asift

> Plus, isn't the free speech crowd usually about letting private companies do what they want?

You can believe that a private company has the right to do something but also be opposed to them exercising that right.

There's a difference between free speech as a legal principle and free speech as a moral principle. I personally support both, so while I acknowledge that YouTube has a legal right to restrict speech, I still disagree with their use of that right in this case.

1.25 per 100 million miles is almost certainly a bad benchmark since the majority of those miles are interstate miles. Fatality rate per mile of urban driving would be much better, although I'm not really sure whether I would expect that number to be higher or lower.

Edit: Actually, maybe I'm wrong in assuming (a) the majority of miles driven are interstate miles, or (b) that the majority of existing miles logged by self-driving cars have not been on the interstate. Would love to see some data if anyone has it, although I suspect Google, Uber, et al. are reluctant to share data at this point.

Do you own a car? Do you realize how big of a pain in the ass it can be to own one (maintenance, parking, cost, etc.)? I live in a suburban area in the Midwest and even I would love to ditch my car if there was a reliable alternative.

I find that law even more ridiculous given those requirements. Making it illegal to do X unless they force you to do X undermines almost all arguments for criminalizing X.

It seems like you have an impossible standard for determining proof of identity. What type of verification do you envision that isn't subject to flaws? Presenting an ID in person also only proves that someone had access to or a copy of an ID. Of course, there are some physical appearance constraints, but it's not hard for a determined identity thief to get around those.

Personally, I'm glad I live in a country that doesn't criminalize identity verification that utilizes 21st century technology (though I'd gladly accept some other German public policies).

There are lots of coherent cases against Social Security. For instance, there are far better ways to achieve the desired ends of providing a social safety net. My favorite would be eliminating all other forms of welfare and adopting a basic income.

It's only coercive when you adopt some backwards conception of what coercion means. (E.g., The rapist claims they are being coerced because they can't do whatever they please with other peoples' bodies.)

I'll agree that there are many ways in which the status quo contains injustice as it relates to claims of ownership, but that's entirely different than calling the system of private property coercive. I also don't think there is one objective standard for what confers just and unjust title (i.e., I think this is an emergent social convention rather than some clearly definable concept), but that again is an entirely different topic.

>By their standards, we've got machines producing everything we need.

Except we don't live by their standards -- we live by our standards. And even if they had lived to see today, their standards would have immediately readjusted to want more. That's why it's ridiculous to assume we will ever have "everything we need".

The fact that governments rely on coercion to enact policies like Social Security is not controversial among political philosophers. It's widely accepted.

The controversy is regarding which cases, if any, governmental coercion is justified. There is a wide degree of disagreement here, but even those who believe coercion is justified still admit that it's coercion.

To think in absolutes would be to believe that human desires are finite. Even if I'm 100% materially comfortable in life (an unlikely occurrence given our ever increasing standards), I'm going to desire forms of consumption that can only come from human interaction.

It's not that advancements are going to hit a wall. It's absurd to assume human demand for consumption is finite. There will always be human desires that cannot be satiated by machines.

How? Free market capitalism is the epitome of creative thought.

It's not a limiting doctrine that says you can only do this or that. It's a doctrine that says you are free to engage with others however you want so long as you respect their autonomy and freedom to make their own decisions.

If someone wants to start a voluntary socialist commune, they have the freedom to do so within a free market. Unfortunately for aspiring socialists, most people don't voluntarily want to adopt socialism (at least beyond a particular point) and socialists must then turn to force and coercion in order to enact their preferred style of society. Ignoring the emergent orders that arise from a free society of creative individuals is the truly limiting mode of thinking. (Note: I just used socialism as an example. You could substitute any style of governance that doesn't respect individual autonomy.)

>If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.

When you start with ridiculous premises, you're going to reach ridiculous conclusions.

I think you're being too narrow in your conception of what markets do. I'm not denying the existence of snake oil salesman--they absolutely do exist--but there are many ways markets combat such behavior. I suspect much of this gets crowded out by the existing regulatory regime, but it's not hard to envision how it would work outside of the status quo (with substantially less cost to consumers).

Underwriters' Laboratories, Consumer Reports, Amazon Reviews, and Yelp are all good examples of effective, though imperfect, market regulation. Producers have no interest in harming their consumers and consumers have no interest in dealing with producers who will harm them. Everyone has an incentive to find ways to ensure mutually beneficial trade. However, when regulatory regimes are monopolized, a new set of incentives emerge which often have nothing to do with consumer safety. Worst of all, consumers and producers have no means to express their dissatisfaction and exit the regime. This is inherently different from companies like Yelp who must fight on a daily basis to continue delivering value to their customers.

Uber will reimburse you if your driver screws up. It would be better if they didn't make mistakes in the first place, but this type of accountability never existed among yellow cabs.

Uber is highly regulated by the forces of market competition. Forces which are far better at protecting and serving consumers than the government.

>What is superior about purely paid drivers?

Low cost of transportation for consumers. No driver is entitled to a job. The efficient movement of goods and people are far more important than preserving jobs from being destroyed by technology that enhances the well-being of society.

My wife is a therapist as well. She has to clock out and do documentation on the evenings or weekends to meet productivity (documenting while treating isn't an option given her need to be hands on with patients). They also require her to overbook (i.e., book >100% productivity) so that she stays above 80% in the case of no shows. I get the logic behind it, but it really sucks for her when she doesn't get no shows.

They don't care if she gets overtime (so long as she meets productivity), so that's nice, but I really can't understand why they don't just go to salary or work with insurance companies to incorporate documentation into billable time. I can't imagine the patient experience would be hurt too much by shifting from 1 hour sessions to 45 minute sessions with 15 minutes of paid documentation. If anything, insurance companies should get better documentation and that should help them combat fraud while also improving care. Granted, I think the clinic my wife works at is almost entirely built around Medicaid reimbursement and Medicaid doesn't have many real incentives to reduce costs or improve quality of care.

I think there is a flipside to this too though. If you're not wealthy, you're less worried about living on start-up income. I think you particularly see this among immigrants who realize how incredibly wealthy even the poor in America are by internatiomal standards. People with this perspective are much more willing to drive an old beat up car and share a room relative to someone who feels pressure to keep up with their wealthy friends and family in the suburbs.

Edit: few people work in start-ups as well, so it is probably easy to run into confirmation bias looking at the people you know in your life

Does that surprise you? As far as I know, they are underrepresented in medicine, finance, and law as well.

There is more mobility than most people realize, but it's not like employment approaches anything near a random distribution. Given the potential advantages of being born into a wealthier class (both hereditary and non-hereditary), I would expect to see underrepresentation.

I support a universal basic income as a replacement to the status quo, but don't pretend that a minimum wage is a way of "valuing someone and the quality of their existence". It's simply not. It's degrading them by refusing them the autonomy to make their own decisions.

No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.

Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.

>The state may need to step in with a minimum wage

Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does really help middle class teenagers though.

That often cited minimum wage statistic also just so hapens to start at a time when minimum wage was near it's all time high on an inflation adjusted basis. Why do you suppose that is?

A basic income is a far better solution than our current mess of bureaucratic welfare programs that are both inefficient and rife with harmful unintended consequences for those they intend to support. Milton Friedman's "negative income tax" was intended to be a basic income until it was bastardized into the EITC.

I get that, which is why I said it's useful for teaching, but I disagree with your notion that game theory is incapable of being anything other than an educational tool.

When models utilize more realistic assumptions, they can be incredibly powerful tools for understanding past behavior and predicting future behavior. Historical evaluation is particularly powerful when game theory is utilized with the analytical narrative form of analysis.

I love game theory, but I hate that the focus outside of academia is almost always on simplistic single period games. These games can result in some interesting conclusions and teach some valuable concepts, but they are terrible at representing how people behave in the real world.

Anyone interested in a more complex and realistic examination of the economics of pirating should consider Peter Leeson's book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.

I would also recommend Leeson's Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think for some interesting applications of game theory in more realistic historical contexts.

1. Lump sum reduction 2. Taxes 3. Split prize risk 4. Logistics

"3D printing threatens our patent system"

Good.

As others said, no one cared enough to get into a legal battle.

And to be honest, the buses weren't bad. Particularly in the winter. You would have been crazy to want walk instead of getting picked up outside your house and dropped off at school. You could get a school permit to drive to school at 14 too (I drove to school in 8th grade), so kids in high school really didn't care about walking.

I also never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble for walking. It was probably just an empty threat, but it was meaningful enough that no one ever tested it.

We actually had a "campus" so the buses were able to get you incredibly close to your school. Any walking you did was on a path similar to what you might find on a typical university campus outside of major urban areas. In this regard, walking was a bit different given that you had no roads to cross when walking from the bus to your school. In the end, I think it all really came down to not wanting to hire people to maintain crosswalks.

I mentioned it in my edit above, but I grew up in an affluent Midwest suburb where parents were threatened with criminal action if they let their kids walk to school. Even high school aged students were threatened with suspensions for walking. Whether this is the "norm" will depend on where you live, but there are certainly entire communities where letting kids walk to school is not the norm.