vgetr

Progressive tax structures are also arbitrary but I don’t see anyone here complaining about those.

Ultimately the problem is that the tax code is altogether too complex. I filed by hand up until a couple of years ago when I had to start accounting for things like capital gains and dividends from stock sales, and at that point it became too difficult and I started paying for TurboTax. At the end of the day they solve a problem that is entirely manufactured by government.

The main area where the system seems to be gamed from a software standpoint is that the federal government provides software if your income is below a certain threshold. More than that and you’re on your own. _That_ has lobbying written all over it.

forrester.com

It is - the book of Matthew, specifically.

This makes sense to me. Sometimes it’s not even about more money but existence entirely. Seeing as that VisiCalc was _the Spreadsheet_ up until Lotus came along and ate their lunch, it’s easy to see that sometimes features and other external forces may have more of an impact than the raw popularity of a product in the end.

Remember when browsers were for, you know, browsing?

So...?

Oh man, you came to the wrong town, my friend.

They each basically tried to start their own trilogy so yeah, episode nine is gonna be tough.

I sometimes wonder if bringing Scott Forestall back in would fix things, even temporarily. He wasn’t necessarily pleasant but then again, neither was Steve.

I agree with the problem (“wanting to freeze the city in amber”), but not the solution, at least as the author wants to implement it. The solution would be to deregulate housing (rent control, etc) and let scarcity take over. Yes it’ll be painful for a couple of years, but when all the people who can’t afford to work at the Starbucks leave the city, people are going to start to notice. Wages and home building would shoot up to meet the demand, and things would ultimately level off. This will never happen in SF (the quasi-regulated NIMBYism the author describes seems par for the course), but we’d see some fast results if it did.

I’ve heard this argument in a lot of contexts, and it has always struck me as saying, “if hitting yourself with this bat hurts, try wrapping this towel around it and maybe it will hurt less.”

I think there’s a grain of truth to this. However, I would ask a counter-question: by what standard do you define “morality”? Or “hate-speech”? Or “extremism”? What gives one person the right to define it and another to be held accountable to it?

I see 2 problems with this. The first is that most of the algorithms they’re using are probably based heavily on machine learning, making them inscrutable not just to the general public but also to any experts they have auditing them. Fact is, Google and Facebook probably don’t know how their tech works half the time.

Second, this sets pretty bad precedent. Asking one of these companies to reveal the algorithms they’re using is tantamount to theft. Why should they hand over their golden goose just because a lot of people want it? What’s to stop the same government to take the technology of a smaller company by force later?

If people are interested in protecting the data Google displays, I think a better solution would be to go after who is leaking the information in the first place (e.g. if Google can crawl HIPAA info from another site, that’s the other site’s fault). If consumers willingly hand over their data to Google, on the other hand, that’s on them.

I mean, it shows (in Hurd, for example).

And it completely ignores what the company has done for Minneapolis and the surrounding area. But it’s easy to disregard local knowledge when Internet outrage is the preferred reaction.

The basis for this claim seems to hinge on the facts that Cargill is a) big and b) privately owned, both of which are sins in today's political orthodoxy.

As a Minnesotan, I was wondering how long it would take before someone would notice them and shift their attention from Koch, but it had to happen at some point.

This sounds eerily like what happened with the railroads, and I suspect it would have some unintended and unsavory side effects. At the very least, it would open up opportunities for the Wesley Mouches of the world.

They could, but then the costs will just be passed down to the tenants (i.e. increased rent).

Funny how expressing the opinion that regulation will lead to harm gets you downvoted while calling someone, “stupid” doesn’t have a single effect.

Should we then require restaurants to install cameras to make sure waiters/waitresses are fully reporting their paper tips? Seems to me that fits within the category of tracking business operations.

Which is exactly why creating more government will exacerbate the problem.

Apparently everyone is about the, “right to privacy” until their own envy overrides it.

It doesn’t.

I wonder if perhaps RMS is annoyed by the lack of GPL v3 adoption.

I feel like things were mostly fine until the 2016 election, after which journalists became _very_ concerned. If I had a nickel for each, “The algorithms are coming! The algorithms are coming!”, I’d be rich. I mean, I didn’t like the outcome either, but these types of articles seem to motivated by a) finding a scapegoat and b) wanting to use “algorithm” in a sentence.

I liked 1984, but probably enjoyed Animal Farm even more. It was likely a combination of the narrative itself and the fact that 1984 is more about what _could_ happen while Animal Farm describes through fiction what actually _did_ happen (not that parts of 1984 haven’t happened already).

I think it’s instructive to note that they also manufactured rifles: http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticle...