Recent submissions

Comment · 7 days ago
Depends on which ranked system. IRV has a lot of issues that other systems (like STAR, my personal preference in voting system, or Condorcet methods for instance) address much better. Non-monotonicity in particular seems like a bad property of a voting system, so I'm confused that IRV is so popular recently.
Comment · 1 month ago
Empirically, according to Doucet, a land value tax would only raise average tax rates if you're living on a parking lot, or vacant lot. Aging homeowners would mostly see a slight decline in their property taxes ( California excluded ).
Comment · 1 month ago
Neither. The US has a problem with incompetency in policing. Part of that stems from the prevalence of far-right ideology that is common among US police but not common in peer developed countries. Far-right officers are ideologically disposed to not being effective, either because they prefer punishment to procedure, or because it's in their interest to keep crime high.

Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.

Comment · 1 month ago
At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.
Comment · 1 month ago
Is the point really to be profitable? Or could perhaps its owners be willing to risk losing money for more power over the information landscape?
Comment · 1 month ago
It has been interesting to me how AI has for many years given people a way to justify any worst case scenario. Nothing is too far-fetched if at any step you tell yourself the AI will be smarter than you, and thus be able to solve any conceivable obstacle. Oh, if only intelligence were the only bottleneck to power.
Comment · 2 months ago
Montenegro unilaterally uses the euro and it doesn't seem to otherwise be a failed state. Besides this being a "marker", what do you think are the actual problems caused? Like why does a small country need its own capital controls when there is a very stable currency available nearby?
Comment · 2 months ago
Where would one ever read that Go is not memory safe? That's just a false claim, and anyone believing it would have probably gone out of business regardless of choice of programming language.
Comment · 2 months ago
And how would you control for the causal possibility that those who will eventually develop Alzheimer's early on might tend to have undetectable memory issues that prevent them from becoming taxi drivers in the first place? You can't control for profession, since that's behind the very claim itself.
Comment · 3 months ago
Property taxes have a component that redistributes wealth from landlords to the working people, but it also has a component that penalizes making better use of the land. The former is usually called "land value tax" and the latter is the part of the tax that is proportional to the improved value of the land. The latter part incentivizes some uncertain amount more towards mcmansions and away from multi-unit buildings.
Comment · 3 months ago
Reading between the lines, it sounds like it was probably one of "tip"/"point"/"head" and "shaft", or similar
Comment · 3 months ago
Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here". I know lots of people optimistic that remote work would upend this, but even the few still-fully-remote workers I know need to live in areas where they or their family can find non-remote jobs if ever necessary.
Comment · 4 months ago
I thought we were moving toward depicting dinosaurs as having feathers? Or is there just too little evidence around what exactly that would look like to add it to visualizations?
Comment · 4 months ago
Sounds like a slam-dunk case for SELC?
Comment · 4 months ago
Isn't most new capacity solar these days?

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