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Suspicious Discontinuities

danluu.com

271–280 of 307 posts

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of children, that’s who’s gonna starve if you decide to let them suffer the consequences of their parents’ poor choices. I would have personally starved to death dozens of times over if not for food stamps.

Food stamps don't prevent children from suffering the consequences of their parents poor choices; people can and do trade those benefits for other things. Children also get to suffer for policymakers poor choices of what the stamps should be spent on, and taxpayers get to suffer the cost of every benefit program duplicating income verification functions and other eligibility functions rather than having universal pro…

I’m telling you that in my lived experience, food stamps filled my belly and prevented me from dying.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#272
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A man can't go in space, can't fly, can't trick rocks into thinking, and can't do many things. But we do anways. Your understanding of reality is flawed. XY chromosomes provide the instructions for the human organism to construct a male body -- they do nothing to prevent the altering of it later on. Also, is this not 'hacker' news? Chromosomes are just the source code -- eventually we we will hack the souce or the bi…

Right, just remind me when we're able to change the physical construct after it has already been constructing. It's literally impossible. Might as well change a banana into a fly by "changing the source code".

People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far cry from changing a fly into a banana, as much as you may wish it were so.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#273
post #175
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the system incentivizes capable people not to work and just live off taxes, that should be corrected.

That's a bit shortsighted. There are many valuable types of "work" in society that are not rewarded monetarily. Take for example, child rearing, community building, or caring for elderly/disabled/homeless people. Should "the system" really push capable people into valueless jobs at the cost of meaningful jobs that have no monetary value?

If there is a deliberate policy decision to penalize someone for working on the grounds that "hey you would do better as a stay-at-home mom", that would be one thing; it would at least have some consistent internal logic to it.

But I don't think the UK's or US's systems are like that; they just got hobbled together by being pushed in different directions by various groups with conflicting desiderata that combined to produce ridiculous incentives, and those incentives should be corrected.

Moreover, to the extent that valueless jobs and valuable non-monetary jobs exist and can be identified, the proper response is to explicitly target them (either with penalties or subsidies), not just allow anti-market-labor incentives to exist because "hey, not every job is worth doing, you know?"

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#274
post #213

I have firsthand experience of the frustration that these sort of discontinuities can cause. I lost all financial aid and nearly all "scholarship" money my senior year of undergrad after my 6 month coop at Intel put me over some income limits (probably around $33k per year). All told, I was probably ~$5k ahead compared to where I would have been with the scholarships and without the income. Still, it would have been…

Presumably the experience itself helped you get other jobs that would’ve been unattainable had you not had a prestigious internship at intel.

Intel is not prestigious in the US software job market. Literally nobody I have interviewed with has ever asked me about my time at Intel.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#275
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of children, that’s who’s gonna starve if you decide to let them suffer the consequences of their parents’ poor choices. I would have personally starved to death dozens of times over if not for food stamps.

You might have been more hungry, but death by starvation in the USA is nearly unheard of. I personally have never heard of anyone - homeless or otherwise - dying of starvation in the USA. The only people I've heard of dying of starvation were stranded on a mountain or on the ocean or something.

Oh sure, I suppose my family could have lived digging through landfills like the wretchedly poor do in Ethiopia and Indonesia and elsewhere. And perhaps I wouldn’t have died, just been left permanently physically and mentally stunted by malnutrition, certainly not coming out of the ordeal in any state to perform the fairly high-level job that I have today. The income taxes that I pay with the large-ish salary that I was able to get because my brain was not stunted by malnutrition as a child have already paid for the food stamps that the government invested in my well-being many times over, by the way. That is what welfare does: it works, and in the long run it pays off in spades.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#276
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, just remind me when we're able to change the physical construct after it has already been constructing. It's literally impossible. Might as well change a banana into a fly by "changing the source code".

People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far…

They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it.

How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a woman? This is physically impossible and is akin to changing a banana into a fly.

> if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman

And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was in the context of a political discussion about what the tax bands should be, not about paying the current taxes in reality. Some people want higher taxes and some want lower; what I’m saying is, 50% stood out as an arbitrary threshold that many people seemed possibly willing to agree on. Some complained that rich people shouldn’t be expected to prop up the rest of society, but conceded that progressive tax b…

Tax rates dont pay for services, they pay for preventing inflation. The government printing money pays for services.

The government can only effectively print money to the extent that they can convince bond purchasers that taxes will be collected in the future.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#278
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far…

They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it. How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a wom…

> How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a woman? This is physically impossible and is akin to changing a banana into a fly.

Well, the spectrum of bone sizes / muscle mass do have crossovers between the sexes. Obviously you're not going to turn a 6'5'' 300lb man into a believable woman but if that same man starts to transition at 16? Who knows. And there are plenty of people who are well within the size parameters of the opposing sex even in adulthood.

> And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.

Disagree with what? I said for all practical purposes. Sure, you could in theory make a biological and physical distinction -- it just won't be relevant to 99% of people if the difference is not available to them. Does a multi-platform software user care if he's running the ARM or x86 binary? They are two vastly different beasts but if the compilers work the user has no distinction.

> They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it.

You are missing the big picture. What we view as physically possible now will change, as it always has throughout history. Space travel used to be 'physically impossible', heck so did circumnavigating the world. We will eventually reverse engineer our brain structure -- downloading our consciousness might be feasible one day. Do you think people will care about XY chromosomes when they can swap bodies? Or in a world that heavily uses VR?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#279
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far…

They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it. How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a wom…

> And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.

You seem to be completely ignoring the generally agreed-upon scientific consensus that gender and sex are not equivalent; sex is biology, and gender is mostly performance. A transwoman is a woman (gender) even though they're biologically male (sex).

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. This is a key motivation for replacing many of those programs with UBI funded by progressive taxes.

A Negative Income Tax which phases out would work too (though I think a UBI would be more popular and thus resilient to budget cuts, as Alaska has shown). The wonderful thing about cash (UBI, NIT, EITC) is that it's easy to divide up and low-cost to distribute.

I think one problem with NIT is it would likely pay out annually, when income taxes are filed. That's not very helpful if you're living paycheck to paycheck. UBI can more easily dish out money on a more frequent basis. Additionally, this was already mentioned elsewhere, but, a major argument for UBI is that not having any sort of means-testing will drastically streamline the process, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. NIT still involves means-testing.
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