rayiner

25 ms·

511.
by rayiner 4mo ago
The travel advisory is because people overthrew the government recently, which is a different problem than the ordinary crime we're talking about. And the Chittagong Hill Tracts are the Bangladeshi equivalent of Indian reservations. Ne
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does. That doesn't matter. If cri
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Yet you continue to make ad hominem arguments based on imagined motivations.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
If you assume a dichotomy between blank-slate cultural relativism and nazism, then you’re correct that everyone who thinks 100,000 Bangladeshi immigrants is materially different than 100,000 Americans must hold that view solely due to skin-
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> I think it's best for universities to train their own future researchers. Research, science, and the university's own core goals should be the focus of teaching. If that were the goal then universities would have like 300 stu
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by rayiner 4mo ago
No, I'm just another third worlder who escaped a socialist country.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
The economists were asked to weigh in on behalf of their field, not just their personal views: > There you have it, six major proposals that have broad agreement, at least among economists The NPR article attributes the proposals to econ
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Economists have known slavery is inefficient since Adam Smith. Non-free labor creates a deadweight loss and inefficient allocation of capital.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> basically decries liberals as too dumb to understand it and conservatives as too evil to want it Yes, that’s the expert consensus.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
The key insight is that wealth that’s not spent has no effect on anyone else. It’s just a number on paper.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
The goal is economic growth, which matters more than anything else. Fun fact: in 1900, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, at about 60% of US GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights&#x2F
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by rayiner 4mo ago
It's an NPR story with economics experts describing positions that are consensus in their field but politically unpopular. > Tuesday's show presented the common-sense, no-nonsense Planet Money economic plan — backed by economis
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by rayiner 4mo ago
I’m not classifying it as the best solution. I’m quoting an NPR article describing the consensus view of economics experts. But as I understand it, the reason is that consumption taxes have the least distortion in terms of deviating from th
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by rayiner 4mo ago
We already have expert consensus on what’s the best taxes, people just don’t like the answer: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... (“Three. Eliminate the corporate in
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by rayiner 4mo ago
That’s almost certainly going to be the case. For example, I have been extremely negative on tech in the legal sector. Until now. AI as it exists now allows me to do stuff that in the past I would’ve delegated to an associate. Even if we’re
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Blaming “republicans” for California’s inability to build a train line within California is an ungodly level of cope.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
“White” has nothing to do with it, but you can’t understand the argument because your intellectual toolbox has only two ideas in it: blank-slate cultural relativism, and Nazism. If it’s not one it must be the other. Thus, the only way you c
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by rayiner 4mo ago
“Protecting the public” is the propaganda. In practice, you have a regulatory system that gives every minority interest an effective veto on development, disregarding the global cost/benefit analysis. In our case it was church micropho
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Every year that you delay Africa and south asia getting to western levels of development equals tens of thousands of under-5 deaths that could have been avoided.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
It’s an fully intra-state train line in a state that has an economy bigger than France. California should be able to build an entire EU-style HSR network with zero regard to what’s happening federally.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> shutdown of that allegedly "criminal organization" (his words), USAID. Even the President of Mexico, who hates Trump, agreed on that one: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu... “This
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by rayiner 4mo ago
That's a ghoulish thing to say.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Empirically, we can't. We can barely even build EV chargers.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
A couple of billion people are doing to join the global middle class over the coming decades. They don’t have pre-existing cable and phone networks that have been in the ground for 50+ years they can incrementally upgrade to broadband. Rich
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> It feels different when it’s the government that theoretically represents people but when it’s one person that feels truly depressing. I worked on technology for years that the FCC effectively killed for stupid reasons. So it’s hearten
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Fiber deployment is bottlenecked by Baumol's Cost Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect . There's basically no productivity gains being made in how quickly skilled laborers can deploy fiber. Lik
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by rayiner 4mo ago
You should read Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. This was a known problem 2,400 years ago. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html https://www.sciencetheearth.com/uploads&#x
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> he explained it correctly to his wife (American lawyer), or if she verified. Are you saying I am mixing it up now? My post acknowledged I had mixed it up before: given that the Commission is so powerful, I had thought it was comprised
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by rayiner 4mo ago
It seems to me that the nationalism issue is orthogonal to the representation issue. In the current structure, the EU government is even more powerful than the U.S. federal government. The U.S. federal government can only legislate in cer
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Thank you! I think that's all correct except (1), unless I'm misunderstanding something you wrote. My understanding is that the European Council appoints a Commission President-elect. The President-elect and the Council of Ministe

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