andriesm

Thank you this got me thinking. The issue isn't (just) whether the rich are paying a high enough rate, it is that a lot of people currently complaining still won't be happy even if we increase it by a lot.

I can only speculate, but I wonder if the reason a lot of people shout "tax the rich" isn't that they want a bit more resources for geniunely deserving causes, but that they hate uber successful people and just want to see them "cut down to size".

In this view, higher taxes aren't meant to bring in more revenue (Laffer curves place limits on the effectiveness of higher taxes), but to hurt Rich people. Bring them down so we don't see some people doing 100,000 times better than the average person.

Maybe they think hurting Rich people will make the world a better place? Maybe they just wanna hurt them because they feel jealous? I'm super curious about what the true motives are.

Why are people so unhappy to see the existence of centinares and billionares?

I'm especially talking about people who made their money by creating new things, or made the world more efficient in some way.

What makes Musk so utterly rotten? Otherwise "it's just like your opinion, man..."

"Requires a shadowy threat actor such ad Russia and..."? Trump is trying to normalize US-Russian relations.

"This is American capitalism operating as designed" - Honestly what do you mean?

Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.

I'm also curious about Billionaires being independently evil - what do you mean, are virtually all billionaires evil? Are they really morally worse people than the average or do they just have access to more resources and influence?

Wow! Really - this is the one patent-restricted feature I was hoping they were going to solve. I'm curious if a decent quality blood oxygen meter could give me additional data about my sleep apnea. I've previously trief several blood oxygen meters ordered from Amazon, and the results were very low accuracy and low confidence, and the only decent ones couldn't log data continuously over time. (At least not when I bought a few different ones a handful of years ago)

No they're lucky, all the best medical discoveries are for them.

How can they build something commercial/grid-scale when not a single research-level reactor truly generates net energy out, and none can do it anywhere near continously enough to be of any practical use?

This news is either based on misleading the public, or I am about to be updated with where Fusion is?

I interpret "government should stop spending money they don't have" metaphorically as standing in for "don't spend so much money (especially in economically unproductive ways) that it devalues money and misallocates resources so much that it slows down economic growth".

I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.

It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence.

It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend.

So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.

It's pretty bad, but smart people do stupid things all the time. Hopefully he learns from this mistake. And as pointed out, it does not automatically make all his prior decisions bad - we can actually analyse them each on their individual merit.

Thank you Minerva was really fascinating.

The movie "Rose Island" about a hippie ancap seasteading micronation that ends up being taken out by the Italian government.

It seems there's a long history of these ancapistans' being terminated by nearby governments' militaries.

You sound very confident and certain, about something which it is not possible yo be this certain about. How do we know with very high certainty that seed oils are not worse for us, say than olive oil?

I assume Honduras was a country desperate to attract foreign investment?

Special Economic Zones worked very well in many other countries.

It's not hard to understand why - give long term regulatory certainty, with strong protections for the the wannabe capitalists who want to bring things there and promise them stable very low taxes, and they will eventually flock to the place, bring a ton of money and build a lot of things there if you let them, creating a ton of economic activity in the process, minus the huge tax contributions, but still a net economic benefit because of all the surrounding economic activity and employment etc.

But then a place like Honduras reneges on their ZEDE promise, so now you can basically never trust their promises again?

At any moment in future they could make hard turns towards socialism and confiscate, tax away, and regulate to death - anything that you invest there.

So I guess Honduras will have to grow without huge influxes of new FDI or the stimulus effects one can sometimes get from lower regulations and taxes.

Honduras doesn't strike me as the type of place where people with money are excited to invest? I wonder how this will affect it's future attractiveness?

Somebody's wife cut your hair in her kitchen and you paid in cash, no taxes. It's tax evasion, quick, let loose 1000s of new tax agents on the population to stop this travesty! Immediately!

I say deregulate everything reasonable, stop trying to nake everything a nanny-society and micro-managing every last bit of compliance, and let the chips fall where they may! Let responsible adults live their lives. People self organise and figure most things out for themselves if you just let them.

If kitchen hairstylists outcompete hair chains, I would be surprised but also not too worried - hardly the end of civilization at risk. But locking people artificially out of jobs and artificially inflating almost all everyday expenses for consumers are pretty big enshittifications, in my opinion.

It's not widely accepted by people on the right that "Project 2025" is the official playbook for the Republican party though?

I'm also thinking that we'll have "cool" humanoid robots before we'll have fully autonomous cars.

It just seems that self driving is staying a "hard problem" (harder than expected!)

Both would be insanely economically valuable.

I do fear humanoid robots will face intense competition from Chinese mass manufacturing, undercutting them with cost while mostly matching features.

Exactly government controlled and mandated education = you will be "appropriately" indoctrinated with framing assumptions while being educated. State schooling = statist schooling.

Do you think government is best at directing charitable money?

Personally I think the best use of such a fortune, 100bn say, it to invest $1m into $1m high potential new small businesses and startups.

That would create the most wealth for the most people.

You could even decide to pick one poor country with reasonable governance, and use 10 percent of the money for oversight and assessing merits of which business proposals to fund.

Imagine a million new businesses across Africa, or across India or across countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines each got funded with 1m usd.

Imagine how many jobs would be created, how much long term economic impact there would be.

Even assuming 80 percent of the funded businesses fail, 200,000 successful new businesses, plus another 800k entrepreneurs who all learned a valuable lesson and gained a ton of experience.

Which legal or ethical code is Buffet not following?

Most people are not aware of what it means to be sociopath/psychopath/Anti-social personality disorder... Or how common it is in the population (a few percentage points seems reasonably accepted) - Why is this information not made general knowledge?

I would argue it should be taught in schools.

It's a basic life skill, to be aware of what it means and how common it is. How do you function in society being oblivious of these facts? Basically by perennially becoming a victim to these, or by becoming bitter.

Just knowing about it is half the battle.

I would also add other dark personality types with potential to cause you real harm to the list - BPD and NPD.

School yourself, save yourself a whole lot of bad surprises. Over a lifetime being aware of the existence of these means you are on the lookout for warning signs, and you learn to get better at picking up on warning signs faster.

Of course genetics play a role - some people can get by on long term sleep of 4-5 hours a night, while most people need more. Some people have fantastic health from genetics (and then work hard to maintain it), while others are born with a slew of minor ailments that make them less productive. Not to speak of inteligence or natural talents, height etc.

Only use WIN on dedicated games-only computer. Please save us, Steam OS!!

Once Steam OS becomes mainstream, I will never boot Windows anywhere ever again.

Windows does NOT care. What kind of OS comes with bloatware out of the box???

So many bugs.

So many bs out of the box behaviours when installing that require secret recipes from the internet to work around.

No thanks.

If you were harmed by AI content, then you should definitely have the option to turn on the safety filter, but please don't stop the rest of us from turning it off.

I've been very hungry for a solution to golang's unsafe nil pointers, something as elegant as what dart lang got.

I was looking at nilsafe source analyzers etc, anything that can get prevent the programmer from referencing potentially nil pointers without checking them first!

Dart really got this handled well. This is the biggest weakness for me about go, so Borgo is worth checking out!

I was even considering also looking at making a lang that transpiles to go, that is almost syntactically identical to go, but just makes clear distinction between nillable. and never-nillable pointers, and forced check before use of any potentially nil ptr.

I'm glad Borgo now exists. I really am not motivated enough to create one myself. I just want to use one. Super happy to see I am not the only person frustrated enough by this. I'm almost at the point of throwing away my super efficient go-server code and redoing it in dart, knowing it will be far less performant, just so I can have less crashy code.

Borgo or something like Borgo could be the perfect solution. Go's toolchain is incredibly fast in build time and super efficient at run time, very few things beat it for the level of programmer productivity. Just a pitty about those damn nil pointer crashes. Would have been an almost perfect language then. Even the error by value ans dual return value stuff one can live with.

But nil pointer crashes in a high-level language in current year is too much for me. Literally a game changer in modern nil safe languages. Have pointers, but know which ones can be nil, and disallow code that can lead to nil pointer exceptions. Is this really such a strange preference to have?

The normal distribution does indeed make some assumptions. Certain natural qualities tend to be notmally distributed like height, but other things like net worth are NOT normally distributed because of feedback loops. The choice of distribution either makes an assumption or validates some other prior assumptions.

Thr choice of using a normal distribution vs another mathematical distribution is not purely a mathematical device, the choice either reflects some assumptions (which one would quickly see if they're valid or not generally).

An interesting case in point for me is when a lot of mathematics assume bell curve distribution in stock market price distributions, like the black scholes option equation does, and it turns out to not really be the best fit. It sort off almost works, but systematically underprices extreme events.

This is what can happen when your assumed distribution turns out to be wrong.

So far though, I haven't heard of refutations that height or IQ (as measured on standardised tests and processed in prescribed ways) are indeed bell curve distributions.

Thank you, I was blissfully unaware of show dead after all these years of being here.

Everytime I see the content dissappear from being flagged and moderated away, I feel poorer and wonder what it was that I can no longer be allowed to read. How aggressively should messages be moderated on HN? After I had myself been unreasonably sensored in other discussions, this very active moderation is giving me serious concerns about HN. Robot spam should be moderated, or illegal things, but do we really need edgy comments hidden from view? I've seen a lot of magnanimous, wise and empathic responses on some otherwise cutting comments, a lot of goodwill here on HN. Do we really need the heavy hand of censors to protect us from offensive speech???

One interesting kind of cog - I've seen examples of tools that claim to provide reliable workflows of AI's as web-scrapers, to take a URL and pull out a list of JSON objects from a listing page (containing a set of specified fields) , and instead of having to write parsing code and deal with changes to the website, the AI driven scraper tool will just keeping chugging along.

Caveat - I haven't actually used these myself, like you I am a heavy user of AI interns!

They are a massive force multiplier for me in coding and in doing investment research.

I use cursor AI for generating code changes from feature descriptions, and perplexity-AI to answer complicated questions using current data from the internet.

Claud and ChatGPT are very nice for language translation - I use one to translate and the other the reverse translate to verify the quality of the translation.

I also found the scientific-ness of the term "Vibes" sprinkled throughout hillarious.

And the article plays back and forth with it's own claims, one momeng saying it will answer the question then saying later it is yet to be determined and then again saying it will quantify it...

Got quite deep into it, but had to give up along the way.

It was somewhat fun to read but could not get what was the point they wanted to make, other than play what appears to be very self indulgent word games. Maybe this is what is required of academic writing nowadays?

I for the first time decided it's worth using after abandoning it very early on. I prefer to use it mostly read-only these days. So there's definitely opinion differences to be had about whether Elon broke twitter or "rescued it". One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter!

Anything that promotes skepticism is good. When I read an article like this, I don't know if the article has political motives for which it is willing to embellish the truth, or use a real issue to insert some false claims inbetween, or whether this is all true which also seems very likely in this case.

I think everyone and anyone can fall for falsified facts if these facts fit one's own expected narratives or political beliefs.

This article highlights how people can br taken, especially when it is politically convenient.

I try to get as good as I can at developing my nose and sniffing out fake news on my side as well as "the other side" , and honestly I see it on both sides. It's definitely easier to pick up on it when it's on the "other" side!

Fake news is not going away, because even most fact checkers have examples where it seems they deliberately lied - ie. abuse their position of trust as a fact checker for political purposes!

The X community notes feature seems like a good idea. It's probably far from foolproof. I must say, I love comment sections on all platforms that have them! So many times I wasn't sure about the truthfulness of piece of content, then after reading the comments I had a much better sense of whether it is fake or real.

Sadly the original comment is gone! This seems to be happening with alarming frequency on HN.

I once noticed something "interesting" about how Taiwan was labelled in some country data, and my comment was also flagged and deleted like this.

It seems the moderation on HN is getting very strict.

Sadly it often means I see interesting discussions where the original base comment is gone. At least the follow ups are not scrubbed.

But I would have appreciated an option to reveal flagged content, maybe after accepting a warning message.

'a very real crime". Is celebrating a murder, a real crime? I know INCITING is in most places. How about laughing about it? Minimizing it? Making. jokes about? Having a conspiracy theory about it? I don't know Turkey' s laws, but I suspect almost all of these are legal in free speech oriented places.