hash872

What is Youtube a 'near monopoly' in? Online video.....? Do you have any idea how much video there is online that's not on Youtube? They don't meet the legal definition of a monopoly

>the journey to modern democracies involved centuries of concessions by kings to the emerging middle classes

Eh, sort of disagree. The journey to modern democracy started with centuries of concessions by kings, first to other nobles (Magna Carta, etc.) Then, to other local power brokers like large landowners, business elites, etc. None of these parties wanted one single figure to have absolute power over their affairs & finances, mostly because they tended to make terrible decisions (random wars, taxation, and so on). Early proto-parliamentary systems in the UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan in the 19th century etc. were just a council of local, powerful elites who wanted to check the power of the king. The 'middle class' part came absolutely last

Fun fact, but there's essentially zero correlation between income inequality & wealth inequality- and the Nordics have some of the highest wealth inequality in the world. For example in 2019 by Gini coefficient, the most unequal countries in the world were #1 the Netherlands, #2 Russia, #3 Sweden, and #4 the United States (with Denmark coming in at #8). The data is clearly pretty noisy, but as far as I can see Sweden was again more unequal than the US in 2021:

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

Meanwhile Southern Europe has reasonably high income inequality, but not much wealth inequality. Just kind of an underdiscussed piece, especially as many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America

Adam Tooze's grandfather was one of the most notorious Soviet moles/traitors in British history, so I guess I don't find it surprising that he's found a new Communist regime to hang his hat on. (For anyone saying 'he can't choose his family'- Tooze famously dedicated his first book in effusive praise for his grandfather)

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

It's just incredible to me that Blade Runner predicted this in literally the very first scene of the movie. The whole thing's about telling humans from robots! Albeit rather more dramatically than the stakes for any of us in front of our laptop I'd imagine

H1-Bs are overwhelmingly new grads, and have been since the inception of the visa. The purpose of a system is what it does- H1-Bs are issued to new grads, hence the point of the visa is to hire new grads. You may want a different system, but that's not how it works now.

Experienced career professionals don't generally move to the US as adults, and anyways if your company really needed one you could just hire them remotely

I just don't think that salaries are high enough for engineers that have been working for 2 years, that we can employ a market-based model for just the highest paid ones. I guess to be fair you could lengthen the OPT visa period to like 5 years, but that just seems cruel to all of the OPT folks who don't make it

But most H1-Bs are brand new grads, so their salary is just not very high. You'd be kicking out every 22 year old graduate of Stanford, Harvard etc. if you enforced a pay scale. The US has had a public policy since the 60s of making it easy for foreign grads of our elite colleges to stay here, I wouldn't mess with that

They're not tied to a particular employer, this is a myth that will seemingly never die. H1-Bs are transferrable between employers. I know multiple people in both my professional & personal life who have done so easily

https://immigrationhelpla.com/h1b-visa-transfer/

The problem with this argument is that most non-spouse H1-Bs are granted to new college grads who just graduated from a US college. Brand new engineers do not have very high salaries, so if you insisted on a 'highest wages' system you'd be sending virtually every new grad from say Stanford back to their home country the second they graduate. US public policy since the 60s has been to welcome foreigners who graduate from our elite colleges.

As I say above- just get rid of visas for consulting companies instead, and everything else fixes itself

Basically all of the problems with the H1-B system could be fixed overnight by simply banning visa holders from working for consulting companies. 'No visa holder may be employed by a company whose main business is consulting for other firms, or staffing'. We'd keep the highly skilled folks who are going to the FAANGs, and at least letting the midmarket companies bid for everyone else. But there's no compelling national or economic interest in importing a class of Accenture/Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys workers who work on 6 month contracts at Wells Fargo or whatever.

I'd actually support more skilled immigration if we could get rid of the consulting firms

Edit to clarify slightly: if your concern is 'skilled immigration', I would like to gently but firmly state that most of the developers that work for the consulting firms are just not very good. Sorry. If you're in a hiring capacity at a tech company at all, everyone knows that the Wipro guys who work on 6 month contracts doing Java at Fortune 100 companies cannot pass even the simplest tech screen. Yes it makes me sound like a jerk to say this, but they're not 'highly skilled'

Seems like a non-sequitur. 'Corruption' is typically not an issue in civil disputes. 'Influence peddling' and 'political horse trading' are not the subject of civil litigation. If you think 'corruption' is influencing judicial remedies- it's certainly a lot easier to bribe a juror than an appointed judge.

Most developed countries using a panel of judges to hear civil disputes score better than the US on corruption indicators, not worse

Thank God I've never been involved in serious litigation, but his description of the process sounds absolutely wild to me. Reminder that the US is a global outlier in 'loser doesn't pay winners' attorneys' fees' (as he notes, this is literally called the American Rule). And a global outlier in using juries for civil trials, which can lead to some gigantic unpredictable judgements. I'd imagine our discovery laws are unique too.

Surprised some business-friendly US state hasn't greatly restricted discovery in civil litigation, so as to attract companies to incorporate there. And this is why arbitration rose as a way to settle disputes- if you look at the standard arbitration agreement they greatly limit discovery

An appellate court overturned & greatly limited the Microsoft decision and found that the judge had engaged in misconduct. An appellate court has nothing to do with the administration in charge at the time

I don't think it's possible to be in compliance with every law in every jurisdiction simultaneously. There are over 300,000 federal laws in the US, and apparently no one knows how many laws each of the 50 states has. That's 1 of the world's 195 countries

Perfecting Parliament, by Roger Congleton. It's a history of the global move towards parliamentary systems. Obviously not primarily an economics book, but he does touch on some econ themes- here Congleton quoted Adam Smith on American colonial wages

Fun fact, the US has always had some of the highest wages in the world- even dating back to colonial times before 1776. Adam Smith did a detailed accounting of them, going occupation-by-occupation and noting that American colonist wages were higher than on the British mainland. (I'm excited because I literally just read this last night. I would link if I could to the specific pages in my book).

I believe the standard explanation is that most of the colonists were British (already a high-wage country at the time), and you really had to pay skilled labor to get them to leave & settle on a new continent. Plus labor mobility between the proto-state governments of the time (Virginia, Massachusetts, etc.)

Congressional (or executive branch.....) stock trading is completely unacceptable and should be totally banned. Full stop.

With that being said- the idea that they're outperforming the market I think has been debunked several times. I'm sure that they're acting in bad faith and believe that they have some kind of precious inside information. But a few different studies have shown that they basically do the same as any group of a few hundred people that pick individual stocks- some outperform, some underperform, and in general their returns are a random walk. See

https://studenttheses.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/20.500.12932/47... "no significant abnormal returns" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4954641 "significantly underperform" https://andy.egge.rs/papers/EggMueller_capitol_losses_jop_20... "between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund"

Stick to index funds folks

BJJ. Good luck, but just so you know- SLAP tears don't heal on their own. There's not enough bloodflow to the area, and the actual physical substance of the labrum for the both of us has been ripped apart. It may or may not bother you (mine doesn't 80% of the time), but it also never heals. So you're at risk of tearing it further, which then becomes a Big Deal. I stopped doing BJJ for this reason

Unfortunately my disposable income to spend on experimental medical treatments is slightly less than Marc Benioff's :(

So are stem cells a 'real' thing now? I can never tell, and I'm not sure that I trust a website called 'medicalxpress' (which has a nag screen that ominously warns me about the 'consequences' of my using an adblocker).

I have torn shoulder labrum that I've been living with for 8ish years now. It doesn't affect me enough to need surgery, but given the option I'd love to fix it without having to go under the knife. I sporadically hear about stem cell injections as a possible fix, and as a sports fan there are always stories about athletes using stem cells to repair serious injuries. Sometimes these stories involve the athletes traveling to another country (Germany, Thailand, Mexico, somewhere) where stem cell treatments are legal outside of the FDA's bureaucratic purview. (The FDA has been working on authorizing European sunscreen for the last 25 years, BTW). The UFC now advertises a Mexican stem cell clinic. I asked my ortho last year about them and she said 'maybe!', which I suppose is better than 'no they're a total fraud'. Are these claims even approaching reality? Is the science of stem cells getting closer at all?

RIP George Foreman.

As a former combat sports fan, I find it increasingly difficult to watch. These guys (and gals) are doing enormous brain damage to themselves & their opponents. Foreman seemed to have been an outlier that came out OK, but listen to the slurring & garbled speech that comes from any other old fighter. I know someone who's a friend with a longtime UFC fighter- he had an anecdote about the guy putting his kids to bed and temporarily forgetting their names. Great fights are very entertaining, but ethically I really find it difficult to be a fan these days

If there are 'mass layoffs in hundreds of sectors of the economy at once', then the economy immediately goes into Great Depression 2.0 or worse. Consumer spending is two-thirds of the US economy, when everyone loses their jobs and stops having disposable income that's literally what a depression is

The discussion was about scoring. In order to score the fight, you do need to process it in somewhat real time. I don't think waiting a few days to find out who won is going to be acceptable to fans

>Boxing for example could calculate the amount of kinetic energy brought to the table and how much of it landed or was sidestepped. How much was absorbed? Not easy to do, but also not impossible

It would be pretty difficult to do in a combat sport without sensors. As I understand it fencing has participants' blades wired up for this exact reason. How would you measure how hard a punch landed from a distance? You could put sensors in the gloves, but some of the time the punches bounce off the opponent's forearms, so you could get a false 'powerful' rating from a blocked punch.

Worse, some of the best punches aren't the most powerful in a kinetic sense, but just happen to very accurately land in the right spot on an opponent's chin. Or they're well timed and the opponent doesn't see it coming, so their surprise makes the strike more damaging. Even if you could precisely measure punch impact to the head from a distance, you'd be missing out on some excellent punches that are less powerful but set up by accuracy & timing. So yes it's basically impossible to measure in any way but subjectively

(I really don't like this but) I definitely expect the future will involve ubiquitous on-person video & audio recording. People will walk around with devices that constantly record every interaction, which will eventually seem normal. A lot of formerly private conversations will be uploaded to whatever social media we have in the future, some stuff will go viral, etc. Goodbye any semblance of privacy!

Yes, one of my ideas that I've had for a couple of years is that the US should impose the following sanction on Russia for invading Ukraine- all Russian scientists & engineers in a narrow range of critical industries (nuclear weapons, armaments, missiles, etc.) and their immediate families are now entitled to a Green Card. It'd only be a few thousand people, so not enough for immigration restrictionists to get upset about- but it'd be absolutely devastating for Russia's technological edge. In some ways it'd be worse than any financial sanction, because your economy can always bounce back later, but once you've lost cutting edge scientists the knowledge loss is probably permanent. I think we should do the same thing for Iranian nuclear scientists too (albeit I understand there might be a bit more political pushback on them)

I think the main point that I want to make is that attracting all of the world's smartest people to our country, and staying the world's superpower in technology & science, does have extremely 'clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country'

But we're all descended from immigrants. Do you think it was wrong when the British & Italian & Irish & German all moved here en masse? Assuming no, what would be different about the latest wave of immigrants?

I'm a little confused. It's possible to be very pedantic and say that the current immigration law only dates back to the 60s, but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent. There was a wave of British, Spanish, and French immigration in the 17th & 18th centuries, followed by Germans, Italians, and Irish in the 19th & 20th. In the 19th century the legal regime about immigration was literally 'open borders', there were hardly any legal controls at all. The vast vast majority of us are the descendants of immigrants (my apologies if you personally are 100% Native American, didn't mean to lump you in)