The interactive quizzes at https://www.wrc.noaa.gov/wrso/security_guide/quizzes.htm are a good quick-skim way to learn a little bit more about this world. It will be interesting to see if these pages are still up tomorrow.
612 karma · joined May 8, 2015
My take on this is that the capital gain was not actually generated all in one year, but by taxing it as ordinary income, you are putting it into a higher bracket as though it were all generated in one year.
As an example, say your father builds a successful company, and runs it well for 40 years before selling it for $10 million and retiring. By taxing the entire $10 million in one tax year, almost all of it is in the highest tax bracket, which is anything above $500,000 for single filers. But the actual average amount earned per year is only $250,000, which doesn’t reach the highest tax bracket at all.
There are ways to balance this, of course, e.g. if you did exactly what I did in my example, and applied the income tax bracket based on the average gain per year of the securities sold. Something like that would still take care of billionaires “paying their fair share,” since you would have to divide by a lot of years to get billions of dollars in gains into a lower tax bracket.
If we’ve literally made tragedy impossible, there’s no way we haven’t traded away a disproportionate amount of freedom to get there.
This is really going to sound dumb, but this kind of creeping surveillance is the biggest reason I hope we can make self-sufficient off-planet colonies. I honestly believe that the trend toward complete surveillance and control in the name of complete safety is irreversible, and the only way to escape it is to literally move to where they cannot physically reach you.
Bell's Theorem is just a model showing how two sets of measurements of certain properties of entangled particles would differ in a “Quantum Physics” regime where there is spooky action at a distance changing the measured properties versus a “common sense” regime where both particles leave the entanglement site with those properties already set.
[0] is a fairly easy to understand graph of the correlation of the measurements at the two sites in both regimes, even if the math that generates those charts is beyond me.
Given that, just knowing what measurements you got only gives you an idea of what the other guy across the universe would see were he to measure your particle’s entangled partner - he has no more control over what those measurements actually are than you do, you just know that there’s a certain correlation between what you saw and what he saw. That’s why you can’t use Bell’s Theorem to communicate, neither one of you is actually controlling the measured property, there’s just a certain correlation between the measurements both of you got.
It seems to this layman that in order to communicate FTL using QM, you’d need a way to determine that the property being measured has already been “collapsed” (if that’s the right word) by spooky action at a distance, e.g if the other guy had already measured it. Bell’s Theorem gives us no way to determine if the other guy has actually made the measurements, it assumes that both you and he have both made those measurements.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem#/media/File:Bel...
I don’t know what the answer is, and I’ve been worried for a while that we are putting blind faith in “science” which just lines up with our preferred worldview. Maybe the answer is simply to use science, however it is performed, to inform, not guide, policy, and always keep in mind that what science believes has a non-zero chance of being politically-driven itself.
With a few decades (years?) of refinement, this technology absolutely has the potential to capture private thoughts.
Sure, it may require an implant, but just like we all carry tracking beacons that have become indispensable to daily life today, in 20 years it may be “the done thing” to have an implant to control your home automation, etc. Or maybe the tech will improve to where it just needs a hat. And at that point, certain authorities will have no qualms about using it in interrogations, with or without “due process.”
I really believe that Republicans can elect some of the craziest Qanon believers precisely because the Democrats refuse to forcefully denounce the craziest whims of their radical base, and are tainted by association, even though almost none of the national-level Democrats are nearly so extreme.
There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of thought around “is it even necessary for this three-ton industrial robot to be dynamically reprogrammed from a service center in Stockholm,” and it seems like everyone just assumes that everyone else will do a perfect job implementing and configuring security. I fear the tune will only change after the first multi-million dollar lawsuit, and I hope all that costs is the money.
Some people think emotionally, not logically. Figuring that out took me way longer in life than it should have.
Logical thinkers will be able to do the risk/benefit analysis with “good enough” fidelity so long as data is available, so you don’t really have to worry about convincing them.
For the emotional thinkers, whom I am assuming have a large intersection with the people that believe misinformation (that assumption may need to be checked, but I ... just don’t have that data), perhaps we would have had better luck by pushing a message like “we are all soldiers in a war now, and soldiers take risks to protect each other.” Complete with an advertising campaign featuring a frontline combat veteran recounting how she walked out under enemy fire to rescue her comrades, and subtly or not-so-subtly shaming people who are unwilling to take tiny risks to protect their fellow soldier-citizens.
The timing on this seems really suspect. Will they release any sort of information on the breakdown of people that were offered / accepted a spot in this study, particularly their political leanings?
It’s pretty well accepted that the workforce in Silicon Valley leans a particular way politically. The suspicion will be that Facebook is encouraging those who lean the other way to mute themselves.
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/09/04/facebook-users-will-be-paid-to...
I think this is a typical example of the medical community's method of communicating with the public - until they've studied something to death, they're too afraid to say anything, and if pressed, will just tell you to keep doing what you're doing, even if emerging evidence to the contrary and widespread anecdotal counter-examples are starting to surface.
Think about the whole mask fiasco at the beginning of this mess. The CDC actually told Americans that wearing masks might make them more likely to get the virus, despite masks being an effective preventive measure against all other known respiratory viruses to my knowledge, plus the widespread usage of masks by literally billions of people in Asia is a pretty good indicator that it can be done safely.
During "normal" times, this general approach may be 100% right, you need to be very sure you understand even low-incidence side effects before you tell 8 billion people what is good for them and what isn't. But that's simply the wrong approach in the face of a fast-moving pandemic - you need to be able to do basic risk/reward analysis quickly and recommend the path that is most likely to work, even if you're not 100% sure, and you're operating on some educated guesses in the absence of hard data.
Basically, they need to operate more like engineers and less like doctors, at least for a little while =)
I think that if COVID19 was more deadly, we'd have a lot more agreement on implementing lockdowns, and not nearly as much politicization of the issue.
I think that the polarization we are seeing regarding lockdown policies is because COVID19 sits right in the middle of what the population at large thinks of as "very dangerous." It's not quite half-and-half, but I think it breaks down like this:
I think it's fair to say that a very large minority looks at a disease that mostly targets the elderly and infirm and thinks, "why don't we take measures to protect the vulnerable populations who aren't getting out much anyway, and let the rest of the world get on with life?" This isn't just about "making money" to these people, it's actually about living your life, and accepting what is in reality a pretty small risk for most healthy people.
One the other hand, a not-quite-supermajority believes that a disease which is 10-100 times deadlier than the typical flu when looking at raw fatality numbers is worth significant cost and effort to suppress. This would also include a significant portion of people who are themselves elderly or infirm, and they don't want to risk society neglecting to protect them if everyone else is allowed to go about their business.
It could well be that if the fatality rate really was > 3%, you would have a hyper-majority in favor of taking action, which means we would have all been in agreement about how to react, really locked down hard and eliminated it by now.
So ..., if widespread testing is not available, we don't have a choice, and have to manage the flow of bodies as we reopen society in stages.
It sounds like this helps address the sample collection material supply chain, but how do we scale the reagent supply chain? The entire world desperately needs test capacity to increase by a factor of 10 or more, but is that actually possible?
Every single expert says mass testing is the only way to get ahead of this before a vaccine arrives, but I'm very worried that mass testing on the scale needed is simply impossible, which leaves us with only two choices - stay in lockdown for over a year waiting for the vaccine, or accept that herd immunity is the only way out, and do what we can to minimize the damage as the virus spreads, e.g. mandating masks in public, keeping the elderly population isolated while the rest of the population is gradually exposed,etc.
>Sounds like a perfect case for publicly funded infrastructure to me.
Why would it be a case for publicly funded infrastructure? We’re talking about entertainment, not highways or clean water.
As a consumer, yes, I would prefer an option to pay only for the shows I want to watch, but I don’t see why your tax dollars should fund my preferred method of entertainment.
But how many of those domestic customers get their own paycheck from exports? China is moving towards a more domestic-focused economy, but exports are still a big deal for them.
We in the “first world” live in the safest period in human history, but we are constantly being fed the idea that we are not safe enough, and we always need to do more. The UK is collectively freaking out about knives and other implements that are only “weapons” if you squint just right[0], and parents in the United States risk being arrested for letting their children walk to the park[1].
I’m not saying we should start freebasing (either kind) on the side of an active volcano, but as safe as we are, we could accomplish amazing things in space flight, medical technology, and food production if we just allow, or even encourage, more informed risk taking.
[0]https://mobile.twitter.com/mpshackney/status/562993045759856...
[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...
It’s not uncommon when applying for a job that you take a “personality test” that measures not just technical knowledge, but also scores you on traditionally “soft” traits like assertiveness vs. agreeableness, with the hiring manager getting a readout of where you fall relative to the “ideal” range of that metric for the job you’re applying for.
We recently had an open position, and I know for a fact that we turned down multiple perfectly qualified people with successful track records in this exact role because they didn’t pass a personality test they received after the interview process - the reasoning for giving them the test after was that this personality test is particularly expensive. The “solution” was not to ditch the expensive personality test, but to bite the bullet and give all the rest of the candidates the test beforehand. But my eyes were opened.
I’m very worried that applying metrics to people, not performance, is creating a homogeneous culture that goes along to get along, resulting in silent acceptance of the situation described in the article.
That said, I'm glad I finished the article, because it seems to clearly describe the state of the overall affordable housing market in the country, which is pretty awful, and there were some eye-openers in there for me, such as one in five renters facing eviction. That's a ridiculous number.
I don't know the answer to this problem, because telling rich people they just can't buy in certain neighborhoods doesn't seem like a viable option to me, but we have to at least acknowledge it is a problem.