mercutio2

The tricky thing is it’s taxing land on what your neighbors built in their land.

If you build something that makes my land valuable, I get taxed more.

I like the incentive structure, but I think part of the incentives are towards collectivization so you and I become one unit, which may or may not be a good thing.

What is this obsession people have with the taxation of billionaires?

There aren’t many billionaires. Expropriating all their wealth wouldn’t move the needle for any of our budgetary problems.

I’m all for closing the step up in basis on death, which is what allows billionaires (and of course only moderately rich folks) to avoid paying much tax over their full life cycle.

But LVT is a good idea, regardless of whether billionaires get some extra punishment for having the temerity to create successful businesses.

If this is really a significant concern for you, are you accounting for the CO2e of the (very significant) difference in energy consumption over the lifetime of the device?

It seems unlikely to me that in a full lifecycle accounting the spinning rust would come out ahead.

Of course MCAS was disclosed to pilots, the idea that it wasn’t is ridiculous to the point of absurdity.

Boeing has gone off the rails, but the general lack of nuance in the common narrative about their failures is really over the top.

MCAS is how a fundamentally different plane behaves (in most cases) like a normal 737. The fact that such a system exists is described, and disclosed, in minute detail to pilots when they get their mandatory training on the 737-MAX.

The specific name wasn’t used in the training, and that’s where this ridiculous narrative came from.

I included health insurance in my calculation, and public schools in Mississippi are just as free in the US as they are Denmark.

Cost of living is much higher in Denmark, so making that adjustment isn't going to help your argument.

If you assume Danish university education is comparable to paying full freight at Harvard (which no one with a median Mississippi income would have to do) or some other heavy weighting on things that are private in the US, you might get close.

Certainly one can argue there's a large intangible benefit to not having to think about health insurance, and I for one place a large premium on having the opportunity to bike everywhere. I'm not arguing life in Denmark is bad.

No doubt there are many public services in Denmark that make transfer payments to the bottom quintile difficult to measure, but I just have never seen a credible argument that in terms of disposable consumer surplus, the median adult does better in Denmark than Mississippi, accounting for all reasonable costs.

And, of course, most Americans are richer than the median Mississippian.

It seems great to argue about the value of things Denmark is good at, but having a large consumer surplus just doesn't strike me as being one of those things. It's also not a value I think the median Dane agrees should be weighted that high, which is fine.

Murdering people is not pro anything.

The answer was already given: it was politically infeasible to pass a single payer variant in the US. And it’s not clear it would have been good even if it had been feasible.

Printing is just not very expensive, relative to the size of the US economy. People like the $1 note. I just don't think it's going to happen for another 2x-4x reduction in the value of the note.

Give it 15-40 years and we'll think about it again!

Of course, by then, so much of commerce will be electronic that I don't think anyone will care about what notes still circulate, other than the $100, which is used more outside the US than inside.

US notes are much more durable than most other countries’, and last much longer in circulation.

The fed has calculated that the seignorage vs. printing costs of switching to coins about balance out for dollars.

Pennies however: we keep them just for nostalgia.

Why do you say you have to pay a monthly fee for iCloud?

None of the technology you’re discussing here requires a paid account.

You may, separately, decide to sync more than the meager free quota of data on iCloud, but that’s an unrelated issue. You’re welcome to use iCloud just for keychain sync.

Living on the streets is one very visible form of homelessness; your numbers are apples to oranges.

LA is also an order of magnitude bigger than Barcelona, so absolute numbers (even if carefully only tracking people sleeping rough) are a weird point of comparison.

Big fan of Denmark!

But where in the world did you get the idea people in Denmark do “much better” than people in even the poorest US state?

Median income in the poorest US state (Mississippi) is slightly higher than median income in Denmark, with much lower taxes even if you consider private health insurance a tax.

A similar analysis of people in the poorest decile, after famously stingy US transfer payments, has disposable income for the poor in Mississippi coming out ahead of being poor in Denmark.

I keep seeing folks make this argument. I would love to live in Denmark, but the reason to live there is not because of higher income. The US is just much, much richer than almost all of Europe (Switzerland and Luxembourg are the exceptions, not Denmark).

It’s totally fine to value things like social cohesion, terrific bike infrastructure, and low income inequality. Those are areas Denmark beats the US.

But income? It’s not even close.

“In XML” is neither here nor there.

The massive amounts of indirection which the IDE wouldn’t help you understand was the difficult thing. What encoding you use for that is pretty irrelevant. JSON would have been worse.

In practice it's unlikely you're using CalDAV or CardDAV on Apple Watch, those data classes are synced from your paired phone unless you've set your watch up as a stand-alone device, which is rare.

One day, hopefully!

[not the original person you asked the question of]

I cannot stand Becky Chambers. I've tried to read her three times, and after about 20 pages I give up. Of the thousand or so novels I've read in the last 20 years, I've done that with about 5 books.

One of my friends asked my why I was so vituperative about Becky Chambers. I said it was just so bad.

They pointed out that I really, really sounded like I was channeling the "I am a man and I really want everyone's favorite things to be what men like in Sci Fi" trope.

I don't think this is accurate! I like all sorts of feminist sci-fi.

But I loath characters who sit around and don't do anything much while some low-stakes activity is happening and there's a bunch of angst that strikes me as unimportant whining not driving any plot.

So, fair enough, I have only encountered that style of writing from female authors. But I don't think it's a particularly damning individual preference.

I happened to love Murderbot (and A Memory Called Empire), though, per the original point of discussion for this post.

I guess everyone is just different.

I loath, loath, loath videos, for "teaching" anything. For basically all types of information.

I find the pacing to be terrible, and even if people talk as fast as I read, I absorb almost nothing from watching people play games.

I can't tell if other people are just slow readers, if they absorb visual information much better than me, or what.

Apparently everyone on Board Game Geek agrees with your side of the ledger, in that most board games have ~2 text reviews of the game and dozens of video reviews, but I basically pretend the videos don't exist.

You’re right, I was wrong!

Fascinating. Vinge is about the furthest from “soft” sci-fi I can think of. We must have very different definitions of what makes something soft.

It’s certainly true that Vinge doesn’t spend much time on the engineering details, but I find him unusually clear on “imagine if we had this kind of impossible-now technology, but the rest of what we know about physics remained, how would people behave?”

He was, after all, a physics professor.

Rainbow’s End is much clearer on this than his distant future stuff, of course.

Only one side is making positive claims in this thread.

I never made a claim that "all men do X" or that "shop talk and banter are fairly universal". I did point out that I and my friends do not mock our friends and colleagues.

Still avoiding positive claims, but here are some normative claims:

  - I object to claiming that mocking is normal and acceptable in all groups of men
  - some, not all, working class subcultures use mocking as a shibboleth
  - this aspect of those subcultures is not a thing I think "we" should valorize

I am a man. I don’t know who this “we” is you speak of. Sure as hell isn’t me or my friends.

Assholes exist everywhere, but “we” don’t have to apologize for them or make the workplace a safer space for them.

My daughter was premature and spent weeks in the NICU.

My family paid exactly $0 for this experience, with good US insurance.

People paying thousands of dollars with insurance have chosen to purchase cheaper insurance premiums, and then bear higher costs when there’s an expensive event.

This is a fine choice to make. It does not mean the US healthcare system is especially expensive for middle class people.

Like many parts of the US economic system, the US healthcare system isn’t very good for poor people. But don’t go thinking it performs poorly for the upper half of the income distribution.

On the contrary. Conditional on living to your 60s, being moderately overweight is positively correlated with lifespan, not negatively.

When you're old, setbacks that cause you to lose your appetite are much more common and much bigger threats to the health of skinny people.

I don't know where you live, but I've met tons of moderately fat people in their 70s and 80s.

Hashes without salts are useless for preserving privacy.

Hashes with salts are also useless for preserving privacy, but at slightly higher than zero computational cost.

It's extremely difficult to compare crime statistics that don't involve death. There's under reporting right and left, and there are classification problems.

With that said, I don't think it's true that the US has, per capita, significantly more violent crime than the median Western country. What we have is a LOT more guns, which increase the probability that our violent crime becomes lethal.

We DO have vastly more incarceration than most other countries, though.

Wow! You're right, since 2010 cell phones (and computers under $2500) haven't been listed property.

I stand corrected.

You view the contact card. The relevant email has a RECENT label.

You really can’t hand down your business expensed iPhone to a family member.

That’s liable to land you in hot water in an audit.

West-facing is pretty close to revenue maximizing, with current consumption peaks in the early evening.

I think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies with solar!

But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy, and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather than a central government, which was a nutty system from the beginning.

Kary Mullis’s AIDS denial has been very, very thoroughly debunked.

I would not recommend listening to him about AIDS.

I had that "oh crap, I'm old" moment when my initial reaction was "what? You've never heard of finger?!" and then I remembered I last used it in the late 90s.

I'm glad your reaction was to assist the young folks. :)