1,789 karma · joined May 9, 2012
Had a car killed my wife or unborn child, there would have been a legal trail and insurance.
Had the e-bike killed my wife or unborn child, there was neither. I doubt I could ever find the killer of the unborn child if the baby died later due to injuries-- there's neither license nor registration on an e-bike.
Pushing powered transportation into the unregulated, uninsured space is madness.
These aren't subtle infractions of the law. Tell me why automated traffic enforcement cameras don't target them.
As a motorcyclist, e-bikes piss me off to no end.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
If you earn $5 and the state gives you $45 in assistance, you practically have $50. If I earn $200 and the state taxes me $100, then I practically have $100. The income inequality is 40x but the practical inequality is 2x.
Current common metrics would report 40x, in this contrived example, is the point Gramm and Sowell both make. Their observation that transfers and taxes are neglected when measuring income inequality is self-evidently true and frequently overlooked. Be careful with income inequality conclusions.
The first chapter of Gramm's book calls out that difference between the hours worked in the various income quantiles is large. Sowell makes the point that the age demographics vary considerably across the quantiles with very young and very old people working less and therefore frequently in the lower quantiles. Sowell further points out that different US demographic groups have different mean ages so that one can explain some seemingly-demographic-related inequality by age differences.
Both books are recommended.
> A simultaneous rise in rewards for work and a growing welfare state that allows more people to live without working virtually guarantees increasing inequality and earnings and incomes, when many of the welfare state benefits are received in kind rather than in money, such a subsidized housing or subsidized medical care, since those benefits are not counted in income statistics.
There should be a well-defined unitless quantity that's real-valued across human history, say normalizing by population size and total human travel. I am not claiming that fixes the NaN, just that the NaN is a smell.
Another smell is that everyone being horribly maimed but never killed would not be a victory for safety though the above metric says it'd be great.
> Then we describe a data-driven method for learning from a dataset of full-orbit α-particle trajectories. We apply this method to the α-particle dynamics shown in Fig. 1 and find the learned non-perturbative guiding center model significantly outperforms the standard guiding center expansion. Our proposed method for learning applies on a per-magnetic field basis; changing requires re-training.
Is this interpolation at its heart? A variable transformation then a data fit?
Anyone know which functionals of these orbits are important? I don't know the space. I am wondering why the orbits with such nuance should be materially important when accessed via lower-order models.
Gramm et al's book, or at least the first couple of chapters, are worth reading on this topic. Oft-quoted official statistics neglect taxes and transfer payments. There is definitely a large uptick at the top 5% but the spread across the lower 80% isn't as strong as it often is stated, according to Gramm and his co-authors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_American_Inequalit...
You opened by saying that democracy is not ideal unless the populace's information diet is carefully controlled.
By whom and in what way? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What happens when they deem misinformation rampant or the public not well-informed?
> I think you might be projecting...
I am indeed projecting. I find those specific words only in use among unreasonably self-sure people who aren't terrified by the implications/risks of concentrating power to answer those consequent questions.
> The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
But my projecting isn't unjustified. Quoted above, you also began by stating the 2020s electorate was duped with misinformation. Had they only known better, understood their own best interests as seen through the eyes of the self-assuredly enlightened, listened to the nascent Ministry of Truth, etc.
"Informed" and "falsehoods" serve perfectly well. Inform people don't fight misinformation. Correct falsehoods don't well-inform the public.
Powerful actors spreading incorrect information to serve their own ends is nothing new. Remember when the consensus was that the Earth was the center of the solar system? And when Galileo was prosecuted for spreading misinformation? That was about 400 years ago.
"Misinformation" implies "It is inconvenient for someone to hold the perspective because it threatens my power". Otherwise, we just call such notions wrong, incorrect, lies, falsehoods, invalid, etc.
"Misinformation" is just as dangerous as "well informed". What we now collectively know as a species was not infrequently once wrong according to some powerful historical consensus.
That's a hell of a dangerous phrase. Usually, it means that the speaker is frustrated that the broader public is not curatedly informed in a way that makes them vote how the speaker wants them to vote.
The great, and terrifying, thing about democracy is that everyone can be informed however they're informed and usually we don't literally burn everything all the way to the ground.
"Least bad" is all anyone claims.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93strain_curve
Another very rational reason for such a margin loan for a home down payment is if the stock you wanted to sell hadn't been held for a year and therefore its sale would not yet qualify for long-term capital gains rates.
You might choose to pay margin interest for up to a year so that the stock sales become taxed at the much lower long-term capital gains rates instead of like income.
That might make sense for someone in the 24% federal bracket which ends at just under $200K of annual income, depending upon how much longer one needs to hold the position to achieve the more favorable taxation. Certainly far below the yacht-owning bracket.
It's not uncommon when people buy deals while traveling or in hot markets.
See also Mr Money Mustache's articles on this topic. He assuredly is not Bezosesque.
Never give absolute financial advice to anyone who's situation you don't fully understand.
It's not particularly hard. Just have enough collateral to not get margin called. And, like the margin interest rate better than the tax hit. Shop around for rates. Notice, you don't have to pay the entire down payment this way.
If you have amassed 6 figures of stock and are buying a house, you're qualified to educate yourself on these topics. It's usually worth reading up anytime you incur that sizable a taxable event.
I am not saying this is a great idea, BTW. Just, it's an idea within many people's reach.
What happens now is journalists throw around secondary and tertiary sources without attribution.
It's okay to report "Bob Jones commented 'Someone is a miserable SOB'." It's not okay to report "Someone is a miserable SOB" as if it's fact not judgement.
None of this is a new variant of journalism. It's just journalism and/or history practices that somehow got forgotten despite the fact that we teach these primary vs secondary source concepts and proper quoting in middle/high school in the US.
By definition, almost half of all $ARTISTS are worse than the median. Should that half not get paid for their time?
Also, it's at least three distinct methods! Read before lectures, read after lectures, read on both sides. Dealer's choice. Neglects recorded lectures and the possibilities they open up.
Talking about people's preferences and studying is funny. Most people prefer not to study. Preferences have little to do with good study habits. The above approaches have worked for hundreds of years just fine.
It's called studying.
Certainly. But how many 9's do we actually need and why are we paying for so many more 9's than that?
Most of the time, I know when my kid needs antibiotics for an ear infection. I didn't go through any exclusive gamut for that single 9.