rayiner

The tax will probably raise negative revenue but that will be fine because revenue was never the point of it.

But what about large governments? Japan has amazing internet service, and NTT is mostly private (with the government retaining only 1/3 ownership).

I would trust my county to deliver my fiber internet. All my government services work great. I literally marvel every time I visit our municipal dump, which is cleaner and mode efficient than my home country of Bangladesh. But I wouldn’t trust most of the other counties I’ve lived in before to do it (Baltimore, Wilmington DE, Chicago, etc.).

Virtually nobody argues that completely free markets should be used for services that are natural monopolies. The actual debate in practice is between rate-regulated private companies, public owned but privately operated companies, and publicly owned and publicly operated companies. There are good and bad examples of all three.

It’s not a counter-argument for two reasons. First, China doesn’t have voters. The problem with publicly owned utilities specifically is the pressure from voters to lower prices now at the expense of maintenance for the future. Not having voters eliminates that problem. More generally, the lack of voters means that China’s public sector operates completely differently than the public sector in democracies.

Separately, China has been moving more and more of its economy to the private sector for decades, ever since Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore: https://www.fairobserver.com/economics/china-and-its-mentor-....

It’s not about corruption. It’s about the allocation of power. At the end of the day, the power to make the final decision should obviously rest with the elected government.

Most of the best public infrastructure is state owned but privately operated, like Sweden and Singapore’s transit systems. But the ownership model is less important than other things. Japan’s world leading training infrastructure is privately owned and operated. By contrast, almost all of the United States’s terrible transit systems are publicly owned and operated. Water is a public utility and almost all the United States and the water systems are in terrible disrepair.

The problem with public ownership is that it drives price is too low because it allows people to vote on prices. Your average age 60+ voter doesn’t care if lowering the water bill now means that the system will be in bad repair 30 or 50 years from now.

At the end of the day, there is no magic policy bullet to fix problems with the people. Public infrastructure in the US sucks whether it’s publicly owned or privately owned. But I bet if the Japanese trains were publicly owned instead of privately owned, they would still be pretty good.

You’re right I don’t value the opinions of economists unless they’ve applied their theories in practice. I don’t think someone who just thinks about stuff should have the power to “take Starlink away” from someone who does stuff. That’s not “snarky,” it’s a substantive judgment about the value of theory versus practice. It’s like some computer science theorist saying we should “take Linux away from Linus.”

> Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.

Without commenting on the merits of Kushner, I don’t understand your comment about “professionals.” Security professionals, like lawyers or accountants or any other professional, are advisors, not final decision makers. Obviously the civilian government retains the final say.

I can’t imagine it’s any different in any European country. I’m fully willing to believe that in say the Netherlands, the civilian government is smart enough to listen to the advice of professionals. But surely there is no special legal status that makes professional judgments final decisions over that of elected or appointed officials?

What has Krugman gone out and built? There are economists who helped turn around countries. The Chicago boys helped Chile become one of the richest countries in Latin America. Has Krugman done any of that?

Krugman makes me think of Ashraf Ghani, the former President of Afghanistan and academic. The guy literally wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” Then he got the chance to put his theory to practice and he flamed out miserably. Then there’s Muhammad Yunus, another Nobel Prize winning economist who is currently shitting the bed as prime minister of Bangladesh. I’d love to see Krugman put his money where his mouth is and run even a small economy.

> How has China built far more and better than the US

It's not because Chinese workers put in so much more effort than American ones!

China supports my point, not your's. Since 1990, China has followed a model of authoritarian-capitalism: https://www.hudson.org/economics/china-banks-on-authoritaria.... The CCP provides broad industrial policy and leadership, while capitalist business owners provide technical direction and capital allocation. The post-1990 Chinese model bears a resemblance to Hamilton's "American System," a combination of state interventionism to build infrastructure and free markets to allocate capital: https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets/2017/0...

Notably, in 1990 China and India had the same per-capita GDP: https://www.bmsmoney.com/article/full/gdp-per-capita-india-v... (both were desperately poor). Today, China's is five times higher than India's. How did that happen? It wasn't because Chinese workers suddenly started putting in five times the effort. It's because Chinese leaders and business owners started doing better at their job of directing people and allocating capital. For the last 35 years Indian workers have been putting in just as much effort as Chinese workers. But thanks to the people above the workers, Chinese workers now get to live in a country that's on the precipice of breaking into first world living standards.

So who is taking credit for the other's work here? The worker, who puts in the same amount of effort, or the leadership who, if they do their jobs well, will turn that same amount of effort into modern China as opposed to modern India?

> You think America is great

I think China is great. America is good for Americans who are socialized into England's 800+ years of civic development. China provides a model the third world can follow.

Americans acknowledge that technical direction, leadership, organizing people, and allocating capital is incredibly valuable work. A guy working construction in the U.S. builds a skyscraper and a guy working construction in my dad’s village in Bangladesh builds a tin roof house. Did the first guy do 1,000 times as much “hard work” that he has so much more to show for his efforts? No, the Bangladeshi guy worked harder. If you took the first guy and put him in Bangladesh (but retaining all of his knowledge and skills) would he build a skyscraper? No, he would build maybe a somewhat nicer and better made tin roof house.

You point to the skyscraper and say “the construction worker built that! Someone else is taking credit for his work! Someone is getting rich off his back!” But how is it that we ended up with a skyscraper instead of a tin roof house? Whatever it is, it isn’t intrinsic to the worker. So it seems odd to give the worker all the credit for the skyscraper when in a different context his same effort would have produced a tin roof house instead.

The 10s were totally fake due to ZIRP.

I don’t actually dislike Krugman’s politics, in the sense that I’m also generally a market oriented economic liberal. But this is America, and here we value people who build stuff and are skeptical of people who just study stuff. It’s not just us. There’s a reason he won the “Nobel Memorial Prize” in economics and not a real Nobel Prize.

Slow permitting is the other thing.

That’s not true. For example, Washington State has no corporate tax: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-corporate-inc.... But companies aren’t exactly flocking there. Florida meanwhile is seeing a huge boom, but its corporate taxes are around the middle of the pack. California has always had pretty high marginal tax rates, even back in the 1970s when it was a solid red state. It used that money to do things like make big investments in higher education.

Being hospitable is more about whether the state makes it a pain in the ass to do business.

Those states will eventually either kill the golden goose or make themselves unattractive for the next big industry. California for most of the 20th century was a place where the government was well managed and efficient, wasn’t afraid to make big investments in infrastructure and education, and made it easy to build stuff without too much hassle. Texas and Florida kind of fit that niche today, but both are a shadow of what California used to be.

In my kids’ lifetime, being a programmer will seem like being a cobbler. People will still wear shoes and be involved in making the shoes. But the job will be in the design not mass production. And of course vastly fewer people will be required to do the design work.

How is github so bad? It regularly throws rate limit errors if you just try to see the recent commits on open source project. Was it always this way? Did Microsoft put the New Outlook team in charge of it?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_electoral_fra...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

I'm trying to imagine what belief someone would need to have about the world to interpret those links as responsive to my point.

> Flagged.

I made a substantive post with facts and you repeatedly responded with snarky non-sequiturs without addressing a single point. I should flag you, but I won't.

> In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.

That’s the problem with having the executive branch, lawmakers and judges oversee the mechanics of the voting and elections. You’re making my point for me.

I made a detailed argument based on facts and logic. Why respond if you have no response except snark?

Considering the arc of history, your son should have the skills and knowledge to be able to get together with a few friends and conquer a primitive land and establish a society in its place. Conquering, raiding, and civilization building are skills that are never going to become obsolete.

You’re smart enough to understand the math, and so was the Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court, so what’s your response? How is it not election fraud to have a partial recount that’s statistically guaranteed to find net additional votes for you relative to your opponent? The fact that reporters didn’t cover it that way doesn’t justify your snarky response. Journalists are mostly innumerate; you meanwhile can’t play dumb about the math.

You’re basically taking an error that is randomly distributed, but then partially correcting that error only from pools that you know skewed your way to begin with.

Imagine if Trump had initiated hand recounted undervotes (votes the machine couldn’t count) only for election day votes but not mail in votes. That would be election fraud, because it would be calculated to find additional votes from a pool that skews GOP while not finding additional votes in a pool that skews Democrat. What Gore did was exactly the same thing.

People scream “election interference” at these highly attenuated and indirect actions like Meta taking down a post. But Gore was statistically minting additional Gore votes before two Supreme Courts stopped him.

> Why should everyone care about founders of a different country

Because the U.S. was the first country in the world created, with great study and deliberation, by high-IQ political philosophers. Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper. Because the U.S. was having orderly transitions of power since it was as poor as Bangladesh is today.

> A system gamed as easily as any other one.

Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.

> They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do.

Every dysfunctional third world has beautiful “laws telling people what to do.” We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections because what the law says to do or who is following the laws or not is highly debatable. Such laws effectively turn the prosecutors and the court system into the locus of corruption, because they have the power to decide “who is following the law.” (It’s like Iran’s system with more steps. Iran actually has fair, functioning elections. It’s just that the Guardian Council, an expert body of highly educated scholars, gets to screen who is allowed to run for office.)

Please try to understand the difference between procedural/power allocation laws and laws that incorporate substantive standards. Instead of having laws that say “what to do”—which is always open to interpretation—you should have laws that focus on “who decides” and “how do they decide.” You need to either make the decision mechanical so everyone can see whether the rule is being followed or not, or you need to put the decision in the hands of a body that can’t credibly be accused of having their own agenda.

Citizens United wasn’t about money. It was about whether the government could ban a movie.

Brazil’s law requires Meta to take down certain posts by politicians. How does such a law not inevitably lead to the loser of the election complaining about “interference.”

Everyone really need to go back and read the work of America’s founding generation. The founders understood the importance of structural and procedural rules versus substantive rules. A structural rule is some thing like: no politician can use Facebook, or alternatively, Facebook isn’t allowed to censor any candidate for political office. Such rules can be implemented with little room for debate.

A substantive rule by contrast requires some person to make a substantive judgment about particular content. Such rules turn that decision maker into a gatekeeper. And as a practical matter, nobody trusts such decision makers to render impartial decisions. This is why, in the U.S., judges largely police procedure and legal instructions, while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries. In the U.S., a highly educated federal judge isn’t even trusted to decide guilt for a misdemeanor that could put a single individual in prison for more than six months. Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies to make decisions that could swing entire elections and affect millions of people. It’s lunacy.

Weights being open isn't like code being open. With code, you can inspect the code to see what it will do. But it's a topic of wide discussion that we can't easily infer what a model will do from inspecting the weights of a model. The process has emergent behaviors we can't predict.

> In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.

When has anyone ever done that? I don't think it's an Eastern Europe problem. You can unify disparate groups under one flag for a time, but top down coercion only goes so far. Look at how well the former Ottoman territories get along today.

That’s like thinking that computers will belong to “capitalists.” It’s already clear that AI is going to be a commodity you’ll be able to rent for barely more than the price of electricity.

Yes. If the early 21st century was the revenge of the nerds, this will be the undoing of that.