141–150 of 190 posts
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What do you think it implies?
for example driverless taxis, which is an application of AI that most of us really want
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Do people with lower incomes have the entitlement to all benefits of the state without paying a fair share of their own? If anything, there’s plenty of literature showing that social programs and tax exemptions on the poor make underpaying them possible to begin with. Walmart couldn’t pay $12/hr. if tax exemptions and SNAP and other aid didn’t fill the gap.
> If anything, there’s plenty of literature showing that social programs and tax exemptions on the poor make underpaying them possible to begin with. That literature is playing fast & loose with terminology to justify a preexisting conclusion. Anyhow, we know what life was like before Great Society programs, and it wasn't higher wages for the poor, we've just forgotten because it's been so successful. That memory hol…
That doesn't tell you the answer because the programs were instituted prior to the productivity increases in the 20th century. Are people better off now than they were before the general availability of electric light or mechanized transportation? Probably, but that doesn't mean you can trace the development of modern agriculture to the existence of SNAP.
> In a free market, how would Walmart be forced to pay a "livable wage" if entitlements didn't exist?
People frequently have choices between jobs that are easier or otherwise more pleasant and jobs that pay more. For example, long-haul truck drivers get paid significantly more than short-haul drivers, but they also sleep in their trucks and don't get to see their families most nights. Likewise, a lot of jobs require you to get a degree or certification, which can be a lot of work, which people may not be willing to do if they don't need to.
If you give them "benefits" then they take the easier job over the better paying one. Which allows the employer offering the easier job to pay less and still get applicants. It also creates a poverty trap if the benefits are contingent on not making more money, because then the compensation advantage of the higher-paying job is much smaller -- in some cases negative.
> EITC increases as your wages increase, theoretically incentivizing work, rather than diminishing as you earn more.
Except that it does diminish as you earn more, because it has an aggressive phase out. For a single person with no dependents, the phase out kicks in below federal minimum wage. If you had a minimum wage job at 30 hours a week and wanted to work 40 hours, increasing your hours would cause you to receive a smaller EITC.
There is a reason the EITC represents ~0.1% of the federal budget, and it's not because it's a bad idea, it's because it's implemented in a way that prevents people from getting much from it.
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We don’t ask people to accept less, quite the opposite: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
Chart that against education and training costs(not just college, let’s include things like trade school or mechanics needing to supply their own tools) and basics like housing. Circuses got cheaper, bread didnt
What did you think it meant? I can’t make sense of your reply.
Payroll taxes are inefficient as they discourage work and increase its cost for employers, leading to lower hiring. If payroll taxes vanishes because of AI, it doesn't mean that we should stop using it to increase productivity, but rather reorient taxes. For instance, land value tax or consumption taxes are often seen as more efficient and fair, depending on their implementation. They also are AI-proof.
The problem with consumption taxes, as we have seen time and time again, is they disproportionately affect those with lower incomes.
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That sounds evasive. I share the parent's view that the article appears to be largely LLM-written. Given that you cite "your AI assistant", I'm guessing you did lean on an LLM here, perhaps without realizing that it imparted a very distinctive tone. And honestly, it just cracks me up that it's usually the authors writing about AI lean on the tech. Including the critics...
Busted. I am a human-in-the-loop. I think everybody should use LLMs to polish their language. This topic is important to me and I want to communicate as effectively as possible. I stand by every character of the article regardless of which fancy autocomplete I used to polish it. I use spellcheck, too, and a digital tuner for my guitar. Just want to reiterate: https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text…
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But people don't want to read something they can tell is AI, and thus you lose more authority and respect from your readers. If you are interested in getting your words out, and presumably you are as otherwise this wouldn't be a public article, the use of AI does in fact hurt that goal, ironic. Finally, I will link this, about how "it's insulting to read your AI generated article:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…
I have a quibble here: the people who post in response don’t want to read content they know is AI-generated. There exists some proportion of people who don’t mind and don’t care about it enough to comment on the topic.
De gustibus non est disputandum
(The writers of HBO’s Westworld deserve a retroactive Emmy. We’re speedrunning to their speculative fantasy much sooner than anyone could have imagined.)
What if AI can greatly reduce the amount of money (i.e. tax receipts) that the government needs to function properly? What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats? We could even cut out a ton of middle-men and return congress to a part-time job. One can only dream, right?
Also, basically all efforts claiming to tackle fraud in government assistance are actually efforts to deny people assistance who do qualify for it.
Payroll taxes are inefficient as they discourage work and increase its cost for employers, leading to lower hiring. If payroll taxes vanishes because of AI, it doesn't mean that we should stop using it to increase productivity, but rather reorient taxes. For instance, land value tax or consumption taxes are often seen as more efficient and fair, depending on their implementation. They also are AI-proof.
> Payroll taxes are inefficient I agree, but governments intentionally shifted from corporate taxes (taxes on net, corporate income) to payroll taxes (taxes proportional to employee wages) because businesses were either finding creatives ways of deferring/diverting income, or they just weren't taking profit (and, thus, nothing to tax). See the third graph here (yellow line vs. dark blue line) https://taxpolicycenter.…
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I don't pay attention to em dashes, they're overused as a pithy saying for sure The actually useful tips are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
One problem with any shibboleths people are looking for is as people see more AI writing they're more likely to begin to pick up AI phrasing. I mean, if the power of Web apps can revive the past participle "gotten" in the UK, it shouldn't be surprising it can get people to use the verb "delve" more often.
Good writing uses novel combinations of tools (vocabulary, rhetoric, metaphor) to communicate novel ideas. Bad writing is a cargo cult of those tools.
Payroll taxes are inefficient as they discourage work and increase its cost for employers, leading to lower hiring. If payroll taxes vanishes because of AI, it doesn't mean that we should stop using it to increase productivity, but rather reorient taxes. For instance, land value tax or consumption taxes are often seen as more efficient and fair, depending on their implementation. They also are AI-proof.
How are sales tax AI proof? AI doesn't tend to buy stuff.