defertoreptar

> Threats in public are designed to make you feel fear. Even if you know that the threat is empty, it's difficult to just put it out of your mind.

Regardless of the intentions of the one making the threat, if the threatened person knew with 100% certainty there was no real danger, then they would not feel fear. For example, if we receive an anonymous threat and then we learn that the person who made it was a 3rd grader on another continent. If we feel fear after receiving some seemingly empty threat, then it's because at least subconsciously we believe there is now some non-zero chance of facing danger.

My point was that it's not hypocritical for him to be upset about receiving online threats. It's the fact that people are making threats that's scary, not whether or not moderators are removing them.

Part of it may be the mindset of "paying for something = negative" and "getting something = positive." Micropayments maximize the time we spend thinking about the negative part of the transaction. On the other hand, if we wait too long and have a $1000 bill at the end of the year, that may be even more painful than having to think about smaller payments more often. The psychological sweet spot for many things is the once a month subscription.

If there are people out there making death threats against you, do you feel safer just because some moderator is deleting them?

This was confusing. The narrator leads by saying that cities are ponzi schemes and supports this by showing a cash flow graph, but that graph doesn't seem to be grounded with any examples. I find it surprising that long term maintenance costs more than the long term tax revenue growth. I would've liked to see more evidence that these cities really are unsustainable.

What you're referring to as "gatekeepers," I would see as one of many sources of evidence. Others include direct experience, non-expert opinion, data from experiments/studies, and so on. Ideally we'd weigh each source of evidence by how trustworthy and reliable they are, and then we'd use our brain to make sense of what may be true based on that evidence.

Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.

Interestingly it was Mussolini who said, “Fascism should more appropriate be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." And this past election cycle and especially the past week, we've seen quite an alignment of those powers: the largest market cap companies, and a soon to be ruling political party.

> For example incitement to genocide must be a red line.

I don't think this has to do with why Twitter banned Trump.

> Iran’s leader has repeatedly shared tweets calling Israel a “deadly, cancerous growth” to be “uprooted and destroyed” — all going unchecked by Twitter.

> “The long-lasting virus of Zionism will be uprooted thanks to the determination and faith of the youth,” Khamenei wrote as recently as May.

That's from an article talking about how Twitter defends allowing Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a platform https://nypost.com/2020/07/29/twitter-defends-blocking-trump...

Clearly Twitter is ok with this kind of political speech, and even defends it.

> So the government should be able to force your business to do something against your will?

No one said that. We can criticize companies for censorship with or without wanting government intervention.

You're comparing banning a company from the App store with having a comment show up in a lighter color.

> The first period includes within it a perfectly flat period longer than shortest of the periods you chose followed by a period of equal length that is more consistently increasing than the (mostly flat) period you've held up as an increasing trend, and then a period nearly as long as your shortest that is as consistently and more sharply decreasing than the one you hold up as showing a decreasing trend.

It sounds like you're referring to the "maximum tax rate on long term gains." As I stated, I used the "effective capital gains tax rate," which is the average rate that is being taxed (long term cap gains tax is different than short term).

They are unequal periods, and that's why we annualize the growth.

The periods aren't "cherry-picked." If you'd actually look at the plotted effective capital gains rate, you'd see a clear difference in tax policy in those three periods.

The "fuzzy subjective descriptors" are totally in line with the parent poster's: "long term tax policy."

Here is an image that plots the effective capital gains rate from the 1950s to recent years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_Uni...

Let's analyze three periods:

1953-1985: no significant trend in effective capital gains tax

1985-1996: upward trend and higher capital gains tax

1996-2020: downward trend

Now let's compare those periods to real median family income (which tracks to 1953). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

Annualized growth in real median income:

1953-1985: 1.8%

1985-1996: 0.8%

1996-2020: 2.0%

Real median income growth during lower capital gains tax policy was twice that of the period of higher capital gains tax policy.

> and despite tax cuts for the wealthy wages haven't gone up.

Real median personal income went up almost 8% from the year before the tax cuts (2017) and 2019.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

The price elasticity of higher education is 0, and healthcare is also very low. We see my more inflation in things that we're not willing to go without.

The nice thing about the median is that it's robust against outliers like the ones you've mentioned. It's over $300k, so we're definitely not talking about some hellhole in MS.

Median sale price of houses sold has increased 2% from November 2019 to November 2020. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPNHSUS

That's on par with historical annualized inflation rates.

Wages and the costs of hiring/employing are a cash outflow. Losses mean that outflow is greater than inflow, so wages can be related to losses, but they are not mutually exclusive.

Cuts to jobs and reduced hours can be because of losses, or they could also be due to efficiency gains, in which they could be related to profits instead. Divisions and jobs can be cut because they make neither profit or loss.

Employee's don't share in losses or profits unless their compensation is somehow tied to profits.

Yes, because you're only temporarily promised to get what you want at the expense of having voting power permanently diluted.

In other words, "I don't mind that my vote carries less weight for as long as the decision-makers happen to share my political views."

> that's obviously a different order of action with explicit criterion than whether or not this deserves third-party investigation which may lead to legal action.

To my saying "plausible doesn't mean actionable," you jumped to the following conclusion:

> So no racism claims are valid without either AV recording or, in all statistical likelihood, a non-Black person vouching for her?

I thought it was necessary to find some foundation on which we both agreed before addressing your conclusion. If we didn't at least agree that the concrete example wasn't legally actionable, then our viewpoints would be too disconnected to make the effort worth it.

How about this: if there is a "he said she said" situation where the accuser believes the accused did something racially motivated, and neither the accused nor the accuser have any evidence other than their word, should the accused face a real consequence?

If someone has a feeling that something was racially motivated but has no evidence, do believe that alone should enable actionable legal consequences?

Whether something is plausible doesn't make it actionable. "He said, she said" shouldn't be actionable because it lacks verifiable evidence, outside of two people's subjective experiences. Those two people are the most vulnerable to bias because they have the most incentive to disregard the whole truth. I think it was Charlie Munger who said, "never expect someone to understand that which their job depends on them not understanding."

Not ironic when you consider people don't always just vote for what will improve their present financial position. Wouldn't you agree that some vote based on their principles?

I picked street kid and I still was confused by why the first part of the story was even necessary. The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.

> If productivity wasn’t the only goal

I think I missed where you explained how to do this.

Here's one possible explanation:

> The vast majority of states adopted new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems between 2011 and 2016.

> We find that high-stakes evaluation reforms reduced the supply of newly licensed teachers by 16 to 18%.

> Evaluation reforms increased the probability a school had at least one unfilled teaching vacancy with effects concentrated in traditionally hard-to-staff schools.

> Evaluation reforms also increased the quality of new teachers by decreasing the supply of teachers coming from less competitive undergraduate institutions.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

I would agree that I'd enjoy my job more if I got paid more, but it sounds like you're trying to say this will result in jobs that are just over all better. Why wouldn't it mean the exact same "shitty jobs" but with better pay?

> So why didn't they do that before? If there is one thing I know about the rich it's that they won't pass up an oportunity to earn more.

There is some number x that is the minimum net profit after tax that entrepreneurs/investors will accept depending on how much pain in the butt the business is to take on.

This number stays the same whether taxes and wages go up or not. People just don't take on new projects unless what they can put in their pockets at the end of the day is actually worth their time and effort.

If taxes or wages go up, the prices must go up in kind for x to stay the same. If that doesn't happen, then entrepreneur/investor interest declines and eventually competition and supply decreases along with it. If that happens, then again, prices go up.

I'd guess that people will be the most apprehensive at the very beginning but then will be more open to it as it goes along.

Sounds like the matchmaking needs to factor in the standard deviation of the players' skill, like a Sharpe ratio for skill.