"Quality schools" are almost entirely about the student body, so it doesn't really make sense to say median schools aren't viable for the median family. Obviously you're not going to get a ton of doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. kids at a median school because the median person is not one of those things, and those people tend to care about "quality schools" i.e. living near each other and away from the median.
It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?
The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.
You don't need someone who knows those two lines anymore. You can just ask codex to make it so that users can't do whatever. It's highly competent at just reading the nixpkgs source, or it knows how Linux works and can write its own modules.
Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.
You still need to have somebody half competent to ask the electric shaitan to the thing and validate the result and also demonstrate this ability during the hiring process. I'm not sure it's easier than actually finding a person who can do those two lines.
If you trust someone to manage IT policy in the first place I'd think they'd be smart enough to be able to learn the basics of Nix? Like 95%+ of it is just declaring obvious settings that are already in nixpkgs. In practice it's mostly an ini file, but with the power to do more if you need it.
That's before it is introduced into the government or a bank. Those environment tend to turn every trivial thing into a multi year project.
It takes three really nice and cleverly designed things that are all very easy to use separately. Then you put those things into the hands of smart, bored and slightly undercompensated people and divide those people into four separate departments so they don't ever talk with each other.
Then you introduce a fourth thing into the mix, let it ferment for a while and make sure some people dealing with the first three leave the building and are replaced with total imbeciles who have no idea what they are doing and also never say no to any silly idea of their boss.
Then you ask to change something. Anything really. And it for some magical reason unbeknown to anybody involved at this point takes a few years.
Windows will not make it easier, but the institution choosing it, including all the people they hired on the market will have pre-existing and agreeing with each other beliefs of how much a shitshow this will be and will happily watch it happen paid by your taxeuros.
What evidence do you have that people borrow against assets as some tax avoidance strategy? What are the details of this brilliant, often repeated plan? In particular, where do you get interest rates that are low enough to make it worth it to avoid capital gains even with an asset that's grown 100x over its cost basis (and are you accounting for reinvestment of income like dividends that can't indefinitely defer taxes, creating regular tax lots with higher basis that you could sell first)? e.g. are they getting better interest than SOFR somewhere?
The framing was slightly glib, and you're correct that current rates impacts the equation, but there has been real damage caused by how extremely attractive this strategy has been over the past decade. We sitting on an unprecedented peace time deficit due to a failure to properly tax an economy that has been massively prosperous during this same period. This strategy is small part of it, but it is a real part.
It wasn't extremely attractive if you actually think it through. e.g. if rates are lower and you're willing to carry investments with leverage (that's the idea, right? Your investments will grow faster than interest?), why aren't you already leveraged up to your risk tolerance? I don't think there's actually a world where this plan works. It seems like this is a reddit meme for people who have never actually considered a securities loan.
Your 401k/Roth IRA (subtracting early withdrawal penalty) amortized over the loan period literally do count when considering qualifying income for a conventional mortgage. This is not a taxable event. You do not actually have to make distributions. It's just standard procedure that it counts when determining whether you can pay the loan.
People absolutely make that argument about property taxes. That's where deferrals or abatements for e.g. elderly or low-income homeowners, or caps on property tax increases come from. Someone may own a home that property taxes price them out of, forcing them to leave their community because they can't actually conjure money from a higher priced home.
I think a lot of tax authorities also don't really aggressively reassess that regularly without a sale, so it also kind of ends up baked in that if you didn't pay that much for the property, it's only theoretically worth that much.
This is all conceding the argument already. Many of us would happily accept these sorts of limitations on a wealth tax if it means there is a wealth tax.
Skip the line passes are an obvious sucker play; they oversell tickets to the park so that people can go on like 1 ride every 4 hours, then charge again to actually be able to use the ticket you already bought (and simply don't deliver service to the others). Do you think they are unaware of the capacity at which reasonable latencies can be maintained?
In case you, or anyone else, actually care or are interested, there's a great deep dive video on the history of "FASTPASS" by the youtube channel Defunctland.
Yes, if you don't intend to sell, and actually want to live somewhere, higher property values just mean higher taxes (or if constrained like with Prop 13, declining services).
This doesn't have to be true. Washington State, for example defines the amount of property tax revenue to be charged and then divides that in proportion to everyone's taxable value.
So if everyone's value goes up 40% your property tax bill stays the same. If your area climbed faster than others, it goes up but not by 40%.
If property prices increase 40%, then cost of living increases, government needs to collect additional revenue to pay employees a living wage, and that feeds into taxes. Even without higher order effects, the above chain was literally about net increases in property taxes to fund more services and saying it's fine because property values increase (in specific locations, too). But property values are not a tangible thing for anyone who doesn't want to sell.
I was actually thinking the other day that it makes perfect sense for AI companies to develop a professional services oriented software development arm. Imagine that you want to develop a training pipeline for "tasteful" programming: you might make a reward metric for that does some obvious stuff (nothing that anyone could easily agree is a bug like a crash, good performance, perhaps minimize LoC), but you really want to also want to also track "bugs" where the feature was discovered to be missing some unspecified nuance that was only discovered through product use, or train on ability to keep a small codebase while also keeping diffs small (essentially, "maintainability") as real new requirements come in.
So then you want a training set full of real product requirements and product evolution, which is something you could get if you offered custom software development, with a lot more control than you'd get trying to do the same by scraping random FOSS projects on github.
Other industries are perhaps similar. If you offer a service directly, you have much more ability to build collection of training data into the process. Want to make the best law bot? Buy a law firm, offer legal services, and integrate extremely deeply into their workflows. If their models turn out to be as good as they hype up, they should be able to scale to be a major player in any endeavor they move into with a relatively small number of staff and develop a strong feedback loop (not that that would be good for the rest of us).
No, ads are approximately never to your benefit, and if they are, it's entirely by accident. Their entire purpose is to corrupt your preferences or misinform you to the benefit of the advertiser. If you actually wanted to buy the thing, they wouldn't need to spend money on ads (and anyone competent would measure lift over a baseline, not just raw "did people buy the thing" for campaign effectiveness).
If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.
The ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores serve to inform me when stores that I normally don't shop at have something I already want on sale at a better price than my usual stores.
How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?
There is no reason we have to make the false choice you present. That is simply Google holding a gun to our heads to encourage us to choose something that is in Google's best interests rather than our own.
The choice should be between X targeted ads or X non-targeted ads. They can still target ads based on the content of the page, no different from how television and print ads worked prior to all of this data collection.
Because in OP's hypothetical, it is the equivalent of a gangster saying "I can shoot you in the face or punch you in the face, which do you prefer?"
They present a false choice where Google is saying "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" and we are forced to choose between bad and worse. There is no reason we should not have a less bad choice: the same amount of ads but non-targeted. We, as customers, should not be held hostage by the massive corporations.
So delusional that targeted advertising (a massively expensive thing to build) makes more money than random advertising, and advertisers are willing to pay a premium, leading to some of the biggest companies on the planet being in the business of targeting advertising! Almost like it's effective at manipulating people into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make.
And then entirely unsurprisingly, professional propagandists also manage to convince people that the proper reaction to being manipulated is "thank you sir, may I have another?"
It's not a mystery that targeted advertising works better than random advertising and therefore commands a premium. It's an unjustified leap from that to the scary sounding 'manipulation'.
> In psychology, manipulation is defined as an deliberate action that aims to influence or control another person in an underhanded or subtle manner which facilitates one's personal motives.
Does that not describe pretty much all advertising? It's not like advertisers are going out and researching all other deals that are out there and making sure that theirs really is the best, and then paying to put theirs in front of you because they're just so great and want to help you out.
No, they're putting themselves in front of you and hoping you don't notice that they're just another white label of some Alibaba special that costs 10% more than the other Alibaba white label. Or trying to pound into your head through constant repeated messaging that you want their thing when you don't, actually (oh and ignore that it will make you fat, give you cancer, lead to your financial ruin, etc. It's fun. And cool people do it. In fact only uncool people don't). Playing happy music when it's them. Playing stern music when it's their opponents. Look, if you gamble with us, you can be a BIG WINNER! LOOK HOW HAPPY AND RICH YOU COULD BE! etc.
Then to make it extra effective, they spy on you to learn everything about your life, and intentionally feed your insecurities to make you into a softer target. Some kids might end up killing themselves when they take that a bit too far, but hey, what can you do?
There is no ethical low to which that segment of society will not sink.
> Should universities be banned from offering financial aid to lower-wealth students?
Yes, that is transparently a scam that let's them set the price to "whatever you've got (or could access via loans)." That is exactly the type of thing that should be banned.
Wealth redistribution should be a transparent government policy, not individualized pricing, which makes it impossible for anyone to know ahead of time what anything costs, completely destroying any ability to plan or even have a meaningful concept of money.
Insurance makes more sense to have different factors for premiums, but the market would likely function much better if their algorithms were required to be public.
At least in some cases, that would likely have the effect of making college education less accessible to poorer people. The richer people are currently subsidizing the poorer people; if you disallow that and have everyone pay the average, the richer students would pay less, but the poorer students would be priced out entirely. I think that would end up being a net negative for society.
(I agree the U.S. university pricing system as it stands is far from perfect.)
Wealth redistribution at point-of-sale is simply an insane policy. If you want to have transfers to the poor, provide transfers to the poor. If you want the government to provide aid, apply once with the governemnt, be approved for some level of aid, and then comparison shop with schools' published prices.
People saying "oh but the poor" are emotionally manipulating you to enable themselves to maximally extract from each person.
That's fair, and I agree a more wholesale policy could make more sense (though a government may still wish to limit some redistributed funds to being spendable only on things like college education, in which case you're approximately back in the same effective place). Bringing it back to the original topic, though, that sort of system is outside the remit of the Seattle city government, so I still think it makes sense for them to limit the rule's applicability. (It might not even be legal for them to apply it to universities anyway -- I don't know what Washington state delegates to cities in that way -- but that's orthogonal.)
Obviously, I think your second paragraph is an extreme overreaction; I have no stake in any university's profits, and I am not attempting to "emotionally manipulate" you.
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