IkmoIkmo

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631.
by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Well, you can get an iPhone 6S for ~€500 (actually 5% more). That's not 4y old, it was officially released less than two years prior to the XZ1. Not that I'd recommend getting one. iPhones have never been the best bang for buck pr
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
To me inherited wealth is just as perverse as nepotism, monarchies, blood rights etc. For example, should the president's son, because he's the son of the president, have a special citizenship that allows him a $1m income for the
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
We're already getting close to the point where it's technically feasible to to enter a facebook profile and press a button for a sex tape to be created from a mix of FB photos and porn websites, for any choice among a billion peop
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Very interesting, thanks! I looked into the Dutch case. It indeed appears that there's no progressive effective tax, but rather a flat tax. Each group pays about an equal share of the tax burden as their share of the income. The study
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
I don't really see the point. PPP is typically measured by looking at actual prices for a basket of goods (e.g. prices in stores for various grains, flour, rice, legumes, cooking oil etc), and then using that to extrapolate for aggrega
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> I believe NL taxes are in fact regressive in the usual sense of the word. They're definitely not? > I'm curious what the justification for this claim is as well. My claim makes no sense cause I used the wrong (opposite) wo
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Can you just stick to Ghana or something more specific? There's various countries which are absolutely not in need of any of those things. For example, more than 10 million people in Tunisia living on a PPP gdp/capita of $1k a mon
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
The $1500 figure is indeed the correct nominal figure, but it's just a number, it's meaningless without context (prices). If you take that into account you get a sense of purchasing power that's comparable between countries,
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Oops, thanks for the correction!
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Absolutely. The point I'm trying to make here though, which I lightly implied, is that regressive tax systems and distributive justice lead to overal higher happiness. i.e., if there are diminishing marginal returns of happiness from m
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
To be honest, I'm kind of tired seeing this 'research finding' pop up over and over again. It feels the whole world is familiar with it. What I'm lacking is a thorough study of determinants and causal effects. Not just i
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
With that kind of money (i.e., so much money you can risk not earning anything for 10 years straight) you can open yourself up to a higher risk-profile. Stocks for example have averaged, inflation adjusted, about 6% in the past 50 years. 6.
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> the maximum the banks will give you is a constant multiplier times your annual salary. The multiplier isn't constant or fixed but dependent on interest rates. So there are certainly multipliers that work in certain periods, like a
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> It really leads to a persistent feeling of danger, so yes, making 100k instead of 40k could literally save your life, or at least keep you from being an indebted loan shark victim for the rest of your life. Right, that problem just doe
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
It's probably important to note the Netherlands has a high degree of decommodification (i.e. a lot of state provisions), with the US having some of the lowest in the developed world. The result of that is that distributive justice is a
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> provision for cycles than we will probably ever have. I'd recommend a brief history of cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. It was actually quite poor here, too. i.e., it wasn't culture naturally shaping a cyclist-first
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
This is definitely the first year where I have absolutely no interest in getting a new phone. I used to be able to do without an upgrade, stretching it. (I had an iPhone 4 about 6 years after release) But now I'm fine with an S7. Seems
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Interesting article, thanks for posting! A few things to add. Your article actually says that cars use 7x as much embodied energy as devices, (7 to 1), but then corrects both for lifetime (10 and 2 years), thus you get 0.5 vs 0.7 for device
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
A lot of energy is spent on things like transportation and heating though. At some point, the rooms you occupy and the time you occupy them hits a ceiling. I'm not going to heat my room above room temperature, I'm not going to be
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Haha I've done it, the Dutch are a bit crazy but yeah... we transport furniture on what essentially is a (frontloaded) trailer-bike. That having been said, I think it's a silly solution to expect bicycles to take over logistics. I
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Western-European capital city here. I can indeed absolutely get-by without a car, as I have for literally all my life. There are certainly instances where a car is necessary, or sufficiently convenient. For example, I rent a truck when I mo
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Sure, in isolation I would prefer a car staying in its car-lane to a bicycle driving all over the sidewalk. But then, this change doesn't have to happen in isolation. The Netherlands is a great example of a decades-long investment in p
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> I have a load of N2O canisters stashed at home and will go full-balloonatic during festival season Hahaha! > There's no way I'd admit to these guys This absolutely though. Just to add... I've never used any drugs for
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
You'd probably just get a heatmap where there is little use of water. i.e. a single individual doing cocaine in a suburb would show far greater concentrations than 100 people doing cocaine at a rave at some farm that's irrigated o
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Netherlands
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
It's tricky though, if you work, marginal benefit from an extra unit of work is quite high. If you're unemployed and on benefits, it tends to be zero and could even be negative, until you reach a full workweek and/or somethin
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
A lot of great stories in this thread, a lot of them are quite disheartening US stories of poverty. Mine was the opposite, really. Grew up as a welfare-kid in Western-Europe with a disabled dad and a sibling. The state provided for us, the
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
It's the notion that we want to be compensated for risk in life. That's true of entrepreneurship, investing, lending out money etc. Shady industries tend to carry high risks, and therefore high risk-premiums to compensate. (e.g. s
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise; that is, the antidote to the zero-sum aspects of education are not necessarily less education. That feels like a strawman. After all, he didn't say the antidote nece
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by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
That having been said, torrenting in some ways seems healthier than ever. On a median retail connection I can download an entire season in 30 minutes while I'm getting ready some food, or the first episode in 5 minutes and get started

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