jaredklewis
I feel like people get caught up with notions of what would satisfy their sense of cosmic, historical justice without paying any attention to what can actually be done in reality.
I responding to a comment suggesting that Israelis (not settlers, but Israelis in general) should move to another place, but the comment did not specify where they should move to. Where is this place that the Israelis can go?
Of course, they also might also not feel like it. I was born and raised in the US. I strongly oppose almost everything President Trump does. I don't see why that means I should have to move.
Maybe Sam Altman is getting worried that they've raised more than $150 billion and still have net losses and thinks of it as the only exit? I don't know, but someone else provide an alternative explanation as to why a company would work so hard to turn the public against AI.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Look at how people vote with their wallets: there is an enormous demand for housing in places like Brooklyn. That doesn't mean we need to turn the whole nation into Brooklyn, but I think (given the massive demand) why shouldn't we have a few more places like Brooklyn, i.e. dense urban areas?
Most places in the US have a remarkably low population density; we can definitely greatly expand the housing supply with a little infill and still have lots of suburbs.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
Perhaps more facts will come out, but if we take the article at face value, the cops are at this woman's house, looking at her car and can see with their own eyes that the car right in front of them has obviously not been in an accident. All that is required is for these cops to rub two brain cells together and they will reach the conclusion that Flock misread a license plate.
It's also worth emphasizing that this wasn't for a parking ticket. The extremely low level of care with which these public servants are conducting a manslaughter investigation is somewhat alarming.
Otherwise, even if one company did something like this, everyone would notice because the other companies would be pulling ahead. Are all the AI developers coordinating a "dumbing down" of models? i.e. Are Open AI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI, and so on, all working together?
So we might be approaching some limit (the "there's only so round a sphere can get" argument). But I very much doubt there is some massive conspiracy between all the AI developers.
At least since I've been programming (early 2000s), open source has been almost entirely free as in beer. Whatever the origins of the movement, as it actually exists today and has for a long time, both definitions of free are integral parts of the concept. If anyone ever uses the term "open source" in the widely understood, colloquial sense, a dozen eager HN commenters always jump in to explain the exact bounds of the various terms in their own idiolect. I can occasionally enjoy a good debate about semantics, except on HN it's basically always orthogonal to whatever issue is actually being discussed. I've been reading on HN about how the term has been misappropriated for 10 years and I'm very ready to move on.
The parent's point is that if you are looking to make some money, putting a bunch of code on github with an open source license and helpful readme is extremely unlikely to move you towards that goal.
LVT: You own the land, you just have to pay these taxes on it every year or we will force you to sell it so we can collect our taxes.
Leaseshold: We own the land, but you can buy a 99-year leasehold, and you can use the land (or sell your leasehold on the open market) as long as you continue to pay the rent. You might also be able to extend your leasehold when it expires, but that is up to the government.
So the expiration part is different, but "taxes" vs "lease rent" is just semantics.
So in that way, since LVT just adds to the cost to exploit any resource, it will reduce exploitation of nature.
But more importantly, LVT is in no way incompatible with other regulations or restrictions on land use. i.e. you can have LVT and a law against strip mining.
From there, hopefully the government uses it wisely in ways that redistribute wealth and stimulate growth, but that is orthogonal to how the money is raised.
I also don't think there would be any particularly progressive or otherwise good effects from reducing stock buybacks, but assuming we did think that, we can skip all of the wealth tax second/third order effect theorizing and just use a direct corporate buyback tax, which we did do in the IRA. Stock buybacks have already fallen, but if its effects are not big enough for you, then raise it or reduce exemptions. Not that I think that anything particularly good would come of that.
Obviously disentangling effects is hard, but there is no evidence that suggests it has the deleterious effects you mention.
If your cost of living is higher (due to LVT), the minimum wage you will work for is higher. The amount of discretionary spending (someone else's income) or investment you can make is lower. Obviously these effects on an individual level are small, but when aggregated across the entire economy are very large.
In a world of LVT, everyone pays LVT because everyone lives somewhere. You either pay it as an owner or its passed through to you in rent prices. It will be passed onto you in the food you eat (which was grown on land), in the products you use (which were manufactured in a physical place), in the internet services you use (which are run on data centers on physical land), and so on.
In this way, it is much like all other taxes. What is special about LVT, and not other taxes, is that LVT create a disincentive against land speculation (using land as an investment rather than for living or productive use).
I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.
But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
Does tiping make any sense? Not to me. Does it (strangely) result in higher wages? Yes, and it's not even remotely close (unless there is some argument that being a barista is markedly more skilled than working at McDonald's, an argument I am somewhat skeptical of).
That the administration thinks these terms signify "wokeness" or whatever is depressing. Not difficult to imagine research grants with military applications using these words. Follow the war in Ukraine much? Energy infrastructure is frequently in the headlines.
There are many others as well.
FWIW, your experience doesn't seem contradictory to the operating margin claims.
Your experience seems to be that hospitals are run very inefficiently, implying that if they were run efficiently that their operating margins would be much higher than 2-5%. That may be the case, but that still means the Yale paper's claims don't make sense (unless they also propose some mechanism by which to suddenly force all hospitals to start operating efficiently).
But I'm also skeptical of your claim that hospitals are leaving a huge amount of operating margin on the table. IME, very little can be explained by "everyone is stupid." Would I be surprised if a given hospital was run very inefficiently or if a given hospital had a particular poor CIO or administrator? Not in the slightest. Would I be surprised if ALL hospitals were run by idiots who were leaving 10% operating margin on the table? Yes, I would be.
Your description of the completely apathetic chain of actors, starting with the journal editors, was depressing to read.
You did not explicitly comment on it, but the situation also implies that even researchers don't really care about research? Like no advisers, or employers or colleagues are reading through these papers?
It feels like more people should have noticed that these journals will print garbage and having an article in a journal like this would not be a positive signal anymore. Maybe it just takes a while?