overrun11

Crime will always pay better than legitimate alternatives. You can either choose to sacrifice the extra income or risk going to prison– that's kind of just how society functions.

> For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).

Then they can go back to prison. Society need not be blackmailed into giving ex-cons excessively lucrative jobs in hopes of luring them away from crime.

It's largely a function of the much higher rate of violent crime in the United States

I've read several of these works excited to hear intelligent challenges to my worldview but they always have the opposite effect. The arguments are _so_ bad, so fallacious and ridiculous that I can't help becoming more convinced that they must be wrong.

Kendi's grand plan involves an unelected review board with full veto power over any law or policy (no more separation of powers) made at any level of government (no more federalism!).

Could someone more sympathetic to these views help me out with what I'm missing?

He would get the benefit of the doubt if he otherwise had insightful things to say. The problem is that his entire body of work is gaffes and nonsensical statements like this. His interview with Ezra Klein is filled with him whiffing on softball questions.

He's also currently embroiled in controversy. His own peers allege gross mismanagement of his $40 million in funds, producing almost no research and loaning university funds to family members to purchase luxury real estate.

You're using a very different definition of homeless than the person you're replying to.

Visibly homeless people– those who literally are living on the streets absolutely do have some sort of addiction or mental illness.

Land is unique because it's a productive asset with fixed supply. The problem with most taxes on assets is that they decrease the amount of productive assets in service by making the economics less favorable. A tax levied against land however, will (obviously) not change the total amount available and therefore have no negative effect on total wealth created.

> I would want to make say $5k for five days of work

You completely ignore expected value. The most likely outcome is that you make nothing for your five days of work. A functioning market requires outsized returns to compensate for the huge failure risk that goes unseen.

90% chance of making nothing, 10% chance of making 10x your salary is a stable state that is not exploitable.

Organizations keep secrets all the time. A huge amount of American history is learned after the fact when documents are declassified.

> Does it occur to you that maybe people just aren't hiding their use now that it's legal?

But we know for a fact this isn't true because there's data on it. This isn't something we need to speculate about.

I live in a state where sports betting was recently legalized and suddenly a lot of people are addicted to gambling who weren't before. There're also many people who got addicted to legally prescribed pain medication, it seems unlikely all of these addicts would have sought out heroin from a sketchy drug dealer had they not been introduced to the pain medicine first.

> The real incidence rate is hard to tease out because of the presumption of criminality baked into the American system

I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be. We have multiple independent sources collecting this data. The FBI collects racial data on perpetrators and victims, and multiple national surveys ask victims of crimes about the demographics of the perpetrator. The numbers from all these independent sources are fairly consistent.

Murders are especially easy to get reliable numbers on because there's a body. We know black people are murdered at dramatically higher rates than any other race and that most murder is intraracial. The reported racial crime statistics are accurate unless we believe that white people are sneaking into inner city majority black areas to murder black people undetected in massive numbers and the FBI is conspiring with multiple independent data collection groups to cover it up.

What are they?

> The specific numbers criticized (1.3%, 7%) decided on by economists are indeed arbitrary

But these numbers aren't chosen by economists or any other individual. If prices aren't arbitrary then neither are discount rates.

No one going to a mommy blog looking for baby food recipes ends up signing up or online gambling somehow. This is a story about SEO/ search engine ranking but that wouldn't get clicks. Whatever you think about online gambling, the narrative presented here is really distorting the truth.

No this article was about layoffs. The employee-employer relationship is very different the one between competing companies. If you have created a better widget factory and need 90% less staff, I do think you have some responsibility to those employees that are no longer needed.

> I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around.

You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.

Hiring 100 people then getting rid of 99 of them is probably worse for society then just hiring the 1

Not convinced this is because of investors. Investors want high returns on invested capital and these growth initiatives are often the opposite of that (see Meta's Metaverse play which investors hated). Executives want to empire build at the expense of both employee stability AND shareholder returns.

$2000/m in two years is amazing. How are you marketing it? Is most of your traffic just from Google Search?

Are you suggesting that committing murder and violent crime is pervasive among tech executives?

City-wide statistics seem almost entirely meaningless in these contexts. Most violent crime is concentrated in specific parts of the city where the people who participate in these debates never go. A 10% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city could cancel out a 10x increase in the areas where most HN people would likely be living in.

Don't think either of us are interested in a debate on the definition of the word "skyrocketing."

I'd be interested in a survey of New Yorkers on how much they think the murder rate rose from 2019-2020. I suspect they'd be pretty close to the right answer (48%), you think it'd be much higher (if I read you correctly) but without that data we will just have to agree to disagree.

> I find it particularly ironic that you complain about mainstream media coverage of Trump, but find it impossible to believe the media could be exaggerating crime rates.

This is a good example of the type of statement that passes as meaningful in partisan debates but is actually incoherent. I'm allowed to believe the media fairly reported one thing but not some other unrelated thing. There's no logical connection between the two that demands a consistent treatment. I haven't been caught in some epic contradiction.

...but if you have caught me in a contradiction, and you believe the exact opposite, then aren't we both in the same boat? If x and y cannot both be true then neither can ~x and ~y.

> That is not skyrocketing, by any definition of skyrocketing

Again, this doesn't somehow negate the fact that they did rise substantially.

> Did you read the part of my first source that compares the rate of crime to the rate of crime reporting

This is not surprising or damning. Crime rates have been dropping for 30+ years and this was the first major reversal of that trend. We lost 10 years of progress in one year. Such a highly abnormal event deserves outsized news coverage. There's no reason why news coverage must rise and fall in perfect proportion to the absolute value of the events being reported on.

If median household income fell in one year from current highs to 2009 levels, I'd expect a lot of news coverage– more news coverage than it would have received in 2009. Likewise, I'm positive there's a lot more stories about interest rates now than the last time they were at the same levels. The background context is important to the newsworthiness of any particular statistic.

Your stats don't back up your claim. Crime _has_ skyrocketed since the pandemic as both of your links show. Your first links subtitle states: "Violent incidents are up since the pandemic began" and the second link shows a graph with a quite large spike starting around 2020.

That there existed a time in history when the murder rate was a higher than it is now is completely irrelevant.

> But as soon as there is a person or group out there secretly “meaning for” some result from the actions of tens of thousands of people, that’s by definition a conspiracy.

There are many interest groups pushing to influence mass behavior in many kinds of ways. Some do so transparently, others less so.

We've overloaded "conspiracy" to mean at least two different things: the traditional definition of secret plotting to do bad things and a more modern derogatory connotation involving far-fetched conspiracies like politicians being lizard people.

Something can be a conspiracy and also be true and it is reasonable to investigate the extent to which reporting is influenced by different interests.

It is inarguable that there were many examples of unfair or plainly factually wrong reporting on Trump. This list was compiled just a year in: http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-rep...

> But while you're looking, take note of how many articles were on substantive evils he was constantly committing.

The implication you are making is that it's acceptable for the media to report inaccurately or unfairly if the subject deserves it.

In that hypothetical I do not think they would necessarily do layoffs. The more likely scenario would be:

2019 Cost of capital: 7%, gross return 10% for 3% excess return

2022 Cost of capital: 12%, gross return 10% for -2% excess return

In which case that project would get cut and layoffs would occur.

Why not RSUs? You're going to find it hard to get a job making more than ~220ish in base salary but with RSUs the sky is the limit (although right now it is much harder to score one of these jobs than normal)

> If their project was profitable to the tune of 10% margins and the risk free rate makes it only 5%

The 5% needs to be weighed against the cost of capital, not just the absolute return from the company's perspective. A 5% return sounds fine but if the market is now pricing equities for a 7% return then a company is lighting money on fire by making that 5% investment (because they can return the cash to shareholders who can invest in other businesses at 7%).

I think it is a fairly new thing yes. I could be wrong but the distinction between owner and manager seems like a fairly recent development. The people in charge have always reaped the bulk of the profits but also bore most of the risk. Now we have "managers" who take no more risk than an employee but receive excess rewards.