Viewing profile — opo

One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this is…

The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims t…

>Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old. You had …

If the building costs for the nuclear plants are paid for, nuclear costs are comparable to the costs for utility solar today (and much less than solar 10 years ago). Closing down n…

>[1] No, PLATO was never nearly so widespread Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story …

>This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. Turning off nuclear power plants while you still are burning coal does not meet the criteria for a cr…

This is a common claim, but it is a misleading simplification of US politics and European politics. (In simple terms, many of the economic positions taken by the Democratic Party w…

>...had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced tro…

Marginal utility tends to diminish as you consume more of a good, but you can't compare utility between individuals. Utility is ordinal, has no common scale and is subjective. It d…

The 1% limit is a limit on the level of the property tax. If property tax values somehow fell by 50%, in theory, the property tax rate would double to ensure city operations remain…

One big limitation is RCW 84.52.050 (Limitation of levies) which I think implements the 1% constitutional max allowed levy. I read somewhere that Seattle is at a levy of about 9.4,…

>...If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year. This claim is simply not true. Even in a budget based system like Seattle, there are har…

Other papers have found both employment losses and more significant price increases. A discussion of the topic was in the Ask Economics subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEcono…

>You're going to have a hard time convincing me the wealthy aren't gaming the tax system after all the reporting and leaks over the last ~40 years. Obviously every person tries to …

The buy, borrow, die idea came from McCaffery in the 90s which was before various IRS sections like 1259 and 7701(o) were codified. Go get a calculator - if you took out a loan and…

>...Additionally, wealthy people can use securities as collateral for near zero interest lifetime loans which also bypass having to pay income tax. This is just Internet mythology.…

This is sometimes referred to as Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: >Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of p…

Well many government pension funds are horribly underfunded, so likely it would just add to the underfunding till eventually the government would bail it out. It is an expensive, i…

If sending military advisors to a country is starting a war, the list of wars started by each President will get MUCH larger. (For some reason most people associate the Vietnam war…

Depends on what you call a “war” since the last time the US declared war was in WW II.. In terms of military operations, a partial list would probably include: Democrat Presidents:…

>... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math). Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fall…

>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, In the l…

>...my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) If your parents were WW II vets, wouldn't they be part of Greatest Generation (often considered to be those born 1901–1927)? Silent Gener…

>A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. Yes, utility solar is very safe. Unfortunately rooftop solar is much more dangerous and also much, much more costly. So one…

You won't convince many people if you think ad hominem attacks and insults are acceptable. Yes, subsidies are done to help drive adoption. The key is that the subsidies should go w…