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sighs wistfully I still remember the first day I was able to exit vim without looking it up. It's right up there with that one time I wrote a function that compiled and worked on the first try.

Good times.

Carried-interest loophole?

While you ARE technically correct, the alternative in the wild is progressive taxation. That makes flat taxation a de facto regressive tax, as it will be more regressive than the current taxation regime.

> Say 4 of the high earners stop working as much (since their marginal rates are so high).

I know you're just using this as an example, but it begs a question I've struggled with: is there any actual proof that marginal tax rates reduce productivity in high earners?

On its face it makes perfect micro-economic sense, but that's like saying a cache will never miss or a cow is perfectly spherical. It just doesn't match up with real life experience. I've never once heard someone say "well, I'd ask for that raise, but they're going to take so much in taxes it's just not worth the effort".

Anecdotally it hasn't changed my motivations one lick as I've moved up tax brackets, to the point that I recently joked with my dad "I guess I'm done trying now!" when I stopped qualifying for a certain tax credit after I'd negotiated hard for a nice raise.

Not-so-anecdotally there's plenty of research that has shown that money (in and of itself) is a terrible motivating factor[0].

[0] https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv

> Despite all the different changes in the income tax rate/other progressive taxes. This supports an overhaul to the tax code to a more simple, flat tax system. From another data source outside this report, I'd have to find it, but historically, no matter the top bracket tax rate, the Federal government collects about 15-17 % income tax. Including when the top rate was 90%+.

Even assuming that is true, it wouldn't change the regressive nature of a flat tax.

I've wrestled with it, and settled into prioritizing humanely-raised meat. I have far more qualms about the inhumane treatment of most farm animals than I do about the concept of raising and slaughtering animals for food.

The heuristic I apply is I only eat antibiotic free meat. It has nothing to do with animals taking antibiotics per se, but rather that large farms abuse them as it's cheaper to pump a pig full of antibiotics than it is to provide remotely sanitary living conditions, nevermind the environmental issues around creating antibiotic resistant superbugs.

Yeah I was having this thought the other day: Why own a home when you could own a self-driving RV? Obviously there will still be advantages to owning land, but there's some real appeal to having your home drive itself around for you. Imagine waking up, prepping for work, opening the door and being in the parking lot, then hopping inside after work, eating dinner, and stepping out in front of a park to meet some friends.d Maybe you own some land with a larger home that you can "dock" with, maybe you don't and you can roam the country while working remotely.

Then you start to imagine what businesses could do with this. Self-driving food trucks is an obvious example: why pay a delivery driver when your restaurant drives itself?

This was a complaint I heard from several people I work with who took the course.

Right. People forget that there is no such thing as a truly "free" market. Literally everything we consider a "market" has regulations, from contract enforcement to currency standardization to abolishing violence and theft as market forces.

Allow me to followup in support: I work for a private VPN company (that coincidentally used to be a dial-up ISP), and the owner/leadership is very active in lobbying state and federal legislatures to pass privacy-oriented legislation. In other words: someone who's worked for decades on both sides of the issue acknowledges that legislation is the best solution.

https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/category/policy

My advice would be: Do learn functional programming, don't learn Lisp.

a) The biggest instigator by far is a dog we adopted at the age of 3 who was abandoned in the street and then spent another 9 months in the dog shelter. Each dog's mileage will vary.

b) I've worked with kids for years, and many display the exact same behavior, regardless of the particulars of the "shiny object". Fighting does not necessarily mean a physical altercation.

c) I've studied animal behavioral psychology, and have yet to find anything I learned that fails to apply to humans. We vary by degree, not kind.

> These five words are, as far as I can tell, the poison in the pudding of American politics today.

In the abstract, you're right, but I feel like it's worth noting that there's nothing exceptionally ignorant about voters of _today_. If anything they're more knowledgeable than any voters in American history.

> I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

This is also 100% true of my dogs. As soon as there's a new dog toy in the house and one shows interest the other will begin to fight over it. There are some deeply-ingrained mammalian social behaviors that have nothing to do with technology, and won't change anytime soon. I'd be wary of blaming a phone ahead of instinct (though blaming businesses for exploiting those instincts is a bit different).

That said, I commend your efforts to try to maintain a happy medium for your family, that's really the best way to address these sorts of issues.

I hadn't thought of that, but it would explain the runaway valuation more than any other theory I've heard.

I'd argue the better analogy is "If you have a great idea, what's more important to get it to market: your first engineer or your first investor?"

The next is always going to be "well, do I have enough money to pay my engineer?" This is why the investor holds all the cards and therefore gets the best deal up front. Without that up-front money there is no eventual business.

This sounds more like a mobile security camera than a replacement for a security guard. I'd be surprised if a large chunk is taken out of that employment market anytime soon.

MY company does hybrid remote/on-site, and one of the best ways to mitigate issues with off-site communication is part-time work from home. Since on-site workers spend some of their time as remote workers, everyone has a good idea of what's required to empower remote developers.

It's not always roses and rainbows, but it definitely helps.

> rather than have inventory, they relist competitor's inventory at lower prices

Wow. No wonder Wal-Mart bought them, they're cut from the same cloth.

Well that's because he's publicly backed Trump, who is as un-libertarian as you can get.

You're right, that's why we have elections every few years to make sure there's an opportunity to make them care about voters, if only for a bit.

This is a good generalized process for getting better at anything, but it's still awfully subjective and squishy once you try to apply it to a given domain. How do you `Identify what it means to be good`? How exactly do you `Deliberately practice`? How do you assess your strengths and weaknesses? How do you find someone more experienced? How do you know that experience has given them good lessons?

Answering all those questions for a given domain is how we have so many articles like this. Everyone has their own take, and it can be useful to look at others' so you can compare it to your own.

I've found audiobooks (and podcasts) to be great for lighter reading, but I tend to drift in and out. That's not a great system for something more scaffolded like a textbook where you have to thoroughly understand each part in order to build the next piece on top

Sure! Our company has been working on a "whole-house, always-on" product for a while, but it hasn't taken off because of the difficulties involved with having users flash Tomato onto their routers. I'm guessing HN readers are a bit more comfortable with that :).

https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn/vpn-router

Full Disclosure: I work for a private VPN company

This depends on the VPN provider. Private VPN services share IPs between customers, and the extra layer of privacy they provide comes with high potential for abuse. Some providers care more about preventing fraud than others. Cloudfront is likely just blocking IPs that have behaved poorly in the past, so I'd suggest you look for more reputable VPN providers that actively weed out fraudulent users.

I'm not an economist, but one thing I've wondered is "how much productivity has been added since the 60s purely by adding women to the workforce"? Naively it would seem that almost doubling the available workforce would have large temporary effects on the economy until that became the norm.

An alternative theory posed by one of my favorite economists[0] is that administration of public companies under the "maximize shareholder value" doctrine is finally coming home to roost. By prioritizing short-term profits in favor of long-term investment, companies have slowed their own growth for the last ~30 years.

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434485-running-the-company-f...

I guess that makes it unsurprising that Sweden, Germany, and Japan are all pretty valued allies to the US these days.

It also mentioned patient care was improved, which is important because it establishes that the gains went beyond the employees who got two extra hours of free time. That could establish the groundwork for some similar studies in different disciplines where perhaps the costs don't increase in the same ways.

Normally I'm not a fan of clickbait headlines, but the authors totally whiffed on "Apple to decimate iPhone production in the new year"

You're right that we produce enough raw food, but what alternative solution would you provide for more efficiently distributing it? Once there's sufficient supply all that Capitalism determines is methods of distribution.