gwbrooks

America First Policy Institute - Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis | ONSITE (US) | Full-time | https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/careers

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit non-partisan research institute, exists to advance policies that put the American people first. Its Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis (OFRA) aims to make government policy easier to understand, reform, and reorient for the American people. OFRA's open-source tools help policy professionals simplify and streamline legislative design and rulemaking. Its analyses highlight major budgetary risks and opportunities. Its voter education products enable the average American to understand the policy impact on their lives. All of OFRA's work is built to be accessible, transparent, and reproducible.

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No monetization, no marketing -- just pro-AI posters for folks who think things might turn out OK.

America First Policy Institute - Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis | ONSITE (US) | Full-time | https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/careers

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit non-partisan research institute, exists to advance policies that put the American people first. Its Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis (OFRA) aims to make government policy easier to understand, reform, and reorient for the good of the American people. OFRA's open-source tools help policy professionals simplify and streamline legislative design and rulemaking. Its analyses highlight major budgetary risks and opportunities. Its voter education products enable the average American to understand the policy impact on their lives. All of OFRA's work is built to be accessible, transparent, and reproducible.

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Debt is a tool, not a convenience.

It's a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot with that attitude.

Marginal tax rates are meaningless because, even in the 1950s, the system was complex and can be gamed.

If you want to judge the net effect of tax policy over time, look at the percentage of GDP captured by federal receipts (the vast majority of which are taxes). In the U.S., it's averaged ~16.5%-~17.5% with occasional spikes and dips. Currently, it's very close to what it was in those 90%-marginal-rates 1950s.

I disagree with some of the framing, but that's what good discussion is about -- figuring out where we agree and disagree.

But consumer uptake strikes me as the worst way to judge whether the big AI shops will make it. That's not where most of the leveraged user return or deployable capital is.

Not sure pricing to recoup costs is artificial.

<<and if you are calling yourself a philosopher CEO you are a blowhard.>>

Yep. Wholly apart from the value or lack of it in his points, I'm not taking that personal brand seriously.

Rubbish. Artists/creators/tortured souls with berets and clove cigarettes don't get to define what art is or isn't.

Art is that which moves us, and "us" isn't a committee of gatekeepers; it's fractal down to the individual (or even the individual-circumstance) level.

Lived in California for 30 years -- it's an amazing place. But it's hubris to assume your definition of quality of life is objective or universal.

California has seen negative net domestic migration for over 20 years. So multiple things can be true:

* It's a desirable place to live and work, for some. * For others, the net quality of life is higher elsewhere.

Triumphalism ("They know they could never make it here...") isn't a good look whether you live in Silicon Valley or Dallas.

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I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.

Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.

We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.

The biggest impact of something like this -- thoughtful, nuanced and multidisciplinary -- is that it makes you remember just how bad the ocean of hot AI takes really is.

It's voluntary. There are jobs with less flexibility and lower pay. There are competitors in the market if you really have your heart set on a career in ridesharing.

None of that sounds exploitive.

It was more than interesting 100+ years ago -- it was the subject of wildly inconsistent, often fear-based (or incumbent-industry-based) regulation.

A vetoed 1896 Pennsylvania law would have required drivers who encountered livestock to "disassemble the automobile" and "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes until [the] equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified". The Locomotive on Highways Act of 1865 required early motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person on foot waving a red flag or carrying a red lantern and blowing a horn.

It might not quite look like that today, but wild-eyed, fear-based regulation as AI use grows is a real possibility. And at least some of it will likely seem just as silly in hindsight.

America First Policy Institute - Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis | ONSITE (US) | Full-time | https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit non-partisan research institute, exists to advance policies that put the American people first. Its Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis (OFRA) aims to make government policy easier to understand, reform, and reorient for the good of the American people. OFRA's open-source tools help policy professionals simplify and streamline legislative design and rulemaking. Its analyses highlight major budgetary risks and opportunities. Its voter education products enable the average American to understand policy impact on their lives. All of OFRA's work is built to be accessible, transparent, and reproducible.

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There's no standard definition of what constitutes the press.

Now, if the question is some flavor of: Do Hacker News posts and comments enjoy First Amendment protections generally described as "freedom of the press?" Absolutely.

The press isn't a special class under 1a; "or of the press;" in the First Amendment simply means you're free to write and publish -- not just speak -- without interference from the government.

In most markets with state lotteries, it's easier to pass a lottery than a tax increase; they're typically sold as a way to fund schools or some other public good. It's an inefficient revenue capture in the sense that there are higher costs (marketing, printing lottery tix, profit for the lottery operator, etc.) but you can get it across the finish line and not have to worry about your opponent calling you out for raising taxes.

California's lottery, converted to a tax and using topline revenue numbers, would be ~$235 annually per resident.

America First Policy Institute - Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis | ONSITE (US) | Full-time | https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit non-partisan research institute, exists to advance policies that put the American people first. Its Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis (OFRA) aims to make government policy easier to understand, reform, and reorient for the good of the American people. OFRA's open-source tools help policy professionals simplify and streamline legislative design and rulemaking. Its analyses highlight major budgetary risks and opportunities. Its voter education products enable the average American to understand the policy impact on their lives. All of OFRA's work is built to be accessible, transparent, and reproducible.

1. Platform Engineer - https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/careers/platform-engineer...

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Using Google's GDELT to analyze velocity and sentiment around public-policy/political news. Objectives: develop a taxonomy of news-event types and their behavior; use that taxonomy to test faster/better time to market with responses; ultimately determine which scenarios, if any, can be predicted.

1. Foreign entities are also investing in land that is strategically or tactically important -- agricultural land is a good example of the former; land near military bases an example of the latter. China has demonstrated a willingness to do both.

2. I think this represents a misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The Constitution provides no power for the federal government to acquire land without just compensation, which courts have regularly held to mean fair market value. Put another way: The feds can likely devise a path for buying your land, but can't outright nationalize it. Changing that is not a matter of presidential decree or even a law by Congress; it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself, which is an extraordinarily heavy political and policy lift.

I've run my own consulting agency for 20+ years and this tracks. It's more organized and incremental-product-improvement oriented than what I do, but there's a lot of wisdom here. Well done!

People seem to handle it very differently, according to my doc. I never had issues while taking Mounjaro or Synjardy (a prescription pill for diabetes management with similar side effects) alone, but the two together meant I could count on a couple of bad days a week.

Sidebar: Mounjaro changed my life. I'd been very diabetic (300 units of insulin a day) for years on end. Taking that much insulin, my normally large frame got very large indeed. A couple of months into the Mounjaro and I was off insulin; a year into it and I was down 75 lbs and healthier than I'd been in 20 years.

If you view the products as prayer, worship and reflection... yeah, probably ridiculously productive.

Nature is healing.

With the exception of things that can be done within the Executive Branch by EO (which isn't much and isn't lasting), the president-elect's rhetoric is communicative and not prescriptive. He's trying to set an agenda but lacks (like all presidents) a lot of power to make it happen beyond the bully pulpit.

Nothing relatively large and permanent happens until Congress makes a law or SCOTUS makes a ruling.

Policy guy here. Big, broad brushstrokes:

* You can go bottom-up or top-down. Some theories of change and some movements focus on developing a critical mass of grassroots/voter/public support to make change happen; others focus on getting the technical/specific policy right and then finding (or creating) the political window for adoption. Sometimes, that takes months; other times, it takes decades. A good read on this concept would be anything walking you through the Overton Window.

* It's hard to overestimate the value of in-person, informed conversations, particularly if you're talking to local or state officials. Show up at the right time (i.e., not the morning something's being voted on) with factual considerations/arguments that aren't outside the law or what's possible. A local example of how not to do it: Showing up at the planning commission to bitch about a new project affecting your view (for example) when the city doesn't have anything on the books about protecting views.

* No politician anywhere ran on doing nothing -- if your proposed solution to something is to do nothing, you're pushing a big rock up a big hill. Better to recommend things that allow politicians to feel like they're taking action.

I'm not in your space, but this advice was damn solid. Well done!

COBOL