dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
Two federal judges being murdered is my freak the fuck out line.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
It doesn't look the way I want it to so I'm self conscious. Though I think the main idea is to see LEDs in the dark or at a distance and that part works fine. Should try to put together some admiration shots ...
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
I actually just tried learning CAD software this week. It's a little less obnoxious than I was expecting. Though I'm both watching YouTube videos and asking LLMs for help every 5 minutes.
New York spends over $36,000 per pupil which gets you near that high number, but the average is about $18,000, which is your low number, so this is skewed a bit high.
And? People outside of NY also pay less in taxes.
$18,000/year in spending per student in public school is still an absurdly expensive entitlement compared to what their parents and non-parent neighbors pay in taxes. People with families are not some rare occurrence in society. In the US, 1 in 4 people are under 18 and likely in this system.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
I had very, let's say, luke warmly received thoughts on this earlier in the week. What if the dead weight is actually half of society? Or 75%? Or 90%? I'm not entirely convinced we're not already there.
(There were some good rebuttals but I'm still uncertain)
I only lived in the UK for 2 years versus decades of life in the US and there's obvious confounders with my sampling but my experience was that Brits are way sluttier.
Which is funny because they don't come off as particularly passionate or sexy. More like .. unabashedly horny?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
Well, you didn't say you were going out with a man of culture!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
So uh.. Advice? Suggestions? I've ticked off the "drink till I'm uninhibited enough to dance" option. I am mostly dedicating myself to being a good wingman,
This seems correct. Since this is your first night out together and they're family I'd probably avoid getting too shitfaced with them.
TRON bike lighting!
The ESP32-C3s with 0.5" OLEDs are in and looking cute.
Putting a spandex cap on bike helmets and sewing into that works better but kinda like looks crappy. I'm thinking maybe just a woven accessory rail/harness like you see on army helmets might work better. I'll have to ask grandma what she thinks next time she visits
In the meantime been working on getting the BLE stack together. Seems like it works. I'm using some smartphone app for debugging BLE to test but I'm almost certainly going to have to make a shitty Android app if I want to blast the same synchronization info to all of the kids' helmets at once. Really don't want to make an Android app but maybe ChatGPT will make it painless.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
9d ago
I enjoyed this.
I'm probably dumb but is the subtext that (spoiler:)
Yeah this argument felt much more like "why bother YIMBYing if it's just a bunch of low tax per capita extremely unproductive Guatemalans?"
No.
Those people are obviously problematic looking enough that it's not even worth debating. I mean some people will debate it but that's not interesting to me.
The point of my post is to advance the premise that even (e.g.) well-meaning white families with jobs who follow the law and don't have high medical burden might also be social dead weight.
But we don't have to get this absurd
Why did you get this absurd then? Kind of feels like you started this off with a nice strawman to anchor on a certain tone.
"Oh you want to build housing? What if it was a shanty town?!?!?!? Anyway let's talk about this."
Because there's two debates we can have.
- Is it even possible to have a line where adding people below it makes the town richer or poorer?
- Oh wait actually of course there is, now lets just debate over where the line is
If I don't include the absurd Connestoga huts example people get lost in believing that everyone you add to a town that's not a homeless alcoholic like Million Dollar Murray enhances it with their unique specialness. But it's pretty clear even just poor people that aren't mentally ill and are simply of modest means would also make it poorer. If you accept that, then you should be open to the idea that the line might be higher than "Connestoga Charlies" and it may in fact be people of median means.
A quick google tells me that NYC spends $36,293 per student per year which is 91% above the national average. That's $3000 a month at the highest end. Also not entirely sure why we're focusing on educational costs specifically here.
Now look up the national average. It is almost always an enormous amount of cost per household with kids that is almost certainly not paid by the median household.
The point of mentioning this is to give an example of how even modest families that aren't blatantly poor or problematic are more costly than the revenues they directly produce. You should be thinking "fuck, these hard working people who pay their taxes and aren't an obvious drain on society are actually a net drain on society" (at least if we look at direct receipts/expenses).
Your argument seems to ignore the fact that NYC, SF, Chicago, LA, London, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Ruhr corridor, etc are all massive economic engines and the most productive and prosperous places in all of human civilization.
I do. But at least these places in the US were built over centuries over a variety of different economic and political climates. Lets talk about today. In case we haven't noticed, NYC isn't going out of its way to build housing that people earning $70,000/year median income can afford ("market rate" bros in shambles). If you go to any town or city's subreddit where some new development is approved you find rage that these are not anywhere close to affordable and appear to just be catering to the affluent.
I doubt the city council has economists explicitly standing up showing slide decks with a line between dead weight citizen and productive contributor near the top, but they are clearly internalizing this on some level.
You completely neglect the fact that more people = more demand for stuff and more people to work at jobs to supply that stuff = more 1%s who own the new businesses that supply the stuff so even if you want to fixate on the progressive tax brackets you'll get more of that too. Plus more 10%ers to be accountants and lawyers to support the new businesses, etc
How do we look at it? What tools do we have to measure this? This just seems like a hand-wavey way of smuggling in "Connestoga Charlies are all net contributors, too!" :hugging_face: but you were skeptical of me even bringing that type of person up at all so I assume you believe, again, there's a line somewhere. Where is it?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
10d ago
I mean... it's kind of the best explanation that fits.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11d ago
My basic math argument is: the marginal elasticity is sufficiently small, and the existing equilibrium is sufficiently far from public service collapse, that marginal changes should not produce a catastrophic phase transition.
Let's say for the sake of argument that sounds fine, but does this make a dent in housing affordability? I'm not sure the people arguing for build build build aren't imagining they're solving the problem of housing is so fucking expensive.
I keep thinking there's a NoTrueYIMBY fallacy.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11d ago
I'm actually not sure this is correct. The steel-man case for YIMBIsm is for market rate new construction, not incentivizing a bunch of Connestoga huts.
I didn't say YIMBYism was about building lower income housing.
I've been enjoying asking basic math questions to destroy dearly held beliefs and I would like to continue. This one requires more intuition than cold basic math though, but it's in the same ballpark.
Let's talk about housing. Housing's so fucking expensive. Especially in desirable places! YIMBYs (or maybe abundance democrats) argue we should build more housing. A lot more. But what kind of housing? Who are we trying to help?
Well. Take a town of 150k people. A one bedroom in a decent part of mine is approaching $1600 a month and inventory is also frustratingly low across the board. Before we get to my actual point lets focus on an absurd toy non-solution first. Let's build 1,000,000 Connestoga huts across town and charge $450 a month in rent. This eliminates a lot of housing pressure but anyone but the most hardcore libertarian would recoil in horror at the thought because it would mean the town would be flooded with poor single people. Per capita tax revenue would plummet while per capita demand on public services would likely increase. Traffic would explode. Parks would be overrun with trash. Police would respond to calls by lottery. This would turn the town into a nightmare.
But we don't have to get this absurd! My contention is, because of progressive taxation, public services are diminished even if you build housing that the median income family can afford!
Looking at federal income tax, the top 1% pay almost 50% in federal income tax. The top 10% pay about 75%. State and local income taxes are structured in similar progressive style. What about sales tax? More tax is paid by people who spend more, and things that are considered essential (like food and cheaper clothes) are usually exempt. Property tax? Lots with higher assessed value and luxuries are taxed at higher rates. Public service spending is carried by the affluent.
For another intuitive look at this, a family with two kids in public school will consume $3000-7500 per month(!) in state expenditure. Public education costs alone dwarf the entirety of taxes most families pay (of which only a small amount is even earmarked for education).
Not just education. The Medicare and Medicaid we all know kicks in at the federal poverty line, but the thresholds for some kind of subsidies are high enough that a family can earn as much as $85,000 in a city like NYC and still qualify for some assistance.
This means every municipality has an economic incentive to refuse newcomers that aren't making potentially 90%ile household income. This means sure, build housing, but only 90%ile housing, or become poorer.
I would like to be wrong about this! It's frightening to think of every newcomer to your town as making it per capita poorer unless they're very affluent!
One weakness in this rationale is we don't have a solid accounting of all of the transfers. E.g. if 90% of education was funded through federal and state revenues, you could imagine purpose building a town just to have a lot of schools so that people with small kids move to it and pull funds from the rest of the country and state. But I think that number is more like 60% and a lot of the "state" funds are likely a matter of appropriation and will be distributed ~right back to where they came from.
I'm kind of surprised nobody else is pointing this out! Am I hitting on some truth neither side really cares to acknowledge because it doesn't support their favorite platitudes or am I just smart enough at economics to twist myself into a gnarly retarded knot?
EDIT: oh! one argument that I've heard from a grimacing YIMBY is that he is forced to admit I am correct, but that's why we can't do this on a local level. Instead we must mandate more housing be built on a nationwide basis (e.g. a federal #NoZoneZone authoritarian order) so any one town or city would be protected from all of the poor not affluent people rushing to it at once and ruining it. This seems like a solution but I am still not convinced I am describing a true real and local deficiency.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12d ago
adding proof of work tests for bots (Anubis) might be in our future
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16d ago
I'm aware. I still don't think it's all that unfair to have fun with "blood boys" imagery when we're talking about the guy who sounds like a Metal Gear Solid villain.
Again, I say this as someone who kind of likes him! I'd actually like to have thought of half of the cyberpunk things he's invested in, or had my shit together enough to apply to be a Thiel fellow.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
17d ago
I was riffing off the blood boys thing primarily!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
17d ago
For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead),
I would think there'd be no difference, ideally.
If there is a difference I would expect it's because the flow control heuristic on a single stream is a bit wrong and not properly saturating your link. That, or by opening multiple streams you are recruiting more resources on the remote end to satisfying you (e.g. it's a distributed system and each stream hits a different data center)
Mostly I would Google it ask ChatGPT to Google it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
17d ago
I kind of like Thiel, but you have a point. If it came out in five years that Peter Thiel had been abducting wayward teenage boys and keeping them in a lovingly accurate recreation of a 13th-century Burgundian dungeon under his mansion, I’d be mildly surprised but not shocked.
Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
17d ago
Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.
Speaking of which, why is Marc Andreseen in the running to be the Antichrist again? I feel like I missed something. If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...
Binance and BitMEX CEO indictments. FinCEN guidance outlawing DeFI unless you do KYC which practically kills it (e.g. Bitcoin Lightning liquidity very limited as a result). Head of SEC refusing to give straight answers on whether things like Ethereum are a security.
They couldn't take these steps when everyone was getting rich but a lot of shit went down during the Biden era crypto winter.
More options
Context Copy link