domain:streamable.com
drmanhattan16
13m ago
The appropriate analogy would be "don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be", not "don't tell people their evaluation of your sex doesn't match what you say it is".
SteveKirk
19m ago
He might be an MMTer. That's gotten popular among the in crowd recently for obvious "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation" reasons.
SteveKirk
22m ago
The big downside of self-insuring for a company is probably political. If you've got a policy from Lloyd's any effort to bankrupt you through insurance payout lawfare is going to get a lot of very important people upset on your behalf.
If musk self-insured there's nothing stopping Some Judge In New York from ordering 70 billion dollar payouts every time a Tesla is involved in a fender-bender.
You need to smear the money around for self defense, and pay off enough of the Party that they at least can't unify in looting you.
SteveKirk
27m ago
Helium's gotten cheaper? I thought there was a huge shortage after they finished selling off that absurdly massive strategic helium reserve.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
27m ago
Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.
The auto insurance industry works because there's a relatively low cap on liability per accident (after which they stop paying out and the driver is on the hook, but the driver is an individual who likely doesn't have much). Once the manufacturer is on the hook, that cap is irrelevant.
SteveKirk
28m ago
What consoles did everyone have growing up?
Showing my age here, but the N64 was the first and last I ever owned (and didn't buy many games after ocarina of time, not even goldeneye). My high school boyfriend had a gaystation 2, but in college the most common game was Mario Cart 64.
Some people also got a Wii senior year, but I had time to play it like twice.
Asking because a few friends were talking about video game nostalgia, and I was shocked at the number of different consoles they'd had access to.
75m is still way too much space for most people.
I mean if we're talking theoretical numbers, in STOL competitions the world record for shortest landing is a little over 9ft, in aircraft that look very much like WW1 fighers or WW2 recon planes: high lift extremely light tuboprops. That part of the problem isn't really that difficult, it's more of an engineering and architecture problem than anything else.
The safety thing is the real reason, but valuing that over flying cars is parochial to the modern societies we live in. It's a cultural rather than physical limitation.
if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins?
You might be joking but people keep saying that will happen since we solved most of the technical issues and helium isn't that expensive anymore.
The problem is that they're slow and their only advantage over planes is fuel efficiency and thus range. Making them only really suited for large scale transport where they don't have enough of an edge over boats or rail.
Maybe some crazy billionaire will
Is this the bitter voice of experience of someone who has worked on software for the financial industry?
Not financial, but the meetings and the acronyms (though not the specific paragraph numbers) are real.
In my experience, companies that operate in compliance-heavy industries that also have hard technical challenges frequently are able to retain talented developers who hate that kind of thing, either by outsourcing to Compliance-As-A-Service companies (Stripe, Avalara, Workday, DocuSign, etc) or by paying somewhat larger amounts of money to developers who are willing to do boring line-of-business stuff (hi).
This works when the regulations target parts of the product that can be isolated from the technical challenges, but not (as in e.g. aircraft) when they can't. But I can understand the bitter envy towards software people of someone who is in a field where a good year means finding that you can tweak the radius of the trailing edge of the winglet by 1mm and save an average of a pound of fuel in an Atlantic crossing and only have to go through an abbreviated aerodynamic design review.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
40m ago
Insurance helps individual drivers because they can pool their risk with all the other drivers. A self-driving car company selling a sufficient number cars may as well self-insure. And yes, the expected cost of liability would be baked into the cars in either case, but I expect if they got it right, self-driving cars would be prohibitively expensive. If they got it wrong they'd go bankrupt when they big verdict came up.
sliders1234
42m ago
Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.
You either add it to the costs of the car as essentially pre-bought insurance for the purchaser (which should be cheaper than current policies) or work out some long-term payment plan on the buyer for yearly insurance (with some kind of termination in time after so many years etc).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
45m ago
Do you think the cost of self-driving car insurance would be higher than human-driven car insurance?
Human-driven liability insurance doesn't cover everything. Losses are limited. If you start a chain-reaction collision and kill a whole bunch of people, your insurance company will pay our to your maximum, and you'll lose everything you have and have to declare bankruptcy. Maybe you'll go to jail or commit suicide, but either way your victims ain't getting anything more. If a self-driving car does the same, the losses are limited to the value of the self-driving car company, which is likely far greater than any individual. And the company has far more exposure. And the plaintiffs and juries know the self-driving car company has much deeper pockets than an insured driver, so I expect you'd see more lawsuits per incident and higher judgements.
sliders1234
47m ago
I think his interview was taken out of context. Atleast I hope it was. The reason we borrow money instead of just printing all we need is it basically soaks up money that would end up elsewhere and cause inflation instead of being saved. And inflation reduction device.
He should be smart enough to know that so I have to assume he was just tired or wasn’t sure where they were going and didn’t feel like providing a better answer.
omfalos
48m ago
What if NASA functioned like the ADA? Every company with more than 50 employees could be made legally liable for failure to launch probes into space to explore the Solar System. The law could be enforced by lawsuits against companies that have "workplaces hostile to space exploration" because they skimp on how many probes they launch.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
53m ago
Isn't this clip of him trying to explain the unexplainable (i.e. mmt)? It seems like they deliberately edited out the question to make him look like a moron and the whole film seems to be mmt propaganda.
Of course it's also possible that he is a moron, he doesn't seem to have any economic background anyway.
IGI-111
57m ago
the numbers are so disconnected from anything the average person can comprehend
Apparently it's not just for the average person.
To be fair, it's easy to mock people who ought to know what they're talking about but the US funding market is legitimately impossible to describe.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
ulyssessword
1hr 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.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Another part is that merely having a regulatory framework transforms your industry from "building cool stuff" to "checking regulatory boxes and making sure all the regulation-following is documented" [...] They didn't get into the field to sit in meetings where you discuss whether the SSDD paragraph 2.0.2.50 is properly related to the SDD paragraph 3.1.2, the ICD paragraph 4.1.2.5, and the STP paragraph 6.6.6, which lines of code implement SDD paragraph 3.1.2, and to make sure the SIP properly specifies the update procedures
Is this the bitter voice of experience of someone who has worked on software for the financial industry?
and drives the sort of people who do innovative work out of the field
In my experience, companies that operate in compliance-heavy industries that also have hard technical challenges frequently are able to retain talented developers who hate that kind of thing, either by outsourcing to Compliance-As-A-Service companies (Stripe, Avalara, Workday, DocuSign, etc) or by paying somewhat larger amounts of money to developers who are willing to do boring line-of-business stuff (hi). Though at some point most of your work becomes compliance, so if you don't have enough easily compartmentalized difficult technical problems the "offload the compliance crap" strategy stops working. I know some brilliant people work at Waymo, which has a quite high compliance burden but also some incredibly crunchy technical problems. On the flip side, I can't imagine that e.g. ADP employs many of our generation's most brilliant programmers.
100ProofTollBooth
1hr ago
more "correct"/rational reaction.
No, quite the opposite. I am explicitly stating that those in the situation of which I gave a criteria (business owner, parent, homeowner) creates a shift in values that would precipitate a change in voting.
Politics is the organization and operation at scale of a marketplace of values. I'll never make the claim that conservatives are more rational than liberals. I will always make the claim that the conservative set of values is better for a functioning society and that liberal values are far more about individual level emotional validation than society level outcomes.
You are right of course. And I did notice all these companies pop up next to the respective universities, back when I was a student myself.
Though I will say it's a question of timeframe. California has been a powerful magnet of talent in recent history. And that's for the entire world, not just America. My observation is only that this tendency seems to not be as strong anymore.
Whether or not that's due to poor Californian policy, mere return to the mean or just noise I won't claim to know for sure.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1hr ago
You're smuggling in the assumption that the reaction to paying out tax instead of having it withheld is the more "correct"/rational reaction. I could just as easily assert voting conservative for that reason is letting their heart and wallet override their mind.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
You're assuming the car companies are the ones footing the bill. They buy insurance for things like this, and the premiums reflect the risk and the average settlement value. This is how every company manages risk, including the car companies, who already get sued in product liability actions. Unless the risks are so high that they effectively become uninsurable, the cost of the insurance will just be reflected in the price of the vehicle. And if they are uninsurable, then self-driving cars are probably too dangerous to be marketed as such anyway. I would mention that I say this as someone who is skeptical that full self driving will be available in his lifetime.
Sure.
Let's look at it from the point of view of Rogers' popular diffusion model.
According to this theory innovation as a social phenomenon is essentially the communication of randomly appearing new ideas of practices and the successful diffusion and adoption of those ideas relies on the availability of communication channels between five increasingly risk averse segments of the population.
So to be a successfully diffused innovation, an idea has to successively be adopted successively by:
- financially liquid risk takers
- educated opinion leaders
- average people
- skeptics
- traditionalists
And the criteria that people use to select what they do and do not adopt are:
- Compatibility (does it fit with existing norms?)
- Trialability (can I try it before i invest?)
- Relative Advantage (how much better is it than alternatives?)
- Observability (are the benefits noticeable?)
- Simplicity (is it easy to grasp?)
Now having established a model, the question is how does regulation and the establishment of norms affect these factors? What does good and bad regulation look like from our model and how likely are they?
Bad regulation is highly normative and costly. It lowers potential compatibility by adding requirements that potential new practices and ideas may not follow. Good regulation makes the existing landscape accessible for new entrants and interoperable with potentially novel uses.
Bad regulation requires high upfront investments that make adoption a risk. Good regulation provides for trials and experiments.
Bad regulation equalizes outcomes so that relative advantage is marginal. Good regulation lets winners win big.
Bad regulation makes the benefits of novel approaches impossible to demonstrate. Good regulation allows them to be obvious.
Bad regulation prevents people from obtaining the skills and knowledge to implement new approaches. Good regulation provides them those skills and knowledge.
Now that we have a good idea of what a good and a bad policy look like, let's make a detour through another area of sociology to figure out what types of regulation institutions and states tend to develop over time.
In Michels' famous study of the eponymous Political Parties, he develops a general sociological theory of institutions that is nowadays mostly known under the name of the "iron law of oligarchy".
This theory provides that any democratic institution (a fortiori any institution) always tends towards oligarchy because the "tactical and technical necessities" of power condition the playing field so that the people who end up leading any institution are always those most organized and motivated by power because this makes them uniquely fit to this selection environment.
In short, as Leach summarizes the theory: "Bureacracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts.".
Trivially, the people who write legislation are participants in an organization, therefore participants in a destined oligarchy and ultimately moved, at the asymptote, by the increase of their power and control and the centralization thereof. This was later described as well by Weber, Galbraith and other sociologists.
As I am sure you understand, this is not the crucible for good regulation in the sense that we are disposed to here.
A centralized bureaucracy needs the world to be understandable to it (see Scott's Seeing Like a State), and it needs it to change slowly enough that the control mechanisms can keep up. This therefore leads to ever increasing lists of demands that require high upfront investments, are specifically designed to prevent powerful new entrants, offer rigid frameworks where it is hard to show the benefits of ideas that upset the established order and ultimately where the availability of financially liquid risk takers is deliberately minimized because the "technokings" are a rival castle.
To give more power, in any quantity, to any human institution is therefore, by necessity, to put oneself on the road to prevent innovation. Because power is threatened by innovation. And as Schmitt rightfully observes, power can stand no rivals.
You may notice the paradox present here, in that innovation itself is such an act. And every rebel is always grooming himself into a new master.
Machiavelli and his followers, myself included, understand that freedom, a fortiori innovation, can only really be found in the cracks of this endless struggle. And thus, I cherish any haven that is beyond the control of power and will defend it, not out of the misplaced sense of self important artistry that you seem to identify, but because it is the only respite that we have against the violence of our condition. And I said as much, in not so long winded a fashion, in my original answer.
cjet79
1hr ago
I worked in accessibility stuff for front end web development. So my experience is limited. But the horror stories were numerous of companies that got sued successfully for some ridiculous ADA website violations. (things like not having alt text for images). https://www.levelaccess.com/blog/title-iii-lawsuits-10-big-companies-sued-over-website-accessibility/
The Act is not specific when it comes to the web (there are web standards for accessibility, but they aren't mentioned or referenced by the law). I assume like most acts it probably has some intense specificity in some areas for the sake of some special interest groups that were paying close attention, and then serious lapses in specificity for all other areas. Leading to the inevitable outcome of random courts throughout the country trying to decide what the legislators meant (or alternatively, what they wanted the legislators to mean).
The courts are a good place for dispute resolution but they are a terrible place for rule-making. The difference is important and vital in this context. A court is always getting a tiny subset of cases around a particular rule delivered to them. Higher courts are often getting the cases that the current rule covers worst. The people who are well served by a particular rule never see the inside of a courtroom. Courts thus end up making rules that serve to fix a tiny minority of edge cases, without having to really consider what said rules might do for the main use cases. Are legislature has become dysfunctional and slow enough that courts have been forced into a rule-making role.
Courts are also intentionally limited in scope. They are to address the current problem in front of them. Not to seek out the ultimate cause and work out a better overall solution. This is great for problems like murder where the final act is very meaningful and important, but all the things that lead up to it are probably more trivial and varied. For something like "why dont you have good alt text on your web images" the final act is kind of meaningless and all the reasons leading up to why that alt next needs to be there matter a lot more.
The problem space in the world is also not conveniently broken up in ways we would like. Sometimes it is cheaper for businesses to solve an issue. Sometimes it is cheaper if all of the people suffering from a problem solve the issue. Take nearsightedness as a simple example. One way to solve it would be to require that all text is much larger and thus more readable at a distance. The other way to solve it is to have people with nearsightedness wear glasses. The ADA often forces a one size fits all solution to these problems, businesses must solve the problem, end of story. It would be a lot cheaper if all screen reader tech was just way better and could read even crappy websites. But instead we have crappy screen reader tech and any website that doesn't go out of its way to be accessible ends up being unreadable to screen readers. Even traditional problems like ramps for wheelchairs might have had a cheaper solution, like just having a few strong men lift the chair up a few steps. Or if robotic technology advanced enough just giving the disabled better wheelchairs that can walk them up and down stairs.
Your dates don't really line up though. Withholding isn't until 1943. You see higher income taxes earlier, after Roosevelt becomes president. You then see an even steeper rise in taxes in general as the USA becomes more and more involved in the war. Finally in 1943 you see withholding implemented, but this is after a decade of higher and higher taxes spurred on by the depression and war. After WW2 you see lower, but still high income taxes and finally income taxes come down after the neo-liberal revolution in the 80s. Withholding doesn't seem important in this picture.
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