rayiner

It’s more complicated than that. You have to read the specific statutes in question to see what they require or don’t require.

The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.

Some people think that professions and bureaucracies are an independent source of authority within a four-branch government.

Rubio dismantled the program, as the Senate confirmed political appointee of the duly elected head of the executive branch.

You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.

You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals. Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.

There is a reason nobody is willing to capitulate on the “culture war” positions they care about to “unify the working class.” People aren’t fungible economic automatons pursing material gain and they don’t believe policy is self-executing. If people have fundamental differences in how they view the world, what they value, what they think “good” is, they’re not going to capitulate on those in support of paper economic policies that may or may not work anyway.

Somebody should do a economic analysis of how technology affects unions. I bet the availability of automation has a lot more to do with the downfall of the unions than the political changes that are commonly described to that phenomenon. Similarly, I bet the availability of AI will have a devastating effect on any white collar unions.

According to the reddit threads it seems pretty good.

87% of full-time private sector workers have access to employer-subsidized healthcare. On average employers pay 82% of the cost for an individual and 73% of the cost of a family. To use BestBuy as an example: Reddit threads suggest costs range from $100/month (as of 2021) to $250/month (as of 2025).

Yeah, this is the dumbest thing you can do. It's a message to the strongest people to leave on their own terms.

How can Microsoft justify making thousands of H1B filings when obviously there's no shortage, and in fact there is a glut, of software engineers? https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=Microsoft&employer=Microsoft

That doesn’t seem ridiculous at all. Replacing clerical and knowledge workers is a vastly larger market than iPhones.

The evidence we have so far points to LLMs becoming commodities. I can’t think of a technology in the last 30 years where so many companies are within ankle biting distance of the leader. There seems to be no data aggregation moat like with Google.

Like all law firm partnerships are pass through entities. Law firm partners have a lot of money, but its fundamentally labor income.

The whole pie isn’t dollars reported on tax sheets. It’s Gross Domestic Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_income.

The economic accounting doesn’t map nearly into what you think of as “labor” and “capital.” For example, the non-labor share includes things like depreciation: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/capital-is-not-taking-half-of...

See also: https://itif.org/publications/2026/08/25/the-false-panic-ove...

Apple is worth more than all the AI companies combined. You think LLMs are less valuable in the global market than slightly updated iPhone models every year?

Our 1960s house in one of the richest suburbs in the country (Mclean, VA) was 1,800 square feet. The average new house today is over 2,200.

The average house is double the size of what it was when the boomers were young.

> With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway

The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education.

Those are fair points. But I think it’s also misleading to look at prices in a fixed location over time, which ignores that places can become relatively more desirable and move upmarket. Yeah, your parents bought a house in Mountain View for cheap. But they were moving to escape high housing prices in the New York or Chicago suburbs where they grew up.

> Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%

The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.

The sense of economic anxiety is due to increasing economic efficiency and sorting. It's not that the cost of living somewhere has gone up as much as people think. It's that the market is efficiently allocating housing in the place you grew up, near your parents, family, and friends, to Google and Facebook engineers. But you can still get a house twice as big as what your parents had at your age in a new subdivision in Tennessee.

Who is neutral in your opinion?

The share of income people spend on housing has been very stable over 40 years: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/04/26/spending-on-...

The problem isn't so much that housing has gotten expensive. It's that many of the existing places have moved up-market compared to what they were 30-40 years ago. 75 years ago, Scarsdale NY or parts of Long Island were expensive. But Palo Alto was a drab middle class suburb. As the tech economy has boomed, that has driven prices up in Palo Alto for the same reason they were already high in Scarsdale. And now you have to move to Gilroy.

Right, a property tax is one kind of wealth tax in the same way as a house car is one kind of feline. That doesn’t make it the same thing as a tax on stock investments.

That article is wrong. They repealed it in 2017 and replaced it with a tax on real estate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_tax_on_wealth

Companies are able to get large simply because of technology the people on HN have built enables scaling. There is no point having more than one Amazon, and a lot of conveniences that come from Amazon’s scale.

No you’re paying a property tax. It’s like saying “a housecat is a feline. You already have a feline” when talking about a bobcat.

Remains to be seen. Sweden and France both repealed their wealth taxes.

It’s just a byproduct of owning shares of a company that becomes big. Which subpart do you object to?

“Born on third base.” You make him seem like minor nobility. His dad is a dentist and his mom is a psychiatrist. Kids with a background like that are a dime a dozen.