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This is a terrible argument.

It implies the money is destroyed by taxation. In reality that money would go towards relieving the governments need to collect other tax revenues. So for example you could increase the standard deduction. Now everyone pays less tax and can either contribute more to their 401k (boosting stock values) or buying more things (boosting stock values). If you want to say the government is incompetent and will waste the money, that doesn't apply here because it applies to every tax, not specifically this one.

The money in this case is capital gains, which is fundamentally not "earned" income, it's income obtained by just having money.

The Humane AI pin says hello and that the almonds in your hand have 16000 calories.

Money market funds and short term t-bills are basically always liquid at face value, unlike longer term bonds. They fall below investment value maybe once per 50 years and that usually lasts a couple days.

This comment is shockingly misguided.

The IRS doesn't have the authority to mandate the creation of a secure national ID system and enforce it's use by the financial system. Only congress has the ability to really do that. The IRS collects revenue.

Even if it did have that authority, it doesn't have the budget to accomplish that goal.

One thing not mentioned in the article: People may be wondering how this book became so popular, basically it's because it became intimately tied to the MLM movement, Amway specifically but it did spread beyond that. People at the top of the pyramids would buy thousands of copies to send down their "downline" as part of a motivational tool. The primary goal of someone near the top of an MLM is to convince everyone down the line that you are ripping off that it's their fault for not hustling hard enough, and this book was and is one of the popular ways of doing that.

There is no real prospect of a "Yellowstone event": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts

We could effectively geoengineer one by pumping things into the upper atmosphere ourselves, but there's a lot of questions about that and we have no idea if this would help more than it hurt.

This is just one of the thousands of cases of a journalists fawning over any ML/AI thing with no understanding of the garbage-in garbage-out problem, and all the other issues with ML. You are completely right, attempting to simulate an individuals coronary systems is 100% out of our wheelhouse right now. At very best it's going to tell us things we already know, that people with clogged arteries are at risk of a heart attack. At worst it's a grift on par with fully body scans on healthy individuals.

I'm not saying ML is useless, far from it, but this is reminding me a lot of Eric Yuan (the CEO of Zoom) talking about AI clones in meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmAg4S2KeE

This. It's really weird the way we suddenly live in a world where it's the norm to take whatever a tech company says about future products at face value. This is the same world where Tesla promised "zero intervention LA to NYC self driving" by the end of the year in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The same world where we know for a fact that multiple GenAI demos by multiple companies were just completely faked.

It's weird. In the late 2010s it seems like people were wising up to the idea that you can't implicitly trust big tech companies, even if they have nap pods in the office and have their first day employees wear funny hats. Then ChatGPT lands and everyone is back to fully trusting these companies when they say they are mere months from turning the world upside down with their AI, which they say every month for the last 12-24 months.

Yellowstone will not explode and end civilization (or American civilization for that matter) in many many lifetimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts

Until someone spams them with garbage, or uses it to deliberately screw with certain people, and the system starts requiring more people to sift through the garbage than it needed without it.

Except the COVID vaccines passed clinical trials with flying colors. I believe not a single person from any of the Pfizer or Moderna trials died of COVID (people with the vaccine did, later, die of COVID, but at much, much, MUCH, lower rates than the unvaccinated). That's genuinely insane levels of drug success. You make an okay point, that the FDA needs some reform, but don't try to turn this into an anti-vax conspiracy ground, focus on actual issues where actual questionable activity exists.

We've realized for some time that... language model technologies going to dominate our future

Citation Needed.

I'm my experience it's the exact opposite and they lay off ICs and leave the managers largely in place, making it worse.

Exactly this. People act like it's a "big government takeover" trying to make multi-family housing against peoples wishes. The real fact is it's the exact opposite. "Big government" policies were created forcing people to only build single family homes on massive lots. Current proposals are to remove those regulations, and ironically people see it as the government coming for them.

You could argue things like the Russian invasion of Ukraine was one. Pointless war that will only hurt Russia long term. Same goes for authoritarian takeovers in general which often lead to trade sanctions.

It is probably the first time a country has democratically chosen to trade sanction itself for no benefit.

Because this is not an easy crime to catch or punish, these cars are so easy to steal a layman can do it in minutes without making much noise, take it to a chop shop, and be off with some money in no time.

Getting better at identifying and shutting down these chop shops is a good idea obviously, but that's also hard. On the other hand, forcing companies who didn't give a shit about security for years to pay for retrofitting the shitty cars they put out is actually a lot easier.

Kissinger's death was where I really started detaching myself from news media entirely. It was extremely hard to find an article or video that didn't say the exact same thing in almost identical wording: "was kissinger a war criminal? well he was certainly controversial but his influence stood large". No, objectively, he was a war criminal. Bombing Cambodia and several other actions were, factually, legally, war crimes. There's no way to two sides it.

Even though I'd firmly disagree with it, I'd much rather read an article that says "yeah, he was a war criminal, but war crimes are okay when America does them because America good." Instead you get this washed out nothingness where we as a society can't reflect on anything.

It Reminds me of the scene in the Big Short where they're trying to convince the reporter to run the story on the obvious pump And dump, and the guys like "hey I've got a family to feed."

Could it be that it’s not about productivity or even “culture”, but actually all about control and/or trying to justify the org’s office space costs?

It's 100% about this. I know several people who were forced back to work after being able to do their entire job at full productivity remotely for years, and they were happier and saving money. They were just as able to "brainstorm" with people. It's all about control and justifying office space cost.

There are a lot of hackernewsers frothing at the mouth for layoffs, so excited that all the engineers they don't think are good are gonna get laid off. This right here is the thing they don't understand: companies are typically incompetent when it comes to performance measurement and there's a good chance they'll lay off good people and leave the suck ups who don't do anything. After all, if you're so confident that you're company has been incompetent enough to make a bunch of bad hires and keep them to this point, why would you be confident they'd suddenly get it right this time?

Most of those are consequences of it being illegal. Similar to how legalizing marijuana has drastically cut down on the illegal trade for it in the states where it's legal, you've actually just made a great argument for legalizing prostitution as a way to reduce human trafficking by pulling it out of the illegal ring.

The rest of those things are consequences of the economic system we live in, not the job it itself. I don't see people arguing for outlawing of electrician work because it draws in young people and is strongly correlated to physical health issues. The fact that people need to sell their bodies in order to survive is an established part of capitalism. Why then is the target of your banhammer specifically prostitution? Just because sex is icky?

What externalities does conesual sex involve? Are these couples spewing CO2?

This is a very bad take in multiple ways. Firstly, problems in the professional workplace need to be discussed too. And that's not just for the benefit of the "professional class" if these people work more efficiently at home it's better for both them and everyone else, the company, the people who pay for the services of that company, the world thanks to fewer driving emissions.

Secondly, you most be very out of touch to think that everyone who can work from home is a 180,000 a year Peet's coffee filled software engineer. Lots and lots of lower wage, lower education jobs can work from home but are getting forced to the office. Executive assistants, customer support, marketers, copywriters, I could list a lot more.

These are the worst comments on HN, just ultra lazy defense of the status quo with no real meat to it.

I'd be willing to say this is causation. Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night to make 0.006 cents on ad revenue. So the content can actually be useful instead of drowned out in SEO and ads.

The book that much of this is based on, On The Clock, is very good and I'd recommend it.

No one wants to ride the bus because the entire public transport budget is slashed to go to more roads, bigger roads, all of which is doing nothing to help traffic and making climate change worse?

I mean it sounds like you're agreeing with me in a complicated way, the trust fund is still money owed to the public so it should be counted when we talk about the debt. Yes?

If that's the case, then that's my point made exactly, it's public debt as much as any other.

I don't like just treating trust fund debt as if it doesn't exist. It's not so much that the government owes itself that money, it owes the American people that money via Social Security. So it's as much a public debt as any other. I especially don't like ignoring it like this because it implies the US government simply needs to ignore that obligation to the public, let millions retire with no safety net, and just default on trillions of debt. It's horrible from every financial perspective. What should be mentioned is that Social Security could easily be well in the black with even higher payments to retirees by simply raising the income limit on the social security tax. The biggest problem with funding Social Security is that income inequality has ballooned, so more and more income is exempt from the tax.