jack_h (u/jack_h) - Readit News

jack_h commented on Amazon cuts 16k jobs reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/DGAP

The entire defense budget is $874b.

As I remarked, the UBI math doesn't work.

jack_h · 16 days ago

UBI would be pure deficit spending which would basically double it. Our interest is already the #2 federal outlay at $1 trillion (defense is #5 last I heard) and we're already in fiscal dominance. So the end result is UBI would trigger much higher inflation which would make those UBI checks worthless.

jack_h commented on I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude theahura.substack.com/p/i... · Posted by u/theahura

godelski · 2 months ago

Also note that votes don't just mean agree/disagree. I frequently upvote comments I disagree with and downvote comments I agree with. The votes place the comments in the discussion ranking so plenty of people vote this way.

One example of this is I might like a conversation that's responding to a comment I don't like. But it's a common misunderstanding so I want the conversation to be boosted. Therefore I upvote the comment I disagree with because it's parent to the comments I want to be more visible.

I don't think I'm the only one that does this on HN. And I think doing this can help reduce the repeated comments. In the above example an early common misconception might get downvoted, not seen by others, and then repeated by some, where it can then rise because it's seen by a different subset.

Anyways, I don't think people should vote strictly on agree/disagree

jack_h · 2 months ago

I also don’t think people should vote like that, the problem is there’s no way to enforce such a pattern[1]. Everyone benefits from voting as you describe, but that’s precisely where the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play. There’s also a size component to it. Small, tight knit communities tend to do well with voting, but as communities grow interactions become less personal, trust drops, and the incentive structure I described above becomes dominant. Voting essentially allows a community to establish its own Overton window distinct from what the official rules create, but that can be changed and constricted until a bubble is established[2]. I’ve seen it happen with countless communities across social media. Despite good intentions I think voting systems are a net negative to fostering good discussions and debate.

[1] Maybe AI meta-moderation?

[2] I don’t mean that this is happening intentionally by bad actors, merely that on average large groups produce outcomes that are dictated by incentives.

jack_h commented on I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude theahura.substack.com/p/i... · Posted by u/theahura

johnfn · 2 months ago

I wrote a comment saying that this should be possible with a proper playwright harness and screenshot taking. My comment ended up in the negatives (though curiously no one stopped to explain why), as if I was saying something so absurdly inaccurate that it wasn’t even worth rebutting. Thank you for actually running the experiment and proving it - I was almost annoyed enough to do it myself.

I couldn’t understand why it had happened - it felt about as logical to my mind as writing a comment that Rust was faster than Node. I feel there is a strong anti-AI sentiment here, to the point that people will ignore evidence presented directly to them.

Personal vendetta aside, I enjoyed this post! You had some clever tricks I wouldn’t have considered. In fact, the idea of producing a pixel diff as output was particularly imaginative. And the bit about autoformalization definitely hits on something I’ve been feeling when working with AI recently.

EDIT: I notice my comment yesterday is in the positives. Please don’t vote it up. That was not my intention here.

jack_h · 2 months ago

Voting is meant to allow a community to police itself to some extent, although the downside to that is it incentivizes controlling the discussion over contributing to it. It’s a lot easier to vote in accordance with your own beliefs than articulate counter-arguments. The prisoner dilemma takes hold, people stop visiting as they get frustrated by the downvoting, and a bubble forms. It’ll be interesting to see how AI changes the online discussion landscape.

jack_h commented on In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All wsj.com/us-news/in-a-u-s-... · Posted by u/nairteashop

gfiorav · 3 months ago

This is one of my pet peeves. If you believe in the welfare state concept, you should never refer to anything that’s subsidized as “free.” It’s a recipe for disaster. As a European who was uprooted and settled in the US, I’ve become painfully aware of how little we Europeans comprehend the workings of the economy. I believe this is partly due to the propaganda surrounding the welfare state as “free.”

Of course, nothing is truly “free.” It comes at a significant cost that must be carefully understood and balanced for the future. It hinders market dynamism and credit flow, which can easily stifle innovation over time. Calling it “free” is a mere emotional appeal, not a rational justification for its long-term sustainability. It’s no wonder that business in Europe, despite being more regulated and restrained than any other part of the world, is so vilified by the youth. We must stop conflating prosperity with corporate misgivings if we are to progress at all.

jack_h · 3 months ago

As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.

The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.

jack_h commented on You did no fact checking, and I must scream shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/... · Posted by u/blenderob

travisgriggs · 4 months ago

> The media have comprehensively failed us.

Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.

I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.

Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.

While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.

So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.

jack_h · 4 months ago

You’re using multiple definitions of “free” here. One is freedom in the Lockean sense, the other is freedom from the properties and consequences of an emergent system. It’s a bit like saying you are free to choose your own mate and have kids without government involvement but you’re still a slave to natural selection.

The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.

jack_h commented on Tariffs Are Way Up. Interest on Debt Tops $1T. and Doge Didn't Do Much wsj.com/economy/federal-b... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

walkabout · 4 months ago

Social security doesn't contribute to the general budget deficit. Its funding source is totally distinct. It doesn't and can't (under current laws) borrow to fund itself—if nothing changes, then as the fund runs low, payments will be reduced.

Mention of Social Security as a major driver of the budget deficit is a red flag you're reading something by someone who's ill-informed on the topic, or else they're deliberately bullshitting you.

jack_h · 4 months ago

You’re only considering one part of the system, not the whole. As the GAO puts it[1]:

> Intragovernmental debt holdings represent federal debt owed by Treasury to federal government accounts—primarily federal trust funds such as those established for Social Security and Medicare—that typically have an obligation to invest their excess annual receipts (including interest earnings) over disbursements in federal securities.

> Debt held by the public represents a claim on today’s taxpayers and absorbs resources from today’s economy, meaning that when an investor buys Treasury securities it is not investing that money elsewhere in the economy.

> Intragovernmental debt holdings reflect a claim on taxpayers and the economy in the future. Specifically, when federal government accounts redeem Treasury securities to obtain cash to fund expenditures, Treasury usually borrows from the public to finance these redemptions.

Or to put it simply the excess contributions are lent to the Treasury who uses it for general government expenditures. When it’s time to pay it back the Treasury can either pay it with tax revenue assuming it has excess or has cut spending elsewhere or it will be forced to borrow it. The latter is generally what happens.

I wouldn’t be so quick to call people ill-informed on this subject if I were you.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107138.pdf

jack_h commented on When private practices merge with hospital systems, costs go up insights.som.yale.edu/ins... · Posted by u/hhs

tptacek · 4 months ago

Every health system in the world makes decisions that result in deaths that could have been avoided had other decisions been made. I don't like many of the decisions our shambolic health system makes. But none of it is "murder".

jack_h · 4 months ago

I want to highlight your point because you're correct and this is something that a lot of people don't understand about economic systems. We exist in a resource constrained system. There are finite medical workers, finite time, finite medicine, finite medical facilities, finite medical equipment, and just finite resources in general. There will always be shortages and surpluses in such a system as resource allocation is never perfect. If you have a shortage you must ration supply through some mechanism. It can be by prices, by queue, by need, by lot, by status, or countless other mechanisms or combinations of mechanisms but you must ration regardless. This will lead to people dying under certain conditions who may not have died if some other rationing mechanism was used, but if a different rationing mechanism was used then a different set of people would have died. The only thing that can be done is to select the system that allocates resources more efficiently than other systems to minimize this failure mode. This whole idea of "statistical murder" would just lead to the banning of medical care entirely as no system has perfect allocation at all times, although some are certainly worse than others.

Plus I have no idea what the word "statistical" even means in this context...

jack_h commented on Gold hits all time high goldprice.org/... · Posted by u/tru3_power

throw0101c · 5 months ago

> If you increase the number of dollars but the size of the economy itself doesn’t increase then the underlying prices would go up and the value of individual dollars would go down.

Just looking the number of dollars, without looking at what they're doing, is like thinking you will gain weight because your fridge/pantry is stocked:

> But also – why do so many people insist that inflation is an increase in the money supply? This makes zero sense. Here’s why – our economy is mostly a credit based economy. So, if I take out a loan for $100,000 then the money supply has technically increased by $100,000. But what if I don’t actually tap that loan? What if I borrow the money because, for instance, house prices just went up 25% and I want to have some cash around for emergencies? This doesn’t tell us anything about prices, living standards or really anything. But this is what so much of the money supply represents – money that has been issued and is just sitting around unused. Why is this useful? It’s like calculating your weight changes by counting how much food you have in your refrigerator. No. That’s potential calories consumed and potential weight gain. The amount of food in your fridge tells you little about your future weight changes just like the amount of money in the economy tells us little about the actual price changes in the economy.

* https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-d...

Japan had an ever increasing money supply for decades and experience not just low inflation, but at times deflation:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1680i