81–90 of 303 posts
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That still requires keeping track of all purchases.
Only the consumer needs to do so in this case, not the government, and if you don't keep track of your own purchases, no problem, you just don't get the rebate.
There is a pretty good book that addresses some of the business aspects of this... "Competing Against Luck" by David Duncan and Clayton Christiansen (the same guy who wrote "The Innovator's Dilemma"). I'm not done with it yet but so far it goes into some interesting detail about how to reframe everything people pay for as jobs... and that building a successful business is about understanding the job to be done and ma…
I've read the book and the title still makes no sense to me. I was expecting a book about how to 'rectify'(in the electrical engineering sense) chaos in business. It seems like "Jobs That Need Doing" or "Products Have Jobs Too" would have been much better titles for the book.
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Poverty and inequality are two sides of the same coin. Massive inequality is driven not by productivity but by compounding debt and other forms of rent-seeking. This always spirals out of control eventually leading to poverty, default or both.
Absolutely right, but it's important to be aware of why it always spirals out of control: it's because part of people's decision making is based on their expectations about the future, and part of those expectations are the result of the societal rules that are in place at the time. So people get used to planning, for example, on the basis that they can expect an annualized 8% return from the market. It has been that…
My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale. Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate…
For every well thought out or engineered piece of software, there's a more successful one that did the minimal work necessary to get their barely working code to market.
And we can easily find counterexamples on the other side, wealthy or successful people who needed very little effort and simply chose the right product, the right timing, were born to the right family.
I might even go so far as to say that in the Real World, and not some libertarian utopia, that effort is irrelevant (or orthogonal) to success.
Progressive consumption tax is ridiculous. It requires your tax rate at the point of sale to be dependent on all your purchases to that point in time. That's just not practical. Or it may require every purchase you make to be recorded for tax-time when you then pay the taxes. Either way it requires the government to know every purchase you make, or at least the price. This is not something anyone should want.
One way to implement a consumption tax is to measure everyone's income and then subtract out whatever they've saved in the bank or otherwise invested. That doesn't mean such a tax is not ridiculous for other reasons, though.
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> Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on making the initial conditions ideal for everyone. The "we as a species can begin focusing on..." part seems to be framed like a choice. But if the choices of the species as a whole are the weighted sum of the choices of the individuals comprising it, and if the indivi…
There's no way to know what the outcome is until the end. Perhaps all of our suffering is necessary for us to realize something akin to what I said, and then we'll all be elevated. Also, yes, I do believe our species future is determined. Since no one knows the future, all we can do is hope. Some people think determinism gives rise to fatalism, but I think the opposite -- determinism means everything matters but you…
This immediately reminded me of Westworld (HBO). Ever since I saw that show, my view started to shift strongly towards yours.
Debating the actual importance of luck seems a lot less important than developing the proper attitude towards luck. Pretending luck doesn't exist can lead to arrogance and a lack of empty for people who haven't succeeded. On the other hand, believing that luck controls everything can lead to fatalism. It might seem best to find a happy medium, but being wishy washy about this whole thing just gives you opportunities…
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Yeah, probably one of the strongest arguments for both Progressive Tax and Basic Income is that the current system is deeply broken, and despite doing a lot of good, carries a solid amount of waste along the way. I do think it's important to remember that a lot of mess of social spending programs happened, at some point, for good reason. You can give everyone $12k/year, but it won't take long for people in SF to ask…
It's not just that it creates financial waste. Phony opportunities are dead ends that take other opportunities off the table. If you have only a few plausible opportunities, you are likely to make them count. If you have a hundred but 50 are phony, you will waste your time, feel entitled to results (hey, I went to college, I deserve a good job!), and become discouraged.
I wouldn't call college, or any person educating/bettering themselves, a waste/phony, I think it pays dividends throughout life. Does it immediately help? Not likely, but life is long and a right educated mind (or humbled person) will turn it to good for them and the people around them the best they can in most cases.
An educated populace leads to more opportunity I believe across the board and smarter authorities as people question more. However, we love those short term metrics and calling out single failures that overpower the successes.
My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale. Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate…
The idea that success is based on effort is fundamentally... wrong. For every famous singer, there are thousands of other people putting in years of effort who cannot even earn a salary. For every Facebook, there are thousands of other products or companies who have put in heaps of effort but just didn't have the right timing, or that special something, that let Facebook take off. For every well thought out or engine…