lend000

76 ms·

781.
by lend000 7y ago
Anything based on wealth will have the challenging task of valuing assets, which is why the cutoff for where current wealth becomes a factor should be pretty high, so you only have to look at areas generating significant economic activity.
782.
by lend000 7y ago
Georgism is an interesting approach to what could be handled by externality taxes in capitalism, but it seems like it would have challenges attaining accurate price discovery of naturally derived resources. Regardless, I think the obvious f
783.
by lend000 7y ago
There are definitely problems with most wealth tax proposals, but I think the author understates the generational differences in opportunity that emerge from massive wealth inequality. As I stated in another thread, perhaps the best solutio
784.
by lend000 7y ago
There are still corporate business taxes in Washington, and they are revenue based instead of profit based (extremely backwards, but it certainly isn't no taxation). The primary benefit is for personal income.
785.
by lend000 7y ago
If only we could combine the two for a wealth-based income tax. If you're already worth 20M, should you be paying a higher rate on your 500k in interest than if you just sold your first company for 500k and previously had nothing? I th
786.
by lend000 7y ago
Interesting that, almost by definition, most of the top HN comments on this article are very critical of the idea. As if proving what the article claims: most people do not push the intellectual boundaries of their social environment. Not t
787.
by lend000 7y ago
Perhaps they are all the same thing ;) Skepticism is important to keep discussion grounded, and I appreciate the level headed discussion. To me, finding something that breaks our understanding of reality is just as interesting and worth pur
788.
by lend000 7y ago
Technically that 20% applies to both life and intelligent life. Of course I'm just playing devil's advocate -- there would certainly be fewer instances of intelligent life than life. We believe it took >4 billion years for inte
789.
by lend000 7y ago
Yes but the IR locked onto a higher temperature source, not cooler. My understanding is that a shadow would be cooler. Other remaining factors include that: - Primary radars on both fighters in the initial pass were being jammed - Passive r
790.
by lend000 7y ago
I don't think you can compare two completely unknown probabilities and make those conclusions. We also know that life has evolved on ~20% of well-known planets in the "habitable zone," are there are believed to be about 4e10
791.
by lend000 7y ago
These were IR videos, and the whole area was restricted airspace.
792.
by lend000 7y ago
Isn't this all speculation by everyone? My reason for such speculation is that if the Oumuamua was actually a probe, the little information which we can observe from it (speed, size, trajectory changes) is plausible in terms of our cur
793.
by lend000 7y ago
How did you come up with probabilities? It seems to me that probability becomes unhelpful and it's either 0 or 1, once we've ruled out everything for which we have reliable known probabilities. A terrestrial foreign superpower&#x2
794.
by lend000 7y ago
There is far more interesting evidence of potential advanced intelligence in our system, such as the Nimitz encounter [0]. The New York Post put together a great video highlighting "The Phenomenon." If Oumuamua is indeed an inters
795.
by lend000 7y ago
While I love futuristic ideas like those of Dyson, it seems naive to assume that because we don't see evidence of our virgin civilization's futurists' visions of advanced civilization, it does not exist. This is considering t
796.
by lend000 7y ago
People regularly oversimplify this problem as socialized vs private healthcare without considering why American healthcare is so broken. If you look carefully at the problems, you see that they won't go away if the government replaces
797.
by lend000 7y ago
Or what can we do to offset the albedo effects of decreasing ice cover? Low primary productivity areas like those that were formerly permanently covered in ice or deserts seem like good places for artificial light reflection.
798.
by lend000 7y ago
I wonder how many people have this opinion just to stick it to "the man" -- seems like most of the anti-Uber HN crowd does not actually drive for Uber, but nonetheless express a passionate hatred for their business model.
799.
by lend000 7y ago
The Great Filter hypothesis assumes that a society that has the capability to expand and colonize would do so without exception and make its presence known to more primitive civilizations. That's a pretty big assumption. Just look at h
800.
by lend000 7y ago
It really is not different, and people of the time certainly made the same exact arguments against most of the inventions on your list. Whether it's caused by a cotton loom or an immigrant, there is something about having to learn how
801.
by lend000 7y ago
If only we hadn't invented the printing press, scribes would still be making good wages. Somehow everybody found a job afterwards, though -- the economy adjusts with an increased supply of labor. UBI is a promising antidote for short t
802.
by lend000 7y ago
Every non-fraudulent profitable trade makes prices more efficient (in either time or value), and in this case it's time. Their competitors aren't you and me, and someone is going to make money from the arbitrage, so what's th
803.
by lend000 7y ago
On the other hand, blindly accepting browser extension upgrades is a huge security vulnerability. There was a post some time ago about how popular extension projects often get bought by adware/spyware companies and they were able to pu
804.
by lend000 7y ago
I'm not aware of the local news outlets or leanings, but my visits over the last few years are pretty consistent with what I've read in this article. It's an undeniable problem and the current response is clearly not working.
805.
by lend000 7y ago
> Instead of doing the sensible thing and saying what terrestrial things could this be and demonstrating it is not them That was already done by the Navy before releasing this, not to mention many other skeptics. Do you have a new idea?
806.
by lend000 7y ago
I would have left a very similar comment a few years ago. As you said, it's human nature to hold on to beliefs, especially when those beliefs strongly define their worldview. Read the wiki link -- it isn't just a video, and the se
807.
by lend000 7y ago
People on HN tend to be skeptical to a fault. In this case, even the usual skeptics just say "we can't rush to conclusions."[0] When the Navy released this footage and the story with a number of highly credible witnesses and
808.
by lend000 7y ago
Where are you seeing the YC companies building computer processors?
809.
by lend000 7y ago
Any interesting anecdotes on HN? I haven't seen anything like this unfortunately, but I've heard enough stories from people I consider reliable to believe that some of these UFO sightings are ET ships/drones monitoring us. Al
810.
by lend000 8y ago
The amount of location-agnostic industry (e.g. software) in Texas or the number of companies officially headquartered in Nevada are some obvious examples of the intuitive statement: the attractiveness of business policy affects where busine

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