Much as leftists and youngsters like to ignore opportunity costs when engaging in government interventions in the economy, they seem to have an excellent understanding of opportunity costs in their personal lives.
Non-profits frequently pay good salaries, for the very reason that any profits they make, they need to actually spend back on their organization.
Of course, OpenAI is Musk and Altman's little hobby and probably considered "educational" rather than "charitable". Nevertheless, they need to pay competitive salaries if they want to hire good people, and these are two of the best names in AI right now.
I believe his point is that two medians are not useful points of comparison to each other, not that they literally can't be compared.
Well, then that's what he should say. But that statement is false too. Comparing medians can be very useful. There are statistical tests for comparing medians because it's so useful. And for income distributions, which we are talking about here, the median is an excellent statistic, giving you the distributional parameter and ignoring outliers.
1) A causal relationship has been found, and is pretty obvious.
Has been found by who? Where is your data? Where are these studies? You're making up things out of thin air.
The claim isn't that you get less utility out of overtime hours, but that overtime hours cut into the productivity of the first 40 hours of the next week
No, your claim is that it is "stupid" to work more than 40 hours because your productivity drops. As an employee who gets overtime pay ("time-and-a-half"), my productivity doesn't matter at all to me. And if I'm self-employed, I make more money for every extra hour worked as long as I make a non-zero salary.
So, even if you could find studies that demonstrate that individual productivity necessarily drops when people work more than 40h (instead of what you obviously did, which is conflate population studies with individual numbers), that doesn't show that working more than 40h is irrational ("stupid"). So, try again.
The bigger problem is the stupidity, as continually working more than 40 hours results in major drops in productivity.
You're packing quite a few fallacies into one sentence there: (1) you're confusing correlation and causation, (2) you're ignoring Simpson's paradox, and (3) whether it's rational or stupid to work more is not decided by productivity but by the marginal utility of extra work.
If you like to look at it that way, it tells you that the value of the extra paid vacation days is small; that is, it may raise the hourly salary by maybe $1-2. Either way, I fail to see what I'm supposed to be outraged about. People who make more money... evidently make more money.
You can not compare two medians. And based on the amount of people involved, you can not even calculate it or "estimate" it.... Both sequences of numbers have the same median.
So you just first tell us that you "can not compare two medians" and that you "can not even calculate the median", and a few lines down you calculate and compare two medians!
How about you rethink that and say what you're actually trying to say.
In actual fact, high income earners tend to work substantially more than low income earners, so the fact that that they nominally more vacations hardly matters. People working around 60h/week make a median of $63000, whereas pepole working 40h/week make a median of $38000. A week or two of extra paid vacation isn't even a blip compared to 20h/week differences in work.
Someone "competent at most things" would have won against Trump in a landslide. Clinton managed to lose and become overwhelmingly disliked despite having massive amounts of money, the support of foreign leaders, most of academia, and most of the press, and most of the Democratic party machinery.
and I've seen no sign of psychopathy.
Her post election behavior alone shows her to be callous, amoral, narcissistic, egocentric, and unable to learn from experience, classic traits of psychopathy. Of course, most presidents are psychopaths, including Trump; the real question is how they direct that psychopathy. Hillary is in a class of her own with her callousness, narcissism, and egocentricity; utterly destructive.
The people did select the lesser of two evils. The electoral college didn't.
Well, I didn't vote for either of them, but looking back, I am utterly relieved that Hillary didn't get elected.
My moral problem with lynchings is that they existed. The fact that they're murder means they're significant, and the fact that the victims were normally black shows private racial discrimination. That's significant private racial discrimination, as I said.
The total number of lynchings in the US (over a century) was around 5000. That pales in comparison to the massive death toll among blacks and minorities that is the result of US government policies. So even if your interpretation of lynchings as solely caused by "private racial discrimination" were true, it still fails to show that tolerating private discrimination is more harmful than government intervention. But, of course, the reason lynchings happened was in large part due to racist indoctrination by government and intellectuals at the time in the first place. That is, Democrats and progressives said what they always say "you are not being treated fairly, get angry, and go out and hurt someone"; back then, they said it to whites, these days they say it to blacks.
I don't consider anything from mises.org to be undebatable historical fact. Your cite says that minimum wage laws changed...
I didn't cite it for the debate on minimum wage laws; I cited it because it gave original sources on racism among union leaders. I suggest you follow up on it. Really, for you to deny that unions were racist is absurd in light of historical fact.
but interpretations change, and the interpretations are far more important than memorizing historical facts individually.
Yeah, and the interpretation you would like is that the massive racism and injustice perpetrated by Democrats, progressives, and unions is forgotten and projected onto Republicans, classical liberals, and the wealthy. It wouldn't even matter if we were just debating distant historical facts, but the problem is that Democrats and progressives are still racist and destructive in pretty much the same way, and that they are blaming the failures of their policies onto others.
More blacks are murdered per year today than were lynched in the history of the US. And it isn't "the wealthy" or Republicans or white supremacists who are killing them or creating the conditions that kills them, it's the policies and institutions of Democrats and progressives that are responsible for these killings, as well as poverty, inequality, and hopelessness.
Although you yourself seem simply ignorant, you are making excuses for racists and bigots. As I was saying: I understand where you are coming from, I used to be a Democrat and a progressive myself. That is also how I know how profoundly wrong you are: I know all your arguments, I used to make them myself.
Thanks for illustrating again that all Oxford graduates are capable of these days is ad hominems, non-sequiturs, and insults. It's truly sad how low the UK has fallen.
In any case, the EU certainly protects consumers a lot more than the US.
Translation: "The EU has a lot of trade barriers."
That's one of the major reasons why US companies find it so hard to sell stuff here, and the same in Japan where they can't meet the automotive emissions standards, for example.
US standards are much stricter when it comes to NOx and particulates (the stuff that you need to protect consumers from), while being less strict when it comes to carbon emissions (irrelevant to consumer protection). That's why we had Dieselgate.
The EU authoritarian? Okay buddy.
Yes, "buddy", it's why I left the EU and came to the US.
Oh, Trump probably scores above average on all those categories, but Hillary is off the scale. People had two choices, and they chose the lesser of two evils.
Private discrimination includes lynching, which is very definitely not government-mandated
That statement implies that your moral problem with lynchings is that they are discriminatory. Apparently, lynchings would be alright with you if they had been applied equally to poor whites and poor blacks! In fact, the moral problem with lynchings is that they are murder, regardless of the race of the victim.
The Republican "southern strategy" was a deliberate attempt to draw racists into the Republican Party
Your claim that unions sought to oppress blacks because they feared competition from cheap black labor doesn't pass the smell test: if they wanted to reduce the competition, they'd have organized the blacks and brought them into unions
That's indeed what Democrats and unions started doing in the 1960's, when they found out that they couldn't use racism to their political advantage anymore and instead started exploiting economic divisions for political gain. Since unions were dominated by Democrats, it's not surprising that they underwent the same kind of shift. But the racist history of unions and minimum wage laws is not debatable; it's historical fact.
From what I've been able to tell, the uneducated and working class are the more racist members of society.
What I said was that "Racism and racist laws in the US (and in most other places) weren't driven by the prejudices of the uneducated or working class (who generally had and have a lot of contact with minorities), they were driven by educated, progressive elites." That is, significant portions of the working class may have been quite racist (after all, lots of them were unionized and Democrats, so a lot of those people were certainly racist), but they didn't drive racist laws or racist public policies; racist policies were the responsibility of educated elites. That's not subject to debate or interpretation, it's documented fact.
Look, I understand where you are coming from. I used to be a progressive myself. I just picked up history books and started reading, and it turns out that a lot of the propaganda used by Democrats and progressives is false.
The EU still has a large trade deficit with China. And, of course, like China, the EU also forcibly redirects money from consumer spending to government investments. That is, the fact that taxes and government spending are about 10-20% higher in the EU than in the US is roughly the equivalent of a 10-20% tariff on US goods. Authoritarian governments like the EU and China can do that sort of thing with impunity; it's not a mark of quality of good government.
Of course, the US plays along with its massive borrowing, which is how dollars return to the US; that's clearly also bad government. What the US should do is stop borrowing, shrink the federal government, and place some more restrictions on foreign investments. If the US were to do that, the trade imbalance would disappear and the EU and Chinese governments would have to liberalize their policies.
I mean sure it may be (ha) what the Republican party likes to say it's about. However, words are not actions.
Well, you didn't accuse me of acting like a Republican politician, you accused me of not being a classical liberal because I sounded like a Republican. As you recognize yourself, Republicans talk like classical liberals, which is why it is not surprising that a classical liberal like me sounds like a Republican to you.
And I see you've dropped the whole cities thing. I guess you realised I was right, huh.
No, it's simply a realization that it is impossible to have a rational discussion with you, among other things, because of your constant use of straw men and red herrings. That is, what you believe you were "right" about doesn't even have anything to do with my original point, namely that NYC may simply have reached the its natural limits to growth: the marginal cost of improving its infrastructure are higher than the marginal benefits derived from it. That's not my opinion, that's effectively what the article says, but like you, the article's authors simply don't want to accept it.
There are two ways to address the trade imbalance with China: reduce overall trade until both sides are down to the same level, or build up US exports to match Chinese imports.
You can't "build up" US exports because the Chinese are already spending every dollar they get their hands on, just not on US exports of goods and services. What are they spending their dollars on? US treasury bills and US investments. And that's a system that American politicians like because it allows them to buy votes in the US (with government spending) and drives up the price of land and the stock market.
The solution is also simple: balance the budget. It might also be worth limiting the classes of assets the Chinese can buy in the US, just like it is limited in the other direction.
lolnope. You don't get to spout Republican fake facts and dutifully trot out right talking points and get to be a liberal.
In fact, in the US, classical liberalism is at home in the Republican party; social liberalism, the only "liberalism" Europeans know, is part of the Democratic party (but is not actually "liberalism").
Who needs facts when you can be angry!
Well, that's obviously your life motto. How else can one explain the pathological obsession with US politics of an Oxford computer science graduate.
Dunno I was quoting you with your incompatible API changes. Maybe you were wrong.
I simply stated that version numbers are meaningful and that major version number changes indicate API changes. How does that imply that a project "breaks functionality frequently"?
But the specific versioning system you proposed is meaningless to the development process of the Linux kernel.
I wasn't making a comment about the Linux kernel, I was making a comment about version numbers in general.
I tried to explain it to you but you either didn't read it or willfully ignored it
You responded to points that you imagined, not to points that I actually made. Learn to read.
I mean it would fit with your right wing narrative that city dewllers are useless and evil and whatnot.
My classically liberal narrative is that people should live wherever they want to and pay for their choices. I used to live in cities myself, but recognized that quality of life and cost of living is better outside cities. And my view on this particular problem is that NYC may have simply reached its limits of growth.
Your narrative, on the other hand, is that government should promote dense living, public transit, and public services and expropriate people to achieve those ends; in different words, you're the typical repugnant European authoritarian. The Nazis didn't need to invade the UK, you gave it up willingly post-WWII.
Won't work though. The top 5 cities comprise over 20% of the entire GDP of the US.
I'm not sure what you're saying there. Are you saying that because cities are economically important, it's impossible for them to experience limits on growth or problems? I think Detroit shows us otherwise. Or that they can expropriate whatever they need from whoever they want to in order to save themselves? Or what?
but this is a little more like a public government office with a sign that says "Documents available in cabinets 3-17."
No, it's really more like a public government office with a room that says "Freedom of Information Request Archive" at the top. You look for document 15-1958 in cabinet 15. And you reasonably assume that cabinet 1 contains FOIA requests numbered "1-XXXXX", and that since all FOIA records are by definition public, you're perfectly free to look through them and copy them.
and plenty of cases of minorities being discriminated against without government requirements
Of course minorities are discriminated against privately, all the time. But private discrimination by itself isn't a significant problem. This may be hard to grasp if you have never experienced it.
If a large majority is prejudiced against X people, then laws are likely to be written discriminating against X.
We don't have to guess at that, we know why the racist laws of the progressive era were written: they were written because eminent academics and intellectuals argued that blacks were inferior and needed to be treated differently for their own good and the good of society, and because powerful constituencies (like unions) wanted to reduce competition from cheap black labor. This isn't a wild guess, it's what proponents of these policies stated on the record.
Racism and racist laws in the US (and in most other places) weren't driven by the prejudices of the uneducated or working class (who generally had and have a lot of contact with minorities), they were driven by educated, progressive elites. That mirrors what happened with slavery: slavery wasn't something uneducated white working class folks wanted, it was something wealthy elites wanted. And it mirrors what we see today, with wealthy "liberal" elites again pushing for policies that categorize people by race and treat them differently, of course, as always, with only the best of intentions!
As far as living under an authoritarian regime goes, yes, there are bad governments in the world. That doesn't mean all government is bad.
I didn't say that "all government is bad". I said that government that respects freedom of association is good for minorities, while government that categorizes people by race or minority status is bad for minorities.
Your cite (more applicable to what you claimed) indicates that there was already mortgage discrimination going on, and that private parties participated in the redlining.
No, it stated that there was mortgage discrimination going on, but that actual redlining started with the FHA. Redlining is not the same as other forms of racial discrimination.
Your own quote shows that non-state-sponsored discrimination already existed.
No, it doesn't show that either. In fact, racial discrimination in the US was overwhelmingly the result of US government policies: Jim Crow laws, New Deal policies, government-mandates segregation, the teaching of eugenics and scientific racism in public schools, etc. Private discrimination in the US has always been largely secondary to such government policies.
You might want to (a) not accuse me of talking out of my ass when making a factual statement relevant to something you said, and (b) read your own cites.
Where in the major version number does it say that you "break functionality frequently"? Lots of software projects increment their major version number very infrequently.
And? To be clear you are proposing changing the approach taken by one of the worlds most expensive and longest ongoing software projects.
No, I'm simply saying that people should remember that version numbers are not meaningless, it is only Linux kernel version numbers that are meaningless because Linus happens to choose meaningless version numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
For income distributions, the median is the exponential of the mu parameter.
For income distributions, the median is usually lower than the the mean.
Much as leftists and youngsters like to ignore opportunity costs when engaging in government interventions in the economy, they seem to have an excellent understanding of opportunity costs in their personal lives.
Non-profits frequently pay good salaries, for the very reason that any profits they make, they need to actually spend back on their organization.
Of course, OpenAI is Musk and Altman's little hobby and probably considered "educational" rather than "charitable". Nevertheless, they need to pay competitive salaries if they want to hire good people, and these are two of the best names in AI right now.
Well, then that's what he should say. But that statement is false too. Comparing medians can be very useful. There are statistical tests for comparing medians because it's so useful. And for income distributions, which we are talking about here, the median is an excellent statistic, giving you the distributional parameter and ignoring outliers.
Has been found by who? Where is your data? Where are these studies? You're making up things out of thin air.
No, your claim is that it is "stupid" to work more than 40 hours because your productivity drops. As an employee who gets overtime pay ("time-and-a-half"), my productivity doesn't matter at all to me. And if I'm self-employed, I make more money for every extra hour worked as long as I make a non-zero salary.
So, even if you could find studies that demonstrate that individual productivity necessarily drops when people work more than 40h (instead of what you obviously did, which is conflate population studies with individual numbers), that doesn't show that working more than 40h is irrational ("stupid"). So, try again.
You're packing quite a few fallacies into one sentence there: (1) you're confusing correlation and causation, (2) you're ignoring Simpson's paradox, and (3) whether it's rational or stupid to work more is not decided by productivity but by the marginal utility of extra work.
If you like to look at it that way, it tells you that the value of the extra paid vacation days is small; that is, it may raise the hourly salary by maybe $1-2. Either way, I fail to see what I'm supposed to be outraged about. People who make more money... evidently make more money.
So you just first tell us that you "can not compare two medians" and that you "can not even calculate the median", and a few lines down you calculate and compare two medians!
How about you rethink that and say what you're actually trying to say.
In actual fact, high income earners tend to work substantially more than low income earners, so the fact that that they nominally more vacations hardly matters. People working around 60h/week make a median of $63000, whereas pepole working 40h/week make a median of $38000. A week or two of extra paid vacation isn't even a blip compared to 20h/week differences in work.
Someone "competent at most things" would have won against Trump in a landslide. Clinton managed to lose and become overwhelmingly disliked despite having massive amounts of money, the support of foreign leaders, most of academia, and most of the press, and most of the Democratic party machinery.
Her post election behavior alone shows her to be callous, amoral, narcissistic, egocentric, and unable to learn from experience, classic traits of psychopathy. Of course, most presidents are psychopaths, including Trump; the real question is how they direct that psychopathy. Hillary is in a class of her own with her callousness, narcissism, and egocentricity; utterly destructive.
Well, I didn't vote for either of them, but looking back, I am utterly relieved that Hillary didn't get elected.
The total number of lynchings in the US (over a century) was around 5000. That pales in comparison to the massive death toll among blacks and minorities that is the result of US government policies. So even if your interpretation of lynchings as solely caused by "private racial discrimination" were true, it still fails to show that tolerating private discrimination is more harmful than government intervention. But, of course, the reason lynchings happened was in large part due to racist indoctrination by government and intellectuals at the time in the first place. That is, Democrats and progressives said what they always say "you are not being treated fairly, get angry, and go out and hurt someone"; back then, they said it to whites, these days they say it to blacks.
I didn't cite it for the debate on minimum wage laws; I cited it because it gave original sources on racism among union leaders. I suggest you follow up on it. Really, for you to deny that unions were racist is absurd in light of historical fact.
Yeah, and the interpretation you would like is that the massive racism and injustice perpetrated by Democrats, progressives, and unions is forgotten and projected onto Republicans, classical liberals, and the wealthy. It wouldn't even matter if we were just debating distant historical facts, but the problem is that Democrats and progressives are still racist and destructive in pretty much the same way, and that they are blaming the failures of their policies onto others.
More blacks are murdered per year today than were lynched in the history of the US. And it isn't "the wealthy" or Republicans or white supremacists who are killing them or creating the conditions that kills them, it's the policies and institutions of Democrats and progressives that are responsible for these killings, as well as poverty, inequality, and hopelessness.
Although you yourself seem simply ignorant, you are making excuses for racists and bigots. As I was saying: I understand where you are coming from, I used to be a Democrat and a progressive myself. That is also how I know how profoundly wrong you are: I know all your arguments, I used to make them myself.
Thanks for illustrating again that all Oxford graduates are capable of these days is ad hominems, non-sequiturs, and insults. It's truly sad how low the UK has fallen.
Translation: "The EU has a lot of trade barriers."
US standards are much stricter when it comes to NOx and particulates (the stuff that you need to protect consumers from), while being less strict when it comes to carbon emissions (irrelevant to consumer protection). That's why we had Dieselgate.
Yes, "buddy", it's why I left the EU and came to the US.
Oh, Trump probably scores above average on all those categories, but Hillary is off the scale. People had two choices, and they chose the lesser of two evils.
That statement implies that your moral problem with lynchings is that they are discriminatory. Apparently, lynchings would be alright with you if they had been applied equally to poor whites and poor blacks! In fact, the moral problem with lynchings is that they are murder, regardless of the race of the victim.
Oft repeated, but false.
That's indeed what Democrats and unions started doing in the 1960's, when they found out that they couldn't use racism to their political advantage anymore and instead started exploiting economic divisions for political gain. Since unions were dominated by Democrats, it's not surprising that they underwent the same kind of shift. But the racist history of unions and minimum wage laws is not debatable; it's historical fact.
What I said was that "Racism and racist laws in the US (and in most other places) weren't driven by the prejudices of the uneducated or working class (who generally had and have a lot of contact with minorities), they were driven by educated, progressive elites." That is, significant portions of the working class may have been quite racist (after all, lots of them were unionized and Democrats, so a lot of those people were certainly racist), but they didn't drive racist laws or racist public policies; racist policies were the responsibility of educated elites. That's not subject to debate or interpretation, it's documented fact.
Look, I understand where you are coming from. I used to be a progressive myself. I just picked up history books and started reading, and it turns out that a lot of the propaganda used by Democrats and progressives is false.
The EU still has a large trade deficit with China. And, of course, like China, the EU also forcibly redirects money from consumer spending to government investments. That is, the fact that taxes and government spending are about 10-20% higher in the EU than in the US is roughly the equivalent of a 10-20% tariff on US goods. Authoritarian governments like the EU and China can do that sort of thing with impunity; it's not a mark of quality of good government.
Of course, the US plays along with its massive borrowing, which is how dollars return to the US; that's clearly also bad government. What the US should do is stop borrowing, shrink the federal government, and place some more restrictions on foreign investments. If the US were to do that, the trade imbalance would disappear and the EU and Chinese governments would have to liberalize their policies.
Well, you didn't accuse me of acting like a Republican politician, you accused me of not being a classical liberal because I sounded like a Republican. As you recognize yourself, Republicans talk like classical liberals, which is why it is not surprising that a classical liberal like me sounds like a Republican to you.
No, it's simply a realization that it is impossible to have a rational discussion with you, among other things, because of your constant use of straw men and red herrings. That is, what you believe you were "right" about doesn't even have anything to do with my original point, namely that NYC may simply have reached the its natural limits to growth: the marginal cost of improving its infrastructure are higher than the marginal benefits derived from it. That's not my opinion, that's effectively what the article says, but like you, the article's authors simply don't want to accept it.
You can't "build up" US exports because the Chinese are already spending every dollar they get their hands on, just not on US exports of goods and services. What are they spending their dollars on? US treasury bills and US investments. And that's a system that American politicians like because it allows them to buy votes in the US (with government spending) and drives up the price of land and the stock market.
The solution is also simple: balance the budget. It might also be worth limiting the classes of assets the Chinese can buy in the US, just like it is limited in the other direction.
In fact, in the US, classical liberalism is at home in the Republican party; social liberalism, the only "liberalism" Europeans know, is part of the Democratic party (but is not actually "liberalism").
Well, that's obviously your life motto. How else can one explain the pathological obsession with US politics of an Oxford computer science graduate.
I simply stated that version numbers are meaningful and that major version number changes indicate API changes. How does that imply that a project "breaks functionality frequently"?
I wasn't making a comment about the Linux kernel, I was making a comment about version numbers in general.
You responded to points that you imagined, not to points that I actually made. Learn to read.
My classically liberal narrative is that people should live wherever they want to and pay for their choices. I used to live in cities myself, but recognized that quality of life and cost of living is better outside cities. And my view on this particular problem is that NYC may have simply reached its limits of growth.
Your narrative, on the other hand, is that government should promote dense living, public transit, and public services and expropriate people to achieve those ends; in different words, you're the typical repugnant European authoritarian. The Nazis didn't need to invade the UK, you gave it up willingly post-WWII.
I'm not sure what you're saying there. Are you saying that because cities are economically important, it's impossible for them to experience limits on growth or problems? I think Detroit shows us otherwise. Or that they can expropriate whatever they need from whoever they want to in order to save themselves? Or what?
No, it's really more like a public government office with a room that says "Freedom of Information Request Archive" at the top. You look for document 15-1958 in cabinet 15. And you reasonably assume that cabinet 1 contains FOIA requests numbered "1-XXXXX", and that since all FOIA records are by definition public, you're perfectly free to look through them and copy them.
Of course minorities are discriminated against privately, all the time. But private discrimination by itself isn't a significant problem. This may be hard to grasp if you have never experienced it.
We don't have to guess at that, we know why the racist laws of the progressive era were written: they were written because eminent academics and intellectuals argued that blacks were inferior and needed to be treated differently for their own good and the good of society, and because powerful constituencies (like unions) wanted to reduce competition from cheap black labor. This isn't a wild guess, it's what proponents of these policies stated on the record.
Racism and racist laws in the US (and in most other places) weren't driven by the prejudices of the uneducated or working class (who generally had and have a lot of contact with minorities), they were driven by educated, progressive elites. That mirrors what happened with slavery: slavery wasn't something uneducated white working class folks wanted, it was something wealthy elites wanted. And it mirrors what we see today, with wealthy "liberal" elites again pushing for policies that categorize people by race and treat them differently, of course, as always, with only the best of intentions!
I didn't say that "all government is bad". I said that government that respects freedom of association is good for minorities, while government that categorizes people by race or minority status is bad for minorities.
No, it stated that there was mortgage discrimination going on, but that actual redlining started with the FHA. Redlining is not the same as other forms of racial discrimination.
No, it doesn't show that either. In fact, racial discrimination in the US was overwhelmingly the result of US government policies: Jim Crow laws, New Deal policies, government-mandates segregation, the teaching of eugenics and scientific racism in public schools, etc. Private discrimination in the US has always been largely secondary to such government policies.
You still don't know what you're talking about.
Where in the major version number does it say that you "break functionality frequently"? Lots of software projects increment their major version number very infrequently.
No, I'm simply saying that people should remember that version numbers are not meaningless, it is only Linux kernel version numbers that are meaningless because Linus happens to choose meaningless version numbers.