domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
From a revenue maximizing perspective: It's essentially the same as using coupons and discounts for price discrimination at a grocery store. You capture additional transactions from customers willing to put in the work/inconvenience of shopping from the discount rack or using coupons, and broadly speaking these are mostly transactions that otherwise wouldn't have occurred because those customers would not have been getting enough consumer surplus from the transaction at the original price. You offer different prices to people with different willingness to pay by placing slight inconveniences in the way, people who really want to pay less will go through the inconveniences while people who don't care about paying more won't. With taxes, people who really don't want to pay those taxes (or people sufficiently sophisticated that their objections to having to pay those taxes would actually matter to the system) avoid paying those taxes in various ways, through complex deductions and schemes to funnel money one way or the other. People who don't really care about their tax bill (or people who are low-class enough that their complaints won't matter to anyone but their bartender) just pay the taxes because they don't care enough to figure out all the ways to avoid them.
From a freedom maximizing perspective: At the time it was put in place, this method minimized the degree to which the IRS surveilled individual Americans. This is mostly negligible today, when privacy has been so thoroughly compromised under law and custom that it feels irrelevant. But at the time this was an important consideration.
Intertia: But mostly, I think the best steelman is that changing the system would have unpredictable effects on the economy. Between two thirds and three quarters of Americans get a tax refund. The average refund (I couldn't find the median where I looked) is around $3,000. This is essentially a forced savings program by the IRS, in which Americans are forced to save a small amount from each paycheck and then given the money back in a lump sum later. This might have systemically important functions at this point which lead to significant switching costs nationally. For example, it's pretty well known that the best time to sell a cheap used car is around tax refund season, as lots of poor people who otherwise spend as fast as they get it suddenly have a pile of cash and need a car. People also often spend that money on home repairs or security deposits to move houses. Though they also often, of course, blow it on vacations or poor decisions. While the system that leads to a tax refund might be inefficient in and of itself, at this point if we got rid of this system we don't know what impact it might have. Poor people might stop being able to buy used cars, as they go back to saving nothing. Cheap flights to Florida from northern cities might dry up as middle class folks stop getting a tax return in the colder months and eyeing up tickets. Plus, regardless of the total taxes paid, once you get rid of the refund, people won't notice the extra few bucks every week, but they will notice the lack of a big lump sum every year, and will feel worse about it. The tax filing system is a way to trick children into feeling like they're paying less.
Lizzardspawn
3d ago
It is poorly worded rule. You are totally allowed to build consensus by convincing and persuading people. You are not allowed to assume already existing consensus on a topic. I am not sure that it is philosophical, but mostly practical. Posts that starts with - "We all agree that" usually are not very productive, not consistent and show that the poster has rarely faced any intellectual adversity and mostly has been in circlejerk places.
Corvos
3d ago
The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains.
Works on people too though.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3d ago
Thanks. As expected, it misses several configurations that are critical, like hadoop.security.token.service.use_ip.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
I'm always surprised he survived the Night of the Long Knives. Von Schleicher didn't, so Hitler wasn't afraid of killing off Hindenberg's buddies.
2rafa
3d ago
First of all, sorry to hear that and all the best with the tests.
Secondly, about:
Especially exams that require months on end of grinding and memorization, when is rather be doing anything else.
I’m curious about these medical exams and studying. Are there some candidates you’ve met that can just ace them without studying, based solely on general medical knowledge and above average recollection from both medical school and hands-on training in the years before their specialist qualification? Or is it like some legal qualifications, where even a towering intellect needs to rote memorize that the answer is a section 37 part 3 form and not a part 4 and that a certain period is 13 working days and not 12?
hallucination rates are close to negligible
This has not been the case for me, unless you count “yes, you are correct, it seems that x is actually y” follow-ups when specifically prompted as negligible, which I would not. The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains. No specific examples, just my general experience over the past few weeks.
The appropriate response to hallucination handwringing from luddites is “it doesn’t matter”, not “it’s not happening”, by the way.
2rafa
3d ago
The real disaster is that the ones who are self aware enough to know they are bad writers went from 2 line emails to paragraphs of AI slop, no doubt promoted by the same 2 lines they would have previously just sent.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
3d ago
Like 1934 maybe, not the later years when he decided to willingly collaborate with the Nazis anyways despite his reservations.
Aapje58
3d ago
which raises a lot of questions on how that mechanically actually happens.
We still have people who are pronounced dead, but weren't, despite modern medical knowledge and tools. So it probably happened a lot more often in the past.
The bible explains that the Roman soldiers didn't follow the correct crucifixion procedure, where the legs of the person were broken. So it makes sense that Jesus could have barely survived, recovered a bit after being placed in a cool tomb, then wandered around a little in a stupor, and then died.
Then add a bit of embellishment and you have a resurrection narrative, with him transcending to heaven (aka actually dying) shortly after a faux death.
Aapje58
3d ago
For the same reason why Venice is no longer Italian. Too many tourists driving out the natives.
Imagine that your hobby spot gets disrupted constantly by tourists who gawk at you like you are a zoo animal. I bet that you'd find a more obscure spot that they can't find.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
I was riffing off the blood boys thing primarily!
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
In the early 70s you would have paid the equivalent of about $1000-$1500 in today's money to fly from coast to coast in the US.
Which confirms @fmac's point - a quick search on Kayak found that Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines* have 1st class transcon fares in that price range. And "Economy with extra legroom" plus the checked bag and other such upcharges is a lot cheaper, and closer to a 1970's economy experience than 1st class is.
* The big 3 carriers use long-haul configured aircraft on the premium transcon routes, and long-haul business class is a lot nicer and a lot more expensive than traditional US domestic first class. So you need to look at smaller airlines to get a fair comparison.
Die Staufer: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Kaisergeschlechts, by Johannes Lehmann.
It's a historical work about the medieval house of Hohenstaufen, and especially about the emperors, with Friedrich I., known as Barbarossa, serving as the headliner. It's pop-sci, but very dry, just the way I like it. Tries to draw from as many different sources as possible, compares them dispassionately, usually shrugs and admits that there's no way to know for sure, and then goes on to recount the history of those rulers in a workmanlike fashion. It's unexciting, calm and goes for accuracy instead of shock value. Thus my teutonic heart gets all warm and fuzzy. What a comfy read.
Also, my wife pulled it out of a book stop, so it didn't cost me anything.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
I would be surprised if no other highly compensated industries did that.
In finance it is part of the deal at mid-levels and above. As a quant VP I get my bonus in cash, but a VP-level trader or corporate financier would be getting part of their (larger) bonus in RSU's, as do my bosses at director and MD level.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
For a different extreme, look at Tesla. 125,000 employees right now. Market cap 1.3 trillion. Elon Musk right now earns about 8$ billion a year under current conditions, but it goes up by 1% of Teslas total market cap for each additional trillion in their market cap. If he hits just the easiest goals, he gets $36 billion a year. If it goes up to 8 trillion, he clears an eye watering $878 billion in 10 years, almost $90 billion a year. (yes that's in stock, not cash, if that makes a difference)
Musk's CEO pay at Tesla is uniquely generous even compared to other overly-generous CEO pay packages - to the point where the Delaware courts ruled it illegal. Tesla has the most liquid options of any single stock so it is quite easy to measure the ex ante value of Tesla share options. The pay package Musk "agreed" with Tesla in 2018 that was rescinded after it turned out to be worth $56 billion ex post was worth $2 billion ex ante back in 2018 - at a time when Tesla was only a $50 billion market cap. The number of public-company CEOs who made $2 billion from CEO compensation ex post is small enough to count them on your fingers. But even as the highest-paid CEO ever (by an order of magnitude) Musk made more as an owner than he did as CEO.
But the typical fat-cat non-owner CEO retires with a net worth in the high double-figure millions. Overpaid non-owner CEOs get a grossly disproportionate amount of public attention relative to how relevant they are to rising inequality, or falling living standards for line workers. I was particularly amused by the press coverage of Andy Jassy's $40 million payday as CEO of Amazon - none of which made the comparison to how much Jeff Bezos made off Jassy's work (about $80 billion, so 2000 times as much).
FtttG
3d ago
If there's no aid on the ships, in what sense are they humanitarian? Because they're full of good vibes and well-wishers?
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Marina Abramaovic
She's mostly pre-woke, isn't she?
Sure, she's still alive, but her heyday and peak relevancy are long behind her. Now she's just one of those old ladies that gets trotted out whenever there is a slow news week and people need to be reminded of what a Legendary and Influential Artistᵀᴹ she is.
FtttG
3d ago
I've heard Infinite Jest is quite the doorstopper. Are you finding it difficult to read?
FtttG
3d ago
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. It's the book which is widely credited with inventing YA fiction, for better and for worse. An easy read which I know I'll never read again, and probably the best book written by a 17-year-old girl I've ever read. The name on the protagonist's birth cert is "Ponyboy"; now there's another reference I understand, RIP.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d 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.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
A bad CEO can destroy a hundred million dollars of value, maybe even a billion, before the board removes them.
A lot more than that, if they are Steve Ballmer. The difference between Ballmer's and Nadella's Microsoft is exhibit A in the case for "Some of our most talented people should be non-founder executives at legacy companies."
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
In a commodity drone, the rare earths are in the motors, not the chips.
The main (but not the only) industrial use of rare earths is for strong permanent magnets, and the main industrial use of permanent magnets is electric motors and generators.
The government shouldn't have any idea how you spend your money, but wants to incentivize certain spending. The only way that can be reported is with a citizen provided form. That's the original reason.
Do the filing prep firms lobby to keep it that way, long after the government collects a lot of this information elsewhere. Absolutely.
More options
Context Copy link