rwarfield

The FEIE and foreign tax credits are just there to limit the scope of double taxation, and often they can't even do that much. Then you have to consider the cost of compliance, requiring specialist tax advice encompassing two countries; the difficulty of obtaining financial services because of FATCA; the frequent impossibility of saving for retirement because of the way the U.S. treats foreign investment funds (PFIC).

There's a reason no other country on earth tries to do this.

no safe level of alcohol

I hear this kind of phrasing frequently in the discourse nowadays, but it doesn't seem like a useful framing to me. Is there a safe amount of chocolate? A safe amount of sex? Are we supposed to stop enjoying every pleasure of life as soon as someone does a large study with high enough statistical power to show some negative effect on health, no matter how small?

The question is whether the enjoyment we derive from these things is worth the risk, not whether there is a "safe level", whatever that means.

Besides the extraterritoriality issue, the other problem with FATCA is that it makes Americans living overseas (99% of whom are just normal people not trying to evade taxes) radioactive to overseas financial institutions because of the potential consequences of failing to report on someone's accounts properly.

Sadly a lot of Americans hear "foreign bank account" and immediately think "tax evasion" without realizing there are a lot of ordinary Americans overseas who just want to pay the rent and save for retirement but can't because Uncle Sam follows us wherever we go for life.

Foreigners on DTVs are allowed to stay for five years. To prohibit someone living in Thailand for such a long period from opening a bank account - often necessary for paying rent and other necessities - is insane. And sanctimony about "guests adapting to their hosts" doesn't make it any less so.

But the ultimate goal is never to decrease costs; it's to provide people housing.

This article is a mess. From the third paragraph:

What happens when prices actually start to fall? Because that’s not just a hypothetical. It’s already happening in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas...

Then two paragraphs later

In The Atlantic, Rogé Karma recently pointed out that housing prices are rising fastest in the very cities once seen as escapes from high-cost coasts, places like Phoenix and Dallas...

So which is it?

There is truth to the fact that the way the housing market is intertwined with the financial markets creates some risk, but those risks are manageable - a nationwide downturn in housing prices is exactly the kind of scenario addressed by the Fed's stress tests for banks.

The article is full of bizarre logic. An increase in housing supply leads to a fall in prices, which leads to a fall in supply? No, in fact the conclusion contradicts the premise. The author is making the classic econ 101 mistake of confusing the supply curve (which is supply as a function of price) and quantity supplied.

And finally the author explains his own solution which is... an increase in supply! But only the kind of supply he approves of ("small scale, incremental development"). Left unexplained is why this type of supply, if carried out on sufficient scale, wouldn't have the negative financial effects he worries about.

We have normalized the treatment of the financial and payments systems as things that exist primarily to perform law enforcement surveillance functions. It's the same dynamic that leads to debanking of small accounts - payments firms exist on thin margins and the potential fines for inadvertently servicing a bad actor are stratospheric, so it's entirely logical to play it safe by refusing to service anyone whose profile looks even the slightest bit risky.

I absolutely love this, and love it even more because of the Nix integration. Fantastic job.

Because for all of Mark Zuckerburg's flaws (or Elon, or whoever), America is unlikely to go to war with him?

I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means - do you think the U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is that these issues need to be debated by Americans without the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public opinion.

Right, the CCP committees are just there to organize picnics. Sure.

Look, I think anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in both places understands that there is a major difference in the way private companies relate to the government in China versus in the U.S. For example, it's far more common for U.S. companies to sue the government over laws or policies they disagree with, whereas in China it's just taken as given that officials have a lot of discretion.

You bring up Meta having US intelligence onboard - I assume you're referring to the Edward Snowden / PRISM revelations. Remember that this was a huge scandal precisely because the idea of American companies working with intelligence agencies to spy (even inadvertently) on Americans is considered so repugnant. Whereas in China it's just taken as given that the government can read your WeChat (or whatever) messages whenever they feel like it, and any encrypted messaging apps that gain a following are quickly removed from app stores.

This is not a distinction without a difference; China is a totalitarian state where you have essentially no right to speech or privacy. The U.S., for all its flaws, is not like that.

DE-nationalizing... geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest...

Can you not see the hypocrisy here, when China functionally bans almost the entire U.S. internet sector?

The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.

It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"

Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.

US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.

As I said, export controls are such a minor part of the problem as to hardly be worth mentioning. The pervasive control I'm speaking of is things like the fact that ByteDance (like all large Chinese companies) would have an internal CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions.

having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion

This is wrong on many levels. No one is talking about nationalizing TikTok (which is not a PRC company) and certainly not ByteDance.

PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.

Chinese state control over private companies is far more pervasive, and less bound by rule-of-law, than that of the U.S. Export controls are not even the H2O molecule at the tip of the iceberg.

Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership

Bytedance is not being forced to divest; they can leave the market, just like Google and many others had to leave China.

This claim is incompatible with the reality that the U.S. runs an enormous bilateral trade deficit with China.

The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.

Isn't it better to use `nix store optimise` for dedup of the nix store? The nix command has more knowledge of the structure of the nix store so should be able to do a better job with fewer resources. Also the store is immutable so you don't actually need reflinks - hard links are enough.

The top comment on that article is really insightful. While I found the numbers in the article interesting, they don't really explain "the housing affordability problem" as it is generally conceived in any meaningful way.

Slow Boring frequently discusses academic studies and quantitative evidence around the relationship between housing supply and affordability, if you're actually interested.

But what really requires evidence is the extraordinary claim that housing is some kind of special case market where prices don't respond to supply, despite the fact that places with high supply elasticity (Texas, Tokyo, Vienna) are more affordable than places with tightly limited supply, and despite the fact that housing prices took off in the U.S. just as strict zoning became common.

Prices increased during covid because everyone was suddenly spending much more time at home and wanted more space, a home office, etc. This is well understood.

The top 1% have more money to buy everything, not just houses. But most other goods are getting more affordable over time, not less.

Vienna's affordable real estate is entirely down to the quantity of housing they build - around 2/3 as many units as NYC with 1/4 the population. It has nothing to do with locking private capital out of real estate (which anyway isn't what Vienna does - there is private housing too). U.S. cities used to be affordable too, when they were building lots of housing.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-can-we-really-learn-about-...

So how does Pkl compare to Nix or Dhall?

ptGHCi runs GHCi as a subprocess and uses GHCi commands to request type and completion information.

ptGHCi author here. IHaskell and ptGHCi are really quite different in goals and design.

ptGHCi is a wrapper around GHCi. In fact, it runs GHCi as a subprocess. That means almost all GHCi features are supported out of the box. No matter you were using GHCi before, you can continue to do so -- whether standalone or under stack or cabal. ptGHCi doesn't care what GHC version you're using -- you can build ptGHCi with one version and use it to develop a project under another version. And .ghci configuration files are mostly respected (though there are some exceptions, such as the prompt, which ptGHCi takes over).

IHaskell is all about Jupyter and its ecosystem. More specifically, I think it's safe to say (though I don't want to put words in the authors' mouths) that the main use case is for creating HTML-based notebooks with rich media output (diagrams, graphs, etc). IHaskell doesn't use GHCi at all and only supports a subset of GHCi commands. While you could configure IHaskell to run in a console, I don't think you would gain much by doing so vs. vanilla GHCi.

At some point in the future, I hope to add support for using ptGHCi as a Jupyter kernel -- mainly because it should be easy to do so. Compared to IHaskell, ptGHCi in Jupyter would give you the full power of GHCi, at the expense of (probably) losing the rich media capabilities of IHaskell. But this isn't a major goal of ptGHCi.