quiet_NaN
8d ago
So what happens once nobody that owns anything of substance is a US Person?
My proposal did not hinge on the nationality of the owner, or them being a natural person or identifiable. As long as the asset is physically within the US, the US can tax it just fine.
I also think it fairer to tax investors in the country of their assets than in their country of residence, which is the opposite of what the US is doing. If a US citizen builds a thriving business in Somalia, I simply do not see how this is Uncle Sam's business (apart from the wealth transferred in or out of the US, perhaps). She is certainly not depending on the US to secure her property rights or provide legal security. By contrast, if a rich Swiss person is buying a mall in the US, he is asking the US for a lot more: that the US shall uphold the doctrine that individuals can own unlimited amounts of land, that the police please prevent robbers and looters from ruining his investment, that the court system be fair and not rule against him just because his name sounds too French. Let him simply pay the same capital gains tax a US citizen who owned the same property would pay, and if he does not like it, he can always invest in China or India instead.
This would have an additional practical advantage. For the billionaire class, becoming a citizen of a tax haven is not a big problem, while investing their wealth in a tax haven will likely be difficult. Sure, your social media company will not pay taxes, just restrict profiles to residents of the Cayman Islands. You want to pay taxes in Ireland? No problemo, just design, produce and sell your smartphones there.
Are you going to start seizing American companies from their shareholders or something?
In so far as taxation is theft, yes.
More importantly, does anybody even read Hayek anymore?
I just looked up the guy on WP and did a ctrl+F tax:
Hayek was against high taxes on inheritance, believing that it is natural function of the family to transmit standards, traditions and material goods. Without transmission of property, parents might try to secure the future of their children by placing them in prestigious and high-paying positions, as was customary in socialist countries, which creates even worse injustices. He was also strongly against progressive taxation, noting that in most countries additional taxes paid by the rich amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue and that the only major result of the policy is "gratification of the envy of the less-well-off". He also claimed that it is contrary to the idea of equality under the law and against democratic principle that the majority should not impose discriminatory rules against the minority.
Hm, it seems some vandal replaced his ideas with neoliberal strawmen.
I disagree with him about inheritance tax. Say we have a progressive inheritance tax which caps the amount parents can pass to their children at 10M$. A billionaire with a single child might spend 990M$ to on "placing them in prestigious and high-paying positions", instead of only the customary few millions for Harvard, private tutors and so on. But he will find that spending money on education and prestige has diminishing returns. The last million he spends on his kid will not be increase their lifetime earning potential by 1M$. Turning your child into a movie or sport star, or sponsoring them to run for public office is all nice and well, but even if it works, most stars are not billionaires and most public officials do not manage to grift billions either.
Progressive taxation can very easily be justified through utilitarianism. There are diminishing returns to wealth and income. The difference between driving a 500$ car and driving a 10.5k$ car is a lot bigger than the difference between driving a 100k$ car and driving a 110k$ car.
I think it is generally more enlightening to look at wealth inequality than income inequality, because what counts as income will be subject to zillions of complex regulations of tax law, while wealth is much more easy to quantify. Just assume that everyone gets born in some natural state without a penny to their name, and if they end up being a billionaire, they must at some point have increased their net worth in a way which would in principle be taxable (unless the gains were made in Somalia).
The wealth Gini for the US is 0.85. Students of mathematics will notice that this is a lot closer to one (one person owns everything) than zero (everyone has equal wealth). If we use wealth as a proxy for "taxation potential", we can see that Hayek when he asserts that raising the taxes on the 0.1% would amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue.
In the US, the marginal federal income tax goes from 10% (for the first 11k$/year) to 37% (for dollars made above 578k$). Looking at WP, it looks like the highest income quintile pays more than twice as much taxes as all the other quintiles combined. This means that if you do not want to change the budget, a flat tax rate would have to be roughly the same as the 24% effective tax rate charged to the fifth quintile, say 22%. (In reality, it would likely be a bit closer to the 29% the top 1% are paying.)
If you tax the poor quintile (currently taxed at 1.5%) that amount, the effect will be that they will unable to make ends meet, so one way (social security) or another (prisons), the state will have to pay for their cost of living.
When he whines about the rich people being suppressed by the poor minority, my response is that there is no human right to unlimited wealth. Capitalism is neither just nor god-given, but it is a system which works much better than all the other systems which have been tried, so societies are willing to accept high income inequalities to reap its benefits. The present deal seems very favorable to the 1%, and asking them to pay a lot to keep the status quo does not seem inherently unfair.
Assuming that the WP excerpt was a fair summary of Hayek's ideas about taxes, I can understand why he is not widely read today.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Per WP, the federal debt amounts to some seven years of federal revenue. This is clearly not great, but it is also not obvious that this will cause a spiraling hyperinflation.
One early warning sign for being over-debt is that lenders are no longer willing to lend to you with low interests. The US still has a rating of AA+ with most agencies, and from my reading of Bloomberg, treasury bonds yield about 5% per year.
Also, the US is similar to Bolivia in that both have debts denominated in US$, but unlike Bolivia the US has the option to debase that currency.
Realistically, I think that the worst outcome for the US would be a bit tamer than the Greek debt crisis. Surely painful and something best avoided, but also not something which will end democracy and give rise to the next Hitler.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I think that the narrative that LGBT makes the US weak while rejecting LGBT is what makes the Taliban strong rings even less true than the usual version of the Fremen mirage. The US has the Taliban beaten by a mile on every civilizational and capability index I care about, GPD/person, infant mortality, education attainment, military capabilities, freedom of speech, etc pp. The Taliban clearly beat the US in TFR, but that is not all that hard to do if you are willing to subjugate half of your population and ban non-reproductive sex. "Don't sell your 15 yo daughter to some man twice her age who will breed her continuously for her fertile lifespan" is not a trans agenda. It is not even a feminist agenda, unless your definition of feminism is something wholeheartedly embraced by 95-99% of the US population.
I will not claim that transpersons will make superior frontline soldiers, having gone through male puberty and then continuing to produce male sex hormones is clearly advantageous physically, but I do not think that a few percent of trans people matter. Look, the obesity rate in the US is 40%, and even that is not an insurmountable difficulty for military capabilities. The US army tooth to tail ratio in Iraq was 1:8.1. Think about it as a pyramid. At the base, you have a ton of taxpayers. Then, you have people working in arms manufacturing, writing software for guided missiles and all that. Then, you have eight actual members of the military who are supporting one frontline soldier. Obviously you want that person to be fit, where your gender-neutral criteria may end up excluding many cis-males and almost all of the people who are not cis-males for the job, depending on the specifics (a commando has likely different requirements than a tank commander). But below this, your care for raw strength drops rapidly. Perhaps the person driving the supply truck is a cis-woman. And the guy operating the drone from 50km away is wheelchair-bound. And the person who wrote the software for controlling the drone is a trans-woman and so on.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Empirically, there are some rich people living in Sweden, where the total income tax can be 55.6%.
If you go to a poor person and tell them they will have to pay another 20% of their income as taxes, it might well be that they will face the choice between emigrating and raising their kids under a bridge.
By contrast, if you tell someone making 1M$ a year (after taxes) that they will have to pay another 200k$ of taxes, they will have to adjust their life-style a bit or accept that their net worth will grow slower than it would otherwise.
By revealed preference, the US seems to be a pretty great place to be rich. Rich people could already move to poorer countries where they could afford to be attended by dozens of servants, and yet they mostly don't. I do not think that having to cut the private helicopter and riding limo like the plebs would change that.
If you are rich, you can afford to worry about tail risks. Despite all the CW, the US still has some of the best institutions in the world. If you are accused for some political crime, would you rather deal with the US justice system or the Romanian one? Do you want your kids to go to Ivy League or get the best Romanian education? Or consider political stability: the US voted for Trump, while Romania voted for some pro-Russian populist. While their courts invalidated the latter election, I have much more trust in US institutions to limit the damage a populist can do. Romania has been in the NATO since 2004, which limits the risk of invasion, at least as long as NATO continues to be a thing. Mainland US has not faced a credible threat of invasion by foreign powers since at least 1900. Likewise, the US has a great track record of not having mobs or governments expropriate rich persons or guillotine them. If Romania experiences a severe financial crisis in 2045, "expropriate rich ex-Americans" might be a platform which would be popular with the plebs and tolerable to the native elites.
Then there are practical costs to emigrating. You might want to learn the language, lest you stay part of a small expat community. You will need to spend a lot of time to get the design of your villa just right, again.
Then there are power costs. Your bank account can be converted to the local currency just fine, but if you care about having political power where you live, you will have to build this up from the scratch. You know the proper etiquette for bribing a US senator, but likely you will not know much about how the local politics work, who will stay bought and who won't. Likely, your opponents will be local oligarchs who have been playing this game for generations. The elites will not see you as one of them, but as a resource to be exploited.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
One could tax every property by default. A mailbox company in the Bahamas hold that tenement? Either they cough up the taxes, or they lose their property. A publicly traded company increased its market cap by 20% in a year? Great, just print shares for Uncle Sam worth 0.2% or the market cap.
This might deter foreign investment, but especially in housing, foreign investment is just driving up prices, which is a boon only to a minority.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
This. Trump has a giant yet fragile ego. I think that the 2020 election denial can be understood not as a carefully designed lie to stay relevant, but as a knee-jerk emotional response. A world in which he fairly lost 2020 was a world where he was less popular than two-term president Obama and president-elect Joe Biden. This was not a world he could imagine inhabiting. Likewise, his 2024 statement to the effect that he would accept the election result if he wins.
In a way, when losing he is like an obsessive ex turned stalker, who can not accept that they got dumped, but tries to construct a world where they were forced by external factors to deny their love.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean
In 1910, there were 2.7M German speakers and 544 German-language newspapers in the US. As we all know, the result was a Germanization and Nazification of the US as seen in the documentary series "the Man in the High Castle". Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society. As are the immigrants which came from Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, and so on one hundred years ago.
In 2011, the US had 1.1M people who spoke Korean at home. I don't know how many newspapers they have in the US, Wikipedia has a grand total of two Korean-language newspapers with articles. In time, most of their descendants will certainly be fluent in English. (Given the cliches about East Asians, I would not be surprised if it turned out that most of them are fluent and have actually read more Shakespeare than the median White American.)
The US has been integrating (not assimilating in the borg sense) people of various origins for about as long as it has been a thing. What you observed is part of that process.
Also, my gut feeling is that either for cultural or HBD reasons, East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I specifically meant it did little to create the impression that Musk was advancing the capabilities of humanity, as with SpaceX or Tesla. Instead he spent a decade fighting in the trenches of the culture war. Even if he had fought on my side of the culture war, unbanning my allies or banning and name-calling my opponents, I would have seen that as less useful than what he did previously.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Elon Musk’s friends
Ah, the press. Always exaggerating.
Remember 2015, when Musk was unironically used by Scott as an example of someone who was doing good effectively?
Insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, I have no excuse for not being Aubrey de Grey. Or if Aubrey de Grey doesn’t impress you much, Norman Borlaug. Or if you don’t know who either of those two people are, Elon Musk.
Back then, it could be assumed that a Grey Tribe member would admire Musk, and there was certainly much to admire. By making EVs cool, he certainly made an important contribution to the decarbonization, and the SpaceX concept of recycling rockets certainly has decreased the cost of space flight a lot.
But since then, there have been few obviously pro-social successes of his. His social media persona was not very endearing, calling random people pedophiles will not make you look a great role model. Buying Twitter did not improve things. Openly supporting election denier Trump likely cost him most of his friends outside the MAGA bubble. Now this messy breakup with Trump likely cost him his friends within MAGA.
I am sure that he still has a following of loyal fanboys, self-interested grifters, and yes-men, who will sit in silence while he lashes out against them, but with his break with Trump, I doubt that anyone with an ego of a similar size as his is anywhere near him on a social graph.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I will second your observation that permanent health damage to the mother as a side effect of pregnancy is not much talked about in my circles. I mean, I occasionally read the Guardian (strictly for the Monday math puzzles), and while they certainly have a bee in their bonnet about women's health specifically, I don't remember encountering any articles on the body horror aspect of pregnancy.
If a medication had these side effects, it would either be banned or come with a big scary warning label, but for some reason, nobody has proposed legislating requiring the penises of fertile men to be tattooed "THIS ORGAN IS KNOWN TO THE SURGEON GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE HEALTH PROBLEMS IN WOMEN INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ....".
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Nucleus Genomics just launched their "Nucleus Embryo" product yesterday, if you want to do IVF to get improved odds on the kid's genes. I'm not sure what their process is or how reliable it is, though.
Vaguely relevant (if mostly not actionable): LW on superbabies.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
You might want to consider giving kidney stones a try sometime. I had a stone twice, and in both cases the pain was so bad that I vomited. The first time, it was over in an hour but the second time, it got stuck on the way to the bladder and required surgical interventions. It is the kind of pain where you start to think what floor the waiting room of the hospital is on, and if it would be enough.
When I had my four wisdom teeth removed and the anesthesia wore of I had pain where Ibuprofen did not cut it, but Metamizole did. With the stone, I went back to the hospital in an ambulance because Metamizole did not cut it, and was on an opiate drip within an hour.
I don't know if second for second, it is worse than getting kicked in the balls though. What is really dragging you down is that it does not stop. Getting kicked in the balls every ten seconds for hours might be as bad or worse, but good luck convincing your IRB and finding volunteers for that one.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
My unpopular opinion on anything ai safety or alignment aligns with a top level comment a few weeks ago and the general skepticism some have worded out very well here.
Well, I am rather sure that there is a great rebuttal to these arguments somewhere on Less Wrong, so I remain unconvinced.
The religious fervor around this seems pretty irrational with Scott getting people over at slatestarcodex calling him names for this.
Well, the version of Pascal's wager offered by the AI safety people is that (1) the current AI boom might lead to AGI which is much smarter than humans are, and (2) that aligning such AI systems will be hard. You assign a probability to both of these, then multiply this by the QALY cost of killing all humans (or an even higher cost if you care about humanity's far future, which many do), and you get a number how seriously you should take AI x-risk.
Of course, you can simply pick your AGI probability to be 1e-50, but then I might claim that you are overconfident, and ask what other past correct predictions you have made which might make me rely on your predictions instead of everyone else's.
If you pick 1% for both numbers, then a one-in-10k chance to wipe out humanity still seems like a big fucking deal.
In Scott's last 24 non-OT posts on ACX, I have counted four AI stories (2x geoguesser, which is more "AI as a curiosity" and 2x AI 2027, which is more doom and gloom). While I am sure that some of the ACX grants go to AI safety, he is also funding plenty of other projects, which would be totally irresponsible if his p(doom) was 0.9. If this is him showing religious fervor, it is not very convincing.
I never read Yudkowsky till a few days ago, a lot of what he's said and his arc in the past two decades makes me not take him seriously.
I will concede that AI alignment is his pet thing much more than it is Scott's, and as of late he has been very bullish on p(doom). Still, I have found him to be a smart, engaging writer. Most of the ideas from the sequences could also be picked up elsewhere, but he did do a great job of communicating all these ideas and putting them in one place. For some light reading of his, see if you like HPMoR.
By and large, the ratsphere does not share his high confidence on p(doom), I think, because they were trained by their prophet to update based on the strength of arguments, not to blindly follow their prophet.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rethoric
I do not think that climate change is an x-risk. I do not even believe that climate change will necessarily flood big parts of the landmasses, likely we can handle a few meters of sea level rise the Netherlands way.
However, this is not the same as saying that it is not a big deal. The amount of population regions can feed will definitely change, and often for the worse.
Besides CO2, there are a few other arguments against ICEs. First, as long as fossil fuels are the lifeblood of transportation, the world will always be beholden to the few countries which are blessed with that resource. GWB's misadventure in Iraq was a consequence of that region having oil and thus being of strategic importance to the US and his buddies.
Then there are regional health effects of minor combustion products. I will totally grant you that ICEs have improved tremendously since the 1970s in that regard. Still, depending on where you live, my gut feeling is that these products might still make up a good fraction of a QALY for you. Even if you don't care personally, it should be apparent that society is caring more and more for these things over time. If you by a fancy new ICE car today, there is perhaps a 10% chance that you will not be allowed to drive it withing some European cities without retrofitting more exhaust cleaning in a decade.
Then you might believe that the gas prices will increase more than the electricity prices in the long run.
Also, while modern ICEs are marvels of technology which evolved to be very reliably over a century, the fact remains that fundamentally, they are complex machines. In principle, an EV could be a lot simpler. In practice, we don't know yet (apart from the battery requiring replacement at some point).
and secondly the choice to not pick a Tesla might have been justified by practicality, but let's be frank: it isn't. What it is is "Musk man bad".
Personally, I would not have bought either a Tesla or a high end German EV because I don't care for the status symbol aspect and want a car where I do not have to freak out about every minor dent. Other than that, of course people pick brands based on politics. If Apple's CEO made a statement defending Nethanyahu's operations in Gaza, of course Apple sales would plummet. If a fast-food chain sponsored a campaign to lower the age of consent to five years, they would find that most of their customers would take their business elsewhere. When Putin attacked Ukraine, Europe became a lot less interested in buying his gas, even though the gas had not changed at all.
Most tech CEOs know better than to get openly involved in partisan politics. Musk made the business decision that the goodwill of a Trump administration he had loudly backed before would be worth the hit to his brands, or at least better for him than a Harris administration he had stayed neutral about.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The genius of Musk was not to invent the electric car, there were EVs on the market before Tesla was a thing. The difference was that these cars were very clearly not performing as well as ICE cars given and more expensive.
By contrast, a Tesla is (I think) on par with high-end ICE cars in how much fun it is to drive. For example, if you wanted a car to impress women in 2014, I think you could do worse than a Tesla: not only is is as good a status symbol as a fancy German car, but you will also get bonus points with any woman worrying about climate change.
The fact that fancy German car makers now produce electric vehicles is mostly due to Tesla's success.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that likening the rationalists treatment of AI to the anti-finasteride crowd is a bit unfair to the former.
Now, AI has been a theme with rationalists from the very beginning. It would not be totally unfair to say that our prophet wrote the sequences (e.g. A Human's Guide to Words) as an instrumental goal to be able to discuss AI without getting bogged down in pointless definitional arguments. That was almost two decades ago, in the depth of the AI winter.
Scott Alexander wrote about GPT when it was still GPT-2, it was the first time I heard about it. It is fair to say that AI is the favorite topic on LessWrong, with Zvi minutely tracking the progress with the same dedication previously allocated to COVID. Generally, the rationalists are bullish on capabilities and bearish on alignment. But I feel that Eliezer's "dying with dignity strategy" haha-only-serious April's fool is overconfident in a way which is not typical of LW. In practical terms, it does not matter much if you think that p(ASI) is 0.15 and p(doom) is 0.1 or if you think they are 0.95 and 0.9 respectively.
We do not have a comprehensive theory of intelligence. We have noticed the skulls of the once who have predicted that AI would never beat a chess master, succeed at go, write a readable text, create a painting which most people can not distinguish from a human work of art and so on. This does not mean that AI will reach every relevant goalpost, reverse stupidity is not intelligence, after all.
We are in the situation where we observe a rocket launch without the benefits of any knowledge of rocketry or physics. Some people claimed the rocket would never reach an altitude of more than twice its own length, and they were very much proven wrong. Others are claiming that it would never reach 1km, and they were likewise proven wrong. From this, we can not conclude that it will obviously accelerate until it reaches Andromeda, nor can we conclude that it will not reach Andromeda.
Wrt the AI 2027, the vibes I remember getting from browsing through it is that it mostly Simulacrum level two, and came across as the least honest things which Scott ever co-authored. The whole national security angle is very much not what keeps LW up at night -- if China builds aligned ASI, they have a whole light cone to settle. What will happen to the US will just be a minor footnote in history. But the authors recognized that their target audience -- policymakers in DC -- will likely be alienated by their real arguments about x-risk. By contrast, national security is a topic which has been on the mind of the DC crowd for a century, so natsec was recruited as an argument-as-a-soldier.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
This is a good test, but it only tells us that the Founders were fine with the destructive power of grapeshot in civilian hands when it came with the costs and portability, etc of a cannon. A fragmentation grenade will have a similar destructiveness as grapeshot, but it will also have much-increased portability, will be easily concealed and vastly cheaper, and can easily operated by a single person. So the trade-offs for society are very different.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
To be fair, Paine lived in a very different age. In his day, to compete in the Atlantic against the great colonial powers was not on the table for the US. If the Brits decided to invade again, a fleet to block them would not have been cost-effective. Instead, they would have been able to make uncontested landfall somewhere in North America. Of course, with a supply line spanning the Atlantic on sail ships, they would then have been at a disadvantage compared to the US in a land war.
Even today, I would argue that most of the naval forces of the US are not to keep the continental US safe from maritime invasion. Land based missile bases and a few spotter ships or planes would suffice for that.
The US navy is all about force projection. A airbase is superior to an aircraft carrier in every regard, except that you can not simply move your airbase to the South Pacific. Defending democracy on the other side of the world was probably not what Paine had in mind for the US.
To use civilian ships for warfare seems not entirely outlandish either, while purpose-designed warships will certainly offer superior performance, filling a merchant ship cannons is still a reasonable thing to do. What I am much more doubtful about is the use of turning over just some of the space on the ship to cannons. Traditionally, warships have dedicated most of their space to propulsion and armament, which is why they make very shitty merchant vessels. Smoothbore cannons do not exactly operate themselves, and the sailors will be quite busy navigating, so you need dedicated personnel to operate the guns (and the bilge pumps, for that matter). Unless you are also paying that merchant vessel to keep an extra crew of a few hundred to operate the guns, that 50 guns will be worthless.
Paying them to only carry a small fraction of the guns their ship could carry is even worse for warfare, because that means showing up to a rifle fight with a handgun. (It might still work out to scare of the occasional pirate, though.)
I think a better approach would have been to pay merchant vessels to have gunports so they can quickly be retrofitted with cannons (and the crews to man them) if the need arises.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend.
While I do not know the specifics, based on priors I would guess that this involved a suspected gang member being at risk of imminent deportation to some El Salvador mega prison. As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.
--
I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations. One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it. Or that they meant 'state of the art military firearms, in perpetuity', because surely nobody would beat any tyrant today with flintlock rifles. Or even that they meant weapon systems to wage war in general, from man-portable antitank weapons to stealth bombers and nukes.
Previous case law has extended 2A to cover cartridges, revolvers and semiautomatics, but not automatics or explosive weapons. As far as the original purpose of the second (to enable the population to resist a tyrant like the US did during the revolutionary war) is concerned, it is very much moot. If the tyrant fields a tank, then the Americans owning what is currently legal for them to own, AR15s or no AR15s, will lose very badly in a direct confrontation. To give them the firepower to even have a fighting chance against tanks or airplanes would also give them the power to effortlessly take out school busses or jumbo jets, and this is a trade-off which few people will favor.
It should also be pointed out that the current SCOTUS has been otherwise quite Republican-friendly. They overturned Roe (which to be fair was always a stretch) and they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president. I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I think that there are two distinct groups which value high house prices.
One group are investors. At the end of the day, they profit from the fact that land is in limited supply, and people have been moving towards cities for centuries, thus steadily increasing demand. The proper way to fix this is a Georgian land value tax. If any value you gain from owning land is 100% taxed in perpetuity, then the intrinsic value of the land for its owner becomes zero. (Realistically, one would impose taxes which would increase towards 100% over a few decades, so present-day investors might still reap 20 years worth of rent or so. This is certainly more than the kind of people who invest in goods with perfect supply inelasticity deserve.)
The other group are home owners who would prefer to stay apart from less wealthy people for good or bad reasons, the (home-) NIMBYs. While I am not very sympathetic to the NIMBYs, I can sort-of see their point. If you bought a house situated a quarter of an hour drive from the city half a lifetime ago, you have every reason not to be happy if the urban sprawl swallows your neighborhood and your suburban home gets surrounded by high-rises. Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
I think that the dynamic between these two groups is not always the same. To complicate things further, landowners generally also own the buildings on their lots, and depending on the type of building their rent could increase or decrease with further urbanization. If you own a hotel building, you will likely be more enthusiastic about urban development than if you own single-family homes you rent to wealthy people.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Take for example the IUEC. From WP:
The IUEC forbids modular construction of elevators, preventing the kind of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world, leading to higher elevator costs in the United States. The union limits entry of new workers into the field, and has constrained the ability of firms to use new technology to streamline elevator production in the United States.
Data indicates that elevator-related work is the highest paid trade in the United States, with a median wage $47.60 per hour in 2021.
See also this article (found with google, I can not vouch for the source):
Smith estimates that a new six-stop elevator that costs $170,000 to install in North America would run $60,000 or less across the Atlantic. Operating cost differences are even steeper. New York City guidelines advise affordable housing developers to budget $7,500 for annual elevator maintenance, with private housing operators in New York and Washington quoting similar numbers. This is several times European costs: one German firm, for instance, offers midrise maintenance contracts for about $450 per year.
I will grant you that building costs are not the biggest impediment to building, they come after high land costs and NIMBY, but they are very much part of the problem.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Rather than fear that the AI will work, the fear seems to be that management will buy into the hype and fire everyone, regardless of whether it works or not.
I think that this is justified. There is a reason why tropes such as the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert or the Boss from BOFH exist. In a lot of non-tech companies, non-technical people are in charge of IT management. Often, this attracts a certain sort of people. "We are using tech from a decade ago and it is working okay for our needs" is no way to bedazzle the board or future directors. While IT might be best seen as some more complex version of plumbing which should be mostly unnoticed by the users when it works well, your average head of IT has delusions of grandeur which go well beyond that of the head of facility management.
For example, anyone who understands the basics of the blockchain will immediately notice that it does not offer anything interesting to 99% of non-scammy enterprises. Luckily, your IT manager can count on the probability of a board member understanding what the blockchain is to be very small, so they can sell a fairy tale of the block chain being the future of IT, point out how people got rich from bitcoin, and how there is money on the street just waiting to be picked up, and it with their plan United Dairy Producers Inc will get a slice of the cake. And they can also depend on consultants popping up who will happily sell them some repackaged open source blockchain software.
While blockchain might serve as a baseline for "empty hype", AI certainly has a non-zero potential for most corporations. But unlike the blockchain, there is no decisive first-mover advantage for adopting AI tech for non-tech companies, if your archenemy Dairy and Cheese United adopts some tech a year ahead of you, it seems unlikely that they will bankrupt you in that time because they just reduced their accounting costs to zero.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
Citation needed.
I think that "tens of millions of dollars" is not a good measure for potential savings. A more appropriate way to look at savings would be to consider the fraction of the total costs of the company.
Software consultants and vendors of enterprise resource planning software have been plaguing advising all kinds of businesses since the early 90s. I find it very unlikely that there is any sector which could save ten percents of its costs by just using Excel. Stuff like electronic inventory management or customer relations databases are standard for pretty much any business larger than a lemonade stand.
The lowest-hanging fruits left are probably more on the order of 1% of the total costs, and I think that it is reasonable for companies to be wary there. Consultants have been known in the past to overpromise and underdeliver, and that shiny ERP solution which is supposed to take care of all of your software needs might end up being a software hellscape which requires an expensive specialist to run and only does half of what you want it to do.
I will grant you that in large organisations, departments often become fiefdoms whose bosses employ a lot of people simply to show how important their department is, not because they are needed. But for most organizations, these oversized departments came to be long after the invention of spreadsheet software, and at the core they are indicative of a political, not a technological problem.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
It looks like we both agree that if Unikowsky had posted his article directly on the motte under a new user account, that would have been fine.
What we disagree on is how much introduction should be required when a motte user quotes a source. My position is that as I am already reading takes from random persons on the internet, if a source is not contextualized (or I do not trust the poster's contextualization of the source), I will simply treat it with the same level of skepticism I would have for a new motte poster.
I have a similarly dim view of people who link to long youtube videos for supporting context in lieu of their own arguments.
Total agreement here. They are the worst.
(Second worst are links directly to twitter threads, which depending on how Musk is feeling might only show me the first tweet and tell me to create an account.)
This suggests the OP is conducting a bait-and-switch argument, using Unikowksy's position as the opening bait (neutral observer on deportation process) for the concluding switch (deportation is a part of Trumpian oppression that must be resisted).
I browsed a bit through the substack, and it seems that at least 50% of the articles are Trump/CW related (and generally Democrat-leaning), 10% are about LLMs in judicial processes, with some other legal topics being sprinkled in here and there. The main difference is that while @sockpuppet2 with his Mecken quote points out that the deportees deserve due process even if they are as guilty as sin, the substack focuses more on the fact that many of them might not actually be Tren de Aragua, but simply people with unrelated tattoos.
Nah, collect the taxes in countries where the assets are. If people want to invest in China or India or Somalia instead, let these countries decide if they want to tax them and how much.
More options
Context Copy link