ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
4d ago
Before his death: Company is worth 3.86 million dollars.
Literally the one second that you're calculating taxes: Company is worth 6.86 million dollars (or if they had planned properly and did the algebra, 16.78 million)
After his death: Company is worth 3.86 million dollars.
They could have set it up so that some external entity A) held the insurance policy, and B) had the obligation to destroy the shares once obtained. If they had, the second entity would obviously be worth zero dollars (because its assets match its liabilities perfectly) and the normal business would be worth 3.86M throughout.
Or if they had structured it as a survivor's benefit, so that Thomas got the money and the obligation to buy Michael out.
Or, or, or...
The intent was clear. Just let people make agreements without hopping through hoops.
ulyssessword
4d ago
The IRS, on the other hand, argued that the value should be 6.86 million (the 3.86 million valued before+3 million that was about to be paid out),
Simple, they should've just got a 0.77 * (3 + 3.86) = 5.28 million dollar insurance policy instead, so his estate could get 77% of the value and the business could stay together. Oh wait, then they would need a 0.77 * (5.28 + 3.86) = 7.04 million dollar policy...
Doing the algebra, they should've taken out a 12.92 million dollar policy (plus some extra for the taxes?) so that the business doesn't have to sell anything off while his estate gets 77% of the business. That makes perfect sense. /s
ulyssessword
6d ago
IIRC female hiring managers have stronger anti-woman biases than male hiring managers do. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true for jurors as well.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Why is there this special carve out to discriminate against men?
Who cares?
That's a literal question: Which people care about men being discriminated against, how much do they care about it, and what can they do based on those feelings?
Men's Rights activism is a powerless joke, and equal rights activism has died off and been replaced by a dozen individual interest groups. The people that care don't matter, and the people that matter don't care.
ulyssessword
7d ago
If an algorithmic system is consistent and has limited inputs, then it doesn't really matter if it's completely blackboxed. You can just rerun the analysis with slightly-changed inputs to find what it decides. Hopefully that results in mostly-smooth results on simple categories, but a illegible AI might be more understandable than a lying human regardless.
ulyssessword
8d ago
I don't want AI making hiring decisions, [...] or deciding verdicts in criminal trials. Anything that helps prevent that (even if imperfect and incomplete) is a good thing in my view.
What's better about a person making those decisions? The criteria I can think of (accuracy, speed, interpretability/legibility, compliance with standards) don't always favor human decisionmakers.
(I don't want anyone monitoring what I write on the internet for wrongthink, so I'm with you there)
ulyssessword
12d ago
A recent headline here was:
Government delayed [COVID] lockdowns even though it knew the virus was spreading "exponentially"
No shit, that's what viruses do. What's the doubling time? What are the current conditions? What do those data points say about the near-term future?
ulyssessword
12d ago
Yup, as happened in 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2021. It's not a rare event, it just never lined up perfectly before now.
ulyssessword
12d ago
Six years is a term and a half under normal circumstances. Trudeau called an election mid-pandemic (when he was only two years into the four year term) because he (correctly) thought he was at peak popularity at that time. If that election hadn't happened and nothing else had changed, we would have been half a year into a Conservative majority, so good call, I guess.
ulyssessword
13d ago
Presidential Ballot Access: Ohio Edition
Semi-related: The date of the upcoming Canadian federal election.
By statute, Canadian elections are held on the third Monday of October, unless they aren't. Also, MPs only get a pension if they serve for six years. The problem? The third Monday of October 2019 (two elections ago) was the 21st, and the third Monday of October 2025 will be the 20th. The ruling Liberal party has put forward a bill to push it back by a week , to "not conflict with Diwali". Of course, 22 Liberal (and 58 other) members reaching eligibility would have nothing to do with that, particularly when the Liberals are expected to lose a devastating amount of seats.
Why didn't they see this coming in 2007, when they set the fixed dates? The pension rule was already 22 years old at that point, so it's not like it was unforeseeable.
ulyssessword
17d ago
Last I heard, it was because black women chose black obstetricians, and being in a situation where you give birth with a doctor other than your first choice indicated some sort of problem (usually, complications that required a non-racially-filtered specialist).
It's also why home births are so safe in some studies: if they become dangerous, they become hospital births.
ulyssessword
20d ago
How about a "right to retreat"? If you decide to leave and there isn't a safe route, that's the blockade's fault. They're still free to block the road, but they can't surround and attack vehicles.
ulyssessword
20d ago
Alright, so what would be a “good sign”?
Assuming that the evidence was genuinely unclear...
Communicate that in an unambiguous way, and find him not guilty. If necessary, explain the presumption of innocence and lay out exactly how and why the evidence was insufficient to convict him. That's how the system should work with genuinely unclear evidence.
Instead, he was found guilty, the rationale was not communicated clearly and effectively, and there isn't even agreement over how it should be judged.
ulyssessword
24d ago
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues.
The Guardian (Like the New York Times before it), was exercising its right to kick people in the balls:
suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I’m gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don’t want to make anyone unsafe , so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they’ll hold off...
No! There’s no dignified way to answer any of these questions except “fuck you”. Just don’t kick me in the balls! It isn’t rocket science! Don’t kick me in the fucking balls!
In the New York Times’ worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I’m the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested,
It is a story. It has plot, characters, setting, conflict, and all the rest. It just isn't news.
They've pulled a great trick: they (often) write newsworthy stories, therefore (all) stories they write are newsworthy. Heck, they're even called "the news", so anything they see fit to print must be real news.
ulyssessword
24d ago
Try slipping the words "prisoner" and "dilemma" into a Rabbit and Stag game, and see how many humans can get it right. Or say "Monty Hall" but don't describe how the host chooses which door to reveal. Or "blue eyes" without establishing any common knowledge.
ulyssessword
27d ago
Go right ahead. What's interesting about those topics, where can we hear more about them, and what are your opinions on them?
ulyssessword
29d ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities?
IMO, the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences.
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did. That is to say, in the "Interstate Anarchy" themed game, you had to build an army, opportunistically raid neighbors, and build unstable alliances against stronger foes. If you didn't, your nation would be overrun and destroyed. If you have an argument against that ("Why can't we just be nice?" etc.), then you can try it in the game and see how well it works for you.
I'm not sure which great works would benefit from that treatment, but I'm guessing there are some. Or maybe those works are "great" because they're perfectly suited to their medium, and we can only make new, distinct ones.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy
I'll recommend Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power. It thoroughly earns its 3.5 star rating with its characterization, plot, and prose, but man was it fun.
A few underappreciated positives of stories I'm reading (that wouldn't generally make it into other reviews):
The Calamitous Bob: The world and everything in it is as serious as reality, which makes it an excellent straight man. For example, the first group the main character runs into doesn't have a "V" phoneme in their language, so she becomes known as "Bob". Also, you know the the trope where you can tame a cute animal by acting nonthreatening and giving it food? And animal-like people (eg. cat-people, lizard-people, bird-people)? Well,
Markets and Multiverses: Death isn't final, so the stakes are higher. If the protagonists got into an unwinnable fight in any other story, I'd know they would survive (because otherwise the story ends). However, the worst-case scenario of having to reincarnate doesn't end the story, so it's a possibility: they lost plot-armor in exact proportion to their immortality.
Player Manager: It's set very much in present day London. In-story, it's mid-April 2024, and the earlier chapters included the Queen's death and its effects on English sports. It lends a certain amount of grounding to the story.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Would you call "...openly carry military weapons..." a broad interpretation of that part? From my point of view, that's about as narrow as you can get before you start chipping away at the text. A broad interpretation would exempt American citizens from nonproliferation treaties.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Do you think the cost of self-driving car insurance would be higher than human-driven car insurance? If so, would that cost be spurious or would it reflect genuine harms?
Ideally it should be fine, but I don't trust that the ideal case would happen.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I do not think 'enabling someone to accuse a 5 year old of sexual harassment' is a problem the median therapist has.
I think that's the wrong standard. It's a problem that one therapist that hasn't been stripped of their license has, and that's concerning enough on its own. Given that this story comes from a relatively small pool (compared to swarms of journalists searching the entire nation for one example to prop up their story), I'd guess that there's more than one.
Any decent self-regulating professional body would immediately (or possibly preemptively) distance themselves from charlatans like that. And yet, there they are.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Here are some general arguments for why women are choosing bear over men, trying to not strawman to the best of my ability:
I think I can do better: The framing of the question sets it up as an obstacle, so the respondents are treating it as one. If the question was "Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a guidebook to local plants?" then people would recognize it as a choice between types of assistance, and (more likely) choose the man. If the question was "Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a guidebook to local plants?" then they would just be confused because it's obviously trivial and arbitrary. If the man could help you in this hypothetical, then why are you even asking the question?
ulyssessword
1mo ago
...on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.
I didn't even finish the first sentence before finding "...his thought is more than ever enabling us to see in a new way the horrors of..."
What are your standards for unclear writing??
One interesting distinction I've heard is "being ambitious" vs. "having an ambition".
A person who is being ambitious might do well in school, put together a good college application, do well in college, put together a good job application, do well at their job, put together a good promotion application, etc. then end up as a multimillionaire CEO/partner/senator/other-0.01%er. They follow the predefined "ambitious" path, reach elite status, and kind of just do normal stuff.
A person who has an ambition starts with an audacious goal (develop a martian colony, change society on a constitutionally-relevant level, break an Olympic record, etc), organizes their life to achieve that goal, and blasts past obstacles that would stop any reasonable person.
Under that framing, a politician who is running on ambition alone ("being ambitious") would be a person who follows the straight line to power/money/status and ends up in government.
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