stdbrouw

19 ms·

211.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
This presumes (a) a highly reliable ability to identify the "best person", which we simply don't have, (b) the idea that "best" is unidimensional and unrelated to the context one finds oneself in and (c) the idea th
212.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Except that's not what is going on. Usually, when the time comes to look for a new postdoc or a new professor, there are plenty of candidates of very high talent and future potential and committees end up deciding based on low-inform
213.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
But that's exactly what people used to think in the 60s and 70s: instead of requiring a bunch of electrical engineers to build some arcane contraption, now ordinary folks can just write something that almost looks like English and you
214.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
For anyone who might be put off from reading the article: lovage is mentioned in the article but isn't the lost mystery herb from the title.
215.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Even if you could donate to Firefox specifically, that's still no guarantee because Mozilla could decide to just channel less money from other sources of funding towards Firefox and you'd end up where you started.
216.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
You don't have to extract key or card, the Kindle has a built-in browser, that's the point.
217.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
It did? The paper under discussion doesn't really give an answer and first paper I can find that does, about the 1986 tax reform (admittedly it's not about the 1964 reform when top rates were even higher), states that "The es
218.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
It'd be an interesting experiment :-)
219.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Not sure if you're joking, but... the taxes on your salary are subtracted at source in most countries so there's no way to avoid them no matter how highly you're taxed, but things are quite different when you can decide what
220.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Well, but that's a very different issue: the rich have an incredible amount of options to optimize their taxes that us mere mortals don't, and can shift their income so that it doesn't incur income taxes. You don't fight
221.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
I don't necessarily find it disingenuous because at the end of the day the result is that the rich do in fact benefit most, and there's nothing wrong with reporting this. But I agree that it is rather silly that this is sometime
222.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
I'm not rich and not a proponent of tax cuts for the rich, but there's one bit of insight that ideologically flavored reviews of tax reforms often seem to miss: almost any imaginable (income) tax cut will disproportionally favor t
223.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Somewhat of a tangent, but another (and somewhat more disappointing) trend are "only high margin item stores". There's a lot of this in DIY, where it's easy to find a new drill but hard to find a new drill chuck, easy to
224.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Even buildings that are built to code can deteriorate or suffer unexpected damage.
225.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
This sort of thing is very easily gamed using transfer pricing. There's a worldwide effort to see whether it's possible to tax using some combination of where profits are made, where the workforce is, etc. (OECD BEPS) but you can&
226.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
The US corporate tax rate is 21%, above the 15% minimum that was proposed. Furthermore, it was the Trump administration who introduced GILTI and BEAT, both measures aimed at taxing foreign profits in low wage and low tax countries. Now, of
227.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
> I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count cells in a microfluidic device using image processing. I sat down with t
228.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
So many anecdotes in business writing are uncorroborated, that's hardly enough to make it "an unfortunate example in hindsight" is it? Unless you believe that it has now been proven beyond reasonable doubt that she faked the
229.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Even novelty is a dubious standard that is often used to discard replications and meta-analyses (not novel), empirical work (no novel theory), reformulations and simplifications of existing research (not novel) and null findings (nothing wa
230.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Any other news source than the one that rejects climate change and originated the Obama birther movement? :-)
231.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
I guess you're referring to recent reporting that she might have made up some of her earlier claims, e.g. that she was being asked to "delete" deaths from the system: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/0
232.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
This is the kind of talk I often hear from people who never take public transport. The question then arises: do they not take public transport because it really is that awful, or do they actually have no idea whether it's truly awful b
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by stdbrouw 5y ago
Guess it depends on what you consider to be shit. Public transport in Belgium is incredibly widespread and affordable, and while trains are somewhat often delayed (but people love to kvetch and exaggerate all the time, https://pu
234.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
> Let's not forget that adding all this complexity to Unicode has a real burden for people who implement Unicode. We're talking about emoji for crying out loud, the entire idea is frivolous (and that's fine!)
235.
by stdbrouw 5y ago
Nitpick: the "loudness war" is about mastering / compressing a recording so that it sounds louder at any given volume, it doesn't really have anything to do with optimizing things so they sound better at high volumes or
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by stdbrouw 6y ago
You might need a subscription, but the NYT has a rent or buy calculator and it really depends a lot on the market and on your specific situation: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
237.
by stdbrouw 6y ago
Argumentation by synonym, that's a new one! "Rent" in an economic context refers to "any payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" ( https:/
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by stdbrouw 6y ago
I agree, but my point was not that armchair economics is wonderful, what I tried to say was that it's often useful to find out precisely where theory and reality diverge and to focus solutions on those gaps, to avoid putting the blame
239.
by stdbrouw 6y ago
Not an expert in macroeconomics either, but in a perfect free market there shouldn't be a lot of difference between renting and buying: if you can get a 5% yearly return by renting out a house, then the person renting from you can prob
240.
by stdbrouw 6y ago
That's simply not true. Economists who try to explain the housing crisis have pointed to increased regulation, cheap credit leading to an asset bubble, speculation, ill-advised tax cuts for homeowners, NIMBYism (not by government but b

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