doukdouk

6 ms·

1.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Fair point.
2.
by doukdouk 6y ago
If your point is that "monopoly" has a different meaning in a colloquial/political context and in a legal context, that it relies on non-obvious definitions of what the relevant market, what dominant is, and that it varies by
3.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Because it is generally accepted that monopolies are bad and that not-monopolies are ok. It is much easier to sell the simple idea that "X is a monopoly, so split X", than to make a long case that "X does Y and Z which meet A
4.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Again, mindless arguing what exact word fit or does not fit the situation detracts from the real issues.
5.
by doukdouk 6y ago
State-owned monopolies exist in most capitalist countries, from operating prisons, to managing railroad or telecom infrastructure, to nuclear energy. The US may have fewer of those than say, the UK or France or Singapore, but I would not ca
6.
by doukdouk 6y ago
I think you missed the point - representatives should be expert (at a minimum) in HN interests or come from the same demographics (better) as HN commentators. Anything else means they are "morons", to use the word of the previous
7.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice). When random person X complains a
8.
by doukdouk 6y ago
They are still in use, see this [0] French FOB in Mali [0] https://i.redd.it/f325vekqsxh51.jpg
9.
by doukdouk 6y ago
> Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance. Architect of (illegal) government surveillance gets influential role in a major Internet company. I do not expect him to strongly criticize Amazon's privacy
10.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Some thoughts on whether hard times make strong men: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
11.
by doukdouk 6y ago
I don't think such calculations are particularly useful, maybe about as much as Paul Graham's wealth tax "model". The reason is that tax codes are way more complicated than just nominal tax rates. Did you know, for insta
12.
by doukdouk 6y ago
All this feels so wasteful, especially the CIR and formerly the CICE. Instead of having low taxes, you have nominally high taxes and a bazillion paperwork-heavy to make them low. Might as well just make them low in the first place.
13.
by doukdouk 6y ago
There is indeed one in numpy : https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.clip....
14.
by doukdouk 6y ago
VAT pass through can be quite high (see for instance [0]) : VAT does not tax businesses as much as consumers. [0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Est...
15.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Is it? > In contrast to Chamley-Judd, the optimal tax on capital is positive in our model because we have finite long run elasticities of inheritance to tax rate https://www.nber.org/papers/w17989.pdf
16.
by doukdouk 6y ago
> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it
17.
by doukdouk 6y ago
> Wealth is not money. Wealth is production. It is the flow of money. Wealth is efficiency. Wealth is production not consumption. A flow of money is income, which is different from wealth. See "What are income and wealth?" by t
18.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Property taxes are a wealth tax, specifically a tax on real estate wealth. It's hard to see why taxing this form of wealth is so great, but other forms of wealth is so bad. As for the argument that the US should be more decentralized -
19.
by doukdouk 6y ago
The extreme case of this is France, where the "income tax" (90B€/year, progressive) is not the largest income tax. Rather, it is the "generalized social contribution" (124B€/year, flat rate). Of course, public
20.
by doukdouk 6y ago
An important point here would the magnitude of those effects: how much a 1% wealth tax would reduce wealth creation? Whether it is by .0000001% or by 99%, it would be "incentives to create less wealth" but in the former case it is
21.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Interestingly, what you see as completely normal (other taxes) was once as disturbing as capital tax seems to be: > Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. > At that time, many people in Britain oppose
22.
by doukdouk 6y ago
> Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever The link you gave says that about 50% of Americans pay zero federal income tax. Are you trying to imply that the only tax in the US is the federal income tax? Federal income tax brings about
23.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Well, not putting explosives in a city is not hard; not putting substances that have some industry uses and happen to be explosive (eg fertilizer) near industry is hard. After all, it needs to be shipped, stored and used. If there's sh
24.
by doukdouk 6y ago
This trial was done in Kenya, not South Africa.
25.
by doukdouk 6y ago
I don't see how that would be a problem: even if it was common, handing out pill to one group but not the other would still lead to one group being more "dewormed" than the other, all others things being equal. Anyway, in thi
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by doukdouk 6y ago
All those many factors equally affect both groups, that's the point of running a randomized trial. I am not sure how they are relevant to the claims that worms cause poor outcomes or that deworming children make them less poor adults.
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by doukdouk 6y ago
My understanding is that this is not a clinical trial at all - the question is not whether the treatment works for health purposes, but whether this medicine, that was already tested for its medical effects, also has long lasting economic i
28.
by doukdouk 6y ago
In this case, the deworming treatment was allocated randomly (see the paper [0]). Giving the deworming treatment to children make them less poor than those who did not get the treatment, and there should be no baseline differences on averag
29.
by doukdouk 6y ago
Is it really not a surprise? If someone told me that there was a magic, 50-cent-a-year pill that would increase my wage by 15% for the next 20 years , I would be skeptical.
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by doukdouk 6y ago
See this paper [0] bu Gabaix for instance: > This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks. > Existing research has foc

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