I feel like the car usecase demonstrates that these models are not really useful for the cutting edge: They produce exactly the kind of in-domain data that already exists in droves. What is needed, and what tesla collects, are the edge cases!
(Now for a startup with zero data, this is of course still useful)
I think if you read it as "campaign meant for drug boats," it isn't editorialized. The actual boats struck are alleged drug boats indeed; the stated desire was to only hit actual "drug boats."
At any rate, even if all the boats struck were carrying drugs in violation of American law, murdering the crew is still not an acceptable form of punishment.
If the desire were in any way to hit only actual drug boats then the boats would receive due process instead of murder. It is definitionally a campaign meant for alleged drug boats.
> even if all the boats struck were carrying drugs in violation of American law, murdering the crew is still not an acceptable form of punishment.
The rationale (don’t karma kill the messenger for not liking my saying so) is that they are a foreign power invading the United States with the illicit intentions of doing catastrophic harm.
If any of this is fentanyl then it is very accurate to say that it leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. And we've seen a very good decrease in fentanyl deaths -- though that could also be attributed to the higher availability of Narcan.
Fentanyl remains a primary driver of overdose deaths, with synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, accounting for 60% of all overdose deaths in the United States last year, totaling about 48,000 people. While opioid overdose deaths remain high, there has been a decrease in fentanyl-involved deaths from 2023 to 2024.
More
National Fentanyl Overdose Data
The CDC reports a 35.6% decrease in synthetic opioid overdose deaths from 2023 to 2024.
I think you mean they are _allegedly_ a foreign power _allegedly_ invading the United States with the _alleged_ illicit intentions of doing catastrophic harm.
> Your linked comment comes across to me in much the same way as TFA: seething with bitterness kept just beneath the surface, channeled into a style that projects authority and precision.
It reads entirely to me like someone tired of dealing with a chronic rule-abuser. That is what moderators are for. I don't see how you interpret any of that as the mod looking for a fight.
> Some of the reactions to this are slightly unfair because ... in 2014. It was only in around 2020...
I think you're wrong about Yarvin changing, but let's say you're right for a moment. Do you know what's easy to do between then and now? Say, "That was an error. I regret it." Do you know what hasn't been done between then and now? Yeah.
The problem seems to be that you treated a professional job interview like a therapy session and showed yourself to be a person who brings up situationally inappropriate subjects without a filter.
> I’m a little ashamed remembering myself talking about failed relationships, family struggles
It sucks what happened, but, yeah, you need to establish filters for yourself. No matter what they ask you, it's an absolutely terrible idea to bring up your failed relationships in an interview. Something tells me they did not ask for that private information specifically and you just decided it would be a good idea to volunteer it, otherwise the story would have said so.
It does not matter what you think they asked. You are the one in control of the words that come out of your mouth. This was poor judgement all around.
Which protected characteristic does "personal relationships" fall under? It's vague enough to mean almost anything you want it to be, and I struggle to imagine any sort of successful prosecution.
There’s a reason interviewers in the US won’t (or shouldn’t) even ask if the candidate has a spouse. If they ask something about that specifically, and the answer indicates some kind of protected status (a man says “my husband” or reveal which place of worship they got married in) and they then decline the candidate, the candidate could make the claim they were denied because they’re gay or practice whatever religion or something else.
Asking personal questions could be seen as a way to elicit information about a protected status and thus give a rejected candidate ammunition for a claim, whether warranted or not.
It’s best to just keep questions focused on the workplace.
I think people vastly overstate the amount of actual risk companies are taking when they engage is possibly illegal behavior, especially on this forum.
Likely true, and I’m sure many companies go unpunished despite engaging in it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, and probably the kind of thing that could ruin a small business if they did get caught up in it.
Having been on the sidelines for spurious claims of this nature, these sorts of lawsuits are a huge risk: the cost of mounting a defense can easily bankrupt a small business, even if the claims turn out to be baseless.
Even in the case of complete innocence, it often becomes a he-said-she-said situation, and the outcome boils down to which side presents the best set of “facts”.
I use quotes there because my broader experience with the court system routinely shows that it does not need be burdened by the “truth” or “facts”. That is probably because the regular cast in those venues are literally trained and practiced liars.
I think it also depends on how big of a company. If someone (say perhaps, GP) mostly has experience in smaller companies, they might not have had the law of large numbers bring the lawsuit cudgel to bear on their company before.
But if you're at a large enough company, you're absolutely getting sued for this from time to time, so you'll have the "how to not get sued" training before you're allowed to interview.
(Edit: this isn't limited to interviews. There's many, many examples of things that large companies will not touch due to legal risk, that smaller companies will... either due to lack of knowledge on the legal risk (maybe no legal department even exists yet?) or intentionally as a gamble)
Never ever prompt someone to discuss personal relationships in an interview. The moment the conversation drifts into religion, family status, child count, sexuality or gender makeup, or any number of other things, you can easily run afoul of state or federal laws, or open yourself to discrimination lawsuits.
Employer fishing to see if the person is married, which will require additional dependents on health insurance. Married is possibly more likely to have kids and take more time off for them or maternity/paternity leave.
Women in a committed relationship can enter a medical situation that renders then unable to work for 6-9 months, + 2 - 3 years of leave afterwards. Men don't, that's just a month or two twice.
It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.
Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients.
The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.
Yeah if you're willing to go into a decade-long court fight then maybe they'll allow you to use a test (where the burden of proof is on the employer to show the test is necessary, i.e. guilty until proven innocent). Or maybe you'll be liable for millions of dollars in compensation. And even something as seemingly reasonable as an IQ test for a knowledge work position is illegal.
No it isn't. This Griggs v Duke Power meme is an internet myth. Practically every white collar job can use IQ tests to qualify applicants, and a few very large companies do exactly this.
You call it a myth yet it was a real case, with that real conclusion, and the subsequent case of New York having to pay for daring to require a teacher licensing test was also real. You can't just dismiss real examples by calling it a "myth". You also omit that "very large companies" almost universally have DEI departments and affirmative action policies to shield themselves [1]. And it is still the opinion of law professors that such tests are legally risky [2]:
Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, using IQ tests could violate the law if the tests are shown to have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities or women, and are not job-related, New York University School of Law Professor Samuel Estreicher told The Post.
Estreicher added that the use of IQ and Myers-Briggs tests also risks violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars companies from requiring applicants to take mental or physical examinations prior to offering them jobs.
“To avoid legal risk, companies shouldn’t rely on these tests,” Estreicher said. “They should just be talking to job applicants.”
Lydia Brown, a policy counsel at advocacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology, said trying to quanitfy an applicant’s intelligence is a ” rather slippery concept.”
“Employers need to really carefully consider whether their test is actually measuring a quality or trait that is necessary to perform the job — and that’s a legal standard,” Brown told The Post.
Key element of your quote: “if the tests [...] are not job-related”
There’s nothing magic about IQ tests. Any hiring criteria that isn’t sufficiently linked (the threshold here has always been low, and the trend has been to lower it further) and is also shown to have an uneven impact by protected class is a problem.
And now we're pretending to not understand chilling effects. And again ignoring how New York had to pay for asking teaching-related questions to prospective teachers.
The (well-known) companies that sell general cognitive testing services for employment applications have logo crawls that include household names with deep pockets. It's an internet myth.
The reason general cognitive IQ testing isn't more commonly used in employment settings is that it doesn't work very well.
IQ testing in white collar US employment is not unlawful and several household name companies openly perform general cognitive assessments; the companies that provide those tests have logo crawls just like every other product company. Griggs doesn't say what you think it says.
IQ testing is uncommon in US employment because it doesn't do a good job of selecting candidates, not because it's unlawful.
> On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways.
That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that matters when discussing the fairness of taxes is how much people are left with at the end after paying whatever taxes they pay, including sales tax, income tax, and any other kind of tax. And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none, and for the people for whom a wealth tax would even apply the answer is unimaginable amounts.
That's not all that matters. The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. And thinking that billionaires will just take a wealth tax as served, and perhaps will ask "can I have some more" is one way to think about this, but probably not the best way. A better way to think is that action might be followed by reaction. There is no manifest destiny for California to be the epicenter of tech.
California already has very high taxes. I think marginal tax rates are higher in California than for UK tax residents, certainly for CGT, and roughly similar for income tax.
I'd say the fact that California remains the epicenter of tech despite its high taxes suggests concentration of talent matters far more than tax rates.
Sure, the government has that goal too. But the government has many tools, and using taxes for that is using the wrong tool. Or maybe you think that billionaires owe us not only to pay taxes, but also to play nice, and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?
Billionares shouldn't exist. We shouldn't just tax them for the revenue. We should tax them to limit the undemocratic power that comes with excessive wealth.
Agreed. Humans evolved in a tribal, local community leadership system. To have as much wealth as millions of people that you never interact with should not exist as a person. It is against the system principles of humanity; either create a new species and turn the billionaires into them, or balance the system.
This is wishful thinking. Billionaires can vote with their feet, or can pay expensive lawyers and accountants to find all the possible loopholes to not pay those taxes. California wants to tax Elon Musk for his trillion dollars. But how much of that trillion dollars was generated in California? He has a very valid claim that a lot of it was generated in Texas, and he'll go all the way to the Supreme Court with that.
People can vote that a new tax should be levied on billionaires, but can't vote how those billionaires will react to the tax. Moving out of state is one option (see Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). Hiring armies of lawyers to challenge any wealth assessment is another. Litigating to the Supreme Court yet another. I'm not a billionaire and never will be, but if I can think of these few ideas, they can think of 100 times more.
Exactly. You can ask many things, like you can ask for world peace, and you can ask for universal brotherly love. If the ask has no chance to result in the outcome you desire, it's purely wishful thinking.
It feels to me you are asking "why can't we just eliminate billionaires". Well, they have a vote in that decision.
Considering the alternative for them over the past millennia has been, inevitably that they get caught, hanged, quartered, beaten and other various violent methods: yes, they should smile, they're buying their lives with all that money :)
Ah yes, extortion is not the part where their disproportionate centralisation of wealth threatens your very livelihood with every action they take. Extortion isn't when they happily tell you they're going to replace you with AI. Extortion isn't when they steal your money with unpaid hours, it isn't when they threaten to fire you if you don't shut the fuck up and do as they say, when they act as a state within the state, corrupting institutions and polluting the very ground you, your children and your food grow on, it's when they're being held accountable for their actions and told that if they're going to have a personal wealth equal to that of millions, they also have the sum of responsibilities of these millions.
Just so you know, careers as a bootlicker are kind of a dead end.
You clearly don't understand psychology at all. Rule by fear has a major downside that Machivelli warned about. If you keep people under threat all the time, as soon as the threat fails and you can no longer point a gun at your head they preemptively kill you and feel good about it.
Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.
This is how alpha chimps function in their tribe. They resort to war and violence to prolong their rule, and it works for long enough, thats all they need for the cost-benefits to be worth it on their side.
In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten.
I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).
It's only by fear if they don't understand how to restrain themselves. Behave well with all your wealth, and nothing will happen: it's the same reason why wealthy patrons of art and craftsmen were at least respected, and why things ended poorly for robber barons.
And no, I do not believe that Musk's flabby arms or Bezos' shiny head are a threat of bigger violence to me anyways.
> The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society.
Both are important reasons for taxes.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote)
Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration.
Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution.
In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.
There is no consensus on what is "fair" to tax, you can find people arguing from 0% to 100%. And if we're talking about measures of fairness. A much better measure is something like trying to maximise the median living standard without sacrificing any one demographic.
> And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none...
So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.
Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.
> If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.
Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit.
That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for.
Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two.
The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on."
Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain.
Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.
And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.
By using progressive taxes, either wealth or income, those who benefited from the current system get to keep some of those excess benefits, while keeping less than they would under a no tax system.
No, I mean real resources as in tangible ones. Although in this case I'd also be interested in redirected labour even though that isn't really a tangible asset. Like if you were explaining to someone who didn't speak english and you had to point at the things that the wealthy control that you want to tax away from them, what real objects do you point at?
Excess profit is a stupid fairy tale told by the bearded idiot. It is literally impossible to not retroactively 'exploit' somebody. Not just in the practical 'need to know what the end user will do with it to avoid them making an excess profit' but if the value changes over time they need to somehow predict that perfectly or else be guilty of exploitation. The notion itself always assumes that the capitalist should get absolutely nothing because he isn't doing "real work" and then ignores how things fall apart without them, or how much that the worker would have to do to substitute for them.
Ironically the communists have managed to out-greed the capitalists through this one fantastical concepts. Capitalists accept that they need to pay people to get their inputs and try to make the most of it one way or another. Communists are kept up at night at by the thought that somebody else may have made a penny off of their labor, and think that they need to murder them for it.
The "excess" in "excess profits" means profits greater than what a fully-competitive, perfect market would allow.
No one would be paying Apple or Google 30% of their revenue if there were infinite alternative app distribution options.
The essence of post-capitalism is that a lack of market intervention allows monopolies to not just grow (probably fine in limited niches with regulatory bounds) but also to rent seek without investing and adding value.
So yes, profit is a motivational force that has outperformed all others to date in aligning individual action with market desires.
But the excess profit era the US has been sliding towards for decades is not a free market.
When was the last time a large corporation was forcibly broken up?
Pick a target amount of inequity. Act to hit that goal. Adjust as needed.
For example, I advocate restoring our gini coefficient from the current 0.48 (?) back to 1970s era 0.35. People smarter than me will figure out how to best measure inequity, ideal targets, and implementation details.
Arguing about all the misc tax rates, purposefully ignoring the macro, is an obfuscation strategy to prevent taking any action at all. Straight out of the CIA's field guide on sabotage.
There is very little debate that you should be taxed proportionally to your total wealth; I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor. In fact the only people trying to debate this are the rich who want to avoid paying back towards the society that enabled their success.
> I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor
How else could it work? The poor don't have enough money to tax them. That's why they're poor. Schemes where the rich don't get taxed are systems that tend towards the 0% tax for everyone end of the spectrum.
The thing that all these asshole billionaires don't want anyone to think about is that not taxing wealth means that a person who primarily accumulates non-income capital only ever pays taxes on what they spend while the rest of us pay taxes on approximately everything we get regardless of whether we spend it.
The existence of perpetual trusts is solvable in a world that has decided to fix the insanity caused by intergenerational wealth transfer instead of propping it up. "This thing we could also eliminate stops us from eliminating this other thing" is a silly platform. Just eliminate them both.
Perpetual trusts are different from irrevocable trusts, which have legitimate use cases. I don't really see how irrevocable trusts would be gotten rid of. In most states all trusts are irrevocable by default and there is a huge body of law dealing with trusts. Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.
> Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.
So is getting rid of intergenerational wealth transfer. So since we're already dreaming about a new system that seems irrelevant.
> legitimate use cases
Intergenerational wealth transfer also has "legitimate use cases" if one gets to define "legitimate". I'm curious what legitimate cases you have in mind.
By “raising death taxes”, I meant comprehensively, eliminating loopholes, as the sources I linked discuss more at length.
Re: irrevocable trust, a cursory search revealed no legitimate use case imo, all use cases I see are proxies to skirt taxes or hide income/wealth. What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?
Your point re: case law is well taken, but per [2] up until a few decades ago there was a cat-and-mouse game between laws and tricks regarding inheritance wealth transfer. This stopped and it’s easier than ever to transfer > 10M tax free at or death, which has massive implications for wealth inequality.
That said I agree it’s extremely unlikely and have no hope that any of this will change.
> What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?
Setting aside money to pay for a relative who can't provide for themselves, protecting assets if you are professional who faces high chance of being sued (e.g. surgeon), providing for children from a first marriage if you get married and predecease your second spouse.
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