Larger scale family farms that would go over the estate tax minimums make up around 4% of all farms in the US, from what I can find. Disrupting about 4% of farms upon the death of the farmer does in fact seem like a bad idea to me. But thst didn't stop Stalin from liquidating the kulaks.
What if one person owned all the farms. It would be terrible if a larger scale family farm would go over the estate tax minimum, and would make up 100% of all the farms in the US. Disrupting 100% of farms upon the death of the "farmer" does in fact seem like a bad idea to me. Those kulaks must be protected.
>However, we never talk about the laffer curve for dead people. I'd say that it could be about as high as you want to make it, and they're not going to work any more or less for an additional dollar.
Can you really not imagine that what happens to their wealth after they die, wealth they were presumably accumulating at least in part for their children, would have zero effect on how much they work before they die? Honestly, your argument here comes across as utterly unserious.
It's partially unserious, but I want people to think and not just repeat dogma. So, let's extend it one generation. The children who inherited their parents wealth. Why not tax that 100%? They're not working, so how would a 100% tax impact their output?
What's the difference between a welfare deadbeat and a nepo baby? The bank account their money comes from.
I'd love the idea of a more equal share of wealth in America. Unfortunately most of the proposed solutions tend to be of the "make everyone equally miserable" sort, and usually come from the sorts of people that imagine themselves as the commissars and cadres of the new regime in such a situation.
Europe has tried to limit to wealth of the wealthiest, and in the process seems to have utterly kneecapped their own economies and development. The poorest US states are wealthier (even when adjusting for PPP) than all but the wealthiest European nations.
The standard of life you get is one you can afford. GDP PPI does a better job of capturing this than GDP, but better yet look at how long people live. The best raw GDP is gotten when you drive your working class until they collapse and die and thus is a shitty metric for measuring quality of life unless that means the ability to acquire globally manufactured trinkets to you.
Americans have homes roughly twice as big as European homes, and a far higher percentage of Americans are homeowners than Europeans. Home ownership rates are within a few percent of each other too.
At far, far, far lower rates than in the city, so I really don't know what argument you thought you just made.
I live in the countryside. In 2018 our small neighboring town of about 13k residents had their first murder since 1965, and none since. That works out to about 0.12 homicides per 100,000 residents annually. By comparison, Baltimore has 22 per 100,000 annually.
My point is mostly that cherry picking a city-specific assault scenario and acting like it’s super common is no different from me saying “better than living in bumfuck louisiana where cletus will sexually assault you in the back of his pickup truck.”
The murder thing is also an error of faulty generalization. As a counter example, Opelousas, Louisiana, a nothing town with barely more people than yours, has a murder rate of 39/100k, higher than your example of Baltimore, and much higher than New York (3.92/100k).
Baltimore is also like top 10 nationwide for murder, you might as well have cherry-picked some Southern city like Birmingham to really drive the point home. The odds of you being murdered in NYC are 1/10th of dying in your car in Mississippi.
And which do you think is which? Whatever the "intent" of either the US or EU economies, the US has produced far greater wealth and material prosperity for its citizens than Europe has for its citizens.
Material prosperity. Euros don't have the newest iPhones, 3 row SUVs or a gas dryer that gets your load of laundry crispy in 30 minutes flat. They have third spaces, public transit that actually covers cities/intra-city transport and in southern countries actual food (for now).
Nope, even adjusting for health care costs the average American is still roughly 20-40% richer than the average European. This may come as a shock to you, but roughly 20% of Americans are on Medicaid, our state-sponsored healthcare insurance. America does actually provide healthcare for its poorest citizens.
When I run the calculations and take vacation, health, education for the median person they are close to similar.
But these calculations does not take into consideration: less noisy cities, walkable neighborhoods, longer life expectancy, higher quality food, better workers protections, education, etc.
An honest study would need to include the value of the commons.
> roughly 20-40% richer
This is likely wrong. Americans have better purchasing power, but are not necessarily richer.
In fact, America's wealth (and our fairly generous welfare programs, despite what Europeans might think) actually enables the massive obesity rates we have, which is one of the main reasons we have lower life expectancies. If Europeans were richer they'd likely be eating themselves to death more like we do (though cultural and other factors play a role too).
You don't think Europeans can afford to eat the cheap crap that makes one fat? Healthy food is expensive, garbage food is cheap. Obesity is a poverty problem in the whole western world.
No it must be that Europeans can't afford corn fed omega-6 beef, corn syrup water and baked extruded corn mush coated in MSG so they have to get by eating real bread, tomatoes and ham.
I wish we’d focus more on living standards than wealth as I think that’s what really matters. “How can we lift up the people with low living standards in the US?” should be the question rather than “How can we keep people from becoming ultra rich?” which I think is what happened in Europe. The only reason wealth should be checked is because of undue influence on politics/power. Otherwise I don’t care if there are 1,000 trillionaires as long as as many Americans as possible have a good quality of life. I think for many the obsession with redistributing wealth comes from a deep seated jealousy.
Regarding your last sentence about the jealousy, I have been thinking about this quite a bit for myself, if it is actually jealousy. And I have come to the following realisation:
I would like 20$ million. It would let me live the life I want (with extra), and take care of the people I love. I would be able to spend my time doing only things I like. I am envious of people having this kind of wealth. I don't really want more, and I am not more envious of someone having 100 of millions of dollars. This you must just belive me on, but I truly don't see what I would do with more than 20$ million.
But they, the ones with hundreds of millions, are the ones I want to tax. Because I am afraid of them, afraid of the power that comes with the wealth. And if it was envy I would have wanted to tax everyone I envied, also the ones with 10-20$ million. But I am fine with them having their wealth, cause they don't scare me.
So, money is likes votes into the economy, and it decides what the economy produces. When a rich man decides that a house should be built for his two dogs, and that another human should spend their time taking care of those dogs, he can use his money to influence the economy to produce as he wants. The labour does not pop into existence from the void, similar with the materials for the house. It is a redirection of the economy to produce what he wants.
Money is not like mana, it does not conjure things into existence, it moves (through the invisible hand) the economy to produce what the owner desires.
Now, this does absolutely not mean that the economy is zero sum (over time). There are of course something the economy can do which will be productive and produce more goods, and there can be bad decisions. Wealth can absolutely be created by actually value creation, but also by a lot of parasitic processes(and inheritance). And the owner of money gets to controll what the economy does, you don't (barely).
A large concentration of wealth will mean that the economy at large will to a larger degree be used to produce what really rich people wants, instead of producing things the middle class wants.
I wonder how many people think about the options we can offer to our children. Will my future grandchildren have access to gene therapy? Or has generational wealth already closed the door for the upper-middle class? Maybe that’s jealousy or envy.
Mississippians average $43,000 of disposable income. Net federal money to Mississippi is roughly $9,000 per capita. Even if we assume that 100% of that $9,000 is welfare payments to the poorest, that still puts Mississippi roughly equal to Germany in terms of disposable income.
And still Mississipi has a child mortality rate og 9.65 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to Germanys 3.4. Life expectancy is 72.6 vs 81.7 (!!)
Looking at income per person really misses some important factors of a societies real riches.
Mississippi has a very high obesity rate (enabled by our wealth and our fairly generous welfare programs, actually). Mississippi also has a far higher percentage of black residents than the median US state, and blacks generally have higher rates of obesity and lower life expectancy due to lifestyle choices, higher rates of participation in gang violence (which leads to a higher murder rate), and various other cultural and environmental factors.
A Mississippian is free to eat themselves to death (enabled by Americans' wealth) in a way that Europeans simply can't.
As mentioned before, your view that Europeans can't afford to eat the cheap shit that makes you fat, is just straight up absurd. Across western countries (including the USA) obesity is a poverty problem. It's often called the "poverty obesity paradox". There is no lack of information about it online if you care about knowing, and American obesity is not the flex you seem to think it is.
White people in Mississipi had a infant mortality rate close to the national average at 5.8. Which still means it's 50% more likely that a birth result in the infants death the the USA than in Europe. The fact that black people in Mississipi has a infant mortality rate of 16 should really shock you, and indicates that something is seriously wrong somewhere.
I mean, outside of our own internal experience of qualia, there's no way for us to prove anyone or anything is conscious. But my biggest issue with the debates about consciousness and LLMs is that the "LLMs are conscious" crowd usually has to presuppose a completely materialistic/mechanistic understanding of the universe and of our own consciousness, and that's something that we really don't know for certain. Also, if we were running LLMs on a mechanical or pneumatic or water based computer (albeit very slowly) then the non-electronic computer would be just as "conscious" as the normal electronic computer, and I think it would give a lot of the "LLMs are conscious" crowd pause to think that a bunch of pipes and valves can be conscious. I think there's a lot of magical thinking that arises from the fact that computers are electronic.
Billions * billions of pipes and valves can result in emergent behavior that appears conscious while at the same time the sound of a single independent water pipe can moan and sound like human speech or otherwise lifelike and evoke human emotions.
I think LLMs are doing both of these things and often people are more impressed by the independent fixtures (the moan) rather than the emergent behavior. Both the sound and the emergent behavior can be built on purpose or on accident.
I think it helps to look at this through an Information Theory lens. What information is coming into the system (the human or the machine)? What information goes out of the system which is novel? How much of this can be attributed to attempting to parse random noise aka. `Random_Imagination_Engine` vs something else? The number of inventors who come up with a breakthrough idea after mis-hearing someone is surprisingly high.
If we make the distinction between phenomenal consciousness from access consciousness we can see that LLMs clearly can make decisions based on input (A-Consciousness) but they probably don't have raw feelings and sensations (P-Consciousness).
> What information goes out of the system which is novel?
I think there is very little truly novel information. Most information including the information of "breakthrough idea after mis-hearing someone" is just a mix of previous information.
I guess you are already aware of that... just for completness sake.
You will need immense evidence to go against the entire arc of history where all bets about supernatural or aphysical elements have failed. Until you do so, the brain is another not fully solved physical science problem.
And yes, turing equivalence is turing equivalence, I don't see why a system of pipes can't make an AI.
We only need to assume the hypothesis that brains don't exceed the Turing computable to say that LLMs have the same computational power as a brain.
We can't prove it, but given the total absence of evidence of anything exceeding the Turing computable, as a hypothesis it is a reasonable one that would require truly extraordinary evidence to rise above "magical thinking".
Now, that is also far from proving they are "conscious".
ESP-IDF is only compatible with the ESP32 range of devices, not all ESP-prefixed devices, so "ESP" alone is not sufficient information to satisfy the earlier comment.
Sure, but there's nothing in the name "ESP-IDF" that inherently means it can only support ESP32 devices. It could also support a new theoretical ESP33 device.
(I don't have an issue with Espressif's ESP32-* naming scheme, but I don't think the ESP-IDF angle is a good argument for not changing it.)
.NET has had Linux support since 2016 or so. The only major part of .NET that is still stuck in Windows is official UI frameworks from MS, though there are third party frameworks like Avalonia that support Linux.
I am well aware it supports Linux but the vast majority of work still involves being in Windows-only shops which is a circle of hell I am keen to tread only when I absolutely have to. :)
>Private citizen fund scientific research [under threat of prison or deadly force.]
I mean I'm not inherently opposed to laws or government, but I think a lot of people need to be more measured and considerate of what they are using tax money for when it is being taken from their fellow citizens at gunpoint.
ignoring a gratuitous reference to use of force, absolutely. having a discussion as society about what we are funding is in fact democracy. sadly there is an issue in the sciences in that lay people may have difficulty seeing the benefit of connecting the dots. but we should try. and as flawed as it is, the adversarial system we have in the US is at least a forum for those discussion.
using grep to defund grants that contain words we don't like is the exact opposite of measured and considerate. so is punishing scientists for the sin of working for a 'woke' institution. in fact all this seems extremely punitive, and not in the spirit of optimizing outcomes for costs at all.
note that this policy explicitly removes the requirement to provide any kind of rationale. that sort of directly contradicts the notion that this is a measured discussion about priorities.
I agree. This administration is ground zero for mismanagement of funds and outright corruption. Just look at the director of the FBI and former secretary of DHS. Both have used and continue to use tax payer money for personal use. It should make every tax payer livid.
It does make me livid, just as much as the waste of taxpayer money on pointless (and sometimes outright racist) research here makes me livid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48335722
Believe it or not, it's possible to hate both Kash Patel/Kristi Noem and the unelected bureaucrats burning tax money on awful research.
Sure that’s fine. They funded research that you think is wasteful and you would like to have tools to provide that feedback. The issue with this OMB change is that it is not that. The OMB change is a change that allows the administration to cancel any grant for any reason without answering to citizens about it.
BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?
So you want every decision in government to be made by a politician instead of an expert? We should start with the military right? Get those bureaucrats generals out of the battlefield and put some elected officials in charge of our battle plans so our plans aren’t wasting tax dollars!
Again, the status quo is that funding recommendations are made by expert peer review by PhD scientists. Political appointees literally do not have the knowledge to make the calls this policy directs them to.
That’s even worse, the incentives are completely misaligned for a political appointee vs unelected civil service workers who are just carrying out their jobs.
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