fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Liberal democracies need asabiyyah too, and in fact witnessing American asabiyayah in action was a bit of a culture shock moment for me
Is supporting Ukraine asabiyah-yayayay?
It's fair enough if you want no part in it, I'm not here to convert you,
But convert me to what? You don't have an ideology, or a plan, besides "shit happens, the wheel of fortune turns, you can't control humans by rules or systems of rules, but hey people should stick together".
And yet, unlike us, they're scheduled to inherit the Earth, by the mere act of showing up.
Not likely. If prognosticating that far into the future even makes any sense, my money is on some pro-natalist modernist offshoot.
The point is that it's not about the system, it's about Asabiyyah. Even some Enlightenment Liberals understood that, or at least that's how I understand the quote about everlasting vigilance and freedom.
What is asabyiah but ‘group loyalty’? Where the interest of the individual and that of those outside the group disappears for the collective good of for instance, the nation. Where the prole and the industrialist, the jew and the catholic, stick together because they’re italians first, right or wrong. It’s collectivistic and faschistic. I don’t mean it as an insult, but I don’t agree with it. What happens if the group decides individual freedoms are unnecessary, or even that a minority has to die for the good of the nation? So I remain vigilant against asabiyah too. I guess my group loyalty is to ‘the good’, which no doubt comprises many, but not all, italians.
I mean, I don’t know what asabiya means to you, but it seems to be related to the ‘hard men good times’ concept, which I also don’t subscribe to. The highest asabiya societies (tribal, nomadic, clannish) are not places I want to live in, and also, in the modern world, militarily incredibly weak. The bonds between people in primitive societies may appear stronger than in our ‘atomistic societies’, but they are still far more violent with each other. They may have ‘coherent values’ in the sense that they have never asked themselves which philosophy they subscribe to, but they are more than capable of bashing each other’s heads in over the parochial, stupid stuff.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I don’t agree with the way you splice up the debate types. You’ve got the old-school adversarial debate, in the interest of finding out the truth (so still cooperative on a deep level), which used to be at home in universities, and I guess we still have here, for example. Then you’ve got the adversarial politician’s debate, which looks and sometimes is similar, but with dirtier rhetorical tricks to appear right.
But the university presidents have little experience of those. They are used to more surface-level cooperative debates, where the goal is not the Truth but the reaching of a status-adjusted consensus. Free speech gets in the way of that consensus. Hostile questioning, from that perspective, is rude and a status challenge. The correct answer is not to answer but to air your disdain and let your higher status win the debate consensus for you.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
A wealth tax reduces returns by k:
x = ((A-k) - (i-k)) / (2ekkB) = (A - i) / (2ekB)
I think there’s an error here. The k subtracts itself in the numerator, so the two k’s stay in the denominator, unlike in the cap gains equation.
in case it wasn't clear, I'm saying a wealth tax is better than a capital gains tax in that it doesn't distort risk-taking while a capital gains tax does
Vast layers of misunderstandings keep peeling off, yet your position remains as inscrutable as ever. Didn't you (wrongly, see above) determine that the equation was the same : ' x = (A - i) / (2ekB)' for both? So why is risk tolerance increased for cap gains tax and not for the wealth tax?
I want to distort risk-taking, I think we would all tremendously benefit from a 90% reduction in financial risk aversion of the average citizen. By the lights of MPT, shouldn’t we collectively expect a higher return on all our investments if risk aversion went down?
Yeah. Note: people would probably save less, but what the people are saving would be invested in stocks rather than bonds in this model.
I think that discredits the model. They’re not going to take all the equity risk for 1% of the equity premium, they’re supposed to be loss averse.
Sure. I mean that according to ivory-tower theory, even a 1% capital gains tax now is equivalent to a 100% tax on far-future consumption.
This is a useless extrapolation theory.
I think a poll tax (and its opposite: welfare) is distortionary.
Welfare is not the opposite of a poll tax, it’s a progressive tax that goes into the negative. Regardless, how is a poll tax distortionary?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
The timing of the peak is the entire prediction! That they were correct about the “growth” part of “limits to growth” does not make them half-right. Boomers say ‘growth, no limit, no peak’. The only contentious, falsifiable part of doomers’ predictions has been repeatedly falsified. If you love being proven wrong, you must love the doomer life.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
It’s fair game. You shouldn't close ranks over bad actors out of partisanship. What you gain in fanaticism, you lose in credibility. If the NYT published an article with credible evidence that Trump was The Serial Killer of Times Square, should you ignore it because it’s partly politically motivated? And as vorpa says, hbomber's main target is a gay queer theory popularizer(although hbomber still dings him for misogyny and insufficient wokeness, like everyone else).
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Let e be your risk aversion and let p be the the proportion of your portfolio you are investing in stocks
Where is “p”? I’m gonna need a template for these equations, like an article who uses similar ones (the wikipedia markowitz model wasn’t helpful). Or more letter definitions.
As taxes go up, k shrinks from 1 towards 0, which makes x increase. Therefore, capital gains taxes cause increased risk tolerance.
So a 99 % capital gains tax results in everyone investing in stocks?
The chief academic argument against capital gains taxes is that they impose a 100% tax on consumption in the far future, which is maximally distortionary.
I call bullshit on that. A 100% tax on everything right now is more distortionary.
I personally think that if society had no welfare, a flat income tax would be either not distortionary or push people to work more.
But we have welfare, and the income tax isn’t flat. You’re very theoretical today.
Note: historically people worked much more and (e.g.) wages being 4x lower because your country is poor is equivalent to a 75% flat tax today.
Ignoring the motivating effect of hunger, of course.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I made my comment in good faith, but will not chide you on the rules in the future.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
It would be nice if you would refrain from attempting to describe my beliefs to third-parties in the future
I usually ping you when I do. I still think you and the others defend the carrying out of immoral orders, even though you don’t think they’re immoral. The strawman accusation comes across as an attempt at controlling and censoring my interpretation of your beliefs. You can always refute and dispute (like I flatly stated to you recently : “I didn’t say that”). Half of all discussions are just two people trying to reconcile their interpretation of the other’s position. Don’t ask me to blindly accept your perspective on your beliefs, like a sacred garden you have dominion over.
Would you prefer more questions, or just statements?
That’s up to you, it’s all good, at your service.
The Enlightened, Absolute Monarchists, theocrats, and presumably anti-enlightenment reactionaries, it seems to me, all believe that humans are a simple mechanism amenable to control through the construction of legible systems of rules. It seems exceedingly obvious to me that this model of humanity is dead wrong. Humans cannot be controlled by rules or systems of rules. No legible system can ever contain them indefinitely, because one of the things humans consistently do is break things that get in their way. Everything made by the human hand and mind can be unmade by those same tools. [...]
Looks like you’re claiming the unassailable rock of the skeptic-pessimist so you can easily criticize without ever having to defend.
Beyond Christianity, I suppose you could say I'm a humanist, or perhaps a better term might be a Machiavellian. I see the basic ethical question as split between "What is right", and "what is expedient".
I like machiavelli, I like the split, I don’t buy that he was ironic and it was meant as an indictment of the prince. Taking one variable away is always a useful way of looking at the world.
But it seems to me the kind of people lampooned in the OP have taken his thought experiment too seriously, and consider themselves free to always act expediently, and relegate the question of what is right to their inner conscience. Sola fide, if you will.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
This will strongly incentivise, as you put it, lazy bum money, and other difficult to access forms of wealth.
People who park their money in a completely unproductive manner are already granted total tax- exemption. The state can’t possibly incentivize them more. Plus the destruction of income/capital gains tax would obviously incentivize successful kinds of investment.
Every individual will have to do extensive bookkeeping of all their belongings
They already do if they file for income tax. Impractical? Somewhat, like most changes. That’s all small stuff, the status quo is far more “horribly distortive”. Most of the capital base of society is effectively stored in a dark room instead of being put to productive use. The minority of actually working capital is being bled dry so that working class grandma doesn’t ever have to sell the family castle.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
That's a bit nitpicky. Storage is a better objection to this hypothetical than transmission losses (which are well understood and not very important) . But it's a theoretical, order of magnitude discussion . He claimed that just by "seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply the energy", it would seem absurd, and it doesn't. Solar panels are a 'cut-out-the-middleman' form of agriculture, and look how much space that takes up.
But assuming doomers can get past this theoretical argument, I want to highlight just how incredibly extensive their claims are, and how far they are from proving their thesis. Before we run out of food, the oil will have to run out, the coal will run out, all the other fossil fuels will run out, nuclear will fail, solar will fail, all the renewables will fail. And not just ‘oh we couldn’t make it to 100% world energy consumption on just this one thing’, every single one has to fail completely: it’s not just that they each don’t scale, they all somehow don’t work anymore.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
You can work this out by looking at how much energy society spends, and then seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply it (the answer is "too much").
The answer is 10 000-20 000 sq miles(for electricity in the US), which is the size of lake erie. For all the energy in the entire world, it's going to be a small fraction of the sahara.
The Chinese give absolutely zero shits about safety/not cutting corners, and yet they continue to use fossil fuels rather than nuclear power, despite the massive geopolitical gains that would be associated with no longer being reliant on fossil fuels.
They are vastly expanding their nuclear capacity as we speak. .
Similarly, the world has been tracking the World3 model from the Limits to Growth study fairly well
In 1939 the department of the interior projected that oil would last only 13 more years, and again in 1951 it was projected that oil would run out 13 years later. In Limits to growth (1972), Gold was supposed to run out in 1981, silver and mercury 1985, zinc 1990, oil before 1992. In 1992 they published the revised ‘beyond the limits’, where they pushed it all back a few years, as they always do. And 30 years later they’re still doing the same thing, like a broken record – oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now.
Just so. You have a million dollars. You can either:
A) put it in a highly productive, socially beneficial company, which produces 100 k/y profits
B) stack it under your mattress, buy a huge house you don’t need, or a very secure (read: lame) bond
The tax is 33 % on profits. The alternative wealth tax is 10k/y.
Under an income tax regime, your personal profit is A: 67k and B: 0 .
Under a wealth tax regime, your personal profit is A: 90k and B: -10 k
Of course B is also safe, that’s why it’s so popular. A results in a societal gain greater than 100k/y, B close to zero. For a more productive economy, people should be encouraged to choose A.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Who has 99% of their income generating power tied up in private equity? The illiquid unassessed capital is invisible to the rest of the economy and therefore wastes productive capacity. If you don’t believe in price signals, might as well have communism.
Double tax/it can be inconvenient: yes, but so are ordinary taxes. You’re comparing this replacement tax to a hypothetical tax with no downside. But the taxes it replaces are actually worse. They impair the wealth generation of everyone, not just a few special cases. Imo you’ve got status quo bias, and you’re all annoyed that this argument supports the democrat side.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
All else equal, all wealth should be taxed equally (say, flat 1%/y) , not income from wealth. Current tax laws encourage bubbles and poor investing. Just buy a garbage bond or shitcoin and uncle sam will barely touch it, but god helps you if you invest in a company actually making money. And don’t give me the hard-luck grandma story.
It’s like a poll tax on wealth, and like a poll tax, it’s very tax efficient. The problem with income tax is that it discourages economically beneficial behaviour, like working or good investing. Every time you engage in it, the state wants a piece, and possibly, an even bigger piece, the better you are at it. So the state, counter-productively, eggs you on to be a bum and to stack your wealth under the mattress (ignoring inflation). Your lazy bum money should be taxed at least as much as superstar cancer-curing money.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
SCHLACHT is great, it’s closely related to slaughter, schlacht-en, schlacht-hof. Even phonetically it sounds like a man drowning in his own blood. BATTLE is wobbly and inconsequential.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
“Wars develop in phases. We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times. We should also be prepared for bad news, Stoltenberg said ”
That’s what you pinned your hopes on, cryptic nato comments? Let’s just wait for this crushing north korean industrial superiority to bear fruit. Even if "the factories are gone!", it's helplful to have this low-stakes operation to reflect on and correct our weaknesses.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Doesn’t need to be instant. I haven’t seen this deficit of european arms and great north korean bonanza result in significant russian victories. To carry on war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money.
Still fits (ok, hispanics should be lower, but they’ve had less time to be culturally acclimated). I don’t mean it’s strongly genetically predetermined, obviously culture plays a large role. r/K provides an explanation why supposedly pro-children cultural beliefs (that they should be supported) are effectively anti-children. The west is facing a tradeoff between a few supremely coddled and educated children, and enough of them.
The legal and cultural responsibilities of parenthood should be massively curtailed. Safe haven laws should be expanded to the first 18 years of the child’s life (obviously the other parent should get first dibs). I don’t mean people should walk away from their responsibilities, just that they should be free to. It would lessen the pressure on those who don’t, encouraging them to have more. Right now the decision to have a child is the equivalent of signing an irreversible, decades long legal servitude contract.
Given the apparently dire fertility situation (and attendant pension problems etc), it’s even doubtful that aborting/not having kids is worse for society than filling orphanages with the children of unfit mothers and cads. I would certainly prefer to grow up in an orphanage than not exist at all. Seen that way, the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine works against the best interest of the child.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
The amount of resources required to sustain the Ukrainian military is astounding and completely unsustainable.
The amount of resources required to sustain the Ukrainian military is similar to that required to sustain the russian military, only the west is economically about 30 times greater. So assuming the russians go all-in and marshal about 50% of their economy for the special military operation effort, and Ukraine, the sanctions, and technological superiority do nothing, the west needs to assign 1,7 % to that nuisance. That’s relatively high but completely sustainable for a distant power like the US, and outright cheap for the threatened countries of europe.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
The russians haven’t made any progress either. When the soviet inheritance is entirely spent, the attritional industrial war will just be western handouts versus the russian economy, and I don’t think russia looks good in this contest. Whether the ukrainians want to keep fighting is their business, but as a western european I’m happy to foot the bill and keep russia busy indefinitely, especially since there is no long-lasting peace on the table, only a provisional ceasefire.
I could lean on zelensky if you offered pre-feb 24 borders, else let’s just keep playing ,who gets uncomfortable first.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it.
Not only can they do it, but solar or nuclear could do it all alone if everything else vanished. Not that it's going to be necessary. What is your basis for saying this? Is it some flimsy extrapolation like: 'Based on current consumption , If we go 100%, we'll run out of some rare mineral in 2 years, or landfill space to put old windblades'.
there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world.
That's due to safety regulations. If we went back to good old rugged soviet standards, it would be dirt cheap.
There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
Payday comes every month like clockwork. The proven reserves of oil keep increasing, to say nothing of the stuff we haven't learned to harness yet.
Does it bother you that you could have said the same thing every year since at least the industrial revolution, and be wrong every time?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
It’s socially easier to say ‘I haven’t found the right girl/guy’ than to have a bunch of kids and refuse to provide the expected massive parental investment.
Rushton’s pet peeve was to rank blacks > whites > asians on every scale, and r/K was a big one, it fits with the observed fertility.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term.
The malthusian long term could be 5 billion years. All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially. Tech beats nominally diminishing resources every time. The EROIE of the past was irrelevant, they had no idea what a lump of coal, a vial of kerosene, a handful of uranium ore, could do.
And it keeps going, more layers of misunderstandings.
So your math was incorrect, but luckily you interpreted it wrong, so by being doubly wrong you went all the way to being right again?
And what happened to the k’s now, why did you remove them from the denominator? You previously used them to justify “As taxes go up, k shrinks from 1 towards 0, which makes x increase. Therefore, capital gains taxes cause increased risk tolerance. “
By that logic, and assuming the equations are worth a damn, the wealth tax also causes increased risk tolerance. More even, since you have two k’s in the denominator going to zero.
Another misunderstanding. Man, I am in favour of risk, from the beginning. Between low-risk/low-return and high-risk/high-return, I choose high every time. Personally, and macroeconomically. I said people should be less risk averse, ie, take more risk. I could rail against insurance companies and the giant societal loss they represent all day. They prey on the irrational fears of people to the tune of trillions of dollars annually. But that’s besides the point.
To be 100% clear, no, I do not believe VC and startups are net-bad for society at all.
I am not talking about a reduction in risk, but a reduction in risk aversion. An investor with less risk aversion (ie, willing to take more risk) could expect higher returns, correct? I’m just applying this to all investors in the economy.
Yes, and yes.
Your progressive tax depends on your income. When your income is low enough, instead of paying the tax, you get welfare. So it’s the ‘negative side’ of the progressive tax. Your progressive tax becomes a payment to you.
The poll tax is not distortionary, because nothing you do matters. You can work or not work, you’re still on the hook for the same poll tax, 100 dollars or whatever. The progressive tax( including welfare), takes from you if you work and gives to you if you don’t. Whether that is good or bad is another issue, but it definitely distorts your behaviour more.
Any tax in this model is distortionary. We’re talking relative distortionaryness.
That’s what I referred to above : “ignoring the motivating effects of hunger”.
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