191–200 of 265 posts
The big question for me is how in the world so many smart people convinced themselves it would turn out otherwise?
It's easier to see the direct line to DJT, but that historic line passes through eight years of BHO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More and more it seems like some sort of UBI or welfare system is the only real option. Give people an income floor and don't worry if they flourish above that, at least to a certain extent.
> More and more it seems like some sort of UBI or welfare system is the only real option. Give people an income floor and don't worry if they flourish above that, at least to a certain extent. Except: 1) UBI is unproven and 2) it strikes me as a bit of a band-aid solution designed mainly to avoid confronting certain ideological assumptions.
1. doesn’t cover the rising costs of medical care and insurance (in the us at least)
2. won’t keep up with inflation
3. sets up private markets to potentially inflate prices “because people have 1000 dollars extra to spend”
UBI in concert with price limits for basic goods and services, insurance reform, and medical costs limits might have a chance.... but then you are now confronted with the potential that it’s now the “rich and large corporations” who are subsidizing everyone, giving them extraordinary political power over the govt/people
i’m still skeptical of UBI
This is ridiculous. Trump's economic policy is a near exact copy of what Krugman has been advocating for years. See my previous comment with an itemized list of op-ed pieces by Krugman linked with major themes of Trump's economic rhetoric: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647721
No, it's not.
Let's start with the major area of economic policy called taxation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opinion/alexandria-ocasio...
> But after the Cold War ended, the debate over trade (Krugman’s Nobel-winning specialty) became a proxy for a larger intellectual struggle over free markets versus government intervention. This is the crux of it. The notion that economics, as a field, was blindsided by the rapidity and extent of economic dislocation doesn't match the history. Such a narrative is a whitewashing of a particular clique of superstar eco…
> the truth is, on balance free trade is better for the world and for every nation in it; Well not quite. Free trade is better for every nation after they have achieved development and wealth. Pretty much all of whom got wealthy by pointedly ignoring free trade. There's a decent book from 10 or 15 years ago by Ha-Joon Chang called Bad Samaritans that explores globalisation, free trade and in particular the insistence…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the good people of Miramichi are to blame for this. It's the people in Ottawa who wrote a blank check to Oracle/IBM for attempting to migrate a large part of the government software infrastructure to their incompatible system. Somehow, the contract was that billions would be disbursed to IBM/Oracle whether their system worked or not (it didn't). Also I don't think Oracle should be allowed to hide behind…
The Phoenix failure wasn't really a software failure, if I recall correctly. It was more that when everything moved to Miramichi the people who understood the byzantine government pay systems basically didn't follow and the result was people with no clue of what they wanted or how to do it being heavily involved. No software firm can succeed in those conditions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Somehow, the contract was that billions would be disbursed to IBM/Oracle whether their system worked or not (it didn't). Pretty sure it was simply a time and materials contract, as is standard. No competent software company will accept a fixed price contract without tightly specified and unchanging requirements, which is something very few customers are able to provide (especially not government agencies).
I have worked on several flexible fixed cost contracts. It’s a more complex contract, but money gets handed out on a per deliverable basis with negotiation occurring during the contract period. They allow some back and forth but require designs to be finalized by the government at specific times. The issue is it’s hard to scale that up to a multi year 2 billion dollar contract. However, I think individual large scale…
Just delivering something for the sake of it leads to atrociously bad public infrastructure, be it software or a stretch of pavement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Phoenix failure wasn't really a software failure, if I recall correctly. It was more that when everything moved to Miramichi the people who understood the byzantine government pay systems basically didn't follow and the result was people with no clue of what they wanted or how to do it being heavily involved. No software firm can succeed in those conditions.
Which in a way is the point. How many folks in DC want to move their family to rural West Virginia to work with a group of inexperienced locals who know little to nothing about how their agency operates? The interesting question is how did the Scandinavian country manage to avoid this pitfall?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle / IBM had an existing working payroll system to copy. All they had to do was reimplement it in modern hardware and software. Some government employee in Miramichi might not have been happy because oracle didn’t listen to what they thought they wanted but if the contract has been to deliver a system that produced the exact same output as the old one oracle/ibm would have no excuse for not having a successful pr…
I'm not so sure it's easy to represent the exact behavior of a complex system. What would your estimate be to: "rewrite facebook in language L, with the same behavior, bugs and all".
This is ridiculous. Trump's economic policy is a near exact copy of what Krugman has been advocating for years. See my previous comment with an itemized list of op-ed pieces by Krugman linked with major themes of Trump's economic rhetoric: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647721
> Trump's economic policy is a near exact copy of what Krugman has been advocating for years: No, it's not. Let's start with the major area of economic policy called taxation: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opinion/alexandria-ocasio...
How about if we start with the ones I listed in the linked comment. The link you cite is Krugman aggressively trying to signal something anti-Trump after it was already too late.
I've been reading Krugman's op eds for years and nearly everything Trump says about economic policy is practically verbatim Krugman.
Also, one could argue that Trump's massive increase in deficit spending will likely result in increases to future income tax rates to the levels AOC advocates, but with the beneficiaries (unfortunately) being defense contractors rather than the poor and middle class.
Krugman has advocated closed borders for years as well:
The New Deal made America a vastly better place, yet it probably wouldn’t have been possible without the immigration restrictions that went into effect after World War I. For one thing, absent those restrictions, there would have been many claims, justified or not, about people flocking to America to take advantage of welfare programs.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/opinion/paul-krugman-immi...)
To be clear, Krugman is a respectable person unlike Trump, but he shares the same ideology of economic populism and framing of rust belt workers as victims of modernization, globalization, and trade.