defertoreptar

Joined 9 years ago

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407
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Comment · 5 years ago
> Threats in public are designed to make you feel fear. Even if you know that the threat is empty, it's difficult to just put it out of your mind.

Regardless of the intentions of the one making the threat, if the threatened person knew with 100% certainty there was no real danger, then they would not feel fear. For example, if we receive an anonymous threat and then we learn that the person who made it was a 3rd grader on another continent. If we feel fear after receiving some seemingly empty threat, then it's because at least subconsciously we believe there is now some non-zero chance of facing danger.

My point was that it's not hypocritical for him to be upset about receiving online threats. It's the fact that people are making threats that's scary, not whether or not moderators are removing them.

Comment · 5 years ago
Part of it may be the mindset of "paying for something = negative" and "getting something = positive." Micropayments maximize the time we spend thinking about the negative part of the transaction. On the other hand, if we wait too long and have a $1000 bill at the end of the year, that may be even more painful than having to think about smaller payments more often. The psychological sweet spot for many things is the once a month subscription.
Comment · 5 years ago
If there are people out there making death threats against you, do you feel safer just because some moderator is deleting them?
Comment · 5 years ago
This was confusing. The narrator leads by saying that cities are ponzi schemes and supports this by showing a cash flow graph, but that graph doesn't seem to be grounded with any examples. I find it surprising that long term maintenance costs more than the long term tax revenue growth. I would've liked to see more evidence that these cities really are unsustainable.
Comment · 5 years ago
What you're referring to as "gatekeepers," I would see as one of many sources of evidence. Others include direct experience, non-expert opinion, data from experiments/studies, and so on. Ideally we'd weigh each source of evidence by how trustworthy and reliable they are, and then we'd use our brain to make sense of what may be true based on that evidence.

Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.

Comment · 5 years ago
Interestingly it was Mussolini who said, “Fascism should more appropriate be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." And this past election cycle and especially the past week, we've seen quite an alignment of those powers: the largest market cap companies, and a soon to be ruling political party.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
> So the government should be able to force your business to do something against your will?

No one said that. We can criticize companies for censorship with or without wanting government intervention.

Comment · 5 years ago
You're comparing banning a company from the App store with having a comment show up in a lighter color.
Comment · 5 years ago
> The first period includes within it a perfectly flat period longer than shortest of the periods you chose followed by a period of equal length that is more consistently increasing than the (mostly flat) period you've held up as an increasing trend, and then a period nearly as long as your shortest that is as consistently and more sharply decreasing than the one you hold up as showing a decreasing trend.

It sounds like you're referring to the "maximum tax rate on long term gains." As I stated, I used the "effective capital gains tax rate," which is the average rate that is being taxed (long term cap gains tax is different than short term).

Comment · 5 years ago
They are unequal periods, and that's why we annualize the growth.

The periods aren't "cherry-picked." If you'd actually look at the plotted effective capital gains rate, you'd see a clear difference in tax policy in those three periods.

The "fuzzy subjective descriptors" are totally in line with the parent poster's: "long term tax policy."

Comment · 5 years ago
Here is an image that plots the effective capital gains rate from the 1950s to recent years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_Uni...

Let's analyze three periods:

1953-1985: no significant trend in effective capital gains tax

1985-1996: upward trend and higher capital gains tax

1996-2020: downward trend

Now let's compare those periods to real median family income (which tracks to 1953). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

Annualized growth in real median income:

1953-1985: 1.8%

1985-1996: 0.8%

1996-2020: 2.0%

Real median income growth during lower capital gains tax policy was twice that of the period of higher capital gains tax policy.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
The price elasticity of higher education is 0, and healthcare is also very low. We see my more inflation in things that we're not willing to go without.

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