natnat

13 ms·

91.
by natnat 16y ago
I totally agree that people are paid what they can get. The problem is, a lot of the people who justify their enormous salaries by saying that the market is amoral then try to argue that they 'deserve' every last penny they made come tax ti
92.
by natnat 16y ago
I don't see what creating something has to do with owning it. If I have kids, they are not my property, even though their existence entirely depends on me. The whole point of copyright is that the government decided that people would be mor
93.
by natnat 16y ago
Many of these devices were invented by doctors and implemented by programmers. The doctors, in many of these cases, were the ones who created most of the value. When the idea behind a device is more like, "Here's how we're going to use magn
94.
by natnat 16y ago
You can easily remove the word "tech" from that comment.
95.
by natnat 16y ago
Individual freedom against the public good isn't entirely what's at stake here. What's at stake is the individual freedom of the original author against the individual freedom of other authors who want to use similar characters, and the ind
96.
by natnat 16y ago
I have no problem with broadcast TV, although ubiquitous fast internet service could make that unnecessary. What I have a problem with is the use of really good spectrum space for analog signals inefficiently. TV now is a lot better than it
97.
by natnat 16y ago
A big reason our wireless infrastructure sucks (and won't improve a whole lot) is that we devote a huge amount of the best spectrum space to broadcast radio and television. Signals sent on TV or radio-sized frequency travel farther and are
98.
by natnat 16y ago
Other deposits in Swiss bank accounts are from the very kleptocrats who keep their citizens from having any money. Where do you think Kim Jong-il keeps his billions? (Actually, he probably keeps it in a number of countries, like Switzerland
99.
by natnat 16y ago
I really don't understand this at all. According to iSuppli[1], Apple pays $229.35 in parts and labor to make the low-end iPad. They develop their own operating system, buy incredible amounts of ads, and yet they still have massive profit m
100.
by natnat 16y ago
I really doubt that there are fewer business monkeys than code monkeys. In 2008, 335,000 students graduated college with a degree in business, while only 40,000 graduated with a degree in computer science or a related field. An additional 7
101.
by natnat 16y ago
That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying some businesses are more effectively run by engineers and others are more effectively run by MBAs. It depends on what the business is trying to do.
102.
by natnat 16y ago
Some businesses are run by engineers and are really successful because they solve difficult problems really well. They have sales/marketing people, but their main focus is in engineering. Google is a great example of such a company. Other b
103.
by natnat 16y ago
How do you know that few people die from medically necessary drugs? I've been looking for a source of number of deaths by drug, but I can't find one. Also, I'm fairly confident that drugs being illegal causes fewer people to die from drug u
104.
by natnat 16y ago
There is also a long and documented history of people dying from preventable diseases. A history that, for many diseases, abruptly ended when governments began mandating vaccines. Perhaps the threat of the government somehow secretly admini
105.
by natnat 16y ago
Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking drugs that are necessary to keep them alive. Chemotherapy kills a lot of people, simply because the whole purpose of it is to kill a tumor with poisons. Does that
106.
by natnat 16y ago
I think a big part of this, in the US at least, is that ISPs are monopolies that can do whatever they want to their customers. We granted telecoms monopoly power back before deregulation became popular, and those monopolies have carried ove
107.
by natnat 16y ago
If we're going to internalize externalities, men who get women pregnant should pay for half of all of her maternity-related healthcare expenses, and for half of the income she would have made if she hadn't had a kid. Do you agree? I totally
108.
by natnat 16y ago
Doing something well and doing something profitably are far from the same thing. No one would deny that Microsoft had a successful, profitable stranglehold on the PC operating system market from the early 1990s to the 2000s. But few people
109.
by natnat 16y ago
You're conflating small companies with a few employees and revenues in the thousands to millions with massive quasi-governmental institutions with profits in the billions. The first group doesn't have access to inexpensive healthcare (becau
110.
by natnat 16y ago
Ads that target men are a lot worse, IMO, than ads that target women. Have you ever seen a commercial for GoDaddy.com? They typically involve lots of blonde women with huge tits doing vaguely sexual things. The same goes for ads for Bud Lig
111.
by natnat 16y ago
I like how the 8) on the eighth item in the list is translated into a smiley face. It's a nice touch.
112.
by natnat 16y ago
Actually, Steve Jobs is quite lucky. His type of pancreatic cancer, called islet cell carcinoma, has a much better prognosis than most other types of pancreatic cancer. It is also quite rare, making up only 1.3% of pancreatic cancer cases.
113.
by natnat 16y ago
Why is that? The payroll tax is regressive, and it makes the total tax rate of someone who makes $200k a year lower than someone who makes $100k if you factor in employer contributions.
114.
by natnat 16y ago
You're conflating upper class with middle class. People who are making $50k a year after retirement, or making more than $106k a year before retirement, are not middle class. They are upper-middle to upper class, and they have substantially
115.
by natnat 16y ago
I'm not talking about my income or your income. I'm saying that, when spending is constant and Google doesn't pay as much in tax, you have to pay more. If spending decreases and your tax is held constant, you get less back. Either way, Goog
116.
by natnat 16y ago
Perhaps in stocks, but the value of the currency is kept fixed by the Chinese government and wasn't available for purchase until very recently. Even if all of America's hedge funds spent all of their money on Yuan, it wouldn't get any more
117.
by natnat 16y ago
That's not true. The Chinese government may want to unpeg their currency (1) to give their citizens more purchasing power, (2) because of trade pressures levied by the United States backed up by the threat of tariffs, or (3) because China d
118.
by natnat 16y ago
Tax revenue is necessary to maintain a functional government. When the government doesn't get enough tax revenue to pay for the things it spends money on, it must either increase taxes on everyone, or borrow money from other people to finan
119.
by natnat 16y ago
There's a difference between saying that you're concerned with the level of inflation we might face if the Federal Reserve decides to do more quantitative easing, and saying that we're going to end up like Zimbabwe because the Federal Reser
120.
by natnat 16y ago
> Don't bother polluting this thread with facts. HN is clearly dominated by Keynesians. Your dissent will not be tolerated. This really isn't a constructive comment. It really possible to discuss different measures of inflation without

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