't the job thing _easier_ if you live in a denser town? If you have more jobs per km² you're less likely to need to move when you switch job.

I am not sure everybody would agree with that statement. Some might say academia exist to do research that extend humanity's knowledge, whether there's a financial reward or not.

I don't think so, are you sure? The Conseil d'Etat has two distinct roles (and thus two distinct branches):

- serving as the supreme court for the administrative "order" - as a judge, the CE does not check if laws are constitutionnal

- serving as legal counsel to the government - in which case it does check if bills put forward by the governement (i.e. not laws already adopted) are constitutionnal but this is merely advisory.

Is it so different in practice?

Landmark decisions ([0], [1]) set precedent. The conseil constitutionnel has ruled that its precedent is binding [2]. In fact the majority of current constitutionnal law in France was willed into "constitutionnal" status by a landmark decision of the conseil [3]. I mean precdent can move _laws_ to the _constitution_ (see [4]). That seems pretty binding and persuasive.

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grands_arr%C3%AAts_en_droit_ad...

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grands_arr%C3%AAts_de_la_Cour_...

[2] https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/decision/1962/6218L.h...

[3] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9cision_Libert%C3%A9_d%2...: essentially, the council ruled that the preamble of the constitution also had constitutional value (which was not the case previously and still is not for laws) - since it also mentions other texts (the preamble of the 1046 Constitution, the 1789 Bill of rights, etc. those texts also have the same legal power as the constitution.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_principles_recogni...

Conseil constitutionnel + ?

And the “is this law constitutional?” part is done by the Constitutional council, which is not quite a court. And there’s a second Supreme Court (Conseil d’État) anyway. Quite different from the US.

Only words offensive in English count (e.g. Coq). Words offensive in other languages (bit, pika) are ok!

Disclaimer: I'm French

I never understood why the "Champagne" issue was so obviously silly to Americans.

Champagne is an actual place, that's where the name of the wine made there comes from.

Could you name something "Napa Valley wine" if it's not from Napa Valley?

It's quite simple I think:

1. for any given budget, there is no Pareto-improving reallocation: if you want to give more money to someone, then the money has to come from someone else.

2. given the current complexity, there are a _lot_ of edge cases to account for. If you do not want to make any loser after a reform, and not have as many edge cases, then you'd need to pump a lot of money to a lot of people so that "edge case people" who become "average joe" do not lose out. See for instance the people who end up with less disposable income when their pension is raised (https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/vrais-faux-gagnants-...) (!). See also the riffraff about the "montant net social" - now the exact income (which is basically net salary + a bunch of things your employer pay for you and are counted as income) you need to report on welfare application is written on pay slip. Nice simplification here, right? People who reported wrong income (only net salary generally) were upset that it was a plot to decrease welfare.

3. people genuinely genuinely love special cases. Hence the tradeoff for the government between adressing a special case but adding more complexity always end up with more special cases, more complexity.

Some examples: since housing is expensive, people want to help renters with cash payment (of course it can't be bundled with the basic income, it has to be its own benefit), but they also want some public housing with below market rents. Now you need to acocunt for the in kind benefit of having a below market rent in the rules of housing benefits if you want to be relatively just between those two populations.

Recently, the cash benefit for handicaped people computation was changed - it depends only on the receiver's income and not on household's income (the main argument was that household income as an input makes handicapped less autonomous on one hand, and decreases working incentives for them). Now this means that some benefits are computed at the individual level, other at the household level. Of course there is a transitory period where people can be grandfathered-in the old rules so as not to make any losers.

And so on and so forth.

Large families need their own benefits, because they have unique(tm) needs, you just can't make a per child benefit that just scale.

And so on and so forth.

Did I mention that you want to help overseas territories with special fiscal rules?

And so on and so forth.

I think the two most prominent examples of this were the two failed Macron reform: the first pension reform (universal public pension fund instead of several) and the basic income (revenu universel d'activité - basically a merger of APL+RSA+PA at least). Always a special category that lose out if they own complexity-inducing special case is ironed out.

4. because of points 1-4, no one understands anything and thus there is a strong suspicision that the government is here to rob you of [your benefits | your pension | etc] when there is a reform proposal.

> The problem is that the CNAF deliberately targets small unintentional errors rather than large-scale intentional fraud.

The French welfare system is incredibly complex - see for instance this [0] simplified description of housing allowances which is 80 (!) pages long. This is not the most complex part of the system. With such a system, there are massive amounts of errors, both too-much-money-given and not-enough-money-given. The scale is so large that the French Court of Accounts refused to certify the CNAF accounts last year[1]: thoses errors represent about 7.5% of the CAF budget.

So basically the probability to have an error is just a function of how complex your situation is, and thus the "algorithm" targets more complex situations - change in your marital situation, having adult children (which may or may not need to be taken into account when applying for benefits depending on a bazillion variables), and so on, increases your probability to be targeted.

[0] https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/Brochure-ba...

[1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/certification-des-co...

> I am curious why they used a logistic regression.

CNAF is not a competitive employer.

French public service is essentially split in two: the State, and the various "Social Security" bodies which manages most of the welfare system (among them, the Caisse Nationale des Allocations Familiales which manages part of social & family welfare).

The "State" side has a very competitive track for stats/econ/ML employees, namely the national statistics office members (INSEE). As the name does _not_ indicate, they work everywhere in the government, not just at INSEE.

So if you're good at stats and in public service, the odds you end up in the CNAF team instead of the statistiscal office of the Social Ministry is about zero.

Hence SAS. Hence logit. And so forth.

The capitalization of the title:

> L'esprit de L'escalier

(emphasis mine) is yet another instance of adding capital letters by English speakers in what seems to me to be random place. I have yet to see an explanation.

It is not a "vehicle of desperation", it's just a cheap para-friendly way to move a 47kg gun around. The contemporary equivalent is bigger but still not that big: https://www.defense.gouv.fr/dga/actualites/qualification-du-...

I think you will find the CAE note on inheritance taxation quite interesting: https://www.cae-eco.fr/staticfiles/pdf/cae-note069s.pdf. Note the the top 0.1% of individuals, who receive on average 13M€ over their lifetime -

If you look at the effective inheritance tax rate (ie tax paid on actual money flow from dead people to inheritors), even the top 0.1% of all inheritance is around a 10% rate. See figure 2 in https://www.cae-eco.fr/staticfiles/pdf/cae-note069s.pdf. Note the the nominal tax rate is around 30% - the difference is because a lot of stuff is not taxed, or partially taxed.

I think the issue is that French inheritance taxation has both a very high facial rate and massive amounts of exemptions / loopholes. People that think they can grok the fiscal system in a few minutes look at the high nominal rates , not the loopholes.

In France, the tax is not on the amount of restate but on the inherited income, ie each kid gets taxed on his share. So if there are n kids, the amount of tax paid is nT(K/n), not T(K). Since T is progressive (convex), nT(K/n) < T(K).

Given that the first 100k are not taxed and that there are three kids, only about 14 millions will be taxed at the 45% rate, not 20.

Note that we are talking about each kid making 6,67M€ (four centuries of minimum wage, three centuries of median wage).

If they earned their money through their labour instead of through their birth, they would actually be taxed more (IR + CSG + CRDS).

As for the grandkids, there are a bazillion ways to reduce the tax bill: life insurance is not inheritance-taxed, you can donate money to your kids before your death (about 300k€ per kid every 15 years before it’s taxed - if there are three kids, three grandkids per kid and everyone does a little tax planning you can give 9 grands kids * 300k€ * say give them money at 0, 15, 30, 45 and 60 yo that’s 13,5M€ originally from the grandma that won’t even count as inheritance, etc.).

Companies can either care about cover letters, or not. Applicants can etiher write genuine, informative letters or generic useless letters.

There are only two possible stable equilibria: a "low" don't care/generic letters or a "high" care / informative letters. If most applicants write generic letters, there's no point for the company to pay attention to it. If companies don't pay much attention to it, there's no point in wrtiting more than the blandest, lowest effort letter.

Sounds like you're in a field in the "high" equilibrium. Most of the software industry is in the "low" equilibrium.

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Personally I like cover letters (in the "high" equilibrium of course):

- they basically front load a lot of the interviews, with information that come up in the interviews. I'd rather have as much filtering as possible thourgh the cover letter and CV than in interviews, because it is much more costly for both parties to interview.

- people complain that it overlaps with the content of the CV/resume. The question imho is purely one of presentation: do you want to convey information with full sentences and paragraphs or bullet points? Much like I think powerpoint-style bullet point lists are much worse than actual language to convey rich information, I'd rather have actual text than blurbs in the typical resume. Makes it slower to read and thus requite low number of applicants though.

If the company releases every year, you can always buy the lastest tech when you decide to buy. If it only releases every four year, unless you just happen to be in need of a new phone the exact year of the release, you're buying (slightly) older tech.

> Rather than giving everyone a significant reason to switch every few years, the industry seems to think that releasing new models with incremental differences every 9-14 months is the best way forward. It's dumb IMO.

There's a significant reason to switch every few years because (current model vs model of a few years ago) are quite different, even if (current model vs last yeast model) are not.

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> The term "liberal arts" for an educational curriculum dates back to classical antiquity in the West, but has changed its meaning considerably, mostly expanding it. The seven subjects in the ancient and medieval meaning came to be divided into the trivium of rhetoric, grammar, and logic, and the quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. The modern sense of the term usually covers all the natural sciences, formal sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

You're late. It's en situation de handicap now, not invalide or handicapé.

See for instance https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F31029