Andrew
2yr ago
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences! If you don't like it, get your own platform!" Musk purchases Twitter. "...please don't punish us for our political speech."
Are you sure it's really the same people saying this or is it just "the left" saying it?
Andrew
2yr ago
Crime has a finite cost and so there is actually a point at which it is worth tolerating crime if we get a high enough monetary benefit. We do limit how much we spend preventing crime. So, maybe the goal shouldn't be to make rich people stop committing crimes but to have them properly compensate us.
Andrew
2yr ago
Isn't it also the case that blacks lost their majority of the population in many southern states when many of them migrated to the north?
Andrew
2yr ago
The risk of severe illness doesn't rise with age nearly as quickly as the risk of death.
So it's like buying insurance against a being struck by lightning while being chased by a shark.
I can't be bothered to do the math, but the risk is many orders of magnitude greater than that.
Andrew
2yr ago
Yes, if I could get a vaccine for the cold, I would, though I haven't had a cold in years.
Andrew
2yr ago
If it doesn't matter either way, then I shouldn't get it, because my time is worth something. I know many people who didn't feel well for a day because of it. On the other hand, the people I know who have got covid were usually sick for several days.
I know my risk of dying from covid is tiny. I'm more worried about the other symptoms.
Andrew
2yr ago
Meaning what? The original vaccine was reported to reduce severe illness and death by something like 97%. Was that inaccurate? I understand that the protection against infection dropped down to around 35% after a few months instead of 80% or whatever it was initially.
Andrew
2yr ago
This is the bivalent vaccine that is supposed to offer better protection from Omicron. It doesn't work that well?
I am a strong proponent of land value taxes, but there are a few things people often get wrong about them. The first is that it does not incentivize development on its own. It does so only indirectly if you assume other taxes such as property taxes will be reduced as a consequence of the introduction of the land value tax. The entire point of the land value tax is to raise taxes without distorting the market, which means it doesn't affect behaviour.
Some people point out that, if your taxes go up significantly, it may force you to sell. But that is just a wealth effect. Any tax that reduces wealth has the same effect, and it would have the opposite effect on whoever benefited from the tax.
The other thing they get wrong is that the supply of land is not actually fixed. Erosion causes land to disappear and it's very expensive to prevent. Land value taxes in coastal areas disincentives protecting land from erosion.
It also discourages exploration, which is not such a problem now. But if we can't credibly commit to not imposing a land value tax in the future on newly colonized planets, we will discourage private space exploration.
Finally, speculation is good and land value taxes discourage it. Speculation improves the allocation of land.
Andrew
2yr ago
A few months ago, someone here said he analysed such things for a living in order to identify arbitrage opportunities and this was a sure thing, since Musk had no case. He also said that the decision would be made quickly. It now looks like he was probably right. Does anyone have a link?
That's not quite right. They're saying that bond yields temporarily rose due to illiquidity in the market and were expected to fall shortly, which they did. The Bank of England didn't transfer wealth to the pension fund. They acted as the lender of last resort to tide them over.
Now, if the increase in interest rates had been more permanent, the strategy could have actually failed to the point of insolvency without an actual wealth transfer. Buy that didn't happen.
Andrew
2yr ago
Financial speculators are a much more specific group than corporations. Also, this is Italy, not the US. Do they have a similar phenomenon of companies going woke to avoid discrimination lawsuits?
Andrew
2yr ago
What evidence is there that financial speculators are the right people to blame for what she is complaining about?
Andrew
2yr ago
Plus, riots don't really happen in winter time especially in conditions like this: if it gets really really cold the general population will be too frozen to do anything.
Andrew
2yr ago
So, it needs to know almost exactly when the sun rose. That doesn't work with variable weather. If your brain is basing it on brightness, it's going to take a lot longer to reach a given brightness on an overcast day than on a clear day.
You also need to be outside where you can see that change in brightness. Following the common advice of getting some light exposure within the first few hours of waking is not going to be able to fine tune a circadian rhythm that is off by half an hour.
Andrew
2yr ago
If you look at skin colour, it is clear that, over a few thousand years, we can adapt to local conditions despite migration. We don't need to keep adaptations for conditions from millions of years ago. We can just be adapted to the conditions of the last few thousand years.
Natural selection takes a long time to bring a new mutation to significant frequency in the population, but if a genetic variant is already common in a population - as it would be if two populations have recently mixed together and the variant was common in one of the populations - it wouldn't take long to spread to nearly everyone if there is strong selection.
Andrew
2yr ago
I have considered this before, but there are two problems I ran into. What is the relevant period? Should one base his diet on what his ancestors ate 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago, or 50,000 years ago? We now know that a lot of natural selection due to changes in diet occurred during the neolithic, so maybe that is the relevant period, but my understanding is that most people had terrible diets and terrible health as a consequence. Didn't Europeans mostly just eat bread and milk and weren't they consistently malnourished? We must have some adaptations to this diet, but it is probably still not an optimal diet for us. We clearly never adapted perfectly to this diet, so maybe we should go back further and eat mostly fish, like they did in the paleolithic, or maybe we should supplement the neolithic diet with the fruit, vegetables, and meat that I understand only the rich ate large quantities of.
Andrew
2yr ago
There is something I don't understand about the theory that exposure to bright light early in the morning keeps our circadian rhythm on schedule. Supposedly, our natural circadian rhythm would have a period of slightly more than 24 hours if we were kept in a dark room, but exposure to light in the morning keeps it on a 24 hour schedule. The problem with this theory is that, in a world where the sun were rising a little later, we would still be exposed to lots of sunlight early in the morning. It would just be delayed slightly. So how does waking up in the morning and exposing oneself to bright light tell the body what the sun's schedule is? Wouldn't our bodies have to know exactly when the sun was rising and then make the appropriate adjustments based on the time of year and weather? Isn't the only way to do this to be outside all morning for an entire year? How does the unreliable signal of early morning sun exposure contain enough information to make slight adjustments to our circadian rhythm?
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