bzbarsky

> So what’s the alternative?

To which?

I think we should encourage/require government spending on things that are actually useful (and I acknowledge that there is wide-ranging disagreement on this criterion) and fund such spending adequately.

At the same time we need to have reasonable accountability for governments doing stupid things with money, notice when it's happening, and make it stop, redirecting those funds to something productive. Whether that happens via lower government revenues or reallocated government spending depends on whether there is something productive the government can spend the money on.

The things that you list, and many you don't (quality schools, both physical plant and teacher quality, libraries, parks, clean water, free school lunches, free preventative medical care, etc, etc ) generally pass the "is productive" smell test until proven otherwise; the burden of proof there should be on critics to prove that the investment is not being done in a useful way. That said, once that burden of proof is met, action needs to take place to remedy that.

> In my opinion the whole “throwing money at the problem is not a solution” excuse

You're putting words in my mouth here. For a lot of these things, throwing money at them is a _necessary_ but not _sufficient_ condition for having a solution. If you don't fund your schools adequately they will be bad, but if you just throw money at them and it gets misused in ways that don't advance learning they will also be bad. The whole "there's a whole warehouse of unused computers in that school district" thing is not _common_, but it's also not unknown when it happens it's really bad and needs to be fixed. Both in terms of the immediate problem and the bad incentives that led to it.

So just saying "allocate money to this" is not the end of the road. You have to then make sure the money gets used sanely.

The practical distinction is often not there except for things that are so egregious there is a good chance billionaires would be crossing the boundaries of legality for doing them. But yes, government does have a slight edge on billionaires for accountability, I agree.

You're thinking social security. Medicare is very much not capped, and in fact you only hit the 2.35% rate after 200k individual or 250k family income; it's 1.45% before that (for the employee side).

23.8%, because he would surely have to pay NIIT as well, right?

But also, that's just federal taxes. California adds 13.3% on top of that (for any income over $1 million, which is most of the income here).

But also, this is a stock grant, which generally get taxed as ordinary income, so I would expect 37% federal, 2.35% medicare, 13.3% California tax, adding up to 52.65% in taxes.

The COVID vaccine patent protections were not constraining vaccine supply, because they were being licensed to anyone with the capacity to produce the vaccines anyway.

It sure did make for good grandstanding to speak out against the patents and pretend like getting rid of them would change anything about vaccine availability in practice, though, and lots of people jumped up on that grandstand.

So given that dropping the patent protections would not actually help produce more vaccines and given the questions about long-run effects on drug research, opposing the people trying to score easy political points at the expense of actually doing something useful does not seem like a bad choice to me.

Tim funding a war on "gays" would be .... very surprising.

But also, there's no guarantee that _anyone_ including the government will use money for "good" causes. Bridges to nowhere, military adventurism, wars on drugs, personal enrichment of politicians and government employees, vanity projects of various sorts, the list of things governments mis-spend on is vast.

And of course we don't all agree on the relative merits of different causes.

Both improving education and building infrastructure, as they are actually practiced, are not "simple" and questionably "surely-helpful". See also bridges to nowhere and schools with top-of-the-line computers but broken heating/cooling systems.

Just throwing money at things does not mean it gets used to actually improve them, unfortunately... The question is when you have gotten to diminishing, or negative, returns.

> If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190

Why are we dividing a once-in-10-years (based on targets set 10 years ago) bonus by an every-year salary number?

As in, all your numbers are off by a factor of 10, as far as I can see.

In the short term? Because building a fab takes time and money, I would expect.

> but the book's font is smaller.

If the book's font is smaller, but the lines are the same width, that means more words per line in the book, yes?

And each line is taking a larger fraction of the visual field, since the book is closer to my eyes.

Basically, if we assume books are somewhat optimized for ease of reading (and to a large extent they are), websites should be aiming for the same angular sizes as books. The reading distance is larger, so the physical sizes should be larger: larger fonts and wider lines...

Yes, it's not wide enough.

Just holding up a book to my screen, 700px is about the width of the text in a mass-market paperback. But the reading distance for a screen is much larger than the reading distance for a book, of course. And hardcovers or trade paperbacks have wider text columns than that, of obviously, and are generally somewhat nicer to read than mass-market paperbacks... though also often get held at slightly larger reading distances.

Per https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/news/rumsfeld-rejects-pla... which I think is describing the same incident it was not an "unconditional surrender", though it was somewhat close: the conditions were about immunity from prosecution or punishment for Mullah Mohammed Omar (Taliban's leader at the time).

A 700px max-width would actually make it quite annoying to read for me (as a lot of content on the web is, unless I switch to reader mode)....

Yes, indeed. :)

Not just perl. Also sed, which is likely where perl got it from.

Those don't implement the same SQL as SQLite does, or as each other... What would the standard actually say?

Imagine a world in which everyone has exactly the same income and the same expenses, saves up the same amount of money for retirement, and lives exactly the same amount of time.

In that world, someone just about to retire would in one sense be somewhere in the top 1-2% of wealth holders and in another sense be exactly average (and median, and mode), as regards their consumption patterns.

The point being, lifecycle effects matter a _lot_. In the US, ~17% of the population is 65+ (not all of them retired, of course, but many retired and living partially off their savings) and ~6% of the population are college students. Let's assume that "individual income" does not include children (though it might, depending on how it's measured. It certainly includes various people who only work part-time, but let's ignore that. If we assume that college students and retirees are all below-median (not entirely true, but no worse than the other assumptions we just made), 70th percentile of individual income is something like 60th percentile of "income of non-students and non-retirees".

> That being reasonable doesn't change the fact that it's still more than what 70% of other situations get

The point is, if you look at actual consumption (as in, how people actually live), not everyone's consumption comes entirely from income. So it's extremely misleading to look at incomes and say anything about what people "get".

That is one plausible outcome here, yes.

Thank you, that is useful context!

> This is policy, not capability. The capability is each and every image can be scanned.

Are you familiar with the implementation? If it's in the uploader, then the capability for each image to be scanned sounds like it would involve a bunch of code changes.

But let's posit that the implementation just checks the "uploaded to iCloud" flag and hence this is "just policy". I agree that this is concerning, but I think it's important to distinguish between "could do X" and "is doing X" when describing a situation.

> You are incorrect

I would love to be enlightened here. Can you please point me to an explanation of how my understanding is incorrect?

> but also the concern is NCMEC’s database’s accuracy

I absolutely share this concern.

> You are taking these points entirely out of context and in a vacuum.

No, I don't think I am. I think there is enough heated rhetoric going on here, with people mis-stating what is actually going on to justify how they feel about it, that it's worth being very clear about what the problems here really are. Otherwise it feels like people are arguing against strawmen and makes it too easy to dismiss concerns that are very pertinent.

The original article for this thread, by the way, does a good job here.

Famous Chekhov quote: "Университет развивает все способности, в том числе — глупость". Or in English: "a university education develops all one's abilities, including stupidity".

> It seems much easier for the attackers to supply themselves (even in a foreign land)

That's a modern-transportation perspective. Unless the siege happens to be on a waterway and you supply that way.

Land-based logistics for pre-modern armies was _hard_. The standard solution was to keep the army on the move and forage as you went, so you kept stealing food from new peasants, but that's not an option for an army laying a siege. On the other hand, if the castle/town knew a siege was coming they would move things like livestock from the surrounding countryside inside the walls, and the grain stores were likely _already_ inside the walls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Nuremberg explicitly mentions supply as a problem for the besieging army in that case, and that's an early-modern army, not premodern. http://hundredyearswar.com/Books/History/Sieges.htm also says "the siege was often lifted because the besieging commander ran out of food to feed or money to pay his troops".

In practice, what this meant is that you would not even start a siege unless you had some idea that you could ensure supply, which was the common situation.

What makes you think they didn't? (I don't know whether they did or not, but I would absolutely expect such lobbying to (1) be happening and (2) be kept very quiet because it's too easy to spin it as "Apple supports pedophilia" or some such.)

> scanning your entire Photos library

The parts of it being uploaded to iCloud, not the whole thing, yes?

> and sending hashes to an unaccountable, no oversight nonprofit (NCMEC)

As I understand it, the whole point is that the hashes are computed on-device and compared to the NCMEC database on-device. Is my understanding incorrect?

> but Apple has said that the scanning is done on-device

Yes, but only for images being uploaded to iCloud.

> meaning whether or not you upload your photo library to iCloud, your local photos will be scanned

Not in the currently proposed implementation, if I understand correctly.

Disclaimer: All my information about this thing is from news articles; I might be misunderstanding the details.

The really interesting part is the huge gap between loading the CSS and starting the load of "patternbg.png", which is linked to by the CSS. When I load https://lgms.nl/ locally, I see the CSS finish loading at the 397ms mark in the overall pageload and the image load get queues at the 411ms mark, which is more like what I expected.

My best guess is that there is some extension involved that takes a long time to process attempted fetches and decide whether to allow them or not.... It would be interesting if the timeline included "we are ready to go fetch this and waiting on extensions to make up their mind" bits.

There are absolutely studies out there.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57061 and similar for other years (this is data through 2018, but published this year, presumably after they are pretty sure that various delayed tax return filing has happened and whatnot).

This only goes back to 1979, though. If you find something with data older than that I would be interested.

Of interest in the document I linked to is "Exhibit 11. Average Federal Tax Rates, by Income Group, 1979 to 2018" and "Exhibit 12. Average Federal Tax Rates Among Households in the Top 1 Percent, 1979 to 2018", with the latter showing top 0.1% and top 0.01% average tax rates. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57061#data has links to various xls and csv files, including the data tables those graphs are generated from. Note that per "Appendix C" of this document, the tax rates in these graphs include some sort of individualized attribution of corporate income tax incidence and that attribution could easily be quibbled with. The more detailed data tables include more breakdowns into what fraction of tax is attributed to this source, but I didn't find it more finer grained than "top 1%".

> The top tax rate in the US, decades ago, was 90%.

Which pretty much no one paid because there were so many exceptions to it. Starting with the fact that the top long-term capital gains tax rate was 25%, not 90%.

A lot of those exceptions got eliminated as part of the process of reducing the top marginal rate to the levels we observe now. The current "top" Federal rate is 39.35% on earned income, 40.8% on interest, non-qualified dividends, and short-term capital gains, and 23.8% on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains. That assumes a large enough income that we're not worrying about Social Security in any way, or phaseouts of various sorts or whatnot, but _are_ hitting the extra medicare tax and net investment tax provisions of the ACA. It also assumes that the employer side of the 1.45% Medicare tax is not incident on the employee, which of course it is, but we're comparing "headline" rates.

So specifically for Jeff Bezos, most of whose "income" is presumably long-term capital gains due to AMZN price appreciation, the difference between the "decades ago" utopia you describe and now is the difference between a 25% and 23.8% marginal rate on that long-term capital gain income.

All that said, are you paying a 28% _marginal_ rate, or a 28% _effective_ rate? And are you specifically talking about "wealthy" people or "high-income" people? I ask because last I checked the top 1% of incomes paid something on the order of 25% _average_ Federal tax rate for the last several years (i.e. after the tax cuts a few years ago), and the top 0.1% of incomes paid closer to 27-28%. That's just counting income and payroll taxes, not the incidence of corporate income taxes or whatnot. And again, just Federal; state taxes are a separate story.

I don't see how open immigration solves the self-determination problem, unless the premise is that:

1) You allow open immigration.

2) You then allow a democratic vote, including by the new immigrants, to partition the existing state (the essence of self-determination).

which comes back to pretty much my original premise: that the only way for a geographically dispersed population to have self-determination is to be able to move to a single area where they can them democratically vote to have that area become autonomous or sovereign...

Needless to say, the pre-existing population of that area would likely not perceive this process favorably.

The other option I see is to posit that in modern democracies the principle of self-determination is unnecessary. I suspect a number of people in Catalonia and Scotland would disagree...

> If that relocation involves creating a new state

Creating a new state is what the right to self-determination is all about, yes.

It sounds like we have some fundamental disagreements on definitions here, though I would be interested in your take about how you feel the right to self-determination can be meaningfully exercised by a geographically dispersed group, if at all.