throwaway49849

The burden of proof is on the people claiming that level of taxation is required in the first place. If taxes need to be that high, its on high tax proponents to justify it, not on everyone else to justify why we shouldn't raise them higher.

If you stop to think about it, there are only 3 possibilities: 1) Taxes are perfectly calibrated to exactly what they need to be. 2) Taxes are less than they need to be. 3) Taxes are more than they need to be.

Perfect calibration is nearly impossible. So that leaves 2 and 3. Which do you think is more likely of a corruption-prone organization that takes income through the implicit threat of physical violence?

It is free labor. You giving your income to the government is equivalent to doing free work. And of course, some level of that is required. I'm not anti-tax, I'm anti wasteful tax. And to my mind, requiring 30%-50% of everyones created value, just to maintain society, is enormously wasteful. There is no way in hell an efficient society actually requires that level of income tax of everyone.

For context, 75,518 EUR is $81,014. So if you're a software engineer making $200k, you're paying 37% on the first $81,014, or $30,000, and then 50% on the remaining $118,986, or $60,000. For a grand total of $90k on your $200k salary.

Oof. In a modern society, with modern technology, why does the government demand ownership of 30-50% of the value that people generate? That's an enormous amount of free labor.

So a Gallup poll that doesn't ask about violent crime is used as evidence that people are misguided about violent crime? How does that work?

Aside from it being supremely strange, it's just stupid enough that you risk overthinking each image to the point of answering it inaccurately. The person who approved these images has no business assessing personality types if they cannot understand the multiple ambiguous ways that many of these images can be interpreted. You have to try to infer what they probably meant by the image, and discard other valid interpretations.

The tragedy is that the test giver's job is communication and handing complex and subtle interactions, and they're already failing at it.

>The prospect of onerous alimony, child support and other divorce compensation increases wives’ bargaining power when they have the option to divorce.

Using the government to screw your partner over as a negotiating tactic is a sick way to frame a divorce. It's this sick mentality that young men are warned about as they begin to seriously date.

>Friedman: One of the pieces of what I see as good news in this story is that more people, women and men, are willing and able to say, “I don’t want to have children.” For women especially, I see this as a kind of social progress in human evolution. In every generation prior to the current one, women have been normatively sanctioned to think of themselves as mothers. There’s almost a mindless march into motherhood throughout history. That question hasn’t really been raised. Today, young women are saying, “I don’t feel a need to do that.”

Mr. Friedman should interview the women after their biological window has closed, and see if there answers have changed. Not doing so is ignoring the full picture of how we conceptualize an idea like having children over the course of our entire lives.

>Men and women, on average, like different things.

To a huge population, preferential differences directly and fundamentally imply bias. You see the data and say "see, X", they see the same data and say "see, Y."

What do other people genuinely get from this data? Besides "here are more gender and race stats to quibble over and divide you while the political class robs you blind" ?

Side by side of old behavior vs new behavior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlH6IGmAeqU

>Each participant looked at 16 images and were told to imagine themselves walking through those areas.

How does this extrapolate to actually walking in the environment? There are so many differences between looking at a photograph and actually physically being in a space.

>The government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology will develop a uniform framework for assessing safety, as part of the order Biden signed in October.

They probably need to develop an extremely antisocial, psycopathic, malevolent AI to assess other AIs for safety. Its purpose will be to run through thousands of scenarios, using manipulation, threats, and deception to try to extract dangerous information from the other AI. It can then score the responses based on the information it was able to extract. I don't really see any other way to automate this extremely tedious and error prone task. It's interesting though because we will need to concentrate all of the evil in the world into a single AI in order to run these tests.