marris

I think you may be misunderstanding the post. He is not saying that Meta is prohibited from censorship by the First Amendment.

He is saying that the US has free speech norms (not laws) where it is acceptable for people to get together and rant about X, Y, or Z. There are limits (e.g. calls for violence), but they are few. Anyone who does not like the speech can leave the room, try to argue with the speaker, or make their own speech in another room. It is not the social norm to shut down the speaker, make the speaker unemployable, trash or bankrupt the venue, etc. Those actions are contrary to the norm.

I will do the pro-social thing of wishing that resources were more scarce so that the resources I hold were worth more.

Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).

It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.

I am not familiar with the DSA.

1. Are companies permitted to charge for badges under DSA?

2. Is there an example of another social media that EU officials have identified as being compliant with DSA?

The distinction is not as clear nor as useful as some make it sound. For example, is my pickup truck "personal" or "private"? Or is it personal as long as I drive myself and my stuff around, but as soon as I offer to sell moving services to others, it becomes private? Or is it still personal as long as I don't scale the business to more trucks? What if my brother and I want to pool two trucks? What if I contribute the truck and he contributes the driving skill, but we are both part owners in the business? What if he doesn't want to take the risk of capital ownership and instead wants a steady wage? At what point does the truck stop being personal property?

My personal view of this is that Marxism doesn't really have much to say about organizations below a certain scale, and what it has to say about larger scale orgs is that they are icky/alienating. Everything else is more about trying to verbalize the ickyness than to explain anything substantial about the org mechanics.

I first heard about black owner appraisal discrimination almost a year ago, and I tried to find studies of this phenomenon. The closest thing I could find was this study by Brookings (https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...) which found that homes in black neighborhoods are appraised at lower values than structurally comparable homes in non-black neighborhoods. I have not seen a study of the situation described in this article, where the owner swaps family photos and asks a non-black friend to meet the appraiser.

Does anyone know of a study? I am interested in whether this effect is real and any attempts to quantify its magnitude.

There have been numerous articles like this one, but I fear that they suffer from publication bias (no one prints the article where the black owner received the same or higher appraisal), and the presented sample size is always small.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...) thinks there are 10^80 atoms in the observable universe, which is approximately 2^240. If you only need to assign a unique ID to each atom, then you need a counter with approximately 240 bits.

But if you needed to store even one bit of information per atom (e.g. whether it is hydrogen or not), then don't you need 2^240 bits uncompressed?

MA specifically addresses his education in this interview. He says that he learned most of what he knows via independent reading, that his high school was not high quality (his computer class teacher being a lucky accident that he almost missed), and that he identifies as part of the Midwestern farmer/tinker culture (e.g. Bob Noyce).

How big a problem is the possible breakage of C extensions for new code? Is there currently some standard "future proofed for multi-thread" way of writing them that will reduce the odds of the C extension breaking? And maybe also being compatible with PyPy? Or do developers today need to write a separate version for each interpreter that they want to support?

If they were evicted and living on the streets, then they would not have accrued a rent liability for those months. So the total liability now would be less.

You could argue that the current state of large accrued rent liabilities is better than the alternative world of smaller liabilities, more homeless, more deaths, etc, but the OP is not making the inverse claim.

Further, IIRC the moratorium relied on self-reported hardship. Is it so hard to imagine that people who could have actually afforded their rent decided to game the system a bit and accrue (rather than pay) their liability? Such behavior would also cause the current liabilities to be higher.

Sure they can.

Here, I think some lawmakers probably thought (a) "if someone can use this tool that well, then more power to him", or (b) I don't like it, but it is so unlikely, and I can probably live with it.

I don't think it was a scenario of someone failing to "consider the case."

Sure, if you can reproduce the input and if you agree that it is misuse. This is a scenario where we don't know the formula to create $5B, and and there is no consensus that it ("making an extremely successful investment in a tax shelter") is misuse.

> Is it in the interest of the US to pay Thiel to put his money in a Roth? How much should the US pay? How many of your tax dollars would you want to go to funding tax breaks for Thiel?

I submit that yes, it is in the interest of the US to do this, provided that Thiel is creating value for the US (and to some extent the world) with that money. $5B is approximately one day of US government spending (maybe less now). Letting Thiel invest $5B may not be the best investment decision that the USG has ever made (e.g. Internet funding, Telsa support), but it is way higher than the mean decision.

When you create a tax shelter, someone always asks "what if someone uses this to create an enormous amount of wealth"? This is not just true for the US tax code, but has been true for probably every tax code in history. When that question is raised, the first thing to contemplate is how likely it is to occur. And if it is not considered likely, then this risk is accepted.

Fuzzing may be a good analogy. Fuzzing can be used to test POST request processing when the logic is too complicated to validate via more formal means. We try a large sample of inputs. If they pass, then the test passes, even though we cannot be confident that the code will handle every input string correctly.

He could have saved it up from prior years of work. Starting salaries can in fact be lower than $110K.

I disagree with ProPublica's take. If it was as simple as "pay just fractions of a penny per share... watch as all the gains..." then we would all do it. Not just with Roth IRAs, but with our entire portfolios. The reason we don't all do this is because startups are very very risky. Some people will succeed and walk away with windfalls. Other people will lose their shirts. If there was arbitrage, there would be a an "app for that" and there would be more billionaires walking around.

If they intended something else, then why didn't they write the rules to reflect "else"? The truth is that they didn't think that any Roth IRA investor would be as successful as Thiel. He showed that he can be. Good for him.

I can think of two reasons: (1) It was not his own company when the IRA made the investment. That is, the IRA invests alongside other investors at the founding. Anyone who wants to buy shares at 0.01 is able to do so. He is not dictating some special price that only he gets. (2) If some investors create an SPV to invest in PayPal (e.g. to limit liability), then his IRA becomes an investor in that SPV. He loses management control over that portion of the investment, but when the SPV sells its PayPal shares, it distributes the cash to all investors, including to the IRA.

Does anyone know whether this kind of tax planning is available to today's startup investors? Are there any administrators which support this kind of illiquid investment?

The NFT here seems to be a publicity stunt to both raise money directly from the auction and also to raise awareness about the charity. I had never heard of this charity before this stunt, and I probably would not have heard of them without it. It certainly seems plausible that "using an NFT" here is a net good, even if there is some carbon cost.

You could argue against the stunt, but it requires more work that just stating "carbon costs." You'd have to check whether valueOfSavedLife * moneyRaised / 1235 + carbonCost < 0. And it looks like the auction is structured so that moneyRaised will be at least 2.5M, so the carbonCost would need to be pretty negative to make the sum negative. What is carbonCost?

Can you elaborate? All of the examples I can think of where favoring an in house brand is "bad" ultimately end with the consumer being harmed by either paying a higher price or receiving a lower quality product. What are the other "bad" scenarios which don't reduce to either of these?

If you start from "democratically elected governments exist to make the world a better place," then you're going to end up somewhere wrong. Even in the best of times, democratically elected governments exist to give the majority power over the minority. This is considered an improvement over other forms of government, where often a minority had power over a majority and treated them poorly.

There are actually some "fundamental distinctions" between government and business. For example, most governments (democratic or not) are slow, monolithic, and effectively immortal. Since governments have tax and police authority, they can survive bad periods, including those caused by their own errors, for longer periods of time. Most businesses do not have tax and police authority and must face the market test on a daily basis. The businesses that fail the test typically die and new businesses replace them.

PP implies that that computation runs for a polynomial number of steps before producing its probabilistic answer. In the article description, the computation seems to be run "until the answer is separated from the noise." And although they are hopeful, I don't think they are asserting at the moment that this will happen after a polynomial number of steps. So PP would not apply.

Dear Mr. Millionaire,

As someone with a significant amount of wealth, you have the option to spend it entirely on yourself. For example, you could have consumed all of it already, enjoying non-stop parties, expensive toys, buying the temporary, albeit intense, adoration of an entourage etc. Thank you for not doing those things.

Instead, you have invested this capital. You have put it into a variety of investments, each with their own risk-reward profile. I am hopeful that as you grow wealthier, you will become more charitable, both by donating more wealth to help others, and also by accepting a lower rate of private return (or higher private risk) for investments that have a bigger social return (e.g. biotech investments, space exploration, etc). Even there, I hope you exercise some prudence and a portfolio approach, since it doesn't help anyone ex post if you lose all your money developing an invention that doesn't work.

In the meantime, we (society) are grateful for your concern, but would probably rather that you did not dump more money into our tax coffers. If you want to give money to the people, give money to the people, Give Directly style.

And if you still feel that the government is necessary to solve some of the problems that are bothering you, spend it instead to incentivize better government, or to design and build a government that allocates each tax dollar more efficiently as the years go by.

Thank you.

From the FDA statement:

> This is because both CBD and THC are active ingredients in FDA-approved drugs and were the subject of substantial clinical investigations before they were marketed as foods or dietary supplements.

Wow, this is unfortunate history. So if someone had marketed CBD as a food ingredient prior to the FDA's approval of CBD drugs, then putting it in food now would be OK. Does the FDA even have the facts correct? Were there food products before the CBD drugs were approved?

> go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process

This kind of thing probably doesn't even scale with itself, since there are only so many acrobatics your code can go through before no one can even understand why it's doing something, let alone add new workarounds. So the first K broken programs get special treatment, and the others face a much higher bar to get the same treatment.

Yup. It's especially disheartening that most of the discussion centers around "privilege" and the supposed ease of coasting into one of these schools if parents pay for test prep. Anyone can get test prep books from the New York Public library and practice, practice, practice. The fact that so few members from some groups attend the school says far more about the importance of education in their homes than it does about lack of "endowment."

Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is a society-damaging overreaction.

Angry people will still look for other like-minded people with whom they can share their grievances. The Internet makes it possible for larger groups to meet, talk, complain, and bond. When these folks get kicked off Facebook, substitute ecosystems will pop up on WhatsApp, some other social media app. Are "we" going to start restricting encryption next, just so "we" can keep the next unlikable candidate out of office? Not worth it IMHO.

Thank you for posting this.

Overall, I think that the good done by Uber around the world (primarily for consumer surplus, maybe not so much for drivers) totally dwarfs the various complaints I've heard about breaking local regulations. In practice, it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to roll back regulations in one jurisdiction (just look at the state of occupational licensing in various US states). In that environment, it takes someone with fairly thick skin to "just build the thing" and show consumers what they were missing. Personal failings aside, I think we owe Travis and the rest of Uber an enormous debt for showing us what's possible.