quiet_NaN
10hr ago
To be fair, during the preparations of Oct-7, Hamas actually passed the Marshmallow test.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
- 1 turn signals: no. Mirror and shoulder check are required, though.
- 2 red lights: fucking yes for motor vehicles, no for bicycles. Driving over a traffic light which just turned red (German humor: "kirschgelb"=cherry yellow) can happen, driving a car past a light which had turned red a while ago is a high crime.
- 3 speed limits: No. Strictly keeping the speed limits is not required. In Germany, going less than 20km/h over the speed limit will typically result in a small fine, but no risk of your driving license.
- 4 driving left: Changing lanes is a maneuver with a non-zero risk. If I am overtaking one truck and can see that 200m ahead, I will have to overtake another truck, I will typically stay on the left. If I see that a car behind me wants to go faster and it is 300m, I will typically switch lanes. The fact than a driver who changes lanes aggressively and is willing to not keep appropriate distances between cars can overtake me on the right lane does not mean that owe them a similar behavior so that they can overtake me on the left lane. People who react to a car in front of them going slow by not keeping a safe distance to that car clearly lack the emotional maturity required for a driving license.
- 5 cutting people off who do not let you in: Only if there is no safer option. If your acceleration strip is ending, and your choices are to cut off a car a bit or slam the brakes to let it pass and then end up with a low speed at the end of the acceleration strip, then make them brake a bit, sure. If the situation is that you are quickly approaching a truck and would have to change lanes to overtake it, just brake.
- 6 braking rules. No. We are already talking about which traffic rules as written are optional.
Any other possible driving scissor statements?
- Bikes need to be passed with a limited relative speed and enough clearance. If you can not safely pass a bike, keep driving behind it.
- The motor of an old car losing a bit of oil is ok.
- Public roads are not race tracks. Drivers should go to the bathroom before they hit the roads to avoid frequently seen racing under pressure.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
The requirements for a top level post in the CW thread are notably lower than the requirements for a doctorate in international affairs. Original thought is fine, but so is paraphrasing/citing/linking takes of others.
We do not require a Scott-Alexander-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know 40 hour full depth investigation.
Ideally, you would wait until reputable (in a bounded-distrust sense) media report the facts, then quote or paraphrase them. If it is big news, it will be reported by everyone, so you can check multiple sources, from the New York fucking Times to Al-Jazeera. Provide a few links. Some of the reported facts will be contested by comments, some may even turn out to be wrong. This is ok, but it is still useful to have a shared base of claims or (ideally) agreed-upon facts before the arguments start. If the top level comment for Oct-7 is "BREAKING: HAMAS KILLED A BUNCH OF ISRAELIS. LIKE A LOT. MORE DETAILS TO FOLLOW", then the comments will have to establish what actually happened.
The competitive advantage of the motte is not that it can report what is true faster than twitter, nor that it is better at reporting facts than the news media. The advantage is that it offers takes from a broad spectrum, at least some of which are typically interesting. But good takes can only appear once the facts are half-way settled. Sure, any idiot with a twitter account can reply to "BREAKING: IDF BOMBING IRAN" with either "Fucking Jews are trying to start World War 3 again" or "Bloody camel-fucking antisemites had it coming". But all the interesting takes, like "This was mostly theater for the benefit of Netanyahu's domestic audience, and here is why ..." or "The nuclear weapons angle is a distraction, by taking out a few military leaders Israel managed to reshape the landscape of Iranian politics, as ..." or "Actually, this is a direct consequence of a recent development of the Ukraine war, where ..." will only happen after the facts are in and the posters have had a day to think on them and how they tie into their world view.
A decent current news top level post is basically providing a canvas for takes.
Another low-hanging fruit is reports of reactions by relevant parties. What did Trump say about it? Did Putin react? Again, this is typically widely reported.
Then, you might want to link this to culture war topics. What takes are trending in the cesspits of social media? Are the wokes condemning it as colonialist violence or something? Is the anti-nuclear crowd celebrating?
Then, you might already offer some takes of your own, or link to takes from elsewhere you found interesting, but personally I consider this optional for top level posts on news topics which are sure to spark discussion.
I confess that I do not track which news stories are skipped by the motte because nobody can be arsed to spend a quarter of an hour to write a decent top level post on them. My suspicion is that we would not have skipped the attacks on Iran, but feel free to point out such news stories, or instances of people having gotten a warning/ban after making a low effort post (say, a link to the Guardian, plus a one paragraph quote, plus a two sentence take) for stuff which sparked a lot of discussion.
I see this as a coordination problem. We do not have a system to assign news items to posters, so you will only want to tackle news items when you are confident that you are not preempting another user who is in the middle of a more detailed writeup. I would propose a system of sliding standards. In the first 24h of a news item being reported, I would expect someone putting in a solid twenty minutes of citing multiple news sources. After 36h, if it is an important CW news item (e.g. the first Trump tariff story, not the tenth), I propose top level posters should get away with a low effort post (source+quote+two sentences).
quiet_NaN
1d ago
At this point it just signals your support for Israel.
I should clarify that I support Israels right to exist (just like I support Belgium's right to exist), but am very much not a supporter of the current Israeli government. Apart from Iran, Netanyahu was the biggest ally Hamas had before Oct-7. His strategy of "let us support the religious nutjobs who definitely want to murder all Jews so that the Palestinian cause will be divided" backfired spectacularly. I am totally bewildered by the fact that the Israeli people are still suffering him to lead them.
Now, Hamas did try very hard to convince the world that they need to be wiped from the face of the Earth, and they certainly convinced me of that. If a few thousand Gazan civilians died in the process of wiping Hamas out, that would be sad, but I would not be very upset by it, as a German I understand that sometimes you will be accidentally killed in a bomb blast simply because your parent's generation voted for murderous nutjobs. My problem with the IDF is that from what I can see, that they are just dicking around, going in and out of Gaza, rescuing a hostage here, shooting one there, dropping a bomb on a refugee camp whenever the most senior not-yet-assassinated Hamas leader is there, or starving another thousand out of which exactly zero will be Hamas fighters. Unlike many, I do not think that the IDF is trying to genocide the Gazans out of existence, they know all too well how effective genocides work and this ain't it. But fuck if I know what they think their theory of victory is. "We just have to kill a few more Hamas fighters before their resistance will finally collapse!"? GWB's invasion of Afghanistan seems positively sane by comparison -- at least he had some plan to win the Afghan's hearts and minds through something other than morale bombing. Needlessly to say, if the point of the IDF operations in Gaza is to make the IDF feel less bad about their colossal failure on Oct-7, I am a lot less willing to cut them slack wrt civilian casualties.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think the heat dissipation will be a similar problem with a depth of 50m. You will need active cooling either way, and the facility can be trivially disabled by attacking either the surface structures or the power lines.
The reason why you put your weapons program in the underground is not that you will be impervious from surface attacks. It is so that surface attacks will not set you back very much.
Fans and pumps for cooling, or electricity are not a bottleneck for the Iranian weapons program. Their bottlenecks are definitely gas centrifuges and enriched uranium, plus possibly engineers to design their bombs and raw uranium.
Also, if the Iran manages to put Israel in a situation where their best option is to be the first country in 80 years to use a nuclear weapon in anger, that itself would be a big win on their part. In retrospect, the obvious place for a nuclear facility would be deep under Tehran, so that when someone nukes you, they will also murder a few millions Muslims. It is certainly where Hamas would have placed such a facility.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Great!
There is a place where news junkies can get unsourced, low effort news reports in close to real time. That place is twitter. The thing which makes the motte useful is that it is not twitter.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
putting American lives in danger by publishing
You are making that sound like a bad thing. If it is truthful reporting (and your verb "to publish" seems to indicate that you were not contesting that), then it is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I will grant you that there are some things which are net negative when published. For example, knowing what the nuclear launch codes are will not contribute to the readers having a more accurate map of the territory. Likewise, knowing which fetishes some celebrity is into will normally not update the world view of the readers to be worth the damage to the privacy.
Your sentence is really analogous to "When the teacher reported the dad who was fucking his kid to the police, she destroyed a happy family."
Our greatest ally
You sardonic phrasing makes it look like Israel and its inhabitants are pursuing a singular purpose. Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long. If Bibi had published a press release where he praised the Americans for their support, that would indeed be a faux pas. But the utility function of reporters is different from the utility function of governments, both in Israel and elsewhere, for very good reasons.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
As long as we are banning modes of transportation, why not just ban driving in cities instead?
Most of the cars in cities are carrying only one passenger. Even if they carry groceries, the amount of groceries they carry would often fit in a cargo bike. And as you point out, public transport is always an option. For people who need to transport heavy goods, there is already a solution in the pedestrian zones: just have certain hours where cars and trucks are allowed to drive in (slowly), for the purpose of transportation.
Electric bikes are reasonably fast and likely have a lower TCO than cars. We will also free a lot of space currently dedicated to cars, and improve the quality of life for people living next to big roads.
People who still want to own cars can just park them outside the city.
I am not actually suggesting this, but it sounds more reasonable to me than banning bikes.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think the risk to pedestrians seems minimal and bikes should just fully share the sidewalk with pedestrians. Bikes hitting people is most likely to ruin both people's day, but cars hitting bikes is most likely to ruin someone's life.
I think this is a terrible idea. On roads, we have traffic rules which enable everyone to go at reasonable speed while still maintaining safety. On sidewalks, pedestrians are not required to follow any traffic rules. This means that a safe-ish speed to pass a pedestrian will always be quite low.
I agree that bike-pedestrian collisions are unlikely to kill anyone directly, but that does not mean that they are not bad. For an elderly, a broken bone requiring hospitalization can easily mean the beginning of the end, costing them multiple QALYs.
Then there are unintentional consequences. If you force bikes to the sidewalk, effectively halving the speed of responsible bikers, that will cause more people to drive cars instead. As someone who occasionally drove a car in a medium-sized European city, I don't particularly like having bikes ahead of me, they generally are slower than cars and their vulnerability means that I have to take more care for overtaking them than I would for another car. But most of the time I lost in traffic was actually lost to traffic jams which were caused by cars.
Driving cars is fairly regulated, while riding bikes is not. This means that there are a lot of reckless bikers out there. Ignoring traffic rules around cars is limited by a process called natural selection -- if you keep running red lights without checking the traffic, that is a problem which will solve itself. On the sidewalk, the cost of reckless biking would primarily fall on others.
If we had a way to consistently enforce a sidewalk speed limit, I would support giving bikers the option to use the sidewalk at speeds up to 10km/h. There are certainly times when I would gladly have made use of that option.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Thanks for the link. Given that the ships in that graph were rather small, I tried to calculate the force per ton for a TI-class supertanker. To my surprise, it turns out that the number I get out (F/m=P/v/m=37MW/(30.6km/h * 441kT)=10N/T) is rather similar to the barge.
From physics, I would have assumed that the friction of a ship has roughly two components, one which is proportional to the cross-section of the underwater parts of the hull (and to the velocity squared) and one which is proportional to the area of the underwater hull (and to the velocity). Notably, both of these are decidedly sublinear to the displaced water volume, so going from a 1kT barge to a 441kT supertanker should really lower friction.
Now, it could be that the 37MW are the absolute maximum rating of the engine, and that in normal operations it used only a fraction of that power at top speed, or that the conversion of the engine power into a forward force is inefficient for some reason, but I do not have a great explanation.
I notice I am confused.
The other curious thing about that table is that once your railroad track has an incline, the story becomes much different. For example, with an incline of 1%, you will tithe 100N/T to gravity, regardless of your velocity.
But we can also invert that. An incline of 0.1% (one meter per kilometer) imposes a force of 10N/T from gravity. Per the plot, a 60ton railroad car on such an incline (which would not even be noticeable to the naked eye) would (once we push it a bit to overcome static friction) accelerate until it reaches a velocity of 150km/h. Now, if you try to tell me that 40 foot container filled with water falling door forward out of a plane would reach a terminal velocity of 150km/h, I would already find that unlikely.
I would like to roll a will save to disbelieve, please.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I will grant you that shipping within the continental US is mostly not done using waterways. Part of it are historical reasons. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869, while the Panama canal, was only finished in 1914. Before that, oceanic coast-to-coast shipping had to run around South America, which is a big detour.
Now, if someone needs to ship a lot of bulk cargo (like coal) from New York City to Miami or even Los Angeles, I would guess that in theory (asides from the Jones act) it might still be cheaper to use ships. However, NYC is not known for its coal mines, so any coal which ends up there was likely transported there from the hinterlands by railroad. If you already have your cargo neatly loaded onto railway cars, reloading it on a ship (and then potentially unloading it back onto railroads on the other side) is likely not worth it just to take advantage of the lower shipping costs per kilometer for boats, if your distance is only a few thousand kilometers. And as you point out, there are effects of scale -- if half of your cargo goes to landlocked destinations, then investing in railways seems like a better idea.
I guess the polar opposite of the US in that regard is Japan, which famously consists of multiple islands. If half of your cargo goes from one island to another, it makes sense to focus on ports and use railroads for passengers and getting the goods from the ports to the landlocked locations only.
Unfortunately those markets are too small to sustain an actual shipbuilding industry which requires significant economy of scale.
The three big shipbuilding nations, in order, are China, South Korea, and Japan. Of these, Japan will likely use transport ships a lot domestically, and I can imagine China doing likewise to connect coastal cities separated by thousands of kilometers.
But looking at South Korea, a 600 km x 200 km peninsula, I do not see them doing a lot of domestic transportation over the ocean when the US with its many thousands of kilometers of coastlines does not. To be honest, I am also not convinced that the ships which ferry containers between Hokkaido and Honshu are the same ships as the ones which ferry containers between Shenzhen and Atlanta. Larger ships certainly offer better fuel efficiency, but might also require deeper harbors and might be more expensive to load and unload. So naively, I would expect that the perfect ship size to carry containers half around the world will not be perfect ship size to carry containers for a few 100 km.
In short, I do not see why you would require a thriving local market for transport ships to build ships for transporting goods over the ocean. Sure, it might help to start small and then scale up, but the only strict requirement is access to a sea which is sufficiently connected to the world's oceans.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Shipbuilding was made obsolete by railroads and trucks
I think you could not be more wrong. While I did not find any neutral specific numbers, my gut feeling is that shipping a container by railway is several times more expensive than by container ship.
If you look at a map of Eurasia, you will find that the shortest single-transportation mode from Shenzhen to Amsterdam is over land. Yet China does not ship to Europe by rail, but uses container ships, which need to travel a lot further. Some of it will be geostrategic considerations (you do not need to rely on foreign states for transit, and if the EU instates tariffs, then it is a lot easier to redirect your ships than building a railway to Mexico), but most of it comes down to costs.
A container ship can load upwards of 5k (TEU) containers, and the only part which will see substantial wear and tear are the propulsion system. If you have an ocean somewhere, you are all set. Sure, you will pay a hefty premium to go through the Suez canal -- from naive considerations it should be priced slightly below what it would cost you to go around the horn of Africa, but all the rest of the way (excluding the harbors) is basically provided for free by Earth, and international treaties prevent states through which you pass from making you pay taxes for the most part.
By contrast, a freight train might typically have 150 cars. If we assume four (20-foot, TEU) containers per car, that is six hundred containers. Both the engine and every axle of every car will experience wear. Unlike waterways, railway tracks do not occur naturally on Earth, but need to be painstakingly constructed. To make matters worse, land is not always very suited for building railroads. Mountains in particular make building railroads much more expensive. The tracks will certainly also experience wear, and whoever owns them will bill you for the privilege of using them. There is plenty of international water, but almost no international land, so your train will have to reach an understanding with the states you pass through, which will likely involve you paying money (taxes, union wages, etc) and might also come with regulations which prohibit you from running your diesel engine on the cheapest fuel it can take.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Well, chainmail is famously is famously very labor-expensive to produce. I would estimate that the main market is reenactors and LARPers. I would further assume that most LARPers do not actually expect that their life will depend on their mail's ability to defeat Bodkin arrows. So some of them will reasonably decide that they do not need to spend half their salary on mail made from steel rings which were forged shut, and mail from aluminum rings which were merely bent shut -- or even latex printed with a chainmail pattern -- will serve their purposes well enough.
If high-end chain mail was a billion dollar industry, I think that its production would be much more automated and cheaper -- having a machine assemble the rings and use a laser to forge them shut sounds difficult, but not the most difficult engineering feat humanity has accomplished -- and one might be able to buy high-end chainmail for merely a thousand dollars per square meter or so eventually.
From the stills of the video, I can not determine if the rings are actually closed or not. For the price of the product, I hope they are. They will see a lot less stress than in combat, but a medieval knight (or the inheritor of their mail) would certainly have had access to an armorer who could replace a broken ring, while the average American is very unlikely to find someone to do so below unit cost if a grill eventually defeats the grill scrubber. (The silicone might also not last for decades, but if the company stays afloat for that long, it could offer replacement parts for that at a low price.)
The 75$ price tag means that this product is targeted at enthusiasts, people who saw the video and care about US manufacturing. (From what the guy said when I was searching for a picture of the mail, it seems that their mail is partly sourced from India, though.) Niche audiences famously are willing to pay a hefty premium compared to the mainstream.
If chainmail grill scrubbers ever come to dominate the market, it will be because cheap knock-offs from China are offering a similar performance to the US ones at a small fraction of the price.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
the rainbow from God’s promise not to destroy the world again
When dealing with lawful entities such as YHWH, it is always good to read the fine print.
From Genesis 9, NIV:
13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. (My emphasis, not His.)
One does not need to be a rabbi or lawyer to not that He emphatically does not categorically promise not to destroy all life, just that he will not do so using floods.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I remember Scott posting some twitter screenshots which had the UI text turned to some East Asian language. When he was asked about it in the comments, he basically said that this was so that twitter would show him trending tweets in that language, with which he then would not engage because he could not read them.
Short of not having a twitter account, this is probably the best way to prevent the algorithm from tempting you with outrage bait.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Sure, you can just define women as "people born with pussies" and men as "people born with dicks".
However, I would argue that this is not exactly how these words are used in broader society. Your average six-year-old has a clear conception of which clusters in thingspace the words "men" and "woman" refer to, but are likely not aware of the exact differences in genitalia.
Sometimes, subsequent theories form neat cascades. When you do taxonomy, you might start with the phenomenology of extant animals, then include fossil records, and finally use genetic similarity as a great proxy for generations since last common ancestor. In each step, you might have to revise things a bit here and there, but mostly the shape of the cluster stays intact.
Likewise, if you go from Arrhenius acids to Brønsted–Lowry acids, you just generalized your definition in a useful way.
Contrast this to going from from Brønsted–Lowry acids to Lewis acids. While there is some overlap, these two definitions very much do not try to point at the same cluster in thingspace.
Now, you can argue that gender is such a neat cascade. As a kid, you start out with a vague definition centered around pronouns, then you learn about genitalia and use that as a definition, and finally you learn about X and Y chromosomes.
But I would argue that it does not work that way. Roughly, there are three different spheres where gender/sex is relevant, general social sphere (pronouns, bathrooms), sexual (whatever floats the boats of your partners, perhaps social passing and genitalia) and reproduction/medical (genitalia, chromosomes, disorders). Now, for 90% of the population,all three spheres agree on their sex/gender, but there are certainly cases where this is not the case.
Luckily, gender for the purpose of sexuality does not need to concern society at large. If someone identifies as a silly gender like "attack helicopter" in bed and finds someone who likes to fuck attack helicopters, that is great for them and their partner and ok for society. And if a prospective partner does not like the shape of their M230 in their pants, that is for them to negotiate and not for society to regulate any more than it regulates styles of pubic hair.
This leaves the social sphere and the biological sphere. There are good reasons not to try to unify both spheres. For example, in most societies, it is considered very impolite to pull down the pants of strangers to find out by what pronouns you should address them. From a pure biological point, XY's with CAIS are infertile men, not infertile women, but only a complete asshole would use that reasoning to tell a XY kid with CAIS to shower with the boys.
We solve this by separating sex and gender, and having one word "(biologically) female/male" for the one property, and another, "(cis/trans-) man/woman" for the other.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Good words refer to clusters in thingspace.
In Scott's article, this is a shared understanding between "you" and King Solomon, because both are assumed to have read the sequences. Both can happily agree on a definition of "hair" at least as long as no disputed example (such as the hair on a coconut) becomes relevant.
The thing with thingspace is that it has a really high dimensionality, and often people do not care about all of the axis. Solomon is basically saying "for the projection of thingspace I am interested in, it makes sense to classify a whale as dag.
In mathematics, you can really build your definitions bottom-up, so that new definitions only contain stuff already defined (as well as pre-agreed syntax, such as quantors). In all other human endeavors, not so much. Every definition is its own can of worms, and it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
They actually don't know what a woman is.
Who are them which you mean? Are they in the room with us right now?
If you mean the LGBT* movement, I think you will find that they have plenty of cis-female members and allies. Surely these would know what it means to be a woman?
If you mean m2f trans people, you might be right that their idea of what a woman is might be different from the median idea of womanhood expressed by ciswomen in systematic ways. For example, it might be that for your warhammer nerd, rather than being driven to pursue some high platonic ideal of womanhood centered around social connections and care work has autogynophilia -- the thought of having boobs turns her on. Not that I find anything wrong with that. By contrast, I would expect there to be an anti-correlation between being trans and being unconditionally asexual, because if you are a man driven to do care work, that is a totally valid occupation for men today, and if you are a woman wanting to fix car engines, that is likewise fine. (Giant caveat here is that as a cis-by-default, I might not get people for whom gender is a big deal. Presumably, there are trans people for whom their transness is completely divorced from anything sexual, who knew that people were using the wrong pronouns for them based on the role models of men and women they observed at age eight, long before they even learned what the naughty bits were and how they worked.) Still, the autogynophile conception of woman has some significant intersection with the cis conception, I think. People being attracted to you and engaging in costly signaling to persuade you to have sex with them is not a universal experience of womanhood, but still a rather defining one, I imagine.
If we propose that any definition of womanhood should at least encompass all the adult female humans who have not explicitly rejected that label, then that definition of womanhood will by necessity be very broad. Sure, it will encompass the kind stay-at-home mum as a central example, but it will also include Margret Thatcher, car mechanics, butch lesbians, your odd XX warhammer nerd, nymphomaniacs, dominas, ruthless businesswomen, and so on. It would be really bad style to tell that car mechanic that she is not feminine enough to deserve the label woman. And once that is accepted, I think it would also be bad style to police the conduct of trans-women more restrictively. "Yes, Tina is a woman despite being a warhammer nerd, but you see, she was born with a uterus. You were not, so you will need to try to find a more suitable hobby before calling yourself a woman."
quiet_NaN
6d ago
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.
quiet_NaN
6d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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.
One data point is Shalit, for whom Nethanyahu paid with 1027 Arabs in 2011. Of course, this was a terrible decision on Israel's part: releasing 280 terrorists serving life sentences will have expected costs much higher than a single Israeli life. But likely Netanyahu needed a cheap political win at the time or something.
With all the hostages taken on Oct-7, the market value of Israelis has really crumbled to the point where 200 Arabs are exchanged for for four female IDF soldiers.
(Arguably, the most valuable contribution an IDF soldier could ever hope to make to Israel's wars is to suicide when captured. Most soldiers can never hope to personally neutralize 100 enemies, but a captured soldier can prevent 100 enemies from being un-neutralized.)
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