winston_smith

12 ms·

61.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> The "well-regulated economy" usually implies raising the taxes for top earners A well regulated economy usually implies that people can count on stable laws, enforceable contracts, and markets that aren't distorted by th
62.
by winston_smith 6y ago
You've constructed a false irreducibility here. Freedom and captivity are opposed, and it's important to be able to say "this would be less free than that", even if that distinction isn't always clear cut.
63.
by winston_smith 6y ago
That only works if the alternatives to EMH are better heuristics than it is.
64.
by winston_smith 6y ago
Then the people who decide what the politicians are allowed to say would themselves be politicians.
65.
by winston_smith 6y ago
The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing
66.
by winston_smith 6y ago
The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority. Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where ever
67.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life. I bet the closeted
68.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you You're even more privileged if you're so confident in your job security and the popularity of your political views that you can spend
69.
by winston_smith 6y ago
The reason the word 'political' exists is that some things are very political and many things aren't. To be political in your example would be to base your decision to call an ambulance on whether the victim is wearing a mag
70.
by winston_smith 6y ago
If I followed you around at work all day pestering you about obscure political issues irrelevant to your job, you wouldn't be able to get any work done.
71.
by winston_smith 6y ago
That's a good analogy, and explains how we ended up with banana republics. They were just hostile takeovers of competing companies in Central America, leveraging our superior military assets. When you phrase it in those terms, Jeff B
72.
by winston_smith 6y ago
Seriously! Replace "government" with "Donald J. Trump" and all of a sudden it doesn't seem to appealing to have government in charge of healthcare, education, and Chuck Feeney's fortune, at least to a lot of t
73.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> People criticize billionaires. Full stop. Criticism of their philanthropy is not selective... And Scott's point is that non-selective criticism is dumb. If you don't want your dog to chew the carpet, criticizing your dog, fu
74.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> The only reason they started paying was because it was codified into law. Aye, there's the rub. The greatest evils are when the billionaires team up with the government. Shifting money from the villains with money to the villain
75.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable. Conveniently, we can already see what causes we think are valuable, because the US government already spends about 40% of the entire GDP, $8 trillion per y
76.
by winston_smith 6y ago
> extreme concentrations of wealth should already be heavily and unavoidably taxed Unfortunately, government is already the most extreme concentration of wealth in the history of mankind, spending $8 trillion dollars a year in the USA al
77.
by winston_smith 6y ago
Because most people in society, across all wealth levels, refuse to live within their means. I was quite disappointed when I discovered this, because I thought that if I made enough money, I'd be able to support all my family. But th
78.
Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
1543 points by winston_smith 6y ago|574 comments
79.
by winston_smith 7y ago
OP said "change the constitution and give the govt more power". It's clear that OP's point is to oppose things that erode freedom, not that the constitution represents perfection.
80.
by winston_smith 7y ago
You're splitting hairs. Their "score" just becomes whatever function the university uses to decide, and if they use it then their score would indeed be altered by the "adversity" score.
81.
by winston_smith 7y ago
Of course they're comparable, and you just compared them. Like all pairs of things, they have similarities and differences. You're claiming that they're very different, which is fine, but you're dressing it up in lang
82.
by winston_smith 8y ago
Better yet, all 50 US states have government-run newborn heel prick programs, and they keep the blood. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-biobank-dna-babies-w... It's cartoonishly evil. The government litera
83.
by winston_smith 8y ago
All 50 states have screening programs, so you'd have to go international. But you can refuse the test, and in fact the Mayo Clinic Labs have a test they can mail to your doctor that you can use instead: https://www.mayoclin
84.
by winston_smith 8y ago
That doesn't tell us much without knowing what standard of living you think everyone deserves, and for what level of effort. And if I'm more kindhearted than you and think that everyone deserves a standard of living twice as high
85.
by winston_smith 8y ago
"False equivalency" is a nonsense phrase. Analogies aren't true or false.
86.
by winston_smith 8y ago
"X is political because it is a corporate entity defined in law." is a fully general argument that every company ever "is political", which is the dilution into meaningless I mentioned earlier. And for all the things you
87.
by winston_smith 8y ago
Listing the outrage du jour is not a good counterargument. The principle of "keep politics where it belongs" is a critical part of your ability to effect political change on issues like yours. If you abandon it, then it gets much
88.
by winston_smith 8y ago
No, this attitude is harmful. First, because it dilutes the meaning of the word "politics", which describes something much more specific than "everything". And second, because as you point out in your last sentence, po
89.
by winston_smith 9y ago
Been a while since I read it, but I believe he actually advocated for that. First he tried to establish that the sexes have some differences, then said we should see if we can make the workplace culture less biased toward the male-friendly
90.
by winston_smith 9y ago
> The limit to tolerance is being tolerant of intolerance. This is nonsensical. Tolerance is the region between what you like and what you fight. There are lots of obviously bad things you shouldn't tolerate (like murder), and lots

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