whakim

35 ms·

391.
The Media and Mr Zuckerberg(bylinetimes.com)
3 points by whakim 5y ago|0 comments
392.
The Media and Mr Zuckerberg(bylinetimes.com)
3 points by whakim 5y ago|0 comments
393.
by whakim 5y ago
In a world in which most "literature" was memorized and then performed orally, repetition had a few key functions: 1) making it easier to tell a part of the story (an audience probably wouldn't listen to the whole thing in on
394.
by whakim 5y ago
First, I assume the estimates on capital flight in the WSJ are based on Pichet's 2007 paper, which makes a number of huge assumptions to arrive at its estimate. This isn't necessarily a criticism, more a statement that there isn&#
395.
by whakim 5y ago
Sure, some people will move their assets around in order to avoid wealth taxes (to which there are, of course, solutions). That being said, in France revenue from the wealth tax grew at more than twice the rate of GDP from 1990-2018. Which
396.
by whakim 5y ago
Most evidence suggests that wealth taxes levied in the past have indeed reduced inequality and have not led to the type of tax avoidance their detractors would suggest.
397.
by whakim 5y ago
I think this is a valid point in the United States (to a certain extent, of course: I don't think "working too hard and not seeing your kids enough" is really comparable to "living paycheck to paycheck", although I
398.
by whakim 5y ago
This isn't true. There are lots of recorded instances of wealth taxes (e.g. France prior to the abolition of the ISF several years ago; many countries which levied temporary wealth taxes after WWII, etc.)
399.
by whakim 5y ago
Thanks for bringing up the source; if you do end up finding the data I'd love to see it. It's also fascinating to think about the relationship between social changes like this one and some of the economic/political drivers of
400.
by whakim 5y ago
Social class seems to have always played an important role in marriage (e.g. Jane Austen as a primer on 19th-century upperclass British society), so I'm not sure it's fair to say that this is change from the past. But I think it&#
401.
by whakim 5y ago
I don't think a bootcamp is going to be able to teach you to be "good at" javascript (or any other language). Think back to when you'd been programming for 1 or 2 months. I'd wager there were lots of things that did
402.
by whakim 5y ago
I certainly don't think Ruby is indefensible. I think it's possible to get a lot done with Ruby, and I think that's very valuable for new developers who need to learn a lot in a very limited amount of time. But I don't
403.
by whakim 5y ago
You can, but Celery has pretty tight integration with Django so it's easy to write a Django app that includes a bunch of Celery tasks if you're going that route. Also, it's not entirely straightforward to run a web app writte
404.
by whakim 5y ago
Yes, javascript has some quirks. But most bootcamps are trying to get their students from "zero to employable developer" in a very short amount of time, and "employable entry-level developer" is almost always synonymous
405.
by whakim 5y ago
I'm not sure the point of the article is that we need to get rid of all forms of preventable death (and I think the "toxic individualism" is kind of a side point). As you rightly point out, it's unrealistic (and likely u
406.
by whakim 5y ago
> China is equally as capitalistic and has more wealth inequality than the US. Just wanted to point out that this statement isn't true, on number of counts. First, the value of the assets of the state in China is significantly hig
407.
by whakim 5y ago
I agree with you that central banks don't have the tools to solve inequality in the long run (as you point out, the tax system and spending does). I'm simply noting that we've collectively invested central banks with magical
408.
by whakim 5y ago
While I take your point that wealth is always more unequally distributed than income, income inequality and wealth inequality are definitely related. The degree to which they're related depends a lot on the tax and regulatory regime. I
409.
by whakim 5y ago
"Bad choices" from the perspective of wealth accumulation. Regardless of how you want to frame it, the idea that attitudinal differences prevent poor people from accumulating wealth is no longer taken seriously by most who study t
410.
by whakim 5y ago
One of the reasons central banks and monetary policy have taken on such a strong role over since the 2008 financial crisis is an unwillingness to have honest discussions about taxation. If we want "nice things" however you define
411.
by whakim 5y ago
> If so, that describes a third of Americans, down from half in 2002 [1] Your source is from 2007. I don't have that particular figure; but in 2019, the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution continue to own almost nothing, the top 1
412.
by whakim 5y ago
I want to plug Algolia a little bit. For small teams, the results are truly incredible, and it provides a ton of features out-of-the-box without a lot of development time. I've seen small teams struggle mightily with both ElasticSearch
413.
by whakim 5y ago
> So now leaves the question, what does this report look like? You can slice and dice the data how you like. Again, exactly how we currently do it with income data. > Who's having these discussions? Certainly not the entirety o
414.
by whakim 5y ago
> Which one is it? Public or not? The aggregate data would be public and the underlying data points would not be. Just in the same way it's possible to have a robust discussion of income equality but I can't look up how much mo
415.
by whakim 5y ago
The United States had very high income taxes from 1950 until 1980 (and also grew very fast during that period - much faster than in the period 1980-present). It is also worth noting that the United States was actually the leading advocate
416.
by whakim 5y ago
> OK, what will this do? Nothing. It will do several things. First of all, having robust publicly available aggregate data will spur better debate about the equitable distribution of wealth. Second, it will allow the IRS to easily collec
417.
by whakim 5y ago
A social network is just a kind of business, like a chain of supermarkets or a steel mill. You could, of course, have a non-profit social network (or a business with a different corporate structure - as I allude to in a parent post), but th
418.
by whakim 5y ago
While Macron did indeed win the second round of voting in a landslide, I think that had more to do with an overwhelming rejection of the social-nativism of the National Front. In the first round of voting, it was striking how evenly split f
419.
by whakim 5y ago
While I'm sympathetic to your anti-FB bias, I think it's pretty clear that by any reasonable definition Facebook is indeed a social network (which also happens to make gobs of money through advertising, and covets engagement becau
420.
by whakim 5y ago
I honestly don't know if it's possible. Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. That's just my surface-level take though. I guess the meta-question is

More ›