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itsmek commented on US cities pay too much for buses   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin
littlestymaar · 3 months ago
What commodity isn't ruled by intergovernmental agreements, a cartel, a monopsony or something else?

Please name just one.

itsmek · 3 months ago
Gold
itsmek commented on US cities pay too much for buses   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin
axiolite · 3 months ago
It's not that pushing buses onto surface streets makes it worse for cars. It's that it makes it worse for buses, which then leads people to take cars instead, which makes things even worse.
itsmek · 3 months ago
I'm not familiar with the details of the situation but the tunnel is being used for transit either way right? If someone used to rely on busses in that tunnel aren't they vastly more likely to switch to whatever replacement is in the tunnel (rail?) than a car?
itsmek commented on US cities pay too much for buses   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin
littlestymaar · 3 months ago
There's no such thing as a “competitive market” in the real world.
itsmek · 3 months ago
Global commodities are not competitive?
itsmek commented on UK Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals   taxjustice.net/press/mill... · Posted by u/mooreds
u8080 · 3 months ago
It is not like that, usually immigrants live in grey arey keeping all contacts with govt to the minimum, the whole idea of hiring illegals is to avoid taxes. I know that from personal experience of being illegal immigrant in US of very close person.
itsmek · 3 months ago
Did you read the link above? The average immigrant pays $9000 in tax per year.
itsmek commented on UK Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals   taxjustice.net/press/mill... · Posted by u/mooreds
bluecalm · 3 months ago
>>Because physical presence incurs costs to taxpayer funded infrastructure? Why should I be able to dodge taxes by working remotely abroad? Are you saying independently wealthy people should be able to roam around and freeload without paying tax to their resident nation?

Yeah so tax their presence: land, resources usage, consumption. If you insist on taxing their whole world wide revenue don't be surprised when someone living across multiple countries choose one that isn't yours and then you get 0 taxes.

I live across 4-5 countries spending a few months here and there. Fair system would tax me for my presence/consumption/resource usage accordingly. That tax might be progressive (bigger house taxed at higher rate, luxury consumption taxes at higher rate etc.) but shouldn't belong to one country if you care about fairness.

itsmek · 3 months ago
In the US most things are funded by income and payroll tax, the taxes you mention add up to about 30% of our budget so are not enough on their own. In addition I am unconvinced that it is even possible for consumption taxes to be progressive enough to make up for their inherent regressivity at high income levels. I do think it would be reasonable for the global tax to be prorated by time spent in the US though, which would solve your objection.
itsmek commented on Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank   theverge.com/tech/781387/... · Posted by u/arnon
jauntywundrkind · 3 months ago
Nitecore is somewhat accepted as the best lightweight battery, but they aren't cheap.

10Ah battery is $60, 5.9oz. the 20Ah is 10.2oz and $100. Unlike the Hasbro, it comes close to its rated specification.

My backpacking trips have definitely not needed 20Ah. For two or three nights I can usually get by with a 5000mah, if I shutdown at night and frequently use airplane mode. And my phones are usually getting on, don't have Greta battery life.

itsmek · 3 months ago
What is your source for the nitecore being higher capacity than the equivalently rated haribo? All primary sources I've seen so far indicate they are comparable at 70-75%
itsmek commented on UK Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals   taxjustice.net/press/mill... · Posted by u/mooreds
SilverElfin · 3 months ago
What’s the problem with that? Why should the UK or any country have a claim to money people are making elsewhere?
itsmek · 3 months ago
Because physical presence incurs costs to taxpayer funded infrastructure? Why should I be able to dodge taxes by working remotely abroad? Are you saying independently wealthy people should be able to roam around and freeload without paying tax to their resident nation?

In the US many people falsely believe illegal immigrants do exactly that, and that lie has contributed to a lot of outrage, so obviously people perceive the system you're proposing as unjust.

itsmek commented on Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end   rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-... · Posted by u/alsetmusic
kevincox · 4 months ago
But by this logic roughly half of the population is trans, but the vast majority are afraid to present as such. The actual number of trans people is surely impossible to know due to these societal pressures but I find it hard to believe that almost half of the population is trans. I suspect there are other factors.
itsmek · 4 months ago
My read is that post is not arguing what you think (that it's caused by freedom to present how they feel and that it's a representative population) but instead that it's caused by a selection effect. But this argument is implied so I see why you mistook it.
itsmek commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?   nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm
navi0 · 4 months ago
It's the same question, really. If we make housing too expensive to build through stricter codes, then housing won't get built and at some point (e.g., last decade in California discussed in the parent article), the homeless population increases and people/businesses decide to relocate because the math doesn't work.

I don't think a full look at the history of minimum wages will be kind to their supporters. Minimum wages were created by labor unions for the sole purpose of excluding other workers who are more productive or less expensive than their members[0].

Going back further, labor unions were created during the railroad boom by racist white workers to exclude Chinese laborers who were 2x more productive for the same price. Instead of responding to competition by getting better, American railroad workers formed labor unions and lobbied politicians for relief, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act [1] that forcibly expelled 400,000 Chinese immigrants and led to some horrific violence and racism towards Asian people in this country.

In all cases, the role of government should not be to mandate wages or prices or anything else that markets are better suited to establish, or there will necessarily be higher unemployment. Governments can help by establishing some health and safety standards and policing abuses, but when it comes to accomplishing the social goals that minimum wages intend to, that's better done through tax policy and income redistribution (e.g., guaranteed minimum income, earned income tax credit, welfare benefits).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workingmen%27s_Party_of_Califo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

itsmek · 4 months ago
Ah sorry I was taking you seriously when you said "real question", I didn't realize it was a rhetorical device. The history of the minimum wage is pretty irrelevant compared to the economic models and empirical studies in that article, I'm not going to engage in such a pointless distraction. If the Nazis invented building codes I would still support them based purely on whether they are a good idea or not.

But you seem to be missing my point on housing code: do you support a nonzero housing code? Some is good, too much is bad. Same for minimum wage, many models and analyses show that some minimum wage improves productivity and counterintuitively increases employment in monopsonistic industries up to the point when they (partially) undo the damage the monopsony caused, at which point obviously a further increase in minimum wage causes damage as you say. My point is that your "real question" (which was an argumentative point in disguise) works rhetorically against nearly every intervention, some of which you certainly support (I tried to pick an obviously good intervention and came up with building code), and thus is a weak argument. If you truly support no market interventions I at least respect the internal consistency of your worldview but think you must underestimate how much food poisoning, fire death, servitude, etc it would cause.

itsmek commented on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?   nber.org/papers/w34033... · Posted by u/lxm
BurningFrog · 4 months ago
Many people argue that supply and demand don't apply to the labour market!

Often because they're not even aware of the concept. The more sophisticated claim that it doesn't apply to the labor market.

The minimum wage discussions are dominated by this view.

The supply/demand analysis is simple: If a worker has skills worth $12/hour on the labor market, and the minimum wage is $15, that worker will be unemployed, making 0$/hour. They'll also not learn new skills, since they can't get a job.

Try bringing that up in a minimum wage discussion, and you'll be called many nasty names. Often equalling market wage to human worth, which means you think the poor are lesser humans. A few sophisticates will bring up vague externalities arguments, as if they negate the whole supply/demand concept.

From my perspective minimum wage laws is one of the main factors keeping people in poverty, but that concept is impossible to even explain to most people.

My main thought about externalities is that they their effect is usually minor, and can be ignored. Many of them are also positive. For the bigger ones, it's a case by case analysis.

Is the externality you're thinking of something around the government paying money to the working poor?

itsmek · 4 months ago
That's a strawman. I don't doubt that you've read these things that bother you so much that you bring it up in unrelated discussion, but to the extent serious people critique supply and demand, they don't say it doesn't apply at all (literally all things have supply/demand curves) but that the market distortions in our concentrated economy lead to suboptimal outcomes for society and that the simpler market model (in econ 101 you learn this model is optimal under many assumptions including "perfect competition" that is rarely true of the real world) is an incomplete model of reality which leads to the wrong answer. If you're going to argue against anything please argue against a serious point like one found in an introduction to the topic such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage and characterize it fairly. If you don't understand this graph then you aren't ready to debate the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/media/File:Monop...

To demonstrate that this is a strawman, I will parrot back what that basic wikipedia article provides as a critique of your point: often in the real world that $12/hr number you provide is depressed by a one-sided monopsony (few large employers vs many small employees, a fact known as market concentration that has grown stronger over decades) and minimum wage can provide effectively a mega union against it to put it simply. When a market is dominated by a single entity what is something "worth"? You may say whatever the market will bear but in noncompetitive markets that is absolutely not the most efficient allocation of resources for the broader system. If insulin were a complete monopoly would it be worth $1M/vial because a billionaire would happily pay that much to save their life? I use the extreme to demonstrate the concept of market failure to you. By pointing out monopolistic forces am I saying "supply and demand don't apply"? Maybe in a way, but putting it that way is reductive and unproductive for our collaborative search for the truth in this discussion.

Or, for a totally separate but less abstract argument, say someone has no skills except for an ability to dig a ditch at $5/hr - it is low value because you could pay someone $50/hr to rent and operate a trencher and be 100x more productive at less total cost and a better overall outcome to society (I think these numbers are probably roughly reflective of reality), but this low skill person is unable to run that trencher. Is it better for society to "learn new skills" as you say by digging ditches for years? They probably would get a bit stronger but obviously never get close to the trencher's productivity or bang per buck. This is an exaggerated toy model but it demonstrates the point that many sub-minimum wage gigs teach negligible skills compared to formal education. I point this out just to object to your example - many people turn to education if possible when they fail to find employment, so to say sub-minimum wage employment will teach them skills whereas unemployment will be worthless just doesn't map on to most people's experience in the real world and to be frank sounds out of touch.

u/itsmek

KarmaCake day37November 3, 2024View Original