Viewing profile — wskinner

Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledge…

Yes. The impossible to disable system services (photoanalysisd and friends) are an abomination of software design.

California has the most progressive taxation scheme of any state. Dividends and capital gains are taxed as income. I’m curious what you would consider “sufficient” taxation - the t…

> Taking muni or bart involved walking, waiting, more waiting, and then more walking Exactly. Uber makes a lot of money these days. The price is not suppressed. And yet... it is mo…

Higher energy consumption translates to higher standards of living and better outcomes for everyone.

Amazon’s capex is not funded by venture capital. It is funded by people buying things from Amazon or services from AWS. Uber hasn’t raised from VCs in years, and their business is …

People are generally responsive to incentives. In this case, the GDPR required: 1. Consent to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous and as easy to withdraw as to give…

> The mistake the EU made was to not foresee the madness used to make these decisions. It's not madness, it's a totally predictable response, and all web users pay the price for th…

Why do the data only go back to October 2024? It would be great to be able to see the longer term trends.

The scholarly debate is over how large and how lasting the effect is, not whether any evidence exists.

There are over 40,000 _fatal_ car crashes per year in the US, and a few orders of magnitude more non-fatal crashes. Most of them do not make the news.

There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.

If that is true, then what stops port operators from raising prices from their present level and pocketing the free money? In reality, demand curves slope down and the surplus from…

It is, and it does. US ports are far less efficient than the more automated ports in Asia and Europe.

Everyone buys stuff.

> the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners Totally false. The benefits go to anyone who buys or sells goods that pass through the ports.

X is not Meta.

The 4% rule of thumb is intended to include sequence-of-returns risk. See e.g. https://firecalc.com/ , a tool commonly used to aid these decisions.

"Enough" is a function of how much you have and how much you need. 25x annual spend is a common heuristic for the required net worth before you can safely retire. And the older you…

There is a big difference between Europeans in Europe and Europeans in the US - Europeans in the US readily point this out. The idea that Europeans are somehow genetically less sui…

If you as a shareholder receive a dividend of X% of the share price, you owe tax on it. But if the company buys back stock and as a result the share price increases by X%, you do n…

I share your sense of wonder at everyday objects. The essay “I,Pencil” captures this rather poignantly. https://cdn.mises.org/I%20Pencil.pdf

Sure we do. We can investigate the living preferences of people with the means to choose between multiple options.

What about people who don’t want to live near train tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to live i…