Viewing profile — doukdouk

Fair point.

If your point is that "monopoly" has a different meaning in a colloquial/political context and in a legal context, that it relies on non-obvious definitions of what the relevant ma…

Because it is generally accepted that monopolies are bad and that not-monopolies are ok. It is much easier to sell the simple idea that "X is a monopoly, so split X", than to make …

Again, mindless arguing what exact word fit or does not fit the situation detracts from the real issues.

State-owned monopolies exist in most capitalist countries, from operating prisons, to managing railroad or telecom infrastructure, to nuclear energy. The US may have fewer of those…

I think you missed the point - representatives should be expert (at a minimum) in HN interests or come from the same demographics (better) as HN commentators. Anything else means t…

Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, dem…

They are still in use, see this [0] French FOB in Mali [0] https://i.redd.it/f325vekqsxh51.jpg

> Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance. Architect of (illegal) government surveillance gets influential role in a major Internet company. I do not exp…

Some thoughts on whether hard times make strong men: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

I don't think such calculations are particularly useful, maybe about as much as Paul Graham's wealth tax "model". The reason is that tax codes are way more complicated than just no…

All this feels so wasteful, especially the CIR and formerly the CICE. Instead of having low taxes, you have nominally high taxes and a bazillion paperwork-heavy to make them low. M…

There is indeed one in numpy : https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.clip....

VAT pass through can be quite high (see for instance [0]) : VAT does not tax businesses as much as consumers. [0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Est...

Is it? > In contrast to Chamley-Judd, the optimal tax on capital is positive in our model because we have finite long run elasticities of inheritance to tax rate https://www.nber.o…

> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of peop…

> Wealth is not money. Wealth is production. It is the flow of money. Wealth is efficiency. Wealth is production not consumption. A flow of money is income, which is different from…

Property taxes are a wealth tax, specifically a tax on real estate wealth. It's hard to see why taxing this form of wealth is so great, but other forms of wealth is so bad. As for …

The extreme case of this is France, where the "income tax" (90B€/year, progressive) is not the largest income tax. Rather, it is the "generalized social contribution" (124B€/year, …

An important point here would the magnitude of those effects: how much a 1% wealth tax would reduce wealth creation? Whether it is by .0000001% or by 99%, it would be "incentives t…

Interestingly, what you see as completely normal (other taxes) was once as disturbing as capital tax seems to be: > Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in …

> Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever The link you gave says that about 50% of Americans pay zero federal income tax. Are you trying to imply that the only tax in the US i…

Well, not putting explosives in a city is not hard; not putting substances that have some industry uses and happen to be explosive (eg fertilizer) near industry is hard. After all,…

This trial was done in Kenya, not South Africa.

I don't see how that would be a problem: even if it was common, handing out pill to one group but not the other would still lead to one group being more "dewormed" than the other, …