bzbarsky

> Human beings cannot do the equivalent.

They can to some extent, actually... See IRS publication Publication 536, "Net Operating Losses (NOLs) for Individuals, Estates, and Trusts".

> Spend the entirety of your 20s making very little money because you are investing in growth

To actually do the equivalent you would need to spend your 20s _losing_ money. And if you do (in the NOL sense per publication 536) then you can in fact keep rolling the losses forward to offset future income until the losses are exhausted.

Now one issue is that things like medical school tuition are not considered "losses" for individuals. So in that sense there is a definite asymmetry here.

But businesses can't "go back and use all the unused 24% bracket", not least because US federal corporate income tax does not have brackets. What they can do is that _if_ they have negative taxable income (i.e. revenues - deductible expenses is negative) then they can roll the "unused" part of the deduction into future years to offset future revenues, which is exactly how NOL works for individuals. The primary difference between businesses and individuals here is in what counts as "deductible expense". The business definition is much wider in general, not just for purposes of NOL.

> You also can’t deduct the interest on the loans you took to finance that growth.

Well, you can until you start making that $800k/year. And only up to a limit, etc. Just like so many other things in the personal tax code, there's an income phaseout and a cap for student loan interest deductions...

> Also, what if the expenses are larger than the income?

See IRS publication 536: Net Operating Losses (NOLs) for Individuals, Estates, and Trusts.

Theft losses of personal-use property are only deductible if you itemize deductions, and only the amount exceeding 10% of AGI can be deducted. The amount also needs to exclude whatever insurance payments you got, and exclude $100 per theft event.

As a concrete example: say your $1500 laptop gets stolen from your apartment. Your renter's insurance has a $1000 deductible, but covers the rest, so they pay you $500. Your loss for tax purposes is the $1500 - $500 - $100 = $900. You subtract 10% of your AGI from this, and deduct what's left. Which is most likely "nothing", in this case: if you're in a situation where it's making sense to itemize deductions at all, the chance that your AGI is below $9k is fairly low.

But also:

1. Starting in 2018, theft losses of personal-use (as opposed to business-use) property are only deductible "to the extent they’re attributable to a federally declared disaster" (see IRS Publication 584). So in the laptop example it would need to be stolen as part of the general chaos of some sort of federally declared disaster or something. But this does not apply to thefts of "income-producing property" e.g. many stocks or other investments, which brings us to....

2. There are some special rules for Ponzi schemes that I don't know in detail. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p547#en_US_2020_publink1000... has links you can chase if you really want.

It sounds like we're getting very close to violent agreement.

> it doesn't seem that far-fetched that some percentage of MIT staff might feel this way.

I can pretty much guarantee that some percentage of MIT staff feel this way, sure. I would actually be pretty worried if MIT had, as a job requirement, anything about feelings one way or another in this area.

And yes, there has been a significant presence of military projects at MIT in general, starting with work on radar and up through the present in the form of the Lincoln Laboratory.

What I am not on board with, based on the evidence we have, is the specific claim that MIT, as an organization, is in favor of suppressing reporting of vulnerabilities that the US government or some ally is exploiting. My strong suspicion is that there is no official position on it at the Institute level, and significant diversity of opinion on the matter among MIT affiliates when viewed as individuals, though I have no data to back up those suspicions.

Note that the naming doesn't mean anything about organizational structure; it's literally a branding exercise.

But more to the point, the closer analogy is an Amazon Post that claims to be editorially independent that publishes an editorial that's supportive of, say, Bashar al Assad, and people taking this to mean Amazon supports Bashar al Assad.

There are basically two logical leaps going on there: (1) if the editorial writer supports X then the paper must support X (historically not how editorials work) and (2) if the paper supports X then the organization that owns the paper supports X (not how editorial independence of a paper works).

This is published by "MIT" in about the same way that an editorial in the Washington Post is published by "Amazon".

As the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Technology_Review says:

  MIT Technology Review is a magazine wholly owned by the
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially
  independent of the university

Thank you, that is exactly the sort of info I was looking for!

To be clear, 200,000 tons is the weight of the cargo+fuel this ship carries, not counting the structure of the ship itself. I haven't found a good number for the displacement (the total weight, including the ship), and would be curious to know what it is.

> were already there

I really don't think so. Most obviously because those two groups did not even exist as entities most people were conscious of until recently.

> Hate doesn't spring parthenogenically from the void

Of course not. But it sure can be seeded and nurtured, as you note, by actions people take. And far too many people have been taking various actions that look to me as if they are designed, intentionally or not, to seed and nurture hate. And fear, for that matter. Which are not unrelated things: hate and fear are deeply intertwined and beget each other.

> Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.

That is most certainly true. At the same time, a disagreement _can_ be voiced in a way that begets hate, and all too often is (e.g. via attacking the person, not the idea). And suppressing disagreement can absolutely beget hate. I feel like both are on the rise, unfortunately.

Interesting note: you can probably call your bank up and request that the disallow ACH withdrawals from your account if triggered by some third party.

You can still get ACH deposits. You can still use the bank's bill pay and they will send the payments over ACH (so you can push funds over ACH from the account). But someone else can't _pull_ funds over ACH from that account.

Certainly the banks I use have this as an option, and it's useful sometimes. As long as you remember and don't try to pull yourself from one of your other accounts, of course.

The hate I've seen generated by ham-handed thought-and-speech policing is hate against the people doing the policing and hate against people standing up against the policing, not hate against the people the policing is ostensibly protecting.

So no, it's not revealing existing hate. It's actively generating new hate.

https://www.royaltyexchange.com/blog/mechanical-royalties seems like a decent explanation, though I'm not an expert in this area...

You're right that on the specific topic of government censorship they are not nearly the same. Very different legal structures and all that.

But from talking to people who were living in the USSR as adults through the 70s and 80s (and my own memories of the USSR in the 80s, though I was not an adult, and reading I have done, but I put more weight on the in-person conversations with people I know and who can give me direct first-hand comparisons), the US is certainly same-universe close at this point, and rapidly getting closer, in terms of things like public confessions, limiting acceptable points of view (in _parts_ of the US, segregated by culture) etc. In some aspect, "further along", heading for Cultural Revolution era China. The practical implications are unfortunately not as different as one might like.

Maybe a clearer way to describe it is that the "lived experience" (again, limited to certain professions or locations in the US) is unfortunately far too similar, even while the legal and social structures that produce it are quite different in their details.

And just make sure we're on the same page: the US now is nothing like _1930s_ USSR. We should make sure we mean the same thing when we say "life in the USSR", because it varied quite a bit over 70 years.

Good point. The source I was looking at was talking about .22 caliber rounds. I looked around some more, and that seems to be the general range in which you can achieve those velocities, though that can include discarding sabot versions of 7.62x51mm ammunition (with the projectile ending up 5.56mm or smaller).

> it goes up quite a few orders of magnitude from that

Sorry to be pedantic, but modern rifle muzzle velocities are in the 1.2km/s range. Escape velocity in LEO is 11.2km/s, so your maximal closing speed is ~22.4kms. Which is maybe 1.3 orders of magnitude difference, not "quite a few". Orders of magnitude are big.

For the rest, you are right of course: we're talking closing speeds that can easily be one order of magnitude higher than rifle bullets (or armor-piercing tank projectiles, for that matter; those are at 1.7km/s or so).

Thank you, that makes your position quite clear. I appreciate your continued engagement with this conversation and the fact that I think we managed to keep it reasonably polite...

Israel encouraged immigration, yes. And the countries the Mizrahi Jews left did all sorts of things that encouraged their Jews to leave.

> Yes, I think Israel is attempting a genocide against the Palestinians.

OK, we have that clear. I asked three other questions in the paragraph where I asked that question, and I'd love to know what your answers to those are.

> The ICC is currently investigating war crimes

As they should, yes. I don't think everything Israel does is either acceptable or even justified, by any means.

> This is not modern history.

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing: we're talking about the mass ejections of Jews from various Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 50s, 60s, and 70s of the 20th century, right?

And if that's not modern history, then how is the establishment of Israel at the same time modern history?

> Yes they are colonizers.

They were refugees, more precisely. But just to be specific, what is your concrete proposal for where they should have gone?

> By your logic, anyone could just invade Africa and start a country there since all humanity's ancestors descended from the region.

No, I don't see how that's an analogous situation at all. My question about Israel is a pretty specific one: I challenge its presentation as a "European" or "Western" colonial project. Though maybe that was not your intent?

> Colonization and genocide are actually pretty black and white

We'd have to clearly define "colonization", since I suspect we disagree on whether specific actions constitute it.

Genocide is pretty black and white, I agree. I am opposed to genocide. We may disagree on whether there is genocide, or attempted genocide going on in various situations, unfortunately.

Concretely: Do you feel that Israel is attempting a genocide campaign against the Palestinians? Do you feel that the Israeli electorate supports such a campaign? Do you feel that the Palestinians are attempting a genocide campaign against Jews? Do you feel that their electorate (using that term loosely, due to lack of elections) supports such a campaign?

Fundamentally, I disagree with both the "from the river to the sea" narrative and the "all of Judea and Samaria" narrative... (And I do note that neither of those is necessarily genocidal, though both can be nice jumps onto slippery slopes towards there.)

> Israel is violating international law and committing human rights violations.

Yes, I agree. But just to make sure we're on the same page, so are the Palestinians, every single country Israel has a border with (on the human rights violation parts of the ledger for sure), and quite a number of other entities. Including, I am 99% sure, the country you live in. There are questions of scope and degree, of course. Please don't mention the words "false equivalence", because I am not claiming that anything here is "equivalent" to anything else, and if I were we'd likely disagree on what equivalences are "true" vs "false".

More practically, what specific actions do you think would be required for Israel to stop committing what you perceive as human rights violations and international law violations? And if your answer is "dissolve itself as an entity and have all the Jews go somewhere else", then I can see how that's a consistent moral position, but that does not match either international law nor morality as I perceive it.

If that's not your position, then were back to trying to figure out various shades of grey, as far as I can tell, which we're probably not going to manage to work out in this sort of discussion.

Which is why Poland and Germany constantly fight over the border that was imposed post-WWII (20th century, yes) and the population displacement that took place at that time, right?

It's really easy to declare things as black and white. It's seldom accurate.

(Important note: a large fraction, a majority depending on how you count it, of Israel's population are descendants of Jews who were ejected from other Middle Eastern countries after the establishment of Israel? Are they to be considered "colonizers" in your framing?)

Middling. He keeps making decisions based on how he thinks (and I emphasize _thinks_, because this sort of evaluation of mass public reaction is not really his core expertise) they will play out in the media and politically. The most recent example is him basically saying "yeah, it makes sense for the UK to do first-doses-first, but it doesn't make sense for the US, because people here would not stand for it" and completely dodging the actual question at hand, which is which vaccination regime is better for most rapidly decreasing SARS-Cov-2 infection and COVID-19 deaths. Which is first-doses-first, from everything I can tell of the actual scientific evidence, and I am quite sure he knows that.

So basically, he's walking a line between making the right scientific decisions and protecting his position enough (in his estimation) that he gets to make decisions at all, which is compromising some of the decisions he's making.

> A good old pillory in the town square

You mean like Twitter?

eBay has no problem facilitating the sale of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", or "Mein Kampf", or "laddie magazines", or cartoons of Muhammad, or any of a variety of other things that "denigrate people". So let's not pretend like this is a principled stand of some sort by eBay.

Leaving aside the question of whether the books in question actually denigrate people, what makes this case so special that eBay takes action? eBay is losing money by not allowing sales of the books; presumably they either feel like they would lose even more money if they did allow it or feel that the books are morally repugnant enough to be worth the loss. Any other options?

The second option does not seem to hold water given all the other things eBay allows. The first option leaves the question of why they would lose money. Digging into that is where you find the power structure you are refusing to see.

One place where a (doubly, perhaps) linked list might be suitable is when you have a list that wants to provide the following features:

1. Multiple independent (not necessarily concurrent, but not coordinated) mutators.

2. Insertion and removal happen commonly and should be cheap.

3. Operations on the whole list typically happen in list order or close to it.

Bonus points if the size of the relevant data structures is often such that you blow out caches anyway (e.g each thing in your list is larger than a cache line) and hence there are no strong locality benefits from an array. Thought prefetching _can_ sometimes help with arrays there.

The above features _can_ be implemented on top of an array, but feature 1 means you can't use indices as long-lived handles to items, so you need either handles that get updated on mutations or some concept of identity and "find the current index of this thing" calls.

For context here, Gecko used to store the children of a DOM node as an array of pointers and switched to a doubly-linked list because the DOM does have the above properties and it was faster and mostly simpler to have a linked list in practice. There is a bit of complexity to make node.childNodes iteration (as opposed to .nextSibling/.previousSibling iteration) not be O(N^2), but overall the switch was a win.

If s.index() returned nil, the "if" would test false and the s[i] would not be reached.

The problem is that it returns non-nil, but the _limit_ is broken in this case: using s.endIndex as a limit means you can get non-nil but bogus indices returned. And yes, this is the fault of the docs for using a broken last arg to the API, but there's no really clean way to use this API as designed, afaict. At least not if you want to limit to "end of string" as opposed to "some index into the string that I already know to be valid".

Well, "the grid" is not literally like "roads"; they have all sorts of difference in practice in terms of who interacts with them and in what ways... So equating them in some way is absolutely an analogy.

Ah, I misunderstood your comment. You meant "those retail customers who have fixed rates", but I read it as "retail customers, who have fixed rates".

The thing is, in the US the "sectioned off area of a bigger room" model of housing has been legislated and regulated out of existence. Similar for the other option the very poor (read: serfs) had in the Russia of the period Crime and Punishment is set in: just build something yourself to the best of your ability. The result was not always great, and there are all sorts of reasons (starting with fire-spreading externalities) for modern building codes, so I'm not suggesting it's necessaily desirable or viable to go back to where we were in the 19th century regarding housing. But the upshot is that building and health codes enforce a minimum quality on housing that surely feels unexceptionable to the people writing them while at the same time serving to price people out of housing.

Inheritances are not taxable (for the recipient), but IRS data shows similar patterns.

What it really comes down to is that the upper tail of the "reliable income" distributions is thin enough that a large fraction of the people who end up in various "top N%" buckets are there due to various windfalls, lumpiness of income (e.g. a writer getting an advance that they live on for a few years while writing the book), etc, etc.

Which is, by the way, why the way we do progressive taxation is a bit weird. Progressive taxation with tax brackets based on lifetime earnings, as opposed to current-year income, would make a lot more sense in some ways...

This is a very reasonable thing to fear. The concept of "уравниловка" in Russian exists precisely because the government tried to do just that in many cases. Making everyone the same (in terms of equality of outcomes) is a lot easier to do by making all the outcomes bad.

I should note that "equity" need not mean "equality of outcomes", but when pressed for how one evaluates "equity" far too many proponents fall back to "equality (and proportionality) of outcomes" in practice....

Medicare is reasonably cheap (assuming you paid Medicare taxes for at least 7.5 years; if you did not, it's at least $471/month). To be clear, "relatively cheap" is "at least $148.50/month; more if you have more income during retirement".

But past the premiums, there are deductibles, coinsurance (e.g. for hospital stays longer than 60 days), you still have to pay for medicines (how much varies), etc. See https://www.medicare.gov/your-medicare-costs/medicare-costs-... and the links from it for details.