81–90 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't you just make a small apartment building (with maybe 3 or 4 apartments all connected by a hallway to fulfil the single-outer-door requirement)?
Apartment buildings - even very small ones - come with their own special, elaborate, nightmare regulations. They're worse than housing regulations.
> This tweet is a request for ideas. I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time - working on the long term. For philanthropy, I find I'm drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now.
Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill?
Bezos recently sold about $1billion worth of Amazon stock [1]
[0] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/875418348598603776
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/amazon-ce...
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mainstream spoils everything. btw, what about Bezos paying taxes instead of "optimizing" ?
When you play games, do you actively not explore how to make the rules work to the best of your ability? The problem is not companies "optimizing", it's that the tax code is so complicated that they can do it in the first place.
A citizen trying to "play" the same game who be hit hard by the system. Here's the issue.
Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) concept and significantly over-pay the employees on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to pay down debts of some sort. Employ it as a method to give uneducated (HS degree) or underemployed (able bodied with Bachelors and $8/hr job), rehabilitate and early-release incarcerated US Citizens and put them to work in infrastructure needs. So, thi…
>Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) So you want to put a bunch of poor people in labor camps. Inflation adjusted wages of the CCC works out to about $550/mo. If they get injured on the job they will be sent home with nothing. >over-pay the employees In a country with a minimum wage, how do you know they're not already being overpaid? >on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to…
>> Because "poor people" are too stupid to determine how they should best spend their own money that we should infantilize them and take away their personal autonomy.
That is so ridiculously unfair. 1) You expect someone making minimum wage to have the time and energy to put together a sound investment strategy. 2) Humans LIKE to spend their money the second they have access to it. Among families giving million dollar trust funds to their children, parents commonly don't allow trustees to have access to their funds until they are in their mid thirties. These are children who go to Ivy League schools, and their parents don't let them have access to their savings. It's not because they are stupid, its because they are human.
Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) concept and significantly over-pay the employees on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to pay down debts of some sort. Employ it as a method to give uneducated (HS degree) or underemployed (able bodied with Bachelors and $8/hr job), rehabilitate and early-release incarcerated US Citizens and put them to work in infrastructure needs. So, thi…
>Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) So you want to put a bunch of poor people in labor camps. Inflation adjusted wages of the CCC works out to about $550/mo. If they get injured on the job they will be sent home with nothing. >over-pay the employees In a country with a minimum wage, how do you know they're not already being overpaid? >on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to…
>>>
Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."
In the tweet Bezos wrote [0]: > This tweet is a request for ideas. I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time - working on the long term. For philanthropy, I find I'm drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now. Perhaps, the focus on right now is to find cool ways to end up with a lower tax bill? Bezos recently sold about $1billion worth of Amazon stock [1]…
Sure he most likely doing it to lower tax. Capital gain is 15% no?
Either way at least he's doing it in a helpful way. Even if I don't agree with Amazon monopolistic tendencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) So you want to put a bunch of poor people in labor camps. Inflation adjusted wages of the CCC works out to about $550/mo. If they get injured on the job they will be sent home with nothing. >over-pay the employees In a country with a minimum wage, how do you know they're not already being overpaid? >on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to…
>on the condition half goes into savings accounts for family use or to pay down debts of some sort. >> Because "poor people" are too stupid to determine how they should best spend their own money that we should infantilize them and take away their personal autonomy. That is so ridiculously unfair. 1) You expect someone making minimum wage to have the time and energy to put together a sound investment strategy. 2) Hum…
I suspect that most people will not do what I think would be best for them to do. The difference is that I don't want to usurp their personal freedoms.
>These are children who go to Ivy League schools, and their parents don't let them have access to their savings. It's not because they are stupid, its because they are human.
I agree that the people who have earned money should get to do with it whatever they want, including withholding it from their adult children. Let's apply this universally. You are more than welcome to take some of your money to hire and over-pay minimum wage workers and create these grossly paternalistic contracts with them where you dictate how they're allowed to spend their pay. Just don't try to do it with my money.
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The problem with "significantly over-pay" is that you end up with incentives for people to quit other low paying jobs and switch, which will force those employers to either significantly increase wages to match or more likely, automate the job. An another alternative is that there is a such a huge demand for jobs in new CCC that not everyone can be given one. How do you figure out who to give the jobs to? I would be…
>The problem with "significantly over-pay" is that you end up with incentives for people to quit other low paying jobs and switch, which will force those employers to either significantly increase wages to match or more likely, automate the job. I see absolutely nothing wrong here. What's the problem?
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> Child labor combined with the emancipation system traps teenagers in abusive homes I don't understand what you mean here (I probably miss some background in US culture).
The argument is that since a child can't work on their own and emancipation laws prevent a child from claiming independence until they can work on their own , children are stuck in abusive homes where they would otherwise work a full time job to get themselves out of the abuse. Note I don't really agree with this sentiment as abusing children is fairly illegal and it should be up to the justice system to prosecute th…