abvdasker

I find it shocking that someone of Milton Friedman's stature would begin his argument with something as flimsy as an appeal to virtue ethics. Hard to take the following statement seriously when it begins with such a baseless and by no means uncontroversial value judgment. That Friedman considers "accumulating wealth" a "virtue" in itself is a profound indictment of his worldview.

At a certain point you have to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Thiel is apparently a cryptofascist. I wonder if this will hurt the reputation of Founders Fund and his other ventures or whether the Valley will continue to pretend that this is not a problem.

There were multiple prominent politicians with serious wealth tax proposals running in the 2020 Democratic Party primary. If you want implementation details I would suggest that you read their proposals.

As for an "argument" it's really no different than any other political position in that it boils down mainly to what you personally value.

I've observed at least two distinct value systems which can both lead to supporting a wealth tax.

1) Maybe you believe in helping the marginalized and creating a more equitable society. Perhaps you believe it is insane and obscene that multi-millionaires and billionaires walk past tent cities of homeless people every day in the streets of San Francisco. Maybe you care about the well-being of other people and recognize that what is good for them is usually good for yourself.

2) Or maybe you believe that tax policy should optimize efficiency as a facilitator of economic growth. You recognize that the diminishing marginal utility of wealth and the runaway inequality in America presents a problem of inadequate aggregate demand and threatens the entire economy. Maybe you've done the math and realize that the US government must raise revenues to have any hope of staving off an eventual sovereign debt crisis.

From what I've seen, the people opposed to a wealth tax usually believe something else.

I have a Micro-ATX case for my PC and am a little skeptical that flow-through would well for that form factor because the intakes are on the bottom of the card.

Thank you for the more precise definition. Broadly I think Hacker News could use a little more discussion of Marx, which is why I brought it up.

The Marxist perspective is that the employer is incentivized to pay as little as possible to extract the maximum amount of value from the person's labor, realizing the difference as profit (even though crucially that value was created by the worker). An example of this would be software engineers at companies like Apple and Google, whose labor has been shown to produce several times the value of their compensation. Unions and worker cooperatives are meant to counterbalance these forces by giving workers more negotiating power in the case of the former, or aligning the profit motive with employee compensation for the latter.

It's honestly embarrassing that PG would even post this. The post strikes me as particularly lazy and dismissive because it doesn't engage with any of the arguments for a wealth tax or the motivations behind one. As other comments have pointed out, the example is not even close to a good "model" of a real-world wealth tax. It's a straw man. I would expect an overconfident high school student who just finished The Fountainhead to make this kind argument but not a successful and supposedly smart venture capitalist.

I've seen this pattern from PG and other people in tech over and over. They assume their expertise in one domain translates into other fields in which they have no special knowledge. Underlying a post like this is the arrogant assumption that nobody smart has ever thought of calculating .99^60, and that PG knows what's best.

Paul Graham is hopelessly out of touch.

This doesn't make sense. It sounds like you are equating Uber drivers to human traffickers and crack dealers.

The consequences of this ruling are probably not going to be known for a while. This is certainly bad for Uber & Lyft insofar as it will greatly increase their operating costs. The question is what effect the ruling will have on drivers.

Uber is not a profitable company with fat margins like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Netflix. I don't see any way for Uber to absorb the increased costs that come with full employment without reducing the number of drivers and increasing the cost of rides in California.

The change in employment classification means that drivers will no longer be able to choose when they work. Uber will choose when they work, and for how long. The barrier to becoming an Uber driver will increase. Currently, in most cities it's possible to sign up to drive entirely online and basically just requires a license and a completed background check. Going forward people who want to drive for Uber will have to interview like any other job, probably in-person with a resume, and jump through the many hoops which that process entails.

My guess is that for new drivers who can pass the interview and existing full-time drivers who don't get laid off this will bring a big improvement in quality of life and provide some much-needed financial security and benefits. The rest will be out of a job.

I think it's unfortunate that some kind of compromise couldn't be reached which would have provided some economic security for these workers while accounting for the real differences between gig work and regular employment.

I get the sense over the last year that the wheels have fully come off the bus there

It seems absurd that the DOJ is using the FCC's argument that it didn't have the authority to regulate ISPs to prevent states from regulating ISPs. If they don't have the authority to regulate, how do they have the authority to stop regulation?

I think the answer is pretty obviously not some kind of reasonable legal argument, but simply that the corporations which really run the Trump FCC and DOJ do not want Net Neutrality regulations. Comcast's bottom line doesn't care about rational legal arguments.

Finally! A small phone with decent specs and a headphone jack is really all I want these days (and is almost extinct as far as phone design goes). The Pixel 4a seems like a possible alternative to the S10e, which up until now was the only game in town for high quality small-form-factor smartphones.

I think that's what this is really about. Trump and the various neocons filling his cabinet have decided to try and do to TikTok what China has done to many US companies through its onerous censorship requirements and preferential treatment of domestic technology companies. This is a case of blatant tit-for-tat. What this boils down to is conservatives in the executive branch not wanting Chinese technology companies to be able to do business in the US. There is an argument that this is justified given the protectionism China has demonstrated towards its own tech sector. Ultimately though this escalation is probably bad for Chinese-US relations and the Internet as a whole.

It's possible for this to completely backfire though. Suppose Microsoft pays tens of billions to ByteDance to acquire TikTok's US operations and then the app tanks in popularity or fails to reach profitability. This seems especially possible given how new TikTok is and the faddish rise and fall of many other video-based platforms (Vine, HQTrivia, Pariscope, etc.)

This transcription of the website into a single quickly and easily readable comment is the best criticism possible of the source.

Saffron is still in school. This is patronizing, but she doesn't know anything about real disillusionment yet.

Real disillusionment comes after the elite education.

The stuff that crushes your spirit comes later when you go to work at a FAANG and realize that the modern tech sector is fueled not by lofty ideals of innovation and altruistic visions of technological utopia, but by the same cynical profiteering, exploitation and rent-seeking as every other capitalist enterprise.

Your attitude changes once you understand that the high-paying tech sector jobs you spent years of your life training to perform all require you to compromise your beliefs about what is good/fair/just. The jobs require you to build things which hurt people for people who only care about money. Imagine working 40-60 hours a week to make good money doing something you know is at best a complete waste of time and talent.

Real disillusionment comes after you've lived in San Francisco for a while and you realize everyone you know also works in tech and thinks, looks and talks the same way you do and likes the same things you do. And maybe on your way to work at the glossy tech campus that gives you free lunch that your coworkers are always complaining about you pass a tent city littered with needles and human shit.

Eventually you realize that an enormous number of the public figures who went to your university and succeeded in "changing the world" didn't change it for the better. And you may wonder if a lot of the things you've been told about meritocracy and the virtues of intelligence and achievement and wealth accumulation are true at all.

I agree. For some degrees it's less of an issue but for areas of study like chemistry, biology, physics and many others, access to the college's physical resources like laboratories is part of what you're paying for. I don't know how you solve this problem with the current constraints imposed by COVID-19, but you can't expect these students to pay full-price for an inferior education.

Trading the stock directly would probably not maximize gains. I'm saying you could buy short expiry call options and make far more money (or puts if you're trying to move the price the other way). Part of the reason people trade options is because you can make (and lose) far more money with less capital than you can by just trading the underlying security. In many cases it's higher risk, higher reward.

Here's a scenario demonstrating the idea:

Let's say I spend $92,300 to buy 61 shares of TSLA at its current price of $1,512.18. Then I post my Tweet causing TSLA to jump to $1600.00 on the same day and sell my 61 for $97,600. My total profit is only $5,300.

But what if instead I buy $92,300 of 7/17 TSLA call options at $1600? They cost only $9.23 per contract for 10,000 contracts. Now the same price movement to $1,600.00 today causes the value of my options to increase to $39.16 per contact. I can sell them for $391,600 netting me a total of $299,300 for the same starting capital. If you have access to margin then you're talking millions in profit with even a small price movement (though at that point you probably have to start worrying about the SEC).

I think what the parent is saying that the original post definitely misses is that the trading volume in short expiry options on Tesla is so high that it would be impossible to detect one trade in a sea of hundreds of thousands.

If their goal was to get BTC, why would they copy/paste the exact same message with the same Bitcoin address for every compromised account? Nobody who could pull this off would be that dumb.

Okay here is my mostly baseless conspiracy theory:

As many others have noted, access to the compromised accounts is worth several orders of magnitude more money than the hackers were able to extract using this naive bitcoin scam. Whether it's used to manipulate markets or just resold, the hack is probably worth millions or tens of millions. Is it plausible that hackers who could coordinate and execute this kind of a breach would not know how to maximize the value of the hack and would instead opt for a really naive and not especially lucrative BTC scam?

It is also pretty common knowledge that the activist investor hedge fund Elliott Management has wanted Jack Dorsey removed as Twitter's CEO for quite some time. What if the BTC scam is a cover for corporate espionage? What if the purpose of the hack was actually to make Dorsey look incompetent in the most public way possible, and possibly turn many influential public figures against Twitter? Elliott Management has the resources to finance a breach like this as well as the motive.

An alternate theory would be that this actually was a form of market manipulation -- manipulation of Twitter's share price.

I don't think anyone appreciates how scary this is. A simple BTC scam or even market manipulation is one thing. Can you imagine the mass panic if there were one sombre tweet from Trump's account about a nuclear strike?

At this point the Trump admin is likely to do everything possible to try and drive the news cycle away from the pandemic. Everything the current administration does until the election should be understood through that lens.

Look at the COVID-19 statistics in the US compared to almost every other country in the world and tell me that we have a functional federal government.

Is there recent data on how much investment originates from retail investors? Are there really enough retail investors on Robinhood and elsewhere to push valuations up this high?

Have you talked to the people who use Robinhood? This is exactly how many of them think but in less sophisticated terms.

One-sided? Have you seen what has happened to revenues of news publications since the advent of Google and Facebook? The idea that the tech sector is seriously threatened by the news media is silly. All this fretting about negative coverage basically amounts to persecutory delusion from what is easily the most powerful sector in the US economy.

1. The content of the article is still unknown. Scott — and from what I can tell most of the rest of the SSC chud community — made an assumption about the ill intent of the author for which there is no evidence. Again the hypocrisy here is delightful given how much of rationalist ideology relies on giving people the benefit of the doubt.

2. Scott's last name is already out there and is ridiculously easy to find. The idea that he was actually anonymous as the author of SSC is silly.

3. There's an implicit admission of guilt in the way Scott anticipates that his clients and the broader public will react negatively to his views. I wonder, what is it about Scott's views that makes him so certain the reaction will be negative? Why hasn't he allowed for the possibility that his clients and the NYT readership will react positively to the article? Couldn't it raise his profile and that of his blog in a way that is beneficial to both?

4. I recognize that this is heresy to rationalist ideology, but his identity matters in a discussion of his ideas, especially his political ideas. It's easier to assess his sincerity or credibility given the background his real identity provides. Is Scott really the Grand Wizard of the KKK in real life? Is he a saint who spends his days serving the homeless? Is he just some guy?

5. If nothing else Scott is making the tactical mistake of adding fuel to the fire. My guess is that not only will the NYT still publish, this entire kerfuffle will almost certainly now be part of the story. Traditional news media thrives on controversy and sensationalism. Scott has just made this whole thing far more interesting and already drawn more attention to himself via the New Yorker article. As of my writing this comment the Google autocomplete for "Scott Alexander" is his last name. His knee-jerk reaction to the unpublished NYT piece has already ensured the loss of anonymity. Seems kind-of irrational.

The beauty of the article is in exposing the fundamentally emotional, illogical reaction of the SSC's author and associated community. For a group that seems to value dispassionate rationality and intelligence as inherently morally good, their overreaction to this unpublished article is deliciously ironic. Instead of allowing the "marketplace of ideas" to play out, Scott Alexander decided to take his ball and go home.

Ultimately discrediting the "rationalist" ideology was as easy as making them angry.

Because the vocabulary and aesthetics of science have become very popular, I keep seeing public figures and people on social media using things that look or sound scientific to advance their own agenda, usually political or commercial. Charlatans like Simon Sinek rely on the audience's uncritical acceptance of their expertise and ignorance of the underlying field or the scientific process as a whole.

Whenever I see this sort of thing it makes me want to scream.

I think there's a fundamental difference in underlying motivation which probably changes the dynamic. With work most people would rather be doing something else. For a game there's nothing else most people would rather be doing. I can't prove this, but I bet group cohesion and effectiveness is much higher for teams in which the members' motivation is intrinsic (fun) vs extrinsic (money).