kapuasuite

How dangerous is it to dump it in the river now?

Land ownership, for example, is highly concentrated with the aristocracy/gentry.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2019/...

> When it comes to growth, Britain’s politicians will the ends but not the means. They run scared of the homeowning elderly, who turn up to vote and make up a growing share of the electorate. So tax rises are heaped on businesses and workers instead, further harming the economy. The government has likewise watered down its plans for reforming the planning system—because elderly homeowners object.

This is it - over taxing and over regulating productive activity eventually leads to less growth and lower standards of living.

> a new group who are there to just enrich themselves.

The UK’s been ruled by a relatively small hereditary aristocracy for, what, 1,000 years? A self-interested political class is hardly a new phenomenon there.

The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living.

There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.

South Vietnam was already an independent nation…

> Hopefully, some security researchers will get their hands on it, de-anonymize the data set, and then regulators will burn the industry to the ground.

Who does this benefit, though?

The only compelling reason is to give broader and cheaper access to past works. If you don’t find that compelling then I don’t know what to tell you. What’s the compelling argument for them to exist as is?

The big extensions came in the mid-70s and late 90s, well within living memory. According to your own link they nearly doubled the average duration and pushed it over 100 years.

Congress is the one that’s dramatically extended copyright length, not the courts.

There’s no counter-argument to make beyond my self-interest in consuming creative works at very low cost and with very few limitations outweighing your self-interest in profiting from your works.

The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the local communist party, parties which largely took direction from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing. The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable.

Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.

I don't see the point of the corporate tax at all unless people think the IRS would be incapable of auditing people that incorporate.

A carbon tax could easily be coupled with a dividend...

We would be better off with taxing the unimproved value of the land (possibly until the market price of the land itself is $0) and rolling back the barriers to building new housing. That would result in cheaper, more plentiful and higher quality housing.

I don't know - just thinking of construction, for example, we would probably have seen more innovation in that sector over the last century if every town and city in America didn't have its own zoning and land use laws that strictly limit what can be built and where - along with strict building and fire codes that specify exactly how it can be built. Those regulations shouldn't go away entirely, but they should be reassessed and we should recognize that even good regulations come at a cost.

>I always give benefit of doubt where it's due, but Twitter has definitely something sinister going with their Indian Operations. If Indian companies goes abroad they are expected to follow local laws, and if Twitter wants to operate in India it must give way to the law of the land.

Do you believe the Indian government's policies are sinister as well? If not I don't see how this is anything other than apologia dressed up as neutrality.

>Fighting the govt is rarely productive, but they probably know something to do this crazy in-your-face stuff.

Depends on your definition of productive, I suppose.

Yes, there are tradeoffs anywhere - which means we should rationally assess what we're putting into education and whether at least some of those resources can be put to better use in other ways.

Tax dollars that go to universities for one reason or another are tax dollars that cannot be spent on healthcare - tax dollars that can't be collected from tax exempt institutions (like almost all universities) are tax dollars that can't be spent on maintaining infrastructure. The possibilities are endless. The questions isn't whether or not education is "good", because it obviously is, it's whether the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere, which is probably true.

There are tradeoffs, though - the resources that are poured into higher education are resources that cannot be spent on other vital things.

What’s the actual cost/benefit here?

Yes - corporate income tax should be eliminated entirely - the revenue can be made up in other, less terrible ways. Corporate incomes taxes are a poor way to address inequality because they tend to fall, at least in part, on workers, and not on wealthy people themselves, who largely accrue wealth through investment, not work. If the goal is to reduce inequality then we should simply tax rich people more, not corporations, whose money will eventually be passed to shareholders anyway.

The government could tax shareholders, i.e. the people who receive a corporations profits to begin with.

Why tax a corporation's income at all when you can tax its shareholders income instead?

Capital gains taxes (paid by shareholders) are completely separate from corporate income taxes (paid by corporations). You're also forgetting (or ignoring) that the legal incidence of a tax and the economic incidence are completely separate. For example, employers and employees are both legally responsible for paying a portion of payroll taxes, but economically speaking that tends to lead to lower wages, making the employer's portion fall at least partially on the employee.

https://voxeu.org/article/effects-employer-payroll-tax-cuts

Those would be taxable for the employees receiving those perks, giving away shareholders' money to employees to reduce a tax bill is absolutely nonsensical in financial, and if a publicly traded company were to do this for "every employee" (or even just management) there would be an immediate lawsuit.

Only a few of the items in Gebru's "controversial" paper are even worth discussing - do we really need an Ethics department to calculate the carbon footprint of training a model, or point out that a model based on scraping the internet won't necessarily align with trendy shifts in vocabulary?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

Somebody better let Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland know they are barbarian societies for want of a minimum wage!

>Information is not a harmless dingus. Its a weapon, just as the gun was in the last century.

This is a silly analogy, what is Google doing or planning to do with this information that is dangerous, and how does that stack up against the potential benefits of Google and other tech companies collecting this type of data?

> Because ultimately, all the finance whiz bang talk doesn’t change common sense that only allowing trades in one direction is unfair

Trump’s executive order in November is forcing Americans to divest from a bunch of Chinese companies - liquidating orders only.