nmrm2

Oh right. Those bastards trying to close corporate tax loopholes are totally doing so because they hate me and all the money I'm not saving due to those loopholes...

> Yes

> In order to outsmart them, you will have to be smarter

NO! It's really not that damn complicated. And there are even plenty of extant policy proposals for eliminating or greatly reducing tax avoidance schemes.

Public policy, most of the time, isn't rocket science. See e.g. https://www.oecd.org/ctp/BEPSActionPlan.pdf

There's a difference between globalization of unskilled labor, globalization of skilled labor, and tax avoidance. The first and second are, to varying extent, unavoidable and probably net beneficial to the bulk of humanity. The last is not unavoidable and is also decidedly unbeneficial for most of humanity.

(There's also a difference between off-shoring for the purpose of true cost reduction nand off-shoring for the purpsoe of tax avoidance. The former is far more common than the latter, although a decent amount of FDI is about tax/tariff avoidance.)

> but if you could, you would be one of them

Of course I would. But I'm not delusional and wasn't born into either connections or cash. So I do what I can to boost my odds, but I also cooperate whenever the opportunity arises.

And, if I ever do "make it", I'm sure as hell not going to become one of those "got mine, fuck you" types.

Especially for a previously unpaved roadway with bridges that probably also needs widening, leveling, etc. That isn't patch work cleaning up existing paved road...

The number is high but not unfathomably so...

Anyways, either parent is telling the truth or not. But I find it hard to believe parent helps maintain a 2 mile private road and also you know better than him the cost of paving that particular road.

1. Your parent actually actively maintains a private road, and has probably done their research...

2. It costs them so much because they just have a single road, so they can't amortize the cost over an entire city or country of roadway. Public utilities tend toward monopoly for exactly this reason -- providing the utility to any small fraction of society is enormously expensive.

Make no mistake, natural monopoly is what happens when you privatize utilities. Ever met a Comcast customer who feels anything short of contempt toward Comcast? Now imagine dealing with Comcast any time you need to drive to the grocery store. Or even leave your house.

3. Parent's numbers actually make sense when compared to Florida's, once you realize Florida has an entire state over which it can amortize costs.

> One possible result of such policy would be that both will turn out to be less interested.

Tax rates on the top 1% or 0.5% of earners could double over-night and those people would still have more than enough money to make their effort worth-while. We are literally talking about people who have more money than the can possibly spend on personal luxuries in their lifetime.

At some point far before the 1% mark, wealth accumulation becomes much more about personal power and legacy than anything else. These people continue working hard for the same reason that tenured professors continue to publish prolifically or retired people work hard on their lawns or hobby projects -- for love of the work, and/or because they literally don't know how not to work.

(Whether or not those people deserve to be taxed heavily is kind-of irrelevant to the fact that your hypothesis about human psychology is wrong.)

> You cannot turn the losers into winners

What is a loser? Most middle class people are of average or above-average intelligence and work hard. The only thing separating these people from e.g. Donald Trump is access to an inheritance or some other means of attaining large amounts of capital.

I'm willing to bet your average middle-class accountant or actuary would much rather (pay someone to) manage a portfolio of investments than crunch someone else's numbers.

Also, FYI, almost all computer programmers in the world -- including skilled ones -- are solidly ouside of 1% territory.

> but you can certainly alienate the surviving winners and convince them to build their next factory in China

So your argument for not redistributing some percentage of the wealth of billionaires is that they're petty assholes who will take their ball and go home? But isn't that what losers do? ;-)

As a matter of fact, globalization and national autonomy aren't inconsistent. Tax havens aren't a fact of life, they are an engineered reality created by lawyers and lobbyists.

No.

Inequality is decreasing between nations as the developing world catches up with the west. But inequality within nations -- even developing nations -- is increasing. It's possible for inequality to increase as the the developing world catches up to the west; in fact, that's exactly what's happening.

So the old geographical distributions are very slowly eroding, but they are being replaced by obscene levels of inequality within individual borders. This trend is exacerbated -- especially in Europe -- by tax evasion and avoidance managed (and practiced) by large fintech companies. So the author's fear that concentrating power in the hands of a few large fintech firms would exacerbate global inequality -- and lessen nation states' ability to combat inequality with policy -- is well-founded in global trends.

edit: Instead of downvoting, go read François Bourguignon's "Inequality and Globalization: How the Rich Get Richer as the Poor Catch Up", which states exactly the thesis outlined above and contains pointers to the data sets used to arrive at these conclusions.

Aynways, the currency does still matter. Take it, throw it in a retirement account, and then build whatever the hell you want post-retirement. Building X might be fun, but after N years building slight variations of X you'll probably want to go off and make something else. Maybe even something people won't pay you to make. And then having those extra $$$ will make all the difference in the world.

2. Interstate driving autonomy and city driving autonomy are different beasts. Gathering a ton of data about task X isn't necessarily helpful for task Y; ML isn't magical. If anyone, Google is ahead of the pack in the market Uber is vying for (automated taxis).

As it turns out, going from sensors to working self-driving car is a pretty difficult task, and Uber has some of the best self-driving researchers in the world working for them.

GOML

Which is why state police and then the National Guard and then other branches of the military become involved in any serious unrest. E.g. Ferguson for an extremely recent example.

> say 10% of the population

Overwhlemingly dispersed throughout suburban and rural populations that are far more easily controlled than a large urban uprising. And also, it would take extraordinary circumstances to find 10% of the population willing to commit to an armed revolution. If you have that many people that angry, odds are that the democratic process would work far better anyways. That's the rub with this fantasy and why it hasn't happened in recent memory -- once that many people are that angry, they probably have a sympathetic majority anyways.

Keep in mind that the United States has 2mil+ prisoners and has absolutely no problem keeping the police. If we assume only a small fraction of people who could land in prison actually do, then it's entirely possible that 10% of the population is or was at one point at danger of being locked up and still would never commit to an armed insurrection.

Also, only ~60% of the US even votes. So 10% is a truly huge number.

Actually, the most ironic thing about this part of the gun debate is that the people who are least persecuted by actual systemic violence against subpopulations of the United States both 1) insist that this violence doesn't exist or is justified; and 2) worry about their own non-existent completely hypothetical persecution at some vague distant point in the future.

All the while, people who are in actually persecuted groups (poor, racial minorities who have double digit odds at incarceration) don't get involved in the gun debate because they know the "standing up to the man" fantasy is dangerous bullshit.

A decade-long life extension or growing meat without animals would both probably involve more "Hard Tech" style innovation than building Facebook.

Other observations are IMO less pat. E.g. designing cheaper/better sensors could be either harder or significantly easier than building a Facebook. Depending on the type of sensor and the cost improvement.

> Nope

1. "good experience manipulating differentiable functions and their derivatives" sounds weird in prose.

2. Some continuous functions are differentiable. Those ones have derivatives you can manipulate. In fact knowing when a function is not differentiable is a pretty useful skill.

> The interview was in their computer group, but I indicated that I'd like to get into quantitative trading -- they acted like they had never heard of any such thing.

Sounds like you interviewed for position X and talked about wanting position Y, and were rightly rejected as "not a good fit; likely to leave at first opportunity".

> only a very tiny fraction of the people on Wall Street had good backgrounds in measure theory and stochastic processes based on measure theory

Probably true. Think of this as "calculus for engineers vs. analysis", and imagine how well a civil engineering interview would go if you talked about different types of integrals instead of talking about how to use the basic stuff to build good bridges. Fact is most people in industry are looking for "calculus for engineers" levels of formal understanding. Enough to be useful and make money while avoiding expensive mistakes.

> and were looking to hire people like themselves.

Also probably true. This is a good assumption not just on Wall St but everywhere.

(edit: okay, okay, maybe the article isn't clear.)

I think it's (not im)possible that rates would go up! Here's why:

The most risky (largest) life insurance policies aren't taken out by people who fully expect to reach old age; rather, they are taken out by people in their prime with young families or other dependents. So you have people taking out large policies from ages 25 - 50 or so, and then going back to small policies or no policy at all. The risk pool is now very different -- lots of very pofitable policies, but also a lot of risk. The existential risk to the insurance company might actually increase in that case, and rates would have to be increased to accomodate this risk.

Probably not, and IANAA, but it'd be interesting if an actual actuary familiar with life insurance could chime in.

Undoubtedly, the audience of this article is software developers and managers of software projects within governemnt. Therefore, although the title doesn't convey the article's message to outsiders, it might not actually be misleading.

Because it's treated as an alternative to the main-line college preparedness curriculum.

This isn't Algebra I + Programming I. It's Programming I instead of Algebra I. Because if you're not good enough at math to do well on college entrance exams, you might as well start your career readiness...

(This is rally hard for us folk out in the real world to understand. We know that programming is a high-demand field precisely because it requires a level of intellectual preparedness similar to or sometimes even greater than that obtained while successfully completing a college degree. But K-12 people in the US tend to be idiotic about credentialism. So where we see "exceptional self-learner with great work ethic can make it without a college degree in software", they see "any schmuck who can't hack it at college can get a high paying computer job")

That's what bikamonki was saying.

jerf's comment was tangential to the central thesis of bikamonki's post, and stated "There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those claims didn't become false. They always were false"

> You are talking about education and scientific rigor as a means of talking about truth

No, I'm stating directly that there exist educational institutions that, through educational programs, transfer truth from one person to another.

generally speaking couldn't care less about the marketability of their degree programs among the general public, much less the lower income general public. Enrollment numbers just aren't important enough currency in higher ed to devote enough effort to get the president and a bunch of celebrities on board.

Deans, maybe. But not run-of-the-mill professors.

And even then, almost all CS programs have the exact opposite problem right now -- too many people and too much hype so that it's hard to predict the future and grow sustainably.

Besides, it is a very well-documented fact that the current push for STEM -- and specifically CS -- education is coming from political types and insdustry folks.

It's always cute to hear school administrators (or any non-technical policy types) predict the future based upon superficial understanding of the underlying science and technology.

Code synthesis for fully specified and very simple programs is still considered a hard problem. Automating the entire software and product design process is fully AI hard.

Academic educational programs have exactly been the source-without-a-scalable-distribution-method for at least the past century.

You're unlikely to find a treatment of mathematics or physics or even Computer Science that is as well-curated, free of coercive bias, and well-presented as it often is in the undergraduate programs at universities that care deeply about their educational programs. (Such universities and colleges do exist; they unfortunately also tend to be expensive, selective, and not always well-represented in top N lists -- especially in the US.)

The reason the distribution method of university education is lacking has more to do with economics than anything else. Hiring truly high-quality people to teach small groups of people difficult content in a rigorous way is expensive. If you skimp on any of those features, the quality of the end result goes way down (c.f. typical MOOCs and the university courses to which they are purportedly equivalent, in pretty much any dimension.)

> There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those claims didn't become false. They always were false.

Again, I fail to see how this critique applies in any meaningful way to high-quality undergraduate education programs in hard sciences. Nothing is perfect -- and in fact I doubt any of those programs ever claimed to be "streams of pure, refined truth". But they come far closer than your comment seems to suggest.

Now, going back to the contents of the article, universites certainly aren't "streams of pure, refined, and new truth". Such streams very likely don't exist.

In math, the group sizes are way smaller. A PI might only have 1 or 2 students.

It's really interesting -- I heard this 15 years ago. I think post-modernism has been "dead for about 10-15 years" for at least the past 15 years.