HN user
Vaccines aren’t perfect, and the inaction of others can cause extreme adverse impacts on everyone due to total vaccination rate falling below herd immunity levels.
It’s just like taxes.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict what new information can be derived from the combination of different datasets collected from your devices.
Especially as the N of datasets grows.
Biden Admin?
Invisible. Trust me.
Every time you earn money/spend money you are paying taxes.
I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
Free public roads and highways? Free public parking? Good, normal, should be encouraged. Add a lane or two to the highway? Always a good idea! (hint: it never is)
Free public transit? KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! It will never work (those places it did are aberrations)
Go look up: 1. Jevons paradox (induced demand): More road capacity → more traffic. 2. Marchetti’s constant (30-minute city): Average commute time is stable; faster modes → sprawl. 3. Downs–Thomson paradox (transit sets highway speed): Car speeds improve only if transit gets better. 4. Braess’s paradox (network effect): Adding a new road can worsen traffic for everyone.
Free transit: IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Free roads and highways: GOOD AND NATUAL
The political class are not typically utilizers of public transit: hence even the best attempts are structurally challenged from the outset.
If that isn’t factored into your analysis, you are missing a huge reason why it sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds.
Exact same argument was made against the interstate highway system.
Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made.
If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical.
Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive.
Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.
Ignorance is Bliss.
Science is that which, despite your opinions, exists.
Pathogens everywhere are cheering.
The commons of the creative output of humanity is a resource, just like oil or lithium.
We are rapidly replaying the worst of the Resource Curse.
Fun fact: Biff Tannen was modeled after Donald Trump.
Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.
https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...
You can read the entire exchange for yourself, it’s a link.
At the bottom of the article.
It’s a commitment device: if the only way you’ll stay out of jail is if Trump is elected, you do anything you can, break any laws, whatever, to get Trump elected.
Because then you won’t go to jail.
See Santos.
Don’t Look Up!
Also, what dumbass is gonna drop a million on this?
Literally the CIO of a $20b/year ARR company said to me: “I was gonna send my kids to school in the US. Now? Never in a million years. Even I won’t set foot there.“
You can’t win in the global economy AND nativist white supremacist politics at the same time.
Ah yes, a feeling: even worse than an anecdote.
Yes: they reinvested rather than pocketed revenue.
Anyway, if did the research, you’d see the effective tax rate for the top income earners in US was 40% back then. Substantially higher than it is today.
And that substantially larger portions of revenue were reinvested rather than recognized as profit: high taxes, oddly enough, incentivize investment.
Do the math yourself: $1m in profit, 30% tax rate vs 1% tax rate: which rate incentivizes you to reinvest?
Didn’t they round up and handcuff a bunch of South Koreans who were legally allowed to work in the US?
It’s really worth reading the South Korean perspective on the whole fiasco:
https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_edit...
In the 50’s (the GOP’s good old days) the top income tax bracket paid 90%+ of every dollar earned above $200k. (Roughly $3m in 2025 dollars)
Billionaires are a policy choice that starves children and stunts economic growth.
Duverger’s law: first past the post results in two party system.
Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.
Jane Jacobs: The Nature of Economies.
When you put foxes in charge of the henhouse, are you surprised that all the hens will be eaten?
Tories think government is the problem, thus when they govern, they break the government, which in turn results in situations like this, which the tories can use to argue that government is the problem.
Look, you doubted that the quote could be sourced.
Maybe check your epistemology: perhaps other folks know more and better?
Hmm… maybe go check every other reasonable wealthy western democracy and evaluate your statement.
The people in power WANT the social safety net to fail. That is why it fails!
What, pray tell, is Hayek in fact advocating for in that section?
Arrest stats are also at historic lows.
Criminal complaints are at historic lows.
Murder, which is kinda hard to “juke the stats”, is at historic lows.
Where is your evidence?
Why would cops not report on crime?
Seems counter to the incentive structures of police departments.
For those of you who like well researched analysis: the Lead Crime Hypothesis.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
Hard to have effectively indentured servitude if there’s a social safety net.
Remember even Hayek advocated for universal, government funded healthcare! Ayn Rand was on social security!
In order to make a government “small enough to down in a bathtub” you need to convince the general public that it is corrupt and incompetent, which has been the GOP play all along.
If your core argument about why you should govern is that government is the problem, is it any surprise that you sabotage any attempt at good governance?
Effective government is an existential risk for the GOP.
Companies have reserves, local stock etc.
Fixed prices are a bet on TACO and hoping to avoid the orange rage: see what happens when you blame price increases on tariffs.
Lots and lots of bribes have been paid. This is yet another.