settrans

Well I have good news for you: the next time you’re feeling that ineffable fondness for upstate New York at a point of sale machine, remember that 12345 is a real zip code from Schenectady.

In effect it already is: we lack allodial title in the United States anyhow, and all land is subject to taking by eminent domain and taxation by local governments.

Are the developers of apartment buildings financial vampires too? The people who literally are adding supply to the market (and therefore lowering prices, because supply and demand)?

Housing being an investment is the inevitable consequence of a free market around real estate. Land is scarce. Land near job centers is scarcer. There are far more people that want to live in nice neighborhoods near high-paying jobs than could possibly live there. How do you allocate that real estate?

Who gets to buy the next housing unit built in Manhattan? (This is equivalent to the question: you are selling your housing unit in Manhattan; who are you allowed to sell it to?)

If "investors" are not allowed to buy housing in Manhattan, who will develop the high-rises that house people who can't afford to buy their own apartment? Or do you institute price controls, so that instead of paying with money, you pay with generation-long wait times?

Even $500 is rich, now, for a laptop. iPads and Chromebooks can be had for half that, and could run circles around the laptops of yesteryear. Hell, MT8183-powered Chromebooks cost $170 and still come with FHD touchscreens, 12-18 hours of battery life and have acceptable build quality.

Indeed! What we need is a wealth transfer from new residents paying _even higher_ market prices to legacy tenants grandfathered in to apartments that landlords have no incentive to maintain.

Awesome! How do you plan to monitor and enforce this?

I'm not sure I understand. I'm using simple arithmetic to show that UBI can't replace welfare except at unfathomable expense, based on real welfare expense and GDP numbers. Do you disagree?

The thrust of the (financial) problem is that all of those savings, the bureaucracy and the more efficient capital allocation, is completely eclipsed by the massive waste of paying UBI to everyone who doesn't need welfare. If 10% of households receive welfare, you're looking at a 10x increase in outlay (since you're now also paying the 90% who don't need welfare).

But to actually replace welfare, you'd need to pay enough to satisfy (almost) everyone, not just the average. This means you need to pay the 80th? 99th? percentile benefit to everyone, since UBI is a flat benefit and you've eliminated all means testing.

Assuming your 99th percentile outlay is 150% of the average, you now have to pay 1,500% of your original welfare budget in order to provide the same benefit to the 99th percentile welfare beneficiary (and 1% of people previously on welfare are still worse off). Even if somehow we could afford largess of that magnitude without spiraling into hyperinflation, it's unlikely that the efficiencies of individual capital allocation could overcome anywhere near the 1,400% premium of UBI.

I'm familiar with the idea - but the biggest challenge with UBI is not that it's inherently a bad idea (as you note, it effectively adds a negative intercept to the marginal system), rather that it is unlikely to replace welfare systems in a lasting fashion. There are two problems:

1. UBI would be too expensive if it were to replace welfare. You can't just keep the total welfare spending of $1.16T [0] and smear it across the whole population, since that would significantly reduce the support of families receiving welfare today (since you'd be distributing the benefit _universally_). If you wanted to keep the average payout to welfare recipients the same, you would need to dole out $65,200 (the average welfare benefit) to each of the 122 million households in America, balooning UBI spending to nearly $8T, over 1/3 of US GDP.

But even that wouldn't be enough, since many families depend on even more welfare benefits, since all we did was pay out the average. Suppose you paid out the 80th percentile instead (for sake of argument, assume that's $90,000), now your welfare bill is $11T, or half of GDP. Needless to say, you'd need a lot of taxes to pay for this, and the US would shoot up to the highest-taxed nation on earth.

2. Even this wouldn't be enough: the same social forces that push to expand and grow the welfare bureaucracy today would continue to exist, and I would expect them to cause the reintroduction of welfare even if abolished under the introduction of UBI. Families receiving direct financial support under UBI could (and would) starve, suffer costly medical expenses, and otherwise need additional support, and thus create demand for welfare afresh.

[0] https://www.heritage.org/welfare/report/largest-welfare-incr...

Perhaps if we weren't subjecting the tens of millions of Americans in the $15,000 - $40,000 income range to effective marginal tax rates of up to 103% [0], we would see more labor force participation. Between income tax and benefit phaseout, it can literally cost money to get a raise in our system today [1].

[0] https://fullstackeconomics.com/103-percent-the-hidden-tax-ra... [1] https://www.heritage.org/taxes/report/effective-marginal-tax...

P.S. if you account for need-based financial aid scholarships for college, the situation is even more dire.

This isn't obviously the case (if you consider gun homicide, which is arguably more important since strictly more people are killed than just in mass shootings): https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...

> Gun Murder Rate is not correlated with firearm ownership rate in the United States, on a state by state basis. Firearm Homicide Rate is not correlated with guns per capita globally. It’s not correlated with guns per capita among peaceful countries, nor among violent countries, nor among European countries.

Surely then, we ought to ban pools, wall off access to the beaches and lakes, and generally prohibit human contact with water, as drowning is 100x more likely to kill than school shootings. And any parents of innocent children who have drowned are no doubt incensed by the outcome!

Let's see what happens when you apply critical analysis and derive conclusions from data instead of rhetoric:

Real Talk about School Shootings – where show how school shooting numbers are a terrible thing around which to craft policy. <https://hwfo.substack.com/p/real-talk-about-school-shootings>

The Gun Solution - where we fix the entire gun problem. <https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-gun-solution>

You and I have different definitions of "billionaire".

According to my testing, SSDs would greatly reduce the contention but were not a complete fix.

I never understood this attitude (assuming it's serious). If a job is created in a city that wouldn't exist in the country, where is the stealing? To me this sounds like the city is creating value _ex nihilo_, and the "payment" here is an orthogonal, collectivist redistribution.

Things worked well at the outset, especially in local development against my NVMe drive for my small CRUD application.

Then, with a little traffic, things continued to go well in production. But as traffic scaled up (to 1-5 QPS, roughly 25% writes), they fell apart. Hard. Because my production environment was spinning rust, IO contention was a real issue and totally absent from development. This manifested as frequent database timeouts, both from reads and writes.

Echoing another commenter's sentiment: things would have gone much more smoothly from the beginning had I started with PostgreSQL, but after having written many thousands of lines of direct SQL taking intimate advantage of SQLite's surprisingly rich featureset, migrating was less than totally appealing.

The mitigation strategy, which ultimately worked out, was to implement backpressure for writes to SQLite: queuing and serializing all writes to each database in the application, failing loudly and conspicuously in the case of errors (thus forcing the client to retry), and gracefully handling the rare deadlock by crashing the process completely with a watchdog timer.

Even the most collectivist public-transit apologist should be celebrating Robert Moses. He greatly expanded the predecessor to the MTA, and secured its legacy by building the toll bridges and tunnels that subsidize the wildly expensive New York City subways, generations after the bridges and tunnels have been paid off.

"You can’t say something important about anything ever, without offending. Important speech about important issues, especially contentious issues, is instantly offensive."

Might I caution you away from any tools built with the Abseil flags library.

That's obviously not how property rights work. Sam Walton was entitled to bequeath his wealth to his heirs however he saw fit, subject to any applicable estate and inheritance taxes.

Oh, that's great news! (I last used evaluated them in August 2017)

Indeed, they perform much better, but caveat emptor: hash index operations are not currently WAL-logged. That means that: 1) if you crash during a hash index update, all bets are off and you'll have to rebuild, and 2) they will just be wrong in a replicated configuration.

EDIT: This is no longer true. Thanks latch!

OK, then how do people commute to their jobs (restaurants, shoe stores, or schools) in the small towns that support farms, mines, factories or mills?

Got it. So how should people get to their jobs at the farms? Or the mines? Or the oil fields? Or the factories? Or the mills?

Sadly not, as all Pixels have DisplayPort / HDMI out turned off in software.

Google expects you to use Chromecast or buy an expensive DisplayLink adapter.

Despite being (ostensibly) state-of-the-art technology, I feel similarly about my 2021-vintage MediaTek MT8183-powered Chromebook.

Despite costing sub-$300, its CPU is comparably powerful (according to Passmark) to the Vaio VGN-P588E's contemporary desktop CPU, the Intel Q6600. Of course few PCs in 2009 had 4GB of RAM at the time (to say nothing about the GPUs of the time).

The MT8183-based machine offers a surprisingly capable computing experience, allowing for simultaneous Meet presentation + JavaScript-heavy web application usage, all at that retro computing price point.

Where it ceases to feel like my X61, however, is in battery life. Where the X61 only lasts a few hours of heavy usage with a fresh battery, the MT8183 chugs along for 12+ hours.

"No one has Borgmon readability."

Is there any evidence that, on net, state welfare programs deter crime in any significant way?