supergauntlet

Sure. I'd also be interested in any kind of incentives for poor people to get in fuel efficient small newer cars. A carrot rather than a stick, if you will.

Well even ignoring all that, flat tax rates are regressive. This sounds counterintuitive, but 5% of someones income is a very different thing for someone who makes 30k and someone who makes 300k. Everyone has some amount of fixed costs in common.

Gas taxes disproportionately affect the poor though. I agree with your premise that we have too many large vehicles and there's no good incentive to pick a vehicle that's "just" large enough for your uses (so of course everyone picks these enormous trucks and SUVs), but I just think there has to be a better way of regulating than a gas tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automa...

Said another way: a state machine. True regular languages can be defined by a simple state machine, which is relatively much faster than the extended regular-like language that perl exposes.

> And it's chic and cyberpunk af

I actually can't think of something more cyberpunk dystopia we-are-the-bad-guys than mindless killing machines that uphold imperialism.

> They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.

Damn it, this is a joke that I misread, right? Surely you're not serious?

I've been thinking about this a lot, actually. Advertising doesn't have to be terrible. We already have basically everyone on youtube sponsored by SquareSpace or nordvpn or something, right? Because the ads on youtube are shit pay and everyone hates them. People don't like the squarespace or nordvpn ads but they're more integrated into the video so they aren't as simply blockable, and at least they're paying the creator directly so they're seen as a more necessary evil.

Why not build advertising profiles, then, not on users? Why not build them on the channels? A few channels I follow already have models similar to this, like for example PBS Eons is sponsored by CuriosityStream which is 100% right up the alley of anyone who likes PBS Eons. So why not figure out a way to, instead of tracking everyone so aggressively everywhere they go, find some way to build advertising profiles that match with the content of the video? I've gotten so sick of seeing ads that are totally irrelevant to what I'm watching or reading that I use an adblocker everywhere I can - this is the only reason I still root my android phone. But surely we can do better? If I'm looking up, say, information about electronic drum sets as I've been doing the past few days, I should be getting ads on those youtube videos or those reddit pages or those reviews about other options I have. Seeing stuff about something I searched last week is both irrelevant AND creepy.

I really think planned obsolescence is the future for everyone. Why build things to last when you can 1. save money by cheaping out and 2. ensure a future customer by cheaping out?

There's no reason for them to build high quality, long lasting things. So why would they? They don't care about the waste.

Ah, you mean why did they originally do it? Sorry, I misunderstood. The original reason was that the 737 was designed that way so that it could be boarded with just stairs instead of a skybridge: https://simpleflying.com/737s-low-to-the-ground/

This was super helpful to small carriers at the time, but as time has gone on it's caused problems.

The engines on the original 737 design were quite small by modern standards, and the wings were low as well. As such there aren't really a ton of places to put new, larger engines. They basically have to be placed further forward and higher up. This means the pitch moment created by throttling up/down is different on different versions of the 737, which is what required the MCAS device in the first place - they were trying to make sure the 737 MAX flew the same as previous models.

This link isn't terribly blogspammy or anything, but the original article has more information: https://fullfact.org/blog/2019/mar/does-backfire-effect-exis...

And the original paper: https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/backfire_report_fullfact....

Very much this. Markets are OK at these things when there's symmetrical information, because it forces everyone to play nice.

When one side gets to obscure facts like this and honestly just be downright deceitful, it's time to get out the paddle. Unfortunately I don't really have a lot of faith in the US government to do the right thing right now. Maybe the EU.

Most sites with soft paywalls you can just open in an incognito window. They're doing it with cookies.

I mean this is the core of adtech right? It's built on using psychology to sell things. That's basically always going to mean some sort of deceit or asymmetrical information.

When your whole industry, your day-in-day-out work is based on the assumption that this is normal, of course it all just becomes second nature.

Sure, I just meant the fiduciary responsibility doesn't necessarily always mean "short term profits at all costs."

Why does it seem to always be that way, though? Most every company I see appears very shortsighted with no thought to the long game.

California is full of the worst kinds of "crony capitalism" (that is, regulatory capture, a feature and not a bug of capitalism unfortunately), what do you mean?

Perhaps it's a culture thing? IIRC, you don't actually legally have to bring more value to shareholders every quarter at the cost of everything else. Maybe Toyota's execs and shareholders have some sort of "gentlemen's agreement" where they just agree to not prioritize the short term at all costs?

Maybe that's naive and they're just saying one thing and doing another.

Is your argument that because people can evade taxes that we shouldn't collect taxes?

Sounds just like Warren Buffett: http://money.com/money/5636661/buffett-wants-to-tax-rich-mor...

Reminder that during the time generally pointed to as 'the good old days' (the 1950s) the top tax bracket was 85% (!): https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Feder...

Now, this doesn't directly translate to higher taxes on the wealthy (there are a lot of factors that go into effective tax rate) but it puts the handwringing around AOC's 70% top tax bracket in perspective.

Of course they are. You think they raised 2.1 million in their seed round and didn't pay for any lawyers?

A lawyer 100% told some exec how to craft their legalese to appear to cover theft, but would not actually make KitSplit liable in the event of said theft.

Hanlon's razor doesn't apply here. Never assume these companies, which have all the facts and all the cards stacked in their favor, are acting out of incompetence or obliviousness. They know. They also know they won't be held accountable. The last time (7 months ago) KitSplit pulled this, they paid out to the guy who got his stuff stolen and everyone quieted down.

That's just the cost of doing business.

The core idea of 'move fast break things' is fast iteration time. This is actually really good because it means that even when there are issues, they get fixed.

The problem is when you move fast, break things, and then don't fix them. Hell, I'm even OK with being slow to roll things out to make sure you don't break things, just make sure your iteration time period is on the order of weeks or months, not years or decades.

Yes, but we're already paying that and we're spending more than everyone else. [1] Universal healthcare isn't just morally justified, it's also financially justified. The only justifications for our insane system are regulatory capture or sadism.

1. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

>I know how much $$$ they spend on acohol a week.

Are poor people not allowed to have fun?

>I know how they got fired from their job for not showing up.

Are depressed people not worthy of keeping alive? Do they not bring enough value to the table, so it's okay to just let them die?

>I know they blew their tax return in a week.

Is poor financial sense justification for not helping someone out that needs help?

I dunno, these all seem like kinda tenuous justifications for not giving. By all means, it's your money. I'm not telling you how to spend it. Just that I don't agree with the core idea that poor people should live like hermits, that you know everything about people's lives, that not being taught finance by anyone is a solid justification for not giving.

It seems rather post-hoc. Personally I don't think any of thse things should justify someone losing basic human rights like food, shelter, or health. This isn't to say the problem should be solved by private charity, it shouldn't. Can't, I would even say.

I mean it depends on the context, right? I just mean that generally speaking, when there is nothing forcing people to be decent, it is clearly not simply enough for "wow this is morally reprehensible" to be a deterrent.

For profiteering off generic medication, I think some sort of subsidized natural monopoly producing and selling generics would work. Clearly, there isn't enough profit in the generics to make money off them without acting in a malicious anti-competitive manner, so incentivizing it otherwise must be necessary in a market system.

Alternatively, have a purely nationalized "company" that's funded by taxpayers and "sells" generics at cost. I think the value to society of cheap, readily available generics make this worth it even if it's not something that could survive in the market.

Defense need, sure. But remember that warmongering and imperialism are fed by the war machine.

All politics is identity politics. Putting "identity" in front of it is a weasel word to deflect, as you've just done.

My point still stands. Remaining civilized at all costs in the face of incivility is as insane as trying to calmly debate someone as they are in the process of murdering you.

The entire military industrial complex is predicated on murder for profit. Remember this every time someone tries to sell you the lie that we need to airstrike Iran because they shot down a drone.

Guess who's really winning there? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and their shareholders. Certainly not the Iranian or American people at large.

>No matter how fucked up these things are you don't want to lower yourself to their standards, you'll lose all grounds for discussion.

This is the classic centrist liberalism argument that we have to maintain civility at all costs.

The time for civility was back when the drug companies were doing things like pushing bad legislation (that didn't directly hurt people) or the like.

The time for civility is over. People are dying because drug companies are too greedy and unregulated. The only way to get them to stop being utter vacuous wastes of oxygen is, in the long term, regulation. But in the short term? Harass the fuck out of them. I have exactly zero sympathy for the pharma execs that are profiteering off human misery.

Helicopters are hard as hell to fly. Just look up vortex ring state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_ring_state

It's basically the rotors losing power because of their own turblence. Helicopter pilots amaze me.

Show me a real, evidence and facts based solution to homelessness that Republicans have come up with and I'll edit it into my comment and remove that part.

It just doesn't seem like a useful metric to me. Even if we agree that both Democrats and Republicans want to, say, end racism... what does that get us? That we both have a basic moral compass?

The problem is the high level interpretation doesn't get us anywhere. The devil is in the details, and Republicans are, for example, fully willing to gerrymander and engage in other forms of voter suppression that affect minorities disproportionately. The fact that they say one thing and do another shows they don't really mean what they say, or are so eager to throw away their morals in the pursuit of political expediency that it might as well not matter whether they mean it or not.