Ask HN: Problems for the next decade? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#271

Post by adamhp » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

Kon5ole wrote: post #215

M95D wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Billionaires are a result of avoidable taxation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality . There are lots of countries there with a very high standard of living AND a low economic inequality, mostly in Europe.

That makes no sense to me - you don't become a billionaire just by avoiding taxes, you have to actually create at least a billion dollars worth of surplus value first. And the only way to create a billion dollars worth of surplus value is to create many more billions of total value. If you want Jeff Bezos to pay taxes on the value of Amazon (which is the measure by which he is a billionaire) you basically force him t…

Amazon's "value" comes from the insane profits they generate each year. Profits they earn by taking advantage of labor (not paying them enough, not giving them breaks, not hiring enough people to staff warehouses), and by taking advantage of not paying taxes on those profits with creative schemes. It's not about making Jeff Bezos pay individual taxes, it's about making corporations incentivized to not suck the soul out of every human being in their supply chain in order to maximize profits to result in some higher valuation. People that hold your view tend to look at Amazon's value in a vacuum and say "Wow! Amazon produces so much value, they deserve it!", but you ignore that they do it off the backs of labor and off public infrastructure (roads, etc.) and have been for years.

> In such a system, where you will be forced to sell your success, Bezos (or anyone else) would never have created Amazon.

This is simply conjecture and is not provable in any way. In fact, there are plenty of centi-millionaires and billionaires outside of America (in countries that require them to pay their fair share of taxes) that are doing just fine.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#272

Post by adamhp » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:17 AM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #258

ywain wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that line of reasoning, we may as well eliminate tax brackets entirely. Or any sort of arbitrary limit, really. What makes an 18 year old mature enough to vote, but not a 17 year and 364 days old?

Humans, as all animals, have a built in maturity limit, which is puberty. After completed puberty you are biologically an adult. You can be a completely immature fool though biologically adult, as well as at 18, at 38 or until death. I'd say a majority of people live their whole lives without ever reaching adulthood in a spiritual sense. Go work in the service industry catering to an elderly clientele if you don't be…

How does that answer the argument? Puberty is not reached at the same age for all humans, or even both biological sexes?

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#273

Post by gmuslera » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 12:45 PM UTC

bequanna wrote: post #93

gmuslera wrote: post #61

Climate and the reason that nothing significant have been done regarding that in 40+ years. Problems will not stop to appear while that is not solved. The whole system becomes fragile, and minor disturbances will become major ones.

> The whole system becomes fragile, and minor disturbances will become major ones. Why would this be the likely outcome?

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#274

Post by carlosjobim » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

adamhp wrote: post #272

carlosjobim wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans, as all animals, have a built in maturity limit, which is puberty. After completed puberty you are biologically an adult. You can be a completely immature fool though biologically adult, as well as at 18, at 38 or until death. I'd say a majority of people live their whole lives without ever reaching adulthood in a spiritual sense. Go work in the service industry catering to an elderly clientele if you don't be…

How does that answer the argument? Puberty is not reached at the same age for all humans, or even both biological sexes?

Unlike a tax bracket, adulthood is not an arbitrary limit i reality.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#275

Post by Denatured9654 » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

xerxesaa wrote: post #2

We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences. Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?

aging population who accumulated a lot of wealth. so that'll take care

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#276

Post by abenga » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 2:42 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #259

abenga wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do we do with the billions who can't pay? They should stay offline until they can? I know I can pay now, but when I was starting out, I couldn't

Do whatever you want for them. Make free content for them if you like. Get together with like minded and make free content and services. Are you on it?

I feel like the current situation where a lot of the content online is ad-supported, and people are free to install ad-blockers or move to publications that require payment already does this, no?

I was wondering about OP's suggestion (that is very common around these parts from time to time) that everything online should be paid and the ad supported internet economy is the worst thing in the world.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#277

Post by TheFreim » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #253

TheFreim wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to solve how to deal with this consequences. I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the…

That is a down-right evil idea, in my opinion. It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower. They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families. Remove taxation on young and productive people instead if you want to help them create families.

> It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower.

Incentivization of family formation would push people to get married, it would not make family formation less likely. The entire point of incentivizing a behavior through providing benefits is to make it easier for people who partake in that behavior, therefore drawing people to it.

> They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families.

I'm single, and due to various factors it's unlikely I'll be getting married in the immediate future. I'm one of the people who would be "punished" by my "down-right evil idea" but I still think it's good. Economic pressure would definitely make me more invested, not less, in getting married sooner. Calling this a creation of a "literal slave caste" is an extreme emotional exaggeration since I'm definitely not calling for myself to be enslaved by any meaningful usage of the term.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#278

Post by TheFreim » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

hayst4ck wrote: post #267

TheFreim wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to solve how to deal with this consequences. I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the…

Housing policy is dead simple (not easy): build more homes. The problem is, when you build more homes, the price of homes go down. Great for people that want homes and people who are just joining the workforce. Not great for grandma and her retirement planning. If you frame your housing policy around anything but building more, then housing is fundamentally zero sum. If it is zero sum, that means those couples with a…

> Great for people that want homes and people who are just joining the workforce. Not great for grandma and her retirement planning.

I think policies that encourage families from passing their property down to their children rather than being used as an investment vehicle should definitely be considered. The strategy of buying a home young and dumping it later seems to cause bad behaviors that result in families spreading out which prevents a healthy familial support network to form.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#279

Post by llamaLord » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

alexvoda wrote: post #242

kerkeslager wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is authoritarianism, not communism. Authoritarian communists certainly exist, but there are plenty of anarcho-communists who directly oppose anyone having absolute power, including themselves.

It's a shame GP decided to miss the point so badly. They do indeed describe authoritarianism not communism. I think there are very good reasons that every time some regime self branded as communism it very quickly devolved into dictatorship. Reasons that many of the solutions proposed were unworkable and naive. And I am not sure those reasons can be overcome. Communism should maybe be more of an ideal to be strived f…

How could you ever implement it democratically? What happens when people vote for the capitalists?

The reality is that communism requires centralised power, centralised power attracts bad actors, and bad actors are significantly more comfortable wrestling control of that power by force than good ones are.

Communism isn't inherently totalitarian, but according to all the experiments we've run so far as a species (at the cost of several hundred million lives), it does seem to inevitably lead to totalitarians.

Capitalism works as a socio-political system because its decentralised.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#280

Post by carlosjobim » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

TheFreim wrote: post #277

carlosjobim wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a down-right evil idea, in my opinion. It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower. They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families. Remove taxation on young and productive people instead if you want to help them create families.

> It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower. Incentivization of family formation would push people to get married, it would not make family formation less likely. The entire point of incentivizing a behavior through providing benefits is to make it easier for people who partake in that behavior, therefore drawing people to it. > T…

The end result is that a class of people live and die to provide for others. That's against nature, unless we reduce ourselves to the existence of ants.

Down-right evil is what the consequences would be, but I retract that comment regarding the idea itself, because I don't think any malice is intended.

Economic incentivizing by the government often have awful side effects. Let me make a comparison: Business is good for the economy and nation. Therefore the government should incentivize people to have businesses. Let's therefore give a million dollars to every successful business owner. We take the money by taxing those who don't have businesses.

I think most do not like that idea, but it's basically the same thing.

Let's not pit young people against each other furthermore.