ehfeng

Stating truisms ahead of straw manning me avoids the actual discussion. "Everything has real negative consequences." "Land is not cheap to repurpose." I never said otherwise.

You're right about my estimate being off though and it was a disservice to the discussion. An equivalent revenue from sales tax would require ~2.1%. In SF, that would move the total sales tax from 8.6% to 10.7%; in Oakland, 13.8%. A large increase would likely bend some consumer behavior (chasing sales that have feet, aka move to the informal/grey market).

> Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.

This is the real difference between us imo. I believe the optimal answer is based on realistic projections on revenue collected and what prevents bankruptcy. The compromise answer is what passes a vote and in fact, the bankrupt answer.

I would prefer we didn't raise taxes and instead reduce spending. But given the complexity of reducing spending and the scale of our deficit, we will have to do both. On the side of raising revenue, a land tax offers a way of taxing a wealth that cannot flee.

You shouldn't strawman the other side. Us "people who fancy" actually understand that there are real negative side effects. But the money has to come from somewhere.

If not from land taxes, where? Would you like to double sales tax? Or increase income taxes? Every solution costs something, what does yours cost?

have you tried simultaneously vertically and horizontally scaling?

(copy paste hedged definition of success)

i wonder if it's just an unappealing business to compete with. it's like walmart: no one likes walmart, but it's unappealing to compete with them in small-town america.

plus, it's a huge headache to run and not very profitable. github mostly makes money on ci/cd, but a github alternative wouldn't benefit from that: anyone migrating would inherently evaluate other ci/cd vendors. plus, github eats a ton of network egress, which is very expensive. the only people who could eat the cost are the other clouds: gcp, aws, cloudflare, etc. but it feels dubiously beneficial for them.

Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong are simply in a class of their own. imo, Shanghai and Guangzhou have decent systems.

Compare China's urban areas to Asia's other major developing nations: Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila. China can do much better, but there's also much, much worse urban planning out there.

Yeah, I also own a dumb Prius and love it nostalgically.

I've been using Autopilot for years, but recently subscribed to FSD for a long weekend roadtrip. It changed my mind on the value of FSD.

While unfortunate for consumers, it cleans up the offerings. For four years, I didn't buy FSD because Autopilot was good enough to cover highway driving and I couldn't justify $99/month for the "last mile". If you strip out Autopilot and given the latest FSD, I would 100% buy the FSD subscription.

Removing the lifetime purchase option also simplified my mental model. Before, I was always stressed that if I bought a few months, loved FSD, and then bought the lifetime, I would have "wasted" those few months. Plus, every month I owned the car yet didn't buy lifetime FSD made it worth "less" to me: I'd eventually sell the car, so I'd missed out on those few months of usage.

I do wish Tesla offered a price lock: so long as you maintain your FSD subscription, your price is guaranteed for 5 years. Otherwise, it does feel scary: I spend 50k on a car for its FSD and over time, they jack the price to $200 or $500/month. Also, if they jack up FSD prices and then lower base car prices, your Tesla's value decreases effectively, which feels even worse.

Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.

"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.

I'd agree that China is preparing to be cut off, but it's not because of Taiwan. Dan specifically mentions this:

"In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI."

Consider the historical timeline: "Fortress China" policies coincide with the rise of American protectionism on both sides of the aisle and the introduction of chip restrictions and punishing tariffs. Taiwan is an emotional/nationalist issue for China, but it's only one part of their policy, not the lynchpin as your comment suggests.

No, WhatsApp charged a $1 annual subscription fee prior to 2016.

You should include state taxes, which in CA's case tops at 13.3% and 3.8% NII, bringing the total to 37.1%.

He addressed this. Elon "doesn’t deliver everything he talks about".

His point is that Elon may promise more than he delivers, but he has still delivered on quite a lot.

Early Google search only provided web links. Google Images, News, Video, Shopping, Maps, Finance used to be their own search boxes. Only later did Google start unifying their search experiences.

Yelp suffered greatly in the early 2010s when Google started putting Google Maps listings (and their accompanying reviews) in their search results.

OpenAI will eventually unify their products as well.