gottorf

9 ms·

91.
by gottorf 6mo ago
> But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. Cost is always a valid reason! > A couple hundred people died. Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every y
92.
by gottorf 6mo ago
I'm talking about traits like high time preference and poor impulse control. Ethics make people live in poverty? That would be news to a lot of people.
93.
by gottorf 6mo ago
> People will do anything but work for a living. It's just engrained in certain cultures. In fact, the lengths to which some people will go to avoid working for a living is stupendous. I've heard tell of organized crime in my a
94.
by gottorf 6mo ago
The traits in a person that lead them to a life of perpetual poverty are the same traits that make this type of "lottery" winning seem desirable.
95.
by gottorf 6mo ago
> I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile You could generalize this to the purpose of life itself, probably.
96.
by gottorf 6mo ago
> the ultracapitalist dystopia the US has turned into Seriously, where do ideas like this come from? An "ultracapitalist" country that has about as much redistributive social spending as other developed economies[0]? A "dy
97.
by gottorf 7mo ago
> Go rules! It really does. But I HATE writing/reading Go. Same. I love the Go toolkits, the compile story, the speed at which it compiles, its backwards compatibility, the fact that stale Go code 10 years old still compile and run,
98.
by gottorf 7mo ago
Baumol's cost disease, I wonder?
99.
by gottorf 7mo ago
> Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather. And energy storage, and peaking, and matching demand to supply at the grid level. None of which are included in the usual "costs" of solar.
100.
by gottorf 7mo ago
Honestly, stocks should trade for three hours a day. 24/7 trading sounds like a win for exchange operators and a loss for anyone else.
101.
by gottorf 7mo ago
> Democracy won’t be restored until we increase the number of political parties in this country Parliamentary systems with many parties run into a different kind of dysfunction. Belgium didn't have a government for like two years re
102.
by gottorf 7mo ago
> Every progressive I know would be thrilled to stop with the culture war BS. However, MAGA refuses to just let people live their lives the way they want. Are you using some nonstandard definition of "progressive" and "MAG
103.
by gottorf 7mo ago
Generally speaking, it's better to not assume that everyone with political views opposing yours has them out of racism, or whatever other personal defects you might imagine. In reality, the nonwhite vote share for Trump went up for alm
104.
by gottorf 8mo ago
> that's probably more important on reddit. I don't know if you've noticed, but HN has been full of Reddit-tier comments, most especially around hot-button political topics, for a while now.
105.
by gottorf 9mo ago
> Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.” See also the concept of high-context and low-context cultures.
106.
by gottorf 9mo ago
> the white supremacist views and actions that were perpetuated, emboldened, and exported by the reconstructionist south (not that the north was innocent, far from it, but the majority of the burden inarguably on the south) Well, the sou
107.
by gottorf 9mo ago
I think GP meant eighteen-wheelers and the like.
108.
by gottorf 9mo ago
By "used this to his advantage", it sounds like he was just a fraudster?
109.
by gottorf 9mo ago
Do you believe that the law should treat people differently based on the color of their skin? Do you believe my father-in-law, an Eastern European immigrant who fled communism, should be given disadvantages due to his being white, even thou
110.
by gottorf 10mo ago
The outsized pay for software engineers in the US takes into account a lot of this stuff. Would you trade those 100 things for, say, a salary of $75k a year for a senior software engineer, like they have in Europe?
111.
by gottorf 10mo ago
I think the historical evidence is pretty clear that the only way we can achieve true equality in wealth is in equal squalor.
112.
by gottorf 10mo ago
> It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs I'm seeing no evidence that how much a nation taxes corporations affects its standard of liv
113.
by gottorf 10mo ago
Right, but you won't receive 8x the benefits that your payroll taxes will eventually pay for, either. In fact, your wife will probably receive a higher percentage of her FICA contributions in eventual SS benefits than you, because ther
114.
by gottorf 10mo ago
> when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by Real median household income has been steadily rising over the past few decades; it's up nearly 20% over the past 20 years[
115.
by gottorf 10mo ago
> Neither of these models is probably appropriate for the present day US, but there must be something out there besides neoliberalism and full privatization. (Futarchy? Some new branch of government to direct state investment? Allow stat
116.
by gottorf 10mo ago
> The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%. > the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation How do you or anyone else know what
117.
by gottorf 10mo ago
Some rule of law would be nice, so that we don't have to resort to private security forces.
118.
by gottorf 10mo ago
> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted. > That alone shows the top earners are not bein
119.
by gottorf 10mo ago
The payroll tax is effectively a flat tax; you can peruse the taxes paid vs. earnings at the SSA website[0]. [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/projections/tables/taxpayers...
120.
by gottorf 10mo ago
> Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%! The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, a

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