karzeem

The correlation disappears (when comparing the 50 states, or all countries, or all OECD countries) when you look at all homicides, not just homicides by shooting. In other words, there is no correlation between guns per capita and overall homicide rate.

I'd actually worry more about how efficiently the money is being used after it's been disbursed, not about how much government administrative costs eat up.

E.g. that chart says that ~96% of Medicare spending went to beneficiaries. That sounds good, but all it means is that 96% of the dollars were paid to hospitals/doctors/medical device manufacturers/etc. It says nothing about how efficiently those people are providing their services, i.e. how efficiently those 96% of Medicare dollars are being spent. A lot of those dollars get quickly chewed up by high prices (which I'd argue are themselves caused by the market distortions that these programs foster).

Empirically, how well do you feel the US government spends its budget currently?

There's often an assumption in these discussions that if a billionaire isn't spending their money in a socially optimal way, the government will spend it better. But if you look at how governments actually spend their money, you'll find very little evidence to support that assumption.

The difference I'd point to is that surgery as a system generally works. Fresh med school graduates get hired, train for a few years, and mostly become competent surgeons. Incompetent ones mostly get weeded out, or boxed into careers that minimize any harm they do. And they're (rightly) forced by lawsuits to compensate victims of genuine malpractice.

Regulatory agencies, by contrast, are an extremely fragile system. That's in the sense that if the right people are in charge, it could go well, but if the wrong people are in charge, it's a disaster. And it's completely commonplace to find that the wrong people are in charge.

A good system either makes it very hard for the wrong people to gain control, or, to use a Milton Friedman line, "makes it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing".

What I was trying to say with my comment is that neither of those conditions is true at most regulatory agencies.

There's some cognitive dissonance between how people nod sagely at this vs. how they react when FAA rules force Flytenow to shut down. Note the commenters' largely gleeful reaction to that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779607

You can't cry foul when a coin comes up tails if you were happy the whole time it was coming up heads. Agencies that have the power to make good decisions by force also have the power to make bad decisions by force.

A large portion of the costs of building last-mile infrastructure come from regulations imposed by local governments.

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...

A well-paid lawyer makes several hundred thousand dollars more per year than the comparison group they're referring to (which as you suggest, is probably deliberately defined to be low-earning). Those are tough jobs to get, especially coming from an uncompetitive law school, but for those who manage to do it, their lifetime earnings could plausibly be $10 MM higher. It only takes a few of those to pull the average up by $750k.

Opening the link in an incognito window also works.

"In health care, changes in the way we organize our work will most likely be the key to improvement. This means training students and physicians to focus on the patient despite the demands of the computers. It means creating new ways to build teamwork once doctors and nurses are no longer yoked to the nurse’s station by a single paper record. It means federal policies that promote the seamless sharing of data between different systems in different settings."

I think the author is right about the problems, and these solutions seem sound. These are the kinds of things ossified institutions always say, and they're actually usually right (e.g. Bill Gates's prescient Internet Tidal Wave memo which predicted the ways in which Microsoft would fail to become a dominant player on the web, or the peanut butter memo at Yahoo).

The trouble is that actually implementing changes like these at an incumbent institution is hard. Really hard. So hard, in fact, that failure is overwhelmingly the rule. In most industries, the way that plays out is that incumbents fail to change, new competitors emerge with the new processes baked into them from the beginning, and they then kill the incumbents. A few years later, those new folks ossify and then themselves get killed by the next wave. And so on.

A healthy industry offers all its players a choice: "Evolve or die. Do whichever one you want, but one of those two things will happen." There's no third option, "Do your best to evolve". The institution succeeds at changing or it dies, and that's all there is to it.

The trouble in healthcare is that incumbents do get that third option. And the reason they get it is that for the most part, there are no new competitors to kill them off.

Why does the article blithely take it for granted that we should treat investments by rich foreigners suspiciously while investments by rich Americans are no problem? The big problem in New York real estate is lack of supply — the vacancy rate in rentals hovers around 1%, and building new apartments is a nightmare. So of course, prices go up as demand keeps growing and supply is prevented from growing.

There may be some extremely marginal contribution to housing costs that you can blame on these ultra-premium buildings, but it's not the root cause, and playing whack-a-mole with these symptoms is what got the city's real estate so expensive in the first place.

Do folks think that if One57 hadn't been built, a building full of $150k studios would have gone up in its place? Because of the difficulty and cost of building, these money towers are increasingly the only thing that developers can afford to build. Build something more palatable and you'd go out of business.

The backlash to these buyers is IMO a misguided blend of economic misunderstanding and xenophobia. Something tells me that if the rich buyers were all from Colorado, people wouldn't have quite so much to say about it.

This may be too Talebian a reaction, but isn't the track record of "take this-doesn't-occur-in-significant-quanities-in-food chemical and your health will improve" quite poor? Non-food chemicals are often very useful for acute interventions (e.g. antibiotics, chemotherapy), but at least in modern times, they almost always do more harm than good when taken long-term.

(To avoid getting sidetracked by chronic medicines that some people swear by, I'm directing this point more at non-food drugs that are designed to take people from normal health to great health rather than from a disease state back to normal.)

I think they'd do better to pitch it as a replacement for car UI in general. If it's executed well, it could be a safer replacement for behaviors like looking down at the A/C or radio controls.

Do you have a timestamp?

People always talk about the money, but specifics are tough to come by. What is the typical salary for a first-year I-banker? How about the median for the ones who make it to year five and year ten?

A book called Catastrophic Care came out recently. It's written by a guy named David Goldhill, who wrote a cover story for The Atlantic in 2009 on broken incentives in the healthcare industry that tend over time to push prices up and quality down. (His unrelated day job is CEO of the Game Show Network.)

The book gets at the problems in the industry on a much deeper level than anything else I've seen.

For a good summary, check out Goldhill's Big Think interview on the subject: http://bigthink.com/ideas/big-think-interview-with-david-gol...

The negativity in this thread is a perfect exemplar of the say-anything-critical-to-look-smart, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.", poisonous middlebrow dismissal that pg complains about.

This is an amazingly light convenience, with really solid, streamlined execution. People, it's ok to think something is good.

Good questions, there are disagreements on those points even among libertarians. It's tough to name a single digestible reference because this is such a broad subject. But this one is pretty comprehensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

The other responses to this would probably be agreeable to most "techno-libertarians", but I don't think they're quite correct as to how this natural right is derived.

They don't actually posit a natural right to anonymity specifically. The core idea is that the only moral use of force is self-defense. Therefore, it would be immoral for people to use force against you (in this system, laws are considered force because the government backs them with the threat of arrest) if you're not using force against them.

"Anonymous communication being a non-violent act, it is immoral to use force to suppress anonymous communication" ~= "the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road"

If seeing an applicant's Facebook profile is important to employers, then the market wage for an applicant who says "yes" is higher than that of an applicant who says "no". Based on that, allowing people to say "yes", even when they're doing so for lack of another good option, lets them make more money than they would otherwise make. Banning them from saying "yes" prevents them from capturing that higher wage.

A law that "protects" applicants from having the option to say "yes" lowers their income. Giving them the freedom to answer the question either way leaves them the choice between a higher income and the privacy of their Facebook account. It's not a happy choice, but if I valued the first more highly, I wouldn't like the government to force the second on me.

It's supposedly regulators driving this crackdown, but almost all the quotes in the article come from competitors to high-speed trading firms claiming — surprise — that high-speed trading firms need to be regulated.

"HP have" is British, "HP has" is American.

According to the "salary buying power" section, Silicon Valley's cost of living is 23% higher than that of NYC. Having lived in both, I'd be very surprised if that's not actually the wrong way around.

Unless spending also rises by 1-2% of GDP.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/14/the-19-percent-solutio...

I've seen the same point made elsewhere, and the point isn't really that tax revenue stays constant as a % of GDP, it's that there seems to be a ceiling around 20%. The implication being that attempts to raise tax revenue greater than 20% of GDP are likely to fail.

I'd file this under Hanlon's razor. It would be very odd for the FBI to conduct a raid in a way that made everything they found inadmissible in court.

The ownership percentages listed on the site only sum to 72.669%, so there's a lot of stock not accounted for. I'd imagine that there are lots of relatively low-profile employees with 7-8 figure stakes of that dark 27.331%.

Yes. They can't compel you to give them the means to open it (e.g. tell them the combination), but you can be forced to open it for them.

That would probably be the best defense. If the destruction was carried out as part of a regularly scheduled program instead of as a specific response to law enforcement's demand for the data, you might be alright.

Lots of companies automatically delete all email older than six months for this exact reason, actually.

You don't need to provide the key, just access to the contents. Or they can break the lock. But an encrypted drive is like an unbreakable lock.

Suppose you've been charged with a crime and the police have obtained a warrant to seize the contents of a safe you keep in your house. American courts have ruled that the 5th Amendment does not protect you from being compelled to open the safe.

That precedent doesn't bode well for this case. I don't see a qualitative difference between the contents of a safe and those of an encrypted drive.

One workaround: fail-deadly. Automatically wipe the encrypted data if the password isn't entered every n days. With a small enough n, the courts can't move fast enough to get the data before it's gone. (Whether this scheme constitutes obstruction of justice, I have no idea.)