roenxi

What this woman is allowed to do makes up a complex topic; there are arguments in all directions. But if her scheme for improving the world involves foremost delaying some people's lunch then she should put some time into coming up with a better plan. Ginning up attention by being unusually petty isn't going to be the path to world peace and prosperity.

> Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain

They don't have "domains", they are career politicians. It is nice when a politician has some experience in the topic they're legislating on but the system works by having generalists who bow in whatever direction winds are blowing the most money from.

It is not possible to be an effective career politician by having firm principles or technical expertise. It requires a near total dedication to politicking. If they happen to have knowledge of a topic it is coincidence because the number of political topics is large and the number of politicians is comparatively small.

> The wearable would see the increased heart rate when a person is moving with a heavy backpack versus moving without one.

I'm sure it would notice the heartrate was up, but how is it supposed to translate that into energy consumption? Eg, my heartrate is 80 bpm. How much energy am I burning in an hour? There isn't enough information to say, even if we add in data points like a gps measure of my velocity and elevation change.

This comment confuses me. Why would we expect calorie burn to be related to steps and heart rate? How could a wearable measure energy expenditure? What if someone was wearing a heavy backpack? The energy to move the backpack has to come from somewhere but the wearable can't tell that the person has one.

It's difficult for a politician to do something that isn't political, so I think we can let them off the hook for making symbolic gestures.

However, putting legislation up for a vote is not puffery. Establishing what parties vote against and why is actually an important part of what the opposition does. Otherwise they may as well not turn up.

Absolutely. It's a very effective system for quickly concentrating all the owenership of ice cream machines in the hands of the people who are best at deciding when, where and how much ice cream is needed as measured by profits - even if they personally don't have much when they're starting out. And if there is a better measure than profit I'd like it to be proved up in a country I don't live in because those experiments usually result in ice cream shortages.

The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article.

Assuming we're talking about the US, printing money and giving it to wealthy people has been a big contributor to the failure of the last few decades. The US has made a broad-scale effort to disable every form of market-based feedback that tried to replace the leadership class with more competent leaders. If they'd stopped with the upper class welfare then the 1% probably would have less money, but giving them the money then organising to tax it away again is a strategy that is both bizarre and unlikely to be effective. It's too complex and arbitrary.

If we're talking globally, Asia ain't failing. They're big on producing lots of real stuff. Minted a lot of new billionaires.

> The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth.

I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream).

> Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly

I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't.

There is a certain tautology to "tax the rich" - a country can't exactly tax the poor. The poor have no money. Taxes on poor people are more about the principles of fairness and to some extent transparency than because they have the financial resources to contribute meaningfully.

It'd be interesting to do the same graph by real consumption. I bet it'd be much more equal - most of the wealth is tied up in systems that keep the country ticking over and are only providing paper benefits to the owner. Which is why I say "transparency" - once you track what happens in real terms, "taxing the rich" almost certainly becomes "everyone ends up with less". If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream. The person getting the money wasn't consuming anything real.

> ...or chinese models are benchmaxxed...

It is hard to tell what people are trying to say when they use undefined words with no particular meaning. This doesn't seem to change the relative position of the Chinese models much. The Chinese are a month or few behind and the state of intelligence is so volatile that the top 10 will be completely different in 6 months. I'd expect it to still be a mix of US and Chinese models with the US models leading.

If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.

darth_avocado is implying that he'd rather use a different index to measure inflation. Which is reasonable, this game where "real" doesn't mean real is not helpful. I've been seeing "real" growth in my gold holdings for years but mysteriously enough the weight hasn't changed. And while I'm ranting it drives me mad that we're supposed to pretend exponentially increasing prices are "stable", that is about as unstable as prices can get without starting a mathematics degree.

I doubt there is a compelling argument why people should have to use CPI as the comparison index. I'd consider any investment that only matched CPI to be losing value for example; they should be tracking something one of the monetary aggregates.

There is probably more to it than that. If the platform can censor the content then it is capable of identifying it and so can choose not to display a Nestle ad. That would be a more palatable solution for the ad platforms and also probably acceptable to most companies. If users want to watch something on a platform what do they care? The article makes a good case that this is something more like Operation Choke Point or the itch.io deindexing where the financial system is being mobilised for political ends.

It is an interesting use case to monitor because there are obvious need for something like crypto, but so that has not come close to taking hold.