3 ms·

My version of events: You write about Renaissance: "a huge part of their advantage was not paying their taxes" Me: the 7B is past taxes, interest, and penalti

My version of events: You write about Renaissance: "a huge part of their advantage was not paying their taxes" Me: the 7B is past taxes, interest, and penalties. They grew 66% annualized to over 130B. So the $7B is not big enough to make it a "huge part of their advantage". You: The 7B is not taxes. Presumably they failed to pay much more than that. I don't know how much, I doubt it would be possible to calculate. Did you look? I didn't just pull the phrase from my butt - it's in many articles, and is standard IRS practice. Yet, without looking to update your view, you state it's not taxes. At this point I realize you don't care to learn or look or read. So I cited a clean place to read the phrase. And then you move your "huge advantage" to "nearly half that magic was tax fraud." Missing 7B on taxes allows 66% growth to 130B in 30 years? I asked for napkin math - because I have done decades of modeling of this type of stuff, professionally and as an amatuer , and I don't see any way this happens. Maybe you're used to just making quantitative claims without evidence and not getting pushback for stuff that simply doesn't line up. I am much more interested in people who will back up quantitative claims with evidence, and am willing to call people out on claims pulled from thin air as if they were fact. So sure - go model a world where missing 6B in taxes over 30 annual growth returns of 66% results in half the returns to 130B. If the difference were taxes, the govt could do it too tax free (since they make laws), and in 20 years after putting in 10B (which is trivial for govt), they'd have 252 trillion. But they cannot, because the returns Renaissance got are not from tax issues. So, if you are going to make quantitative claims, don't state them as true unless you can provide decent numerical evidence. Hope that's useful feedback. Take care. Edit: out of curiosity I looked at your comment history - I see many threads where you complain people misread you. It seems common you write something, someone calls you on it, and you attack them and say they're not reading your words properly, simply when they call you on wht you wrote. Hope that's useful.

maxbond 4y ago
Thanks for reading my comment history! I hope you enjoyed it. I didn't want to comment in this thread again, but it wasn't acceptable to me for the last word to be a misrepresentation of my comment history, with my silence being a tacit acceptance of your framing. So fine, let's talk about me. It's true that I often express myself poorly and have a bad habit of escalating arguments when people say snipey things (and the two reinforce each other as the snipes are often based on misinterpretations); this is something I feel I've made a lot of improvement on, for instance, compare this thread [1] to this more recent thread [2] (both of which are on the same hot-button topic). I feel I've gotten much better at having a discussion with people who may try to get a rise out of me, and staying on topic without escalating the disrespect (like I mentioned, I wasn't interested in remaining on topic here, as I've learned that when people mock you the discussion is over, and anything you say on the topic will only invite more mocking). In the earlier thread I think I was being a jerk, but I feel pretty good about how the second thread went. Perhaps when you were reading my comment history, you came across this thread [3], where I, like you, was frustrated that someone expressed an opinion on something I cared about that I felt wasn't an informed view. Perhaps you'll find it interesting that I simply asked them a question to illustrate my criticism, and then didn't remark on them personally or tell them they were what was wrong with the Internet. There's a rich irony that you want to cut me down for being a close-minded Internet poster who rejects evidence, when this is an impression you formed of me off the basis of one comment, which you misread as being my rejecting evidence I in fact accepted, where you were bothered I didn't factcheck something I literally factchecked in that comment, and that you tried to use my getting pissed off by your rudeness as evidence you were correct (which is truly peak Internet posting). When you went to "test" this hypothesis with my comment history, it appears to me that you looked for evidence that you were correct instead of evidence that you were wrong. There are for instance, just as many comments where I admit I'm wrong about something as when I say someone has misread me; they would have been pretty easy to find. You didn't mention any threads where I didn't get into a petty dispute of who misread who, and something tells me you didn't actually spend the 1 or 2 hours necessary to read my entire comment history and critique whether something "happens regularly" or whether it's something that I'm getting better at. I'm pretty sure you made the all too easy mistake when talking to someone online of seeing them as a static entity, doomed to repeat it's mistakes and never to change their mind, rather than as a dynamic, living, and learning human being. So after finding a couple of comments that seemed to confirm your bias, you were satisfied. Perhaps if you see an Internet poster who doesn't always update his priors properly in me, it's because it takes one to know one. (Being steeped in maxbond lore now, I'm sure you'll have already read the thread [4] where I explain why I don't read & cite other people's comment histories, so I'll leave testing this hypothesis this as an exercise to you.) Regardless of whether I'm used to getting pushback on quantitative claims, I am very familiar with and weary of this type of nonsense (which as you no doubt read, I sometimes engage in myself [5], and won't pretend otherwise; it's something I'm willing to acknowledge and work on). I'd really like you to desist from doing that in the future. It's tiresome and rude. Perhaps you're used to being able to yell at people until they back down, and you aren't used to someone calling you out for being a jerk. I understand that without such feedback, it can be hard to see a problem let alone address it. So again, I hope this feedback helps, and take care. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927784 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849719 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755083 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33503421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33503421 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758962

maxbond 4y ago

Thanks for reading my comment history! I hope you enjoyed it. I didn't want to comment in this thread again, but it wasn't acceptable to me for the last word to be a misrepresentation of my comment history, with my silence being a tacit acceptance of your framing. So fine, let's talk about me. It's true that I often express myself poorly and have a bad habit of escalating arguments when people say snipey things (and the two reinforce each other as the snipes are often based on misinterpretations); this is something I feel I've made a lot of improvement on, for instance, compare this thread [1] to this more recent thread [2] (both of which are on the same hot-button topic). I feel I've gotten much better at having a discussion with people who may try to get a rise out of me, and staying on topic without escalating the disrespect (like I mentioned, I wasn't interested in remaining on topic here, as I've learned that when people mock you the discussion is over, and anything you say on the topic will only invite more mocking). In the earlier thread I think I was being a jerk, but I feel pretty good about how the second thread went. Perhaps when you were reading my comment history, you came across this thread [3], where I, like you, was frustrated that someone expressed an opinion on something I cared about that I felt wasn't an informed view. Perhaps you'll find it interesting that I simply asked them a question to illustrate my criticism, and then didn't remark on them personally or tell them they were what was wrong with the Internet. There's a rich irony that you want to cut me down for being a close-minded Internet poster who rejects evidence, when this is an impression you formed of me off the basis of one comment, which you misread as being my rejecting evidence I in fact accepted, where you were bothered I didn't factcheck something I literally factchecked in that comment, and that you tried to use my getting pissed off by your rudeness as evidence you were correct (which is truly peak Internet posting). When you went to "test" this hypothesis with my comment history, it appears to me that you looked for evidence that you were correct instead of evidence that you were wrong. There are for instance, just as many comments where I admit I'm wrong about something as when I say someone has misread me; they would have been pretty easy to find. You didn't mention any threads where I didn't get into a petty dispute of who misread who, and something tells me you didn't actually spend the 1 or 2 hours necessary to read my entire comment history and critique whether something "happens regularly" or whether it's something that I'm getting better at. I'm pretty sure you made the all too easy mistake when talking to someone online of seeing them as a static entity, doomed to repeat it's mistakes and never to change their mind, rather than as a dynamic, living, and learning human being. So after finding a couple of comments that seemed to confirm your bias, you were satisfied. Perhaps if you see an Internet poster who doesn't always update his priors properly in me, it's because it takes one to know one. (Being steeped in maxbond lore now, I'm sure you'll have already read the thread [4] where I explain why I don't read & cite other people's comment histories, so I'll leave testing this hypothesis this as an exercise to you.) Regardless of whether I'm used to getting pushback on quantitative claims, I am very familiar with and weary of this type of nonsense (which as you no doubt read, I sometimes engage in myself [5], and won't pretend otherwise; it's something I'm willing to acknowledge and work on). I'd really like you to desist from doing that in the future. It's tiresome and rude. Perhaps you're used to being able to yell at people until they back down, and you aren't used to someone calling you out for being a jerk. I understand that without such feedback, it can be hard to see a problem let alone address it. So again, I hope this feedback helps, and take care. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927784 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849719 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755083 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33503421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33503421 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758962