You rightly point out that income disparity metrics can be manipulated, but changing the calculation (eg by ignoring Bezos) does nothing to change the actual disparity, it just makes it harder to detect... So what exactly is your point?
That the stat is not only subject to manipulation, it’s pointless.
If every American shopped on Rakuten vs Amazon, bought Samsung vs Apple, searched on Yandex instead of Google, banked at Barclays vs Chase, took a Didi vs Uber, if every hedge fund manager was based in Zurich vs Greenwich, US income disparity would not be so jarring, as the wealth would accrue elsewhere, exporting the income disparity with it.
> sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing.
The author also addresses this point, or rather exposes it as a non-issue.
> One common belief, even in many liberal circles, is that the cause of these outrageous rents and prices is the very government intervention that was intended to ameliorate them: rent regulation. This notion might have some validity if, say, rent regulations in New York stifled construction. But they don’t. New buildings in the city are not subject to rent control and never have been.
When as a NYC renter it is impossible to live in near half of the rental housing stock at any price due to de facto permanent tenancy, this only pushes up the price of the housing that is possible to rent (the exempt buildings). Instead you get people in their 20s, 30s and 40s living in market rate apartments carved into multiple illegal bedrooms, places without a certificate of occupancy, illegal conversions and other shady situations.
Rent regulation help defines the price point of the new buildings, and many of the same tenants living in rent regulation are the constituency fighting for downzoning and against new construction. Rent regulation also contributes to mansionization and other reduction of housing stock.
At least we have as-of-right development of some kind unlike SF, albeit to ludicrously low zoning limits in many places. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people spend hours every week commuting under neighborhoods in Manhattan that are full of 4- or 6-story buildings when they should really be 20- or 30-story buildings that the commuters can live in instead (the Villages, I'm looking at you). It's impossible to tear down a building with permanent rent regulated tenants and build a higher one without massive buyouts; the buyouts raise the price for any new housing that gets constructed in its stead. Instead, you only get sufficient new construction in places like Williamsburg, LIC, Jamaica and the far west side is because there isn't as much political pushback from such permanent tenants in place.
That's not even close to showing it as a non-issue.
I'll share one example, what happens if a landlord of an older / aging building filled with rent-controlled tenants wants to tear it down and replace with newer and denser construction? Can they just evict the tenants? If not, then that parcel of land is effectively unbuildable. Multiply that by how much rent controlled housing NY has (quite a bit) and it's not difficult to see how it impacts creating of new housing.
Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is that these innovations could not have happened without strong IP protections, and I’ve never seen a compelling argument for this.
Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)?
What she did say is that it's not surprising that Google search produces biased results, given that minorities are underrepresented and topics like ethics are barely discussed in engineering schools.
It sounds to me like she is attempting to raise awareness of a systemic issue in the tech industry, which requires no qualifications other than knowledge of the issue.
> This is no surprise when black women are not employed in any significant numbers at Google. Not only are African Americans underemployed at Google, Facebook, Snapchat and other popular technology companies as computer programmers, but also jobs that could employ the expertise of people who understand the ramifications of racist and sexist stereotyping and misrepresentation and that require undergraduate and advanced degrees in ethnic, Black/African American, women and gender, American Indian, or Asian American studies do not exist.
> We need people designing technologies for society to have training and an education on the histories of marginalized people, at a minimum, and we need them working alongside people with rigorous training and preparation from the social sciences and humanities. To design technology for people, without a detailed and rigorous study of people and communities, makes for the many kinds of egregious tech designs we see that come at the expense of people of color and women.
So perhaps not a direct call to hire minorities, but a direct call to hire people versed in identity politics and various non-white studies.
- The company is bad because it doesn't hire enough black women.
- The company needs to hire people versed in identity politics to critique what they are doing.
- Programmers should be required to take the kind of course that she teaches.
- Programmers should be only allowed to work alongside the people versed in identity politics who can tell them what they are doing wrong.
In short, this is a power grab. "They done wrong, so people like me need to be given authority to make sure that they don't continue doing it."
That may seem like an extreme example, but it is along a natural progression for people whose profession is figuring out what should be complained about. Everyone wants to believe that what they do is important. That they should be given more power and authority. What that means in practice varies by profession. But that is always the tendency.
Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth the time/effort.
This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.
Are YouTube beneficiaries of copyright? I think they'd make more money if users were allowed to copy and remix video.
Edit: And Viacom sued them for a billion dollars because YouTube executives knew most of their money was coming from straight-up movie rips anyway. Viacom only lost the lawsuit because the memos didn't name specific videos.
But as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion there are legal repercussions for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request. The problem is Youtube have their own version of the law and just automatically believe the claimant.
The responses to you will mostly be people who haven't read the details of the Diebold case and assume that it set a precedent for false claims of infringement; it didn't, and it's still basically impossible to get someone penalized for that.
The issue, as other commenters noted, is that the only claim made under penalty of perjury is that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, of a copyrighted work.
The claim that someone has infringed your rights (or the copyright holder's rights) is not made under penalty of perjury. The only way to get someone penalized for it is, essentially, to get them to admit in court "Yeah, I knew it wasn't infringing, but I sent a notice anyway out of malice". Which is, well, pretty much what happened in the Diebold case. Other issuers of mass automated takedown notices are dumb, but not quite that dumb.
Why are you singling out capital gains? Your argument works equally well for labor-based income, but capital gains are already taxed much less than labor.
Labor is taxed year-by-year so inflation does not have much influence on it. Capital gains tax taxes the sales of things (capital) that might have been held for decades. Buy a piece of land and hold it for 20 years. If inflation is 3% then the dollar value will go up by a factor of 1.8 without any real increase in value but if you sell it you will get taxed on that inflation created gain. Some see that is not "fair". That is the spin, anyway.
I think the way to mitigate this problem is to index capital gains to the CPI and then tax gains like income. This cleans up the tax code quite a bit, stops favoring capital over labor, and balances out the pressure on the CPI with having a powerful group of people wanting to have it go up. At the moment CPI is probably under-reported and keeping social security and other inflation adjusted things lower than they would be otherwise.
I don’t think CPI needs to be used to mitigate the problem of taxing inflation on assets. It would just increase the politicization of CPI, which is already not realistic.
The market can easily adjust prices for assets to factor in the cost of inflation and taxes.
No. If I pay you $1 and you get taxed $0.5 you are still $0.5 better off than you were before. If inflation raises you salary to $2 and you get taxed $1, you are still one (inflated) dollar better off than you were before you were paid.
But if you buy a stock for $1 and it goes to $2 as a result of inflation, you get taxed $0.5 on the $1 gain, but your resulting $1.5 has less purchasing power than the $1 you invested.
There isn’t enough time between labor being performed and it being paid for inflation to have much effect. Long term capital investments have plenty of time for inflation to pile up and distort the naive calculation of “gain”.
I see your point, but it seems to rest on the rest on the way we determine when capital gains are realized. Capital gains accumulate regularly just like other sources of income; in my mind the tax obligation is incurred at the time of the gain, just like the tax obligation on other income.
For practical reasons the state does not demand the tax until the accumulated gains have been realized by selling the asset. This makes sense for illiquid assets like stock in your private startup, but I don't think it should change the calculation of when the tax was incurred and how much. For liquid assets like shares in public companies, I think it would actually be perfectly reasonable to demand the tax on unrealized gains.
You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them correct.
Jonathan Haidt's work on "Moral Foundations" could be worth investigating. They determined 5 major cross-cultural "moral foundations," to which each person assigns various degrees of importance: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, suggesting these stem from a biological/neurological source. From Wikipedia:
> Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality... From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently.
Perhaps these four "building blocks" -- suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity -- are sufficient for an objective basis upon which an intersubjective understanding of morality can be determined.
Then again, even the notion of objectivity is questionable and culturally-dependent...
Okay, but it's important to note that studying the evolutionary and neurological bases for morality give us a description of morality, not a prescription for morality. In other words, Haidt can only describe how people behave, he can't prescribe how people should behave.
There's a big logical leap between (for example) observing that many cultures proscribe lying, and saying that one shouldn't lie.
1. Some philosophers have a descriptive ethic (this is what people do) rather than a prescriptive ethic (this is what people should do). This is certainly interesting, but it isn't what most people mean when they talk about ethics--it doesn't give us any guidance on how to behave ethically.
2. Some philosophers try to work backward to a prescriptive ethical principle from a set of ethical prescriptions which are widely accepted but, importantly, unproven. For example one might start from the prescriptions "murder and lying are wrong, giving and learning are right" and attempt to come up with a prescriptive ethic that unites these prescriptions. But "murder and lying are wrong, giving and learning are right" aren't objective facts even though they're widely accepted, so any prescriptive ethic that comes from these prescriptions can't be objective either. It's not coincidence, for example, that in the west, the atheist/moral realist philosophers mysteriously often start from Judeo-Christian prescriptions.
My impression of Harris' morality from videos I've seen of him is that, like most ethicists, he's attempting to work backwards from existent ethical prescriptions to find fundamental prescriptive ethical principles. The fact that he's sourcing the ethical prescriptions from scientific method rather than religion means that the prescriptive ethical principles he arrives at are more palatable to people like me who practice science and not religion. But he's still starting from the unproven assumption that the ethical prescriptions he's started from have objective validity. As such, I don't think he's arrived at an objective prescriptive ethic any more than anyone else. I think you should practice the scientific method if you want to understand and operate in reality, but I don't think that practicing the scientific method is an ethical imperative.
That said, I haven't read the book you mentioned, so there might be something in that book which isn't in his talks which would persuade me.
I don't believe that myself, but I do believe that people advocating for a specific ethic are usually supporting their own point of view, which may be closer or further away from the ideal.
> Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem.
Can we please not post that nonsense here? I expect it in some of the stupider social networks (which tend to draw a certain kind of poster), but seeing that here is surprising.
Other countries do not get to tell a county where its capital is.
What exactly makes Tel Aviv the capital anyway? There's no seat of government there, nothing. Did they just randomly pick a large city?
Can you please not post nonsense here. Tel Aviv IS the internationally accepted capital of Israel, period. It's a fact you might like or not, but it remains a fact.
All the world's embassies are in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem.
Jerusalem might be not publicly acknowledged but no one claims TLV is the capital of Israel.
All International agreements are under signed as Jerusalem, anytime there is a foreign visit they go to Jerusalem, even Sadat when he came to visit Israel during the peace process went to the Knesset in Jerusalem to give his speech.
The US embassy and many others in the Netherlands are in The Hague it doesn’t make it the capital of the Netherlands. International recognition isn’t what defines a capital city so while most nations won’t publicaly say its Jerusalem not a single one would say it’s Tel Aviv they would simply refuse to answer.
Tel Aviv is not accepted as capital city because nobody declared it as capital city. All government offices are in the
west part of Jerusalem which is within the recognised borders of Israel. If anyone wanted to "recognise" a capital they could just call it west Jerusalem or something like that. Tel Aviv is one hour away. So it is a subtle political statement rather than factual news.
Yes, it is standard to refer to capital city as a short hand for its government or state. Different news organizations dance around this issue differently for Israel given the context. Many say Tel Aviv, as this article does. Some say Israeli government, Jerusalem government, or describe Jerusalem as the seat of Israel's government, saying nothing about what Israel's capital is. Others describe Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple years given the US's recent announcement. My guess is more of the same.
That seems like more of an argument in favor of having all source code available (i.e. not using closed-source libraries) than an argument against OOP. The question of what code executes when you call `person.walk()` is no different than the question of what code executes when you call `(person :walk)`: it depends entirely on the value of `person`! This is the core of dynamic dispatch in OOP and higher-order functions in FP, they enable behavioral abstraction. You can impose restrictions on the behavior through types or contracts, but at the end of the day you can't know the precise behavior except in a specific call. And this is precisely where a live programming environment comes in handy.
