sometimes people have a hard time distinguishing giving effect to their resentments from virtue.
“trafficking” increasingly just means transportation for purposes you don’t like. cf https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-highways/ ht @ZhiZhu
TIL rclone exists. What a very useful tool. https://rclone.org/
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis i wasn’t aware you were a cofounder, but i know you’re involved! i’m a huge fan. approval voting is a really great system, much better than the unfortunately-more-prominent ranked choice.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis we share an enthusiasm for approval voting, which will help us find the actual political center (rather than status quo leadership that calls itself center). the actual political center wisely favors a much more compressed distribution of income and wealth.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis I don’t think Warren Buffey’s efforts have done anything for anyone other than himself and his investors. There is zero effort that so-called superstar capital allocators do any good for overall output. That said, I don’t think Buffet’s behavior would have changed at all if his taxes, but all his peers too, cut his current income by 50%. At his level, it’s just keeping score. Nothing changes as long as the same tax applies to all the players.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis avoidance is a real concern, sure. but we can harmonize rates aming civilized countries, and use the force of law in other ways, to discourage it. the rich have it pretty good in Western liberal democracies. Being worth only one hundred rather than several hundred or a thousand times the median human is a small sacrifice to make for the privilege.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis at very high wealth levels, you have no meaningful choice, invest vs consume. your marginal dollar is going into a portfolio asset, the insurance value of which is higher than meaningless consumption when your wants have already been satisfied. you don’t have to entice the very rich to “invest” rather than consume with high returns. in fact, it’s a terribly counterproductive enterprise.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis keep income taxes low for people of modest means, for sure. that’s where we want financial incentives to be strong, and effort to be financially fruitful. we’d rather the already very rich not trouble themselves financially at all. for their efforts to matter against hordes very large, accumulating market power and predation generally is the only way forward.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis i’m all for the transfering flat, UBI, universal benefits generally. i’m all for Pigouvian taxes. but i don’t think Pigouvian taxes will disinflationary enough to match the stimulus of sufficient flat transfers, and I think extraordinary wealth itself has terrible externalities in terms of political power and class stratification, so progressive taxes are themselves properly understood as Pigouvian, among other virtues.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis i guess i think you might want to revisit your deadweight tax learnings? there are no triangles if Q — consumption behavior — does not shift. production follows consumption. the evidence for “supply side” effects of income taxation is less than zero. we saw stronger growth during the high tax era than during the low.
@cshentrup @sjwrenlewis “Tax Pigou and progressive. Transfer flat. Encourage equity. Contain the banks.” me, long ago. https://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1232166069.shtml
but i’m cool with income and wealth taxes, which are close to “lump sum” taxes with low deadweight costs, especially when progressive. (Income or wealth taxes of the very rich alter consumption behavior hardly at all, since their marginal propensity to consume is about zero).
“The attraction of cryptocurrency investment for VCs is the way List And Dump Schemes provide much faster liquidity than developing a startup to the point of IPO or acquisition” #DavidRosenthal #DSHR https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/prof-hilary-allen-on-venture-capital.html
“when it comes to redistribution, views about fairness are divided into two: ‘redistribution from’ and ‘redistribution to’… Cavaillé…argues that the way most people think about fairness when thinking about taking away is rather different to fairness when giving to others… attitudes about ‘redistribution from’ tend to go along economic left/right lines, but attitudes about ‘redistribution to’ are more correlated with socially liberal or conservative mindsets.” @sjwrenlewis https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2023/08/attitudes-towards-redistribution.html
back in the eighties, our parents told us that it wasn’t even music. they told us it was a rhyme spree.
putting things into perspective, tracking the different relative urgency and intractability of problems and helping us organize to prioritize, is more useful but not nearly engaging as portraying every problem as a threatening catastrophe.
in this way, any form of engagement-based journalism does violence to our collective capacity to act intelligently, no matter how sincere individual journalists are about their mission and the awfulnesses they uncover and report.
To read the full story, start your free trial today.
[tech notebook] Suppressing bloop for scala-cli managed services https://tech.interfluidity.com/2023/08/30/suppressing-bloop-for-scala-cli-managed-services/index.html
there are no coincidences.
anyone who has met an incidence knows they do not get along.
@SteveRoth sometimes several times a day. i've grown less regular with age.
no, we're just above the recommended-to-evacuate zone (we're storm-surge zone C, A is mandatory evacuation, B recommended), so we're planning to ride it out.
it should be an interesting night.
climate is spooky, like the thing in the horror movie “it follows”.
it’s slow.
but it’s relentless and it’s coming for you.