0xBDB

Coöperate. And coordinate, etc. Also mostly seen in the New Yorker these days due to their style guide, but occasionally elsewhere.

The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold

Neither of your two points covers the reason I feel more threatened by e-bikes, which is that the last time I was in Manhattan I stepped out into a one-way street without looking the other way (my bad) only to be nearly hit in the bike line by an e-bike coming the wrong way at max speed.

The person you were responding to pointed out that the operators of bikes simply don't obey traffic laws (perhaps France is different, but I doubt it). That is at least forgivable if you're trying to conserve hard-pedaled momentum but not if you're operating a 75-pound motor vehicle at 28mph.

Perhaps my chance of being killed by an e-bike is still lower than it would be for a car, but it's not totally irrational for people to prefer things that are higher risk, but more predictable, to those that are lower risk but still dangerous and aren't at all predictable.

Income tax percentage in the U.S. ranges from negative counting credits (for the bottom 60% of taxpayers in states with no income tax) to a marginal rate of 52.7% plus a 1% surcharge on all income combining federal, state, and local for incomes over a million bucks in San Francisco.

Low income tax states tend to make up for it in other ways (sales tax, property tax, or both) but basically UK taxes would look extortionate to an Alaskan, painfully high to a Texan and probably pretty normal to a New Yorker or Californian.

He postulated eightfold increse in economy

Yes. That's math, the rule of 72. At a 2% growth rate the economy will be 8 times larger in 108 years, more or less. The rate is a bit higher, so we're a bit over 8 in the 95 years since that's been written.

Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.

But that's not anticipating things, that's projecting an existing growth rate out for another century. Improbable really that it would neither rise nor fall, and one of the reasons it hasn't fallen is that we didn't cut our work week to 15 hours. So the only thing (in this context) that he really anticipated was wrong.

Social Security in the US is definitely not enough for a "nice retirement".

A two-retiree couple who contributed at the tax limit for long enough would get $122,592 in Social Security benefits in 2025. Not beachfront living in the Hamptons, perhaps, but not cat food eating money either.

It's precisely what Keynes meant. He meant that 15 hours of labor now will buy you what 40 would then. How could he have meant anything else?

How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or proles being able to afford intercontinental flights more than once in a lifetime?

"Democratic Socialists" in America aren't socialists. Even Bernie Sanders doesn't advocate seizing the means of production. You can argue we use it wrong, but we can argue it's our language and we evolved it.

But I don't think even all the nominally socialist parties in Europe are really socialist either.

It still sounds impossible I'm afraid.

A realistic wealth tax probably caps out and around 2%, remembering that the net worth of very rich people is generally not liquid and can be difficult to mark to market. Any higher rate risks forcing the rich to have an asset fire sale, which liquidates productive assets and isn't really good for anybody. At six to seven percent you would force them to be entirely liquid and would begin to shrink their wealth, killing off the tax base in a few generations. Even this is absurdly optimistic since a globally standardized wealth tax is a pipe dream and without it you get capital flight as a result of any wealth tax at all, but let's ignore that.

To steelman this as much as possible let's say you can charge 6%. The top 0.5% are worth $30-$40 trillion in the U.S. (which is just an easy example because the statistics are available) which gives you a probably unrealistically high max annual tax revenue of $2.4 trillion. Social Security and Medicare in their current form cost $1.35 trillion a year; Medicare for All would double to triple that or more, depending on what estimate you believe.

Europeans pay for their social safety nets with very broad taxation while America instead charges negative income tax (after credits) to the bottom 60 percent of the population (even after inflation, excise taxes, state tax, payroll tax and tariffs the total tax burden is pretty slim at the bottom end by European standards). There doesn't seem to be a mathematically feasible way to give benefits to the working class that the working class doesn't pay for.

Counterpoint to the general practice of ever using that phrase:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

In which case that is just "reduce your budget and spend less" with extra steps.

I'm pretty sure the extra steps are the point, in that I simply don't believe the MMT folks expect them to ever take place.

It's not a coincidence it's an American theory, from a country where it's politically almost impossible to raise taxes. Otherwise it would just be a roundabout way to raise taxes and pay for stuff in reverse order. But in fact it isn't "buy now pay later". It's "buy now YOLO LOL". But hey, maybe I'm missing something.

Let's see which tech stack and which customer support organization survives the merger, respectively...

I have no inside experience of either company, but I have been through a lot of large financial industry mergers and I know what's public about this one.

I'd bet heavily that it'll be some of both, but tech especially will be Capital One. Because it's larger, because it's the acquirer, and maybe above all because it's newer - a younger company with a younger tech stack that's known to be entirely cloud based.

Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German.

The John McWhorter theory (not sure if it's generally accepted, but he seems to have evidence that it happened in the right part of England at the right time) is that it comes from Viking-era Danish settlers learning Anglo-Saxon. Similar languages, but different enough that adult learners dumped out all the complications they could.

If you have ever purchased insurance, including car insurance, he has impacted your life either because he probably insured or reinsured you. There's a good chance if you've ever purchased anything shipped by railroad, or electricity in any of several states, or boots, or industrial parts, or a manufactured home, or a financial product of any kind, or an Apple product, or a Coca-Cola, or any of a bunch of other things, it was from a company he either owned or owned a huge stake in and influenced.

If you liked the fact that the Great Recession didn't turn into the Even Greater Depression, he seems to have had quite a bit of influence there behind the scenes as well.

American railroads have pretty good pay and benefits, including some of the last defined-benefit pensions left in the private sector.

They didn't want to give in on same-day sick days (not the same as prescheduled PTO, which they did have) because it kills what they call precision train scheduling, which is basically running trains with the absolute minimum number of people possible. I'm not saying this was right or wrong, just that it's the reason.

With respect, this was not a good reply.

24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling.

Congress at least has to pretend it has enumerated powers and is using them, most of the time, "promote the general welfare" notwithstanding. So do you know the basis for that federal "ruling"? Smoking weed, including weed grown in your backyard, substantially affects interstate commerce.

EDIT for source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/801

And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent.

Is this not my point rather than yours? Open the door for ill intent and the imprecise nature of the law means that the first people with ill intent will exploit it.

"Congress shall make no law" is not a rule we can use for absolutely everything, of course, but where it does not exist, Congress historically shall pretty much inevitably make a law. So the answer to "is my unpopular speech advertising if adverting can be regulated?" is "yes." Of course it will be regulated. Others have pointed out that this applies to lots of laws, not just speech, to which I say... yeah?

Yes.

The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate. So it defined interstate commerce as anything that substantially affects interstate commerce. Did you cut down a tree in your backyard and use it to make your own pencil with your own labor? That kept you from buying a pencil that might have been made in another state. Interstate commerce.

Did you just represent an idea, and did I pay you with my attention? Advertising. Prison.

Logical fallacies aren't automatic falsehoods. They're things that can't be proven with formal logic.

The slippery slope is a fallacy and also a thing that fairly consistently happens in politics and law.

The point far up this thread, however, was that this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a leaky sieve. If there is a law against speech that covers enough cases to be even slightly effective against people with lawyers, and I am powerful and don't like you, then you are going to prison.

There are a lot of questions that are upstream of yours. Or at least, that illustrate why your questions are aggressively framed in a specific ideological directions and it's possible to frame them in the other direction.

If common American citizens can't afford health care, do other American citizens have an obligation to provide it? There is a word for a system where people are obligated to provide their labor to others. Does that word apply to a system where everyone gets free healthcare?

Do common Americans provide enough value to earn the wages they make now, especially the ones making a legislatively mandated minimum wage? How many fewer can actually earn an arbitrary increased number? Do people deserve things they didn't earn? What's the non-mystical explanation for that, if so?

Why aren't we having children? They can't have a productive life without having a life.

Is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger because Americans are unwilling to pay one another? If we are, why is that? (Actually I'll cheat a little on this one and provide a correct answer: the entire increased gap here is explained by housing. So the questions becomes: why aren't Americans willing to let strangers live closer to them? Might there be some risk or self-interest there? Are people obligated to act against their interests? Why, how, and by whom are they obligated?)

Which is better, democracy or a stable and prosperous society? Might they be mutually exclusive? What's holy about the popular vote, especially for morons? Even if we keep democracy, does a functional democracy require some form of IQ tests as a condition of the franchise?

Is the purpose of courts to write wrongs or interpret the law? Does separation of powers require courts to refrain from writing wrongs if the legislature has passed laws that are wrong? If not, does the lack of separation of powers place any limit at all on the courts' ability to right wrongs? How about when the courts are controlled by people whose concept of wrong is different than yours? Doesn't a functioning democracy require the concept of right and wrong to be decided by what are literally called the political branches, the legislative and executive?

Are the news media obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? Are you then obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? What's the difference between you writing in a public forum and a journalist? If there is a difference, should you therefore not enjoy freedom of the press? What if you, say, advocate for the courts to ignore separation of powers to do what is right? What if we the people decide that is not in our interests? How will you be punished for this transgression?

In actuality, I would probably give the same answers to many of these questions that you would. But the point is that there is no "just asking questions, man". Questions have premises and assumptions. If you, like me, don't like the ones in this question set, don't assume people will be comfortable if you're just askin' yours. I wouldn't be. And if people are all comfortable with you just askin' yours, ask yourself whether you have friends or conformation bias with echo chamber.

This administration's legal theory is that executive power is concentrated entirely in the person of the president, which, to be fair, is because the Constitution says that it is.

That's not conducive to good government and is not the current precedent set by the Supreme Court, but it's been the conservative legal view since the 1980s and to be fair again, is again what the Constitution actually says. It will pretty much certainly be the prevailing view after this returns to the Supreme Court.

If that legal theory is true then Congress cannot create independent executive power and so it is not illegal for the President to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason, including inspectors general, the chairman of the Fed, etc., regardless of any law to the contrary. Again, to be clear a third time, the effects of this will be bad, but the constitutional language isn't really ambiguous.

What point of “there is a lot of overlap” is difficult to understand?

The part where it would matter.

The "race realist" i.e. racist right likes to point out that there is a lot of overlap between certain racial groups and the criminal underclass. Statistically this is sort of true. Trying to use it to reason about any individual is logically known as the fallacy of division or ecological fallacy and colloquially known as "Nazi stuff". You may want to reassess your views that have you employing the same sort of guilt by association tactics that these groups do.

I am not a DOGE fan particularly and I am certainly very interested in whether this guy was a sextortionist or carder, but I'm not very interested in whether he was in a general scene with them.

most advice has been starting at the bottom as an IT helpdesk worker

I've been in infosec for about 10 years. It's a very broad field. Opinions vary but it's generally not considered an entry tech field. This advice is broadly applicable to most technical roles (SOC, pentest, security engineering). You are going to need to know what a current IT or devops engineer knows and then some for those.

For appsec you will need to know what a developer knows and then some. Languages may vary but the webdev languages are always in demand.

For GRC roles (governance, risk, compliance) you may not need to be that technical. These are policy / paperwork / audit type roles. Unfortunately supply and demand being what they are, they're also generally the lowest paid and (in my opinion) least interesting roles.

The catch here will be that the job market is very poor right now in security as in every other technical field due to layoffs and AI, and (speaking as a 48 year old) ageism is real.

The only mention of the First Amendment seems to be specifically in regard to Zuck's allegation (whether you believe it or not) that the government subjected him to overwhelming pressure to fact check as he did.

I don't know whether that's legally a First Amendment violation, if true, but I don't think the article is conflating anything.

No. There are entire categories of employers (such as most of the prestigious financial firms for financial jobs) that only hire from the Ivy League. Twitter had its internal hiring policy leaked some time ago (before Elon) and Harvard was on the list (GPA 3.6) but BU was not at any GPA. School matters much more in the American class system than GPA (edit: or class rank) does. My understanding is that too high a GPA may in fact be disqualifying in some places; you might be uptight.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...

The general rule is in fact that you can read anything you can get your hands on, which is one reason people like Prince Harry who come from different legal traditions consider the First Amendment to be nuts.

"Just for starters, we regularly ban books at the state level."

We really do not. We sometimes ban them from public school libraries, more usually at the local than state level. A bookstore can sell you any book you care to read including those with written depictions of child sexual abuse, with the limited exception that a locality might try to declare things obscene as being contrary to local standards of decency (but in practice in modern America rarely does).

"See libel."

Libel of public figures requires knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth and even then is a civil offense. There are vestigial criminal libel laws but it's doubtful they're constitutional and no one gets convicted. You can't go to jail for it and no one gets in trouble for reading it.

"See classified materials"

Unless you have a security clearance, you can read all the classified material you want if it's published. You can be punished for disclosing it if you have legal access to it, but not in practice for publishing it in peacetime (see the Pentagon Papers) and you cannot be restrained from publishing it before the fact unless doing so presents a clear and present danger to American public, a standard almost impossible to meet in peacetime.

"illegal materials such as CSAM"

In general you can read all the CSAM you want. You can't look at pictures or video.

If we were all on the same page the US would have reciprocally banned TikTok as soon as China banned Facebook, i.e., before it even existed, and would also ignore its constitutional guarantee of free speech (which the Chinese, like the Soviets, also have believe it or not) and control content on domestic social networks.

If we were even more on the same page generally, then the US would put its undesirable ethnic minorities in reeducation camps.

The US wants to be much more like a wartime US, in the face of its most intense completion since WWII. I think most Americans have no conception of what WWII era US censorship and propaganda looked like, but it looked a lot like modern peacetime China. TikTok is being treated more gently than Tokyo Rose.

Of course things will not go that far domestically... unless the shooting starts.

The actual American belief is generally "[Most] Rich people bad government worse".

The Pinkertons were breaking strikes launched by Americans, after all. May Day is a commemoration of an event that took place in Chicago. The reaction to the cold-blooded murder of an insurance executive on a public street is pretty characteristically American, in my view. We just don't like power.

Louisiana. I guess it's difficult to reconcile parts of it with the Code Napoleon. All other states have English common law as the basis of their legal systems.

Sweden is an outlier. US debt to GDP is 110%. France and the UK 99%. Italy 138%. Greece 203%. Japan 263%. China depends on who you believe, but probably somewhere around 100%.

Money is debt. Green (or whatever color) slips of paper aren't intrinsically valuable. They're a promise to redeem them for things that are, same as an IOU.

I take your point that not every economy is run by a government that owes 110% of GDP. But Japan and China are, and France and the UK are at 99%, so that doesn't seem to be the whole secret of America's success.