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cjslep commented on Modeling a Wealth Tax   paulgraham.com/wtax.html... · Posted by u/tosh
macspoofing · 5 years ago
This is a great illustration that the wealth tax is not about rational policy. It's based on nothing but emotion and ideology.

We're not debating here the need for taxes, or labor protections. You don't get to justify bad policies by pointing that there are places where government regulation is called for.

Wealth tax is bad policy. Justify it on its own merits.

cjslep · 5 years ago
Your absolutist statements ("based on nothing but emotion and ideology") do nothing but betray your own ignorance.

As an American living in Switzerland, a "good policy" (whatever that means) here has resulted in: 1) no capital gains tax, nor any capital losses and certainly no carryover loss shenanigans but 2) using a wealth tax in lieu of capital gains tax to collect any sort of tax on those who have presumably been using their capital to beget more capital.

Switzerland does not have any flight of capital, still actively is sought after for parking wealth (which is actually an economy-distorting problem as foreign investors seek to buy stable assets in the Swiss market), and definitely still has an ultra-rich class residing here or moving here.

So, if you thought wealth tax alone was bad policy, how does wealth tax plus removing everything-capital-gains (especially the carryover losses which the current US President likes to excessively utilize) sound as effective policy?

cjslep commented on YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech   theverge.com/2020/6/29/21... · Posted by u/nickthegreek
cjslep · 5 years ago
When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer.

For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps.

It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary.

However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.

It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up.

We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.

cjslep commented on On Liberty (1859) [pdf]   socialsciences.mcmaster.c... · Posted by u/mrfusion
gentleman11 · 5 years ago
Which translation was it that you enjoyed?
cjslep · 5 years ago
Of Rousseau? ISBN: 9781981974566. Translated with an introduction by G. D. H. Cole.

I did not do much research into different translations of this work nor the translator themselves, before purchasing this book.

cjslep commented on Those who exercise free speech should also defend it even when it’s offensive   latimes.com/opinion/story... · Posted by u/undefined1
cat_plus_plus · 5 years ago
For the past five years or so, I prefer discussing current events with conservatives - not because I think they are closer to truth, but because they are willing to be a good sport in a conversation. This has nothing to do with political parties, which are both dumpster fires. Maybe Republicans started earlier with Tea Party and got worse, but Democrats are heading in the same direction after Occupy Wall Street. And I realize that conservatives are not super tolerant of rowdy burn cars/block highway protests. But in actual intellectual conversations, they are the champs. Sad because I though tech liberals were supposed to be brainy and open minded.
cjslep · 5 years ago
I think you've simply found the "able-to-have-these-convos conservatives" to have these discussions with and haven't found the "able-to-have-these-convos liberals". Note that I hate using these categories. Anyway, in my personal experience almost all the people I can think of that I have deep political discussions with who may fall into the latter camp almost never discuss politics online, for various reasons.
cjslep commented on On Liberty (1859) [pdf]   socialsciences.mcmaster.c... · Posted by u/mrfusion
dvt · 5 years ago
Just a few of the ideas that this seminal text brought to the fore:

    - The Marketplace of Ideas
    - The Harm Principle
    - Utilitarianism as the moral mechanism of social policy
One of my all-time favorite pieces of political philosophy. I wish more people (not just philosophers or political scientists) took the time to read it. Also consider checking out Hobbes' Leviathan[1] and Rousseau's On the Social Contract[2].

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm

[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm

cjslep · 5 years ago
I just finished Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourses, and I really recommend reading the Discourses as they paint a harrowing picture of how any government -- including democracies -- can become bent to a particular will and therefore lose its Sovereign mandate: it will sound very much like the modern USA. Whether that is true is best left for another time.

I'm currently reading the book's predecessor, John Locke's works Second Treatise and On Toleration.

I think one thing that is very important to these books on liberties that is missed is finding one with a good introduction that can put it in it's historical (read: dated) place. It is too easy to otherwise miss that Locke is not exactly anti-slavery, for example. Or that the "family debate" and role of the patriarchal family, that left the suffrage of women in doubt, was not addressed. Or that the whole struggle for their times was really a question of how to morally justify rule by people versus rule by monarch (and your suggestion of Hobbes' Leviathan is actually arguing for the monarchy, on the other side of the debate). And this debate was otherwise taken within the cultural context of "Wealthy, Man, Head of household", which may be wrong on all 4 counts today (the culture itself is changing, the discussion is no longer limited to the wealthy, men, nor head-of-household family units).

The "monarchy vs people" debate of their time is not an argument we are exactly having in real life. And what I've found by reading the works of this area is: just as fans of this kind of liberty love to out the onus on the "other side" that they need to consider these points, the fans of this kind of liberty really have an onus on them to need to continue the discussion and update it for the modern world: as I move from Plato to Locke to Rousseau their writing really do faithfully build off one another and so it should be possible today in 2020, and modern writers like Haidt (whose works I have also spent time reading) do not meet this bar, I feel.

Without this, simply reading these authors and saying "see, America, read this and be convinced" keeps giving everyone the burden of catching up on the 300-ish years of criticism of these works and discards those intraveneing years' political philosophy debates. A major setback, in my opinion, as I may have the time and willpower to earnestly become a read person of political philosophy, but that is certainly a luxury of a wealthy individual like me (and the founding fathers of the time) and not everyone can afford that (and economic disparity is also a key factor addressed by people such as Rousseau).

cjslep commented on Facebook accused of trying to decloak domain owners' personal Whois info   theregister.com/2020/06/2... · Posted by u/DyslexicAtheist
holidayacct · 5 years ago
This has never been difficult to achieve, why is this a big deal? Privacy never existed in the first place. People have been able to eavesdrop on homes by targeting pretty much anything containing metal coils (including appliances) with advanced HAM radio equipment since the early 1970s. We need to stop pretending there is such a thing as privacy and start actually looking at where scientific progress is at right now. If you actually get a basic grasp of physics, radio theory and electrical engineering you're going to find out exactly how little privacy we have.
cjslep · 5 years ago
We can skip the formalities then!

Please state your full legal name, date of birth, current address of residence, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses, passwords, your favorite type of pornography, and your mother's maiden name.

Thanks in advance!

cjslep commented on A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website   coding.napolux.com/a-face... · Posted by u/napolux
lovecg · 5 years ago
The users don't have to be technical to benefit from those freedoms though - there's a level of indirection involved. I might not have personally scrutinized every line of the Linux kernel, but knowing that there are tons of people in the world with the ability and motivation to do that inspires confidence.
cjslep · 5 years ago
I am not arguing that one has to be technical in order to benefit from those freedoms. I like FLOSS and agree users in general benefit.

I am saying that your example, for instance, stills falls under the "how does a non-technical user simply verify the software they just downloaded respects their freedoms?" which is an very real educational and cultural problem. For example, see the massive money and numerous gun ranges, gun stores, gun clubs, and other gun-associated organizations in the US that work to educate the "unskilled" general public on "how to be aware, recognize, and exercise their rights and freedoms" under the 2nd Amendment while respecting local laws. Folks generally are 1) aware they have the right and 2) have a low-friction no-special-technical-skilled path to exercising that right. The FLOSS movement is nowhere near that level of educating and making aware non-technical users of their freedoms, their digital rights, and how to then act upon them and exercise them. Folks generally are 1) unaware of libre software and 2) don't have a low-friction no-special-technical-skilled path to exercising that right.

cjslep commented on A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website   coding.napolux.com/a-face... · Posted by u/napolux
Drakim · 5 years ago
Copyleft is about maximizing the users's rights, not the developers's rights. Companies can't take linux, put it on a router for sale, and then say that their customers/users aren't allowed to know what's going on on the box in terms of backdoors and spying. The users have a right to look at the source code if they wish.
cjslep · 5 years ago
It may focus on user's rights, but it still requires technical expertise to exercise half of the 4 freedoms: #1 (inspection & modification) and #3 (distributing your modifications). Merely knowing to ask "can I see the source code" I would put into the "technical user" realm. Overwhelmingly, most people don't know or don't care.

The other two freedoms #0 (freedom to run) and #2 (freedom to share) are readily obvious to non-technical users. "Double click to run" and "drag and drop <on external drive> to copy". Unfortunately, they are also often permitted by non-free/libre software. So non-technical users that can readily see they can do #0 and #2 and generally have no litmus test to further determine whether the software is "free/libre".

This is a case where the ideology's practical concerns hamper its purity. I critique despite generally liking the FLOSS ideal, but it's important to know its flaws.

cjslep commented on Facebook will block ads from state-controlled media outlets   cnbc.com/2020/06/04/faceb... · Posted by u/dsavant
Avicebron · 5 years ago
cjslep · 5 years ago
Woosh. I know the legal definition of Corporate Personhood. This is not the same idea as saying "I believe corporations are human-people", which is what the sarcastic poster was playing with. That distinction is the point of the satire: we all know you meant the former when you agreed with the sarcastic-poster on the latter; hence the satire exposing the absurdity of it.
cjslep commented on Facebook will block ads from state-controlled media outlets   cnbc.com/2020/06/04/faceb... · Posted by u/dsavant
Avicebron · 5 years ago
Except sadly I think they actually are.
cjslep · 5 years ago
Yeah my apartment neighbor, who is a corporation, broke down crying the other night from all the stress at work and the news. Cried really loudly, could hear through my walls. But at least their ex-wife-divestment lets him see his kids-subsidiaries on the weekends. But he's going to be moving out soon to be closer to his mother, who is a conglomerate and frail, so he can take care of her.

A real tear jerker of a life. But for some reason he never worries about eating healthy -- or eating at all, for that matter. Maybe I should try giving him some body-positive feedback for emotional support.

Bah, you know what, maybe it's my flawed humanism getting in the way, maybe it'll be easier for me to just become a corporation, too.

u/cjslep

KarmaCake day3057January 7, 2014
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I think I am done with this site. (June 30, 2020)

The very few of you who have revealed your humanity, hold on to it dearly.

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