asift

11 ms·

1.
by asift 8y ago
> Plus, isn't the free speech crowd usually about letting private companies do what they want? You can believe that a private company has the right to do something but also be opposed to them exercising that right. There's a di
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by asift 9y ago
1.25 per 100 million miles is almost certainly a bad benchmark since the majority of those miles are interstate miles. Fatality rate per mile of urban driving would be much better, although I'm not really sure whether I would expect th
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Squaring-The-Survival-Curve and What It Means for Retirement Planning(kitces.com)
1 points by asift 10y ago|0 comments
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by asift 11y ago
Do you own a car? Do you realize how big of a pain in the ass it can be to own one (maintenance, parking, cost, etc.)? I live in a suburban area in the Midwest and even I would love to ditch my car if there was a reliable alternative.
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by asift 11y ago
I find that law even more ridiculous given those requirements. Making it illegal to do X unless they force you to do X undermines almost all arguments for criminalizing X.
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by asift 11y ago
It seems like you have an impossible standard for determining proof of identity. What type of verification do you envision that isn't subject to flaws? Presenting an ID in person also only proves that someone had access to or a copy of
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by asift 11y ago
There are lots of coherent cases against Social Security. For instance, there are far better ways to achieve the desired ends of providing a social safety net. My favorite would be eliminating all other forms of welfare and adopting a basic
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by asift 11y ago
It's only coercive when you adopt some backwards conception of what coercion means. (E.g., The rapist claims they are being coerced because they can't do whatever they please with other peoples' bodies.) I'll agree tha
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by asift 11y ago
>By their standards, we've got machines producing everything we need. Except we don't live by their standards -- we live by our standards. And even if they had lived to see today, their standards would have immediately readjust
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by asift 11y ago
The fact that governments rely on coercion to enact policies like Social Security is not controversial among political philosophers. It's widely accepted. The controversy is regarding which cases, if any, governmental coercion is justi
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by asift 11y ago
To think in absolutes would be to believe that human desires are finite. Even if I'm 100% materially comfortable in life (an unlikely occurrence given our ever increasing standards), I'm going to desire forms of consumption that c
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by asift 11y ago
It's not that advancements are going to hit a wall. It's absurd to assume human demand for consumption is finite. There will always be human desires that cannot be satiated by machines.
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by asift 11y ago
How? Free market capitalism is the epitome of creative thought. It's not a limiting doctrine that says you can only do this or that. It's a doctrine that says you are free to engage with others however you want so long as you resp
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by asift 11y ago
>If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. When you start with ridiculous premises, you're going to reach ridiculous conclusions.
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by asift 11y ago
I think you're being too narrow in your conception of what markets do. I'm not denying the existence of snake oil salesman--they absolutely do exist--but there are many ways markets combat such behavior. I suspect much of this get
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by asift 11y ago
Uber will reimburse you if your driver screws up. It would be better if they didn't make mistakes in the first place, but this type of accountability never existed among yellow cabs.
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by asift 11y ago
Uber is highly regulated by the forces of market competition. Forces which are far better at protecting and serving consumers than the government. >What is superior about purely paid drivers? Low cost of transportation for consumers. No
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by asift 11y ago
My wife is a therapist as well. She has to clock out and do documentation on the evenings or weekends to meet productivity (documenting while treating isn't an option given her need to be hands on with patients). They also require her
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by asift 11y ago
I think there is a flipside to this too though. If you're not wealthy, you're less worried about living on start-up income. I think you particularly see this among immigrants who realize how incredibly wealthy even the poor in Ame
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by asift 11y ago
Does that surprise you? As far as I know, they are underrepresented in medicine, finance, and law as well. There is more mobility than most people realize, but it's not like employment approaches anything near a random distribution. Gi
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by asift 11y ago
I support a universal basic income as a replacement to the status quo, but don't pretend that a minimum wage is a way of "valuing someone and the quality of their existence". It's simply not. It's degrading them by
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by asift 11y ago
>The state may need to step in with a minimum wage Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does re
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by asift 11y ago
That often cited minimum wage statistic also just so hapens to start at a time when minimum wage was near it's all time high on an inflation adjusted basis. Why do you suppose that is? A basic income is a far better solution than our c
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by asift 11y ago
I get that, which is why I said it's useful for teaching, but I disagree with your notion that game theory is incapable of being anything other than an educational tool. When models utilize more realistic assumptions, they can be incre
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by asift 11y ago
I love game theory, but I hate that the focus outside of academia is almost always on simplistic single period games. These games can result in some interesting conclusions and teach some valuable concepts, but they are terrible at represen
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by asift 11y ago
1. Lump sum reduction 2. Taxes 3. Split prize risk 4. Logistics
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by asift 11y ago
"3D printing threatens our patent system" Good.
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by asift 11y ago
As others said, no one cared enough to get into a legal battle. And to be honest, the buses weren't bad. Particularly in the winter. You would have been crazy to want walk instead of getting picked up outside your house and dropped off
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by asift 11y ago
We actually had a "campus" so the buses were able to get you incredibly close to your school. Any walking you did was on a path similar to what you might find on a typical university campus outside of major urban areas. In this re
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by asift 11y ago
I mentioned it in my edit above, but I grew up in an affluent Midwest suburb where parents were threatened with criminal action if they let their kids walk to school. Even high school aged students were threatened with suspensions for walki

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