Perhaps it would encourage the Buy Local movement. Maybe you'll find that everyone in your neighborhood stops buying from across the country to save $0.25 on taxes, and instead comes to you because you're nearby and offer a great return policy, and they don't have to pay shipping and handling in addition to their sales tax when they buy from you. Really, not everything has to be a disaster. Someone else sees opportunity and makes a mint.
The question you should be asking: Can I make an app which will help people in this need? Can I develop relationships with state and local governments to be the preferred app / document format? Can I hire a bunch of people and sell a product that brings people into compliance with the tax laws in all the state and local governments where they want to do business? And don't forget step four... Profit.
When you were growing up, all sorts of things were tax-deductible or could be written off. Tax shelters, they called them. So suddenly your doctor's family vacation in Fiji turns into a business expense because he took a few photos which he put up on the walls of his office. He planned a week-long trip to France and attended a seminar about best billing practices there, making it another business expense and fully tax-deductible. No joke. The tax code has changed to disallow many of these, but there continue to be interesting ways to reduce your taxable income while still living quite well if you are someone with the money to hire a good financial adviser. Sadly, I am not that well off yet.
This is why we can't fix our financial problems. Deficit and Debt are two different things. Deficit is the amount we overspend every year. Debt is the sum across the years of our deficits. (Plus interest etc., but I'll keep the example simple here.) If we were growing our debt by $2.2T per year and now change to growing our debt only $1.4T per year, we're still overspending every year and going further into debt. To get rid of that $1.4T per year, we would need to charge every single American about $4700 more than they're currently paying. This includes all the unemployed, babies, and senior citizens. $4700 from every one. So once you and everyone else pay that extra $4700 per person to eliminate our deficit, then we can look at how much it would cost (in additional taxes on top of that) to provide that health service you wanted.
A perfectly inelastic good, such as a land, or a license to a fixed good like radio spectrum...
Land is not perfectly inelastic. Part of San Francisco is built on dredging that expanded the landmass. Cliffs crumble into the ocean. Volcanoes brought us the Hawaiian islands. The presence or absence of trees and plant life in the Louisiana bayou affects erosion of the land mass into the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the hurricane buffer zones that protect New Orleans and areas further north. And these are just American examples. If you're French, you know that atomic testing can eliminate entire islands. In Dubai, they make their own islands to put fancy rich buildings upon. Land is relatively inelastic as it is a lot of work to make or get rid of, but it can be done and it is done.
We're the lowest taxed generation since WWII. The highest rate now is 35%, and few pay it. The highest tax bracket in the 90s was 39.6. The highest tax bracket under most of Regan was 50%. Under Nixon was 70%. Kenedy was 91%. Eisenhower was also 91%. The rate coming out of WWII was 94%.
Try doing actual research before spitting out far right talking points.
Hypocrisy and talking points indeed. Nobody paid 91% under Kennedy. They wrote everything off in tax shelters and massive deductions. My dentist had some beautiful underwater photography in his office. Turns out that with that, his thousands of dollars for a vacation in the Virgin Islands or wherever became a business expense, fully deductible. In San Luis Obispo, California, there is a hotel/motel called The Madonna Inn. The restaurant men's room doesn't have a urinal; it has a waterfall. The sinks are built from the shells of giant clams. It was built as a major tax shelter for folks who didn't want to be taxed on their income. The tax code has changed to be less friendly toward some of these things nowadays. I don't proclaim to have all the statistics of which era is better or worse, and I don't plan on spending the time to become that fully-versed in it until someone offers me a job in that field, but these 70%, 91%, 94% numbers are not the full story, and need to be acknowledged as such.
California Proposition 17 (2010), about Auto Insurance, would have amended Insurance Code section 1861.02(b)(3) to read:
(A) This subdivision shall not prevent a reciprocal insurer, organized prior to November 8, 1988, by a motor club holding a certificate of authority under Chapter 2 (commencing with Section 12160) of Part 5 of Division 2, and which requires membership in the motor club as a condition precedent to applying for insurance from requiring membership in the motor club as a condition precedent to obtaining insurance described in this subdivision.
Sounds like AAA to me.
(B) This subdivision shall not prevent an insurer which requires membership in a specified voluntary, nonprofit organization, which was in existence prior to November 8, 1988, as a condition precedent to applying for insurance issued to or through those membership groups, including franchise groups, from requiring such membership as a condition to applying for the coverage offered to members of the group, provided that it or an affiliate also offers and sells coverage to those who are not members of those membership groups.
I'm not sure which insurer this is. Maybe GEICO. So to your request for examples, this is the stuff they were willing to write in legislation put on the ballot for every single registered voter in California. If they would put it before millions of folks, I can imagine what sorts of things end up in non-voter-reviewed legislation.
The problem is definitely circles. You can't take sides in a circle, as their only discernable sides are an INside and an OUTside. If we outlaw all circles, and allow only polygons with less-than-infinite sides, then people within the polygon can take sides instead of just agreeing with everyone. Problem solved.
You seem to be implying that there's a whole bunch of people that are just too thick to do anything more inspiring than work on a production line, drive trucks or sweep floors. I actually find that idea quite insulting!
It sounds like you would be incapable of finding satisfaction, meaning or purpose in any of these jobs. In that case, I hope your job opportunities are so stable that you never need to consider such work. In taking insult though, you read implications into my words that I never made. Let me return the favor on a positive direction: Perhaps it means you find your job so satisfying that if they gave you two options: (1) here's your salary, every year, without you needing to ever show up, or (2) come work for me year in and year out for your salary, you would choose (2) in a heartbeat. If so, congratulations, as you are in the minority. I see a lot of people who work, in part, for the money, and if the money was not an issue, would stop coming to work. This is partly because not everyone can be a Creative Director; every department needs grunts to execute on the big vision. In that video game, however, you are the Director, pursuing your own path. That has its appeal.
Depends on your line of work. Replace "Audiobooks" with "text to speech software" and you can catch up on all the emails and news articles you want during the drive. Go one step further and add a headset with Dragon Naturally Speaking software and you can reply to those emails as well. Or you could invite those relatives to visit you instead, and let them drive through boring lands with their audiobooks.
because "everybody knows" that "the other people" are bad drivers, so if it was "better than all those idiot drivers you see all the time", people would accept it. For instance, I have a friend who hates all Asian drivers, another that hates all drivers driving a vehicle with handicap plates, etc. (mind you, that specific approach could be considered "evil"...)
And nothing will change. "Everybody" will "know" that a certain model of Asian car has a different driving algorithm based on being developed and tested in India, and that "older" cars are slower to react while "younger" cars drive more aggressively, squeezing in where others wouldn't. And there will be the modders and tinkerers. As long as there is more than one make and model of car, we will observe variation and call it like we see it. And being human, some of us will develop irrational beliefs that explain what we observe.
The fact is that as technology progresses, the need for human labor generally trends down, and we haven't come up with a really good way to deal with what to do with that excess labor force. I'm pretty sure the answer isn't to stop developing new technologies.
Why do you think there are games on Facebook? Really, the average human, at least in America, celebrates technology that allows him to not work -- so long as he can still enjoy the comforts of life. And he will welcome every time-saving invention that brings him more income per hour of work, except when no work means no income and no nice things.
Scope creep is terribly expensive. From my experience, it very often comes from the users who do not understand the cost of the programmer's time and the impact to the delivery schedule as a result. If the programmer himself determines that he can add features and still meet schedule, that's the kind of scope creep I can support. Yes, he had better meet all the requirements and follow the directions, but if he has time to add something that says "wow," then he has creativity, innovation, and discipline. Those are hireable traits.
Some proposals (maybe not this one, DNRTFDP) would eliminate the gas taxes and replace them with this mileage tax. A long commute can be an expensive thing, but I need more facts before I become sympathetic. Often the person chose it as a better alternative than his other available options, such as buying or renting in a more expensive neighborhood.
We solve it as follows: ensure that we tax each of the energy sources appropriately for the damage (to roads, bridges, clean air, etc.) one can cause with a given quantity of it. Tax the electricity, the natural gas, the gasoline, and so forth... Then ensure that the tax receipts are appropriated toward activities to mitigate the damage.
Now your hybrid and your electric car are paying taxes on what fuel them. The hard part comes in convincing governments to match the income with the expenditures. Somewhere along the line, some legislator will propose using some of the fuel tax to pay for domestic violence programs or Medicare, and a second will propose raising one of the fuel taxes just because he doesn't like that energy source or who makes it or who consumes it. But even with those predictable lunacies, it will be a better-administered tax than a per-mile tax.
To propose eliminating bridges suggests that you don't live near any. Have you ever seen a train go across a bridge?
This is massively different from a gas tax, and we can show it easily with a pickup truck and a hybrid car. People spent extra money to get hybrids to lower their MPG costs (primarily fuel, including fuel taxes). A Prius burns 1 gallon for every 3 that a pickup truck might. So if pickup truck drivers switch to hybrid cars, that cuts out 2/3 of their fuel taxes. Incentive: hybrids. If we tax by the mile, the pickup and the hybrid get the same charge, so why buy a new vehicle? Incentive: old pickup. And if we tax solely by miles driven, the semi driver loves it -- his tax bill may even go down. The open question is, will we tax bicyclists and pedestrians for miles ridden/walked?
To build on it, part of the theory here is that if you are too far from the norm, you can't fit in. If you are only moderately above the norm, you can fit in sufficiently to use your IQ to your advantage. Though most of Gladwell's texts are intended for Dilbertian management to read and then formulate vast policies on things they barely understand.
If you accept that some people are born into a disadvantaged situation, then the rational response is to look for ways to address the disadvantage. This could and does take many different forms (work for benefits, scholarships, micro-loans, basic health care). We should not look at a failed example and simply respond "it is better to do nothing". We simply need to keep working on finding solutions that work.
Fully agree. These forms of help are more like a hand up rather than a hand-out. There is a place in society for giving without any expectations, but that place is the hands of charitable individuals.
The goal of government to promote the general welfare cannot be achieved solely by redistribution. Rather, we ought to reinstate programs like FDR's CCC and WPA so that those who are capable of work but are out of work can make a positive contribution to some part of the economy and community in exchange for their government check. Be it tutoring, litter clean-up, building homes with Habitat for Humanity -- something that gives back. When so many states, counties, and cities are wrestling with how to cut funds because they are running deficits, I do not wish to needlessly put those government workers out of jobs, but for all the tasks they can't get to because there aren't enough of them, we have an unemployed citizenry which could step in and help.
Motivated people are going to actively seek out opportunities for advancement. You don't need a test to identify them.
Once they've made it out of school and into the workforce, they will be free to follow their motivation. You will see them advance in the office, in the community, in the criminal gang, or wherever they choose to go. The youngsters in school who are being told what to do and when to do it -- these are the ones whose level of motivation and ability you want to discover. Because if you don't show them how to harness their strengths to benefit society, they will harness them to the detriment of society, or simply fail to develop their skills, skating by on whatever minimum they can do. And you could have, with a simple test, gained some insight into who was raring for greater challenges without them having to speak up and risk looking like a nerd or dork or whatever is your favorite word to describe the ostracism of one who goes well beyond his peers.
We've heard this lament before: cable TV let the "PBS Liberals" and the "Fox Conservatives" go off in their cliques. Magazine subscriptions do the same thing, as does the telephone and postal mail. Sometimes I hear nostalgia for an earlier time when neighbors knew each other, and discussed the town's affairs in the barbershop and the coffee shop. The downside is that nobody could avoid the town nutcase, and anyone with an unusual opinion or lifestyle or medical condition was outside the mainstream enough to be relatively alone. The answer will not be found in technology itself, but in human motivations: what drives friendship, and common interests? Was there ever a time when politics and debate was conducted civilly?
The quants eat up Malthus, but the economic historians know his data set was flawed. He looked at American population growth, but did not distinguish immigration from birth rates, and thus vastly overestimated population growth rates. He wrongly saw doomsday where there was none. Worse errors have been made in the reverse direction, such as fixing rather than indexing retirement ages, so that despite expanding life expectancies, millions of Americans expect to sit on their fat duffs for a decade or two and be paid for it. Meanwhile, nearly everyone refuses to see the financial impossibility of our current situation, believing on blind faith that because their grandparents could retire at 65 after working since they were 18, the current generation can expect a luxurious 25-year retirement at 65 after entering the workforce at 32 (after lots of college and expensive loans to help find oneself), all while spending every penny they earn on themselves and not having any children to pay half their wages for the current generation's retirement benefits.
That's the theory, anyway. The alternate theory is that economies are dynamic enough while containing enough "sticky" forces that equilibrium is never reachable. I ask myself, "When will the US housing market implosion reach bottom?" and then I look at what is said by the persons deemed to be experts. Their lack of consensus, and the paths they project the market taking in the next number of months with sellers and buyers, bankers and lenders, foreclosures, renters, and so on... shows that there may not be any achievable equilibrium.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.
Please, no. One good tweet does not expand well into a full-length book, or even short 128-page fat margin double-spaced quick read books sold at airport bookstores to aspring middle manager types. Use it as your.sig but stop there.
The rest of this comment has been truncated in compliance with the above statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it would encourage the Buy Local movement. Maybe you'll find that everyone in your neighborhood stops buying from across the country to save $0.25 on taxes, and instead comes to you because you're nearby and offer a great return policy, and they don't have to pay shipping and handling in addition to their sales tax when they buy from you. Really, not everything has to be a disaster. Someone else sees opportunity and makes a mint.
The question you should be asking: Can I make an app which will help people in this need? Can I develop relationships with state and local governments to be the preferred app / document format? Can I hire a bunch of people and sell a product that brings people into compliance with the tax laws in all the state and local governments where they want to do business? And don't forget step four... Profit.
When you were growing up, all sorts of things were tax-deductible or could be written off. Tax shelters, they called them. So suddenly your doctor's family vacation in Fiji turns into a business expense because he took a few photos which he put up on the walls of his office. He planned a week-long trip to France and attended a seminar about best billing practices there, making it another business expense and fully tax-deductible. No joke. The tax code has changed to disallow many of these, but there continue to be interesting ways to reduce your taxable income while still living quite well if you are someone with the money to hire a good financial adviser. Sadly, I am not that well off yet.
This is why we can't fix our financial problems. Deficit and Debt are two different things. Deficit is the amount we overspend every year. Debt is the sum across the years of our deficits. (Plus interest etc., but I'll keep the example simple here.) If we were growing our debt by $2.2T per year and now change to growing our debt only $1.4T per year, we're still overspending every year and going further into debt. To get rid of that $1.4T per year, we would need to charge every single American about $4700 more than they're currently paying. This includes all the unemployed, babies, and senior citizens. $4700 from every one. So once you and everyone else pay that extra $4700 per person to eliminate our deficit, then we can look at how much it would cost (in additional taxes on top of that) to provide that health service you wanted.
You must have bought your sandwich to go. If you consumed it on the premises, it would've been taxed.
A perfectly inelastic good, such as a land, or a license to a fixed good like radio spectrum...
Land is not perfectly inelastic. Part of San Francisco is built on dredging that expanded the landmass. Cliffs crumble into the ocean. Volcanoes brought us the Hawaiian islands. The presence or absence of trees and plant life in the Louisiana bayou affects erosion of the land mass into the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the hurricane buffer zones that protect New Orleans and areas further north. And these are just American examples. If you're French, you know that atomic testing can eliminate entire islands. In Dubai, they make their own islands to put fancy rich buildings upon. Land is relatively inelastic as it is a lot of work to make or get rid of, but it can be done and it is done.
We're the lowest taxed generation since WWII. The highest rate now is 35%, and few pay it. The highest tax bracket in the 90s was 39.6. The highest tax bracket under most of Regan was 50%. Under Nixon was 70%. Kenedy was 91%. Eisenhower was also 91%. The rate coming out of WWII was 94%.
Try doing actual research before spitting out far right talking points.
Hypocrisy and talking points indeed. Nobody paid 91% under Kennedy. They wrote everything off in tax shelters and massive deductions. My dentist had some beautiful underwater photography in his office. Turns out that with that, his thousands of dollars for a vacation in the Virgin Islands or wherever became a business expense, fully deductible. In San Luis Obispo, California, there is a hotel/motel called The Madonna Inn. The restaurant men's room doesn't have a urinal; it has a waterfall. The sinks are built from the shells of giant clams. It was built as a major tax shelter for folks who didn't want to be taxed on their income. The tax code has changed to be less friendly toward some of these things nowadays. I don't proclaim to have all the statistics of which era is better or worse, and I don't plan on spending the time to become that fully-versed in it until someone offers me a job in that field, but these 70%, 91%, 94% numbers are not the full story, and need to be acknowledged as such.
California Proposition 17 (2010), about Auto Insurance, would have amended Insurance Code section 1861.02(b)(3) to read:
(A) This subdivision shall not prevent a reciprocal insurer, organized prior to November 8, 1988, by a motor club holding a certificate of authority under Chapter 2 (commencing with Section 12160) of Part 5 of Division 2, and which requires membership in the motor club as a condition precedent to applying for insurance from requiring membership in the motor club as a condition precedent to obtaining insurance described in this subdivision.
Sounds like AAA to me.
(B) This subdivision shall not prevent an insurer which requires membership in a specified voluntary, nonprofit organization, which was in existence prior to November 8, 1988, as a condition precedent to applying for insurance issued to or through those membership groups, including franchise groups, from requiring such membership as a condition to applying for the coverage offered to members of the group, provided that it or an affiliate also offers and sells coverage to those who are not members of those membership groups.
I'm not sure which insurer this is. Maybe GEICO.
So to your request for examples, this is the stuff they were willing to write in legislation put on the ballot for every single registered voter in California. If they would put it before millions of folks, I can imagine what sorts of things end up in non-voter-reviewed legislation.
The problem is definitely circles. You can't take sides in a circle, as their only discernable sides are an INside and an OUTside. If we outlaw all circles, and allow only polygons with less-than-infinite sides, then people within the polygon can take sides instead of just agreeing with everyone. Problem solved.
You seem to be implying that there's a whole bunch of people that are just too thick to do anything more inspiring than work on a production line, drive trucks or sweep floors. I actually find that idea quite insulting!
It sounds like you would be incapable of finding satisfaction, meaning or purpose in any of these jobs. In that case, I hope your job opportunities are so stable that you never need to consider such work. In taking insult though, you read implications into my words that I never made. Let me return the favor on a positive direction: Perhaps it means you find your job so satisfying that if they gave you two options: (1) here's your salary, every year, without you needing to ever show up, or (2) come work for me year in and year out for your salary, you would choose (2) in a heartbeat. If so, congratulations, as you are in the minority. I see a lot of people who work, in part, for the money, and if the money was not an issue, would stop coming to work. This is partly because not everyone can be a Creative Director; every department needs grunts to execute on the big vision. In that video game, however, you are the Director, pursuing your own path. That has its appeal.
Depends on your line of work. Replace "Audiobooks" with "text to speech software" and you can catch up on all the emails and news articles you want during the drive. Go one step further and add a headset with Dragon Naturally Speaking software and you can reply to those emails as well. Or you could invite those relatives to visit you instead, and let them drive through boring lands with their audiobooks.
because "everybody knows" that "the other people" are bad drivers, so if it was "better than all those idiot drivers you see all the time", people would accept it. For instance, I have a friend who hates all Asian drivers, another that hates all drivers driving a vehicle with handicap plates, etc. (mind you, that specific approach could be considered "evil"...)
And nothing will change. "Everybody" will "know" that a certain model of Asian car has a different driving algorithm based on being developed and tested in India, and that "older" cars are slower to react while "younger" cars drive more aggressively, squeezing in where others wouldn't. And there will be the modders and tinkerers. As long as there is more than one make and model of car, we will observe variation and call it like we see it. And being human, some of us will develop irrational beliefs that explain what we observe.
The fact is that as technology progresses, the need for human labor generally trends down, and we haven't come up with a really good way to deal with what to do with that excess labor force. I'm pretty sure the answer isn't to stop developing new technologies.
Why do you think there are games on Facebook? Really, the average human, at least in America, celebrates technology that allows him to not work -- so long as he can still enjoy the comforts of life. And he will welcome every time-saving invention that brings him more income per hour of work, except when no work means no income and no nice things.
This may be true, but if the average human was in a car accident only once every 100,000 miles, he'd get a much better insurance rate.
Scope creep is terribly expensive. From my experience, it very often comes from the users who do not understand the cost of the programmer's time and the impact to the delivery schedule as a result. If the programmer himself determines that he can add features and still meet schedule, that's the kind of scope creep I can support. Yes, he had better meet all the requirements and follow the directions, but if he has time to add something that says "wow," then he has creativity, innovation, and discipline. Those are hireable traits.
Some proposals (maybe not this one, DNRTFDP) would eliminate the gas taxes and replace them with this mileage tax. A long commute can be an expensive thing, but I need more facts before I become sympathetic. Often the person chose it as a better alternative than his other available options, such as buying or renting in a more expensive neighborhood.
We solve it as follows: ensure that we tax each of the energy sources appropriately for the damage (to roads, bridges, clean air, etc.) one can cause with a given quantity of it. Tax the electricity, the natural gas, the gasoline, and so forth... Then ensure that the tax receipts are appropriated toward activities to mitigate the damage.
Now your hybrid and your electric car are paying taxes on what fuel them. The hard part comes in convincing governments to match the income with the expenditures. Somewhere along the line, some legislator will propose using some of the fuel tax to pay for domestic violence programs or Medicare, and a second will propose raising one of the fuel taxes just because he doesn't like that energy source or who makes it or who consumes it. But even with those predictable lunacies, it will be a better-administered tax than a per-mile tax.
To propose eliminating bridges suggests that you don't live near any. Have you ever seen a train go across a bridge?
This is massively different from a gas tax, and we can show it easily with a pickup truck and a hybrid car. People spent extra money to get hybrids to lower their MPG costs (primarily fuel, including fuel taxes). A Prius burns 1 gallon for every 3 that a pickup truck might. So if pickup truck drivers switch to hybrid cars, that cuts out 2/3 of their fuel taxes. Incentive: hybrids. If we tax by the mile, the pickup and the hybrid get the same charge, so why buy a new vehicle? Incentive: old pickup. And if we tax solely by miles driven, the semi driver loves it -- his tax bill may even go down. The open question is, will we tax bicyclists and pedestrians for miles ridden/walked?
To build on it, part of the theory here is that if you are too far from the norm, you can't fit in. If you are only moderately above the norm, you can fit in sufficiently to use your IQ to your advantage. Though most of Gladwell's texts are intended for Dilbertian management to read and then formulate vast policies on things they barely understand.
If you accept that some people are born into a disadvantaged situation, then the rational response is to look for ways to address the disadvantage. This could and does take many different forms (work for benefits, scholarships, micro-loans, basic health care). We should not look at a failed example and simply respond "it is better to do nothing". We simply need to keep working on finding solutions that work.
Fully agree. These forms of help are more like a hand up rather than a hand-out. There is a place in society for giving without any expectations, but that place is the hands of charitable individuals.
The goal of government to promote the general welfare cannot be achieved solely by redistribution. Rather, we ought to reinstate programs like FDR's CCC and WPA so that those who are capable of work but are out of work can make a positive contribution to some part of the economy and community in exchange for their government check. Be it tutoring, litter clean-up, building homes with Habitat for Humanity -- something that gives back. When so many states, counties, and cities are wrestling with how to cut funds because they are running deficits, I do not wish to needlessly put those government workers out of jobs, but for all the tasks they can't get to because there aren't enough of them, we have an unemployed citizenry which could step in and help.
Motivated people are going to actively seek out opportunities for advancement. You don't need a test to identify them.
Once they've made it out of school and into the workforce, they will be free to follow their motivation. You will see them advance in the office, in the community, in the criminal gang, or wherever they choose to go. The youngsters in school who are being told what to do and when to do it -- these are the ones whose level of motivation and ability you want to discover. Because if you don't show them how to harness their strengths to benefit society, they will harness them to the detriment of society, or simply fail to develop their skills, skating by on whatever minimum they can do. And you could have, with a simple test, gained some insight into who was raring for greater challenges without them having to speak up and risk looking like a nerd or dork or whatever is your favorite word to describe the ostracism of one who goes well beyond his peers.
I heard a rumor that YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were considering a social media merger. The new company would be called YouTwitFace.
We've heard this lament before: cable TV let the "PBS Liberals" and the "Fox Conservatives" go off in their cliques. Magazine subscriptions do the same thing, as does the telephone and postal mail. Sometimes I hear nostalgia for an earlier time when neighbors knew each other, and discussed the town's affairs in the barbershop and the coffee shop. The downside is that nobody could avoid the town nutcase, and anyone with an unusual opinion or lifestyle or medical condition was outside the mainstream enough to be relatively alone. The answer will not be found in technology itself, but in human motivations: what drives friendship, and common interests? Was there ever a time when politics and debate was conducted civilly?
The quants eat up Malthus, but the economic historians know his data set was flawed. He looked at American population growth, but did not distinguish immigration from birth rates, and thus vastly overestimated population growth rates. He wrongly saw doomsday where there was none. Worse errors have been made in the reverse direction, such as fixing rather than indexing retirement ages, so that despite expanding life expectancies, millions of Americans expect to sit on their fat duffs for a decade or two and be paid for it. Meanwhile, nearly everyone refuses to see the financial impossibility of our current situation, believing on blind faith that because their grandparents could retire at 65 after working since they were 18, the current generation can expect a luxurious 25-year retirement at 65 after entering the workforce at 32 (after lots of college and expensive loans to help find oneself), all while spending every penny they earn on themselves and not having any children to pay half their wages for the current generation's retirement benefits.
That's the theory, anyway. The alternate theory is that economies are dynamic enough while containing enough "sticky" forces that equilibrium is never reachable. I ask myself, "When will the US housing market implosion reach bottom?" and then I look at what is said by the persons deemed to be experts. Their lack of consensus, and the paths they project the market taking in the next number of months with sellers and buyers, bankers and lenders, foreclosures, renters, and so on... shows that there may not be any achievable equilibrium.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.
Please, no. One good tweet does not expand well into a full-length book, or even short 128-page fat margin double-spaced quick read books sold at airport bookstores to aspring middle manager types. Use it as your .sig but stop there.
The rest of this comment has been truncated in compliance with the above statement.