skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a few points made in original article, paraphrased:

1. lowering taxes will benefit consumers because corporations will lower prices (and definitely not maximize shareholder value)

2. taxes have loopholes and sweetheart deals, so we should level the playing field by rewarding their talents (or deep pockets) by eliminating everything

3. Only 10% of Federal tax revenue, despite the whales' best efforts at tax avoidance

I think #1 is the most offensive. The idea of companies putting excess profit from tax removal into hands of consumers is the most laughable argument for removing corporate taxes I've ever heard.
Heh, didn't notice until you and orf mentioned it. Good thing there's an unvote button.
Most of that is true.

But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen. And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while. And nowadays, the US mistreating its own citizen is getting extreme.

> Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rather been

That question isn’t nearly as easy either.

In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back. In some states (those which lived under communism), up to 20% of the people.

(This also answers the "I'm pretty sure nobody here defending Castro or Cuba ever had to live under a communist dictatorship" question, I guess? I didn’t live myself under communism, but I know quite a few who’d want it back, because they had it better)
This rhetoric is ridiculous. If I were to stash trillions of income overseas to evade taxes, I'd go to jail, not have the law changed.

> It may look unfair to tax consumers to compensate for a major business tax holiday -- but then such a move would give businesses a strong incentive to keep prices lower to avoid a drop in demand.

A drop in demand? People are going to eat less food because taxes are now lower? Need less healthcare? Will move to a cheaper home? Just not use internet? Drive the car less to work and sit more at home?

Supply/demand is crooked. It doesn't work for the majority of the goods the majority of the people purchase. Demand is fairly fixed and based on population, and supply is provided by the only bidder in your area.

> Besides, liberated from corporate taxes, they'd have more freedom to increase wages.

Does anyone still believe this 'trickle-down' hogwash?

I really wonder when America will have its wake up call during its third part-time job to pay the rent that maybe change is needed, and that your government has no intention of making it.
JSON Hijacking on the Modern Web
FOSDEM 2017 Electronic Design Automation Devroom Call for Participation
Wage stagnation and technological stagnation are separate issues though. I don't think anyone who has studied the period seriously disputes that the Industrial Revolution was a period of hitherto unparalleled technological innovation or that wages collapsed in some sectors, often as a direct consequence of that innovation. And - as you correctly point out, on a scale of centuries rather than the average person's experience - life definitely got a lot better for everyone as a result. It got better for the wealthier much faster, of course.

Today's enabling technology that allows greater innovation is based on silicon rather than steam power, but if anything our situation is more optimistic than before: mobile phones found their way into the hands of the poorest far more rapidly than early twentieth century home appliances, and greater resources (if not political will) exist to support the losers from today's technological change.

I don't believe in technological singularities or longevity escape velocity, but that's really not required to believe that Eroom's law is no more an inviolable rule of human progress than Moore's
Or they just keep it in a cash pile like Apple.
Almost certainly because they assume the reader takes that as fait accompli.
I'm not contesting your main point, but sure why you're including Cisco and Oracle in the "top five tech companies". Facebook, Amazon, and Intel have bigger market caps.

Edit: Looks like you're referring to 2015 rather than present.
This article should be on "Don't reading list".

"Start With Great People" is wrong advice. If you knew who are great people you would be rich anyway. Also "Make Something People Want" is stupid - maybe one of worst advices. You will know "what people want" is only and only after you succeed.

The only and only thing which matter is: "do build it". Right now. No books, no reading blog posts, no HN will help you. And if you are reading this post - you already failing. :-)
I think you're using different meanings of the phrase... "well suited to everyone's interests" vs. "available to everyone".
I identify so much with this statement. Working from home has made my "daily grind" feel sustainable. The downside to all my remote roles is that I've struggled with insecurity with respect to my stance in the team/org. That, combined with social anxiety, leads to a bit of fear for the "fly to HQ" moments. Fortunately, I currently work with really nice/good/hardworking/respectable folks who (unknowingly) help allay that fear a bit.
I discovered that wearing headphones (even earbuds) for hours is pretty tiresome, so I strongly prefer using my macbook's built-in mic and external speakers. Obviously, this wouldn't work in a coffeeshop situation, but it's not a good work environment anyway.
After reading many reviews complaining about wireless headsets, I went with a wired one: Sennheiser U 320 https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B008VQ68C4. It's a gaming headset, but I use it for video conf calls and listening to music. Great quality and haven't had a single issue with it (other than being less convenient than a wireless headset).
It's for everybody, but it may not be necessary for everybody.
The article has been updated with a note that addresses this. It's at the very end.
Given that the companies you mention only employ a tiny fraction of the work force, and that in developed countries small businesses employ over half of the workforce, I can only see the abolishment of any corporate income taxes as an excellent trigger for job creation.
Very few people what to go 8 hours without a break.
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A lot of people would say that, actually. World leaders throughout history have always picked up religions, ideologies as a way to get additional support, not because it's something they believe in or want implemented.
And a self-cleaning toilet with that brush and software would be more effective and cheaper...
The author is confused over terminology. The control strip above the keyboard is called the Touch Bar. The main pointer input device is the Trackpad. Neither is called Touch Pad.
I don't know precisely what "removal of sovereignty" means, but I suspect it means that undocumented immigrants undermine USA laws, by routinely breaking them. Even from the outside that seems different than debating (and voting) what the laws should be... One suspects you'd be more sensitive to this difference if the laws in question were those that you strongly support.
When I was a kid I did pipeline work during summer breaks. Lots of kids are out of school during harvest season, one of the major reasons for kids even having school breaks.
> and so should be replaced with taxes on private wealth or on consumption.

The article notably does not make the case for a wealth tax. It proposes making up revenue with income and consumption taxes. The result would be a transfer of wealth towards the ultrarich.
Not on any significant scale no. And trying to make the 99% buy into something by making that exact claim ("not only rich people own stocks") has been thoroughly debunked as propaganda.

Yes, you are correct, but only academically. In practice the 99% benefit very little from the stock market while the 1% makes most of their money from it.
Correct. But their surrogates have.
We can debate all we want about Communism and democracy, but if history is any guide, democracy has definitely had more positive effect on the world.

Communism looks awesome on paper, but hardly works in practice.
The Cuban revolution was a part of the broader anti-colonial struggle in the post-war period. Many of the leaders of that movement were inspired by some components of a kind of Marxist-Leninism but it was by no means the only influence.

Nor was there universal adulation of the Castro-ites by Marxists around the world.

There is a lot of criticism of the Cuban revolution, and debate whether it was in fact a revolution or a coup, within Marxism itself.

Castro himself was not a self-described socialist until after he was spurned by the U.S. who committed a major foreign policy blunder by supporting Batista, the landowner class, and the existing regime long after they had shown themselves to be brutal and corrupt and after Castro had overthrown them.

Castro threw himself into the Stalinist bloc out of necessity. Blame for the 50 year trajectory of Cuba can be placed squarely on ineptness of U.S. foreign policy to deal with the post-colonial reality. They committed similar and in fact bloodier and worse blunders in central America throughout the 70s and 80s with Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guetemala.

A very sad incompetent and shameful history that Obama looked like he was finally willing to confront.
And returning that money to shareholders (dividends) would incur income tax to the recipient, thus the tax-man gets his due. A much better outcome than just holding cash overseas
Why don't get why people are downvoting this. One may agree or disagree but it looks like a valid point.
In my company, everybody uses Jabra gear (because the company pays for it). I own some Bose Noise Cancelling headset, because I had it before, and everybody complains that there is no noise cancelling on my mic, what the Jabras have. Evolve 80, that's what everybody got and people are quite happy with it, despite the gamer look: http://www.jabra.com/business/office-headsets/jabra-evolve/j...
He said can be made, that's an option.
There's always more R&D. Google could always build a dozen more moonshots. Apple could spend more too. AI, batteries, chips, VR/AR, etc. The future is waiting for someone to invent it.
NPR has a recent podcast called "The No-Brainer Economic Platform" which includes changes to the tax codes that have a unanimous approval of economists across the political spectrum (e.g. abolishing corporate tax), but which they show via focus groups would be impossible to present to the public:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/26/499490275/episo...

Their other plans include things like abolishing housing and medical subsidies, which they claim just leads to price inflation in the longer term, but which are obvious political suicides to propose.

A text summary of the podcast is available at: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-p...

They did a follow-up episode where they hired an actor to play a politician advocating these policies, and tried to convince focus groups of voters:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/11/02/500413695/episo...

The point of these episodes was not to try to present some absolute truth about economic policies, but rather to demonstrate that while there are certain things experts universally or near-universally agree on, convincing voters of these policies can be a hard sell.

E.g. they argue that eliminating mortgage tax deduction would have the counter-intuitive long-term benefit of making houses more affordable. But when you try to explain that to people you've lost most of them once they realize that in the shorter term their existing mortgage would go up.
I see my wife as "family."

You don't abandon family.

Then again I'm Asian so perhaps our sense of family is different. For example, we often treat our cousins like siblings.
'repulsively regressive' is an uninteresting cliched opinion. How about explaining why you take this view taking into account that the tax means that someone has less money to play with - could be employees, shareholders, consumers who pay higher prices for the goods produced or all three groups who might otherwise gain from business expansion. The money could go into a pot of course but it's used in the same ways ultimately.
I think the main argument for abolishing corporate taxes is that they're inherently regressive, if we assume that the taxes get passed on to either consumers (who may be poor) in the form of higher prices, or investors (like grandma holding retirement shares) in the form of lower stock prices.

There's certainly an argument to made that corporate taxes should be abolished, and personal taxes increased instead (income and capital gains), where we can ensure that the equivalent amount of taxation is applied progressively, through higher tax rates on the rich.

Because the key thing to remember is, corporations don't exist on their own -- they have human owners. So if you tax the rich owners directly, instead of taxing the corporation, you can get the same money but with finer-grained control -- you can progressively tax the rich owners more, and grandma's pension less.

(Of course, if you don't believe in progressive taxation, then corporate tax, sales tax, property tax, etc. are all just fine.)
The article fails to point out that if corporate tax rates are reduced wages and/or shareholder revenues have to increase—the money must go somewhere.

Of course they fail to point that out, because there is a strong counterfactual in the way many rich companies let cash sit in bank accounts for an indefinite amount of time.
Did your symptoms ever manifest on your skin? If so, did the propranolol affect that at all?
This would have the unintended/intended consequence of increasing the value of the dollar vs currencies around the world. I think to an extent US administrations see the corporate tax rate and specifically the ability to apply lower rates for repatriated foreign profits as a policy tool for manipulating the strength of the dollar should they need too.
We have a generation starting to fall behind _beacause_ of college. They begin a cycle of debt they can't escape.
That's true I wrote imprecisely, thanks for the correction.
Blue Yeti microphone + semi open sennheiser headphones.
Because you have to draw the line somewhere.

Morale/ethics do change over time, but not killing people has been shown throughout history to be the bare minimum for a decent society, and an accepted standard today. We can discuss and expand on adding more species, kingdoms and domains, but humans are not up for discussion.
I presume what the poster wanted to say is that BH6 made them believe even robots can look and feel humane (and possibly also that they can be made soft, translating in less injuries for the people they care of)
Well good. Once upon a time we had PowerPC and x86; and one particularly smart company was able to switch architecture without too much trouble to their customers.

Sure would be nice to have some competition to get things moving forward again.
> Wow, that's a lot less than I imagined from how he is described as a mindless killer, and the dictatorship as drenched in blood.

Yep. Would it likewise surprise you to learn that the Pinochet government, which is described in similar ways, killed (at the high end of the estimates; the officially accepted ones are 10-20% lower) about 3200 people and "disappeared" about 1000, over the course of 17 years? Also, about 30,000 tortured, though; I have not seen claims of this for Castro's Cuba. All this out of a population of 10-13 million. It sure surprised me when I looked up the numbers.

I'm not condoning the things either government (Pinochet's or Castro's) did, but they are both nowhere close to being "drenched in blood" the way Stalin's or Pol Pot's or Mao's governments were.
It would seem to me that since WD offers free arbitration the prudent thing in this case would be for every single person affected to file for it on the same day and simultaneously withdraw their money leaving only $1 in the account. A bank run and 100,000 filed cases would make for a fine mess.
If they return money to shareholders via buybacks, there is no tax. Only when the shareholder sells will potential capital gains be taxed.
Hmm, I still don't see it. The comparison to stereoscopic vision seems misplaced: we judge side-to-side motion by an entirely different (and non-stereoscopic) mechanism than depth, and neither mechanism is mathematically very similar to that of GPS. And my understanding is that GPS receivers compute their distance to various satellites, which means if all the satellites were all nearly overhead, I would expect the vertical component to be the best understood.

I Googled and found some vague and unsatisfying explanations, but, luckily, wikipedia tells us how to do the math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigat...
Flat tax ignores that people's ability to contribute differs vastly. Also, it ignores the decreasing marginal utility of money.

That statement basically means "fuck the poor".
I disagree. I think there's a multi-pronged, not-necessarily-partisan critique of corporate income taxes.

These taxes are inefficient: They're difficult to collect. They disadvantage small companies that can't afford costly tax minimization strategies. They encourage big companies to spend money on non-productive activities (offshoring, shell games, etc.) The point of taxes is to raise money for the treasury, not stick it to the man. Moral indignation doesn't put bread on the table, so if we can collect by easier means, we should.

Corporate income taxes are a big part of the rationale for the tax treatment of capital gains. The money has been taxed once, so taxing it at standard rates amounts to double taxation. There's an argument to be made for abolishing corporate income taxes and treating capital gains as ordinary income. Since the returns on capital outpace the returns on labor, in the long run wealth accumulates with capital and reinforces inequality.
For those wondering (spoilers), the puzzle he's talking about in section 2 ("the second puzzle in the game") is a simple puzzle where you just have to double the values provided as input to produce an output. The naive solution at 240 points he mentions is extremely straightforward:

mov p0 acc # place input value into internal register
mul 2 # multiply register by 2
mov acc p1 # place register value into output
slp 1 # sleep 1 cycle, wait for next input

The only way (I can think of) to optimize this is by cheating, i.e. by writing an algorithm specifically fitted for the kind of input we have to deal with. Looking at the input, we see that for example there are only 3 input values (0, 25 and 50) and there seems to be more zeros than other values. Based on this info we can try to predict what value is likely to show up as input and follow a dedicated path to handle it, in order to be as efficient as possible.

I must admit I was happy with the 240 solution and never thought there was a better way until I read this article. Now I feel obliged to at least go down to 156 :D
It's only half the picture.

A major source - maybe the major source - of massive unfairness in the US tax code is the capital gains tax. Tax on capital gains is about half the tax on wage income. This is justified by the "double taxation" of corporate income tax. So abolish the corporate income tax, with its myriad loopholes and ineffectiveness, but treat capital gains as ordinary income.

Wealthy individuals who make most of their income on capital gains rather than wages would then pay the same as the rest of us. I remember during the 2012 presidential election, when Mitt Romney finally released his tax returns, he paid less than 50% of my family's tax rate, on 100 times our income. How does that make any sense? If capital gains were taxed as ordinary income, his taxes would have been roughly the same as ours.
I don't really like it when people don't think mental disease isn't a physical issue.
Yep, you and I agree that those people are just wrong. It's a lot more like the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, at least superficially.
Slowing down Gravity: Copper pipe and neodymium magnet [video]
Because they subscribe to a given model of economic theory and understanding that is widely accepted?
This is an old release. The release schedule is outlined in pep-373. Looks like python 2.7.13 is due next month.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/
They are not constrained by money to do more R&D (or they would already be doing it).
You provide no evidence for your claim that building houses and producing food is fundamentally more valuable than building websites.

I meant that in the sense of [basic] human needs, if there is already enough food and housing, then there is of course not much value in producing even more. And I certainly did not want to advocate paying people high wages to pick oranges just for the sake of it.

But this touches my exact point, we use the price as a scarcity signal to steer production and it is certainly a good thing for products so that we are not overproducing things. But I am less convinced for the price of work. While it is good in the longer term to push people into the direction of jobs with unsatisfied demand, it seems bad in the shorter term because it leads to the devaluation of work in case of a high supply of work.

If a hundred workers picking vegetables can be automated by a machine programmed by a developer is these workers' labor more valuable than the developer's labor?

The value for consumers remains unchanged, the effort required to produce this value decreases drastically. In my book the developer should not get paid 100 times the salary of a worker just because he managed to produce the same value as 100 workers, he should get paid the same as one worker because they did the same amount of work, at least in a first approximation just looking at working hours. The benefit of the automation should go to the consumers reducing the price by a factor of 100.

You my argue that in this situation there is no incentive to innovate and that this is a bad thing and I agree with that, the benefit for you is indeed pretty slim, you only get to enjoy the lower vegetable prices. Therefore in reality the the thing should probably be not that black and white to incentivize innovation, but I don't think you should get 100, 50 or even 10 times the wage of a worker.

And just in case, I am none of the downvoters, I don't downvote things I disagree with.
The real enemy of the small-medium businesses
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2016/03/the-real-enemy-of...
South Korea is the poster child here, depending on how you define "western intervention".
What are you looking for---something mobile or something for your desk?

At my desk I use a Plantronics Savi 700 series. It integrates well with a wide variety of Windows phone apps---e.g., grabbing the headset will auto-answer, replacing it or pressing the button on the side will hang up---and since it's multi-line and supports Bluetooth, I can use it with my mobile phone, too. Mac phone app integration is less than stellar and mostly limited to Skype (not Lync) and whatever Cisco's softphone is called. (Older versions of Lync for Mac integrated with the headset, so I'm not sure if I broke something or Apple/Microsoft/Plantronics just dropped the ball.)

Audio quality is fantastic and with the default config, I can let the dog out and walk around the house without any issues. I don't recall how long the battery lasted with the default configuration, but I don't really remember running out of battery except on days where I have back-to-back-to-back meetings. I ended up switching on some power conservation settings that reduced its range, and since then I haven't had any issues running out of battery. (I just schedule meeting breaks to take care of the dog.)
If you had millions (much less trillions) in income to stash overseas, you wouldn't go to jail for it, even if it was flagrantly illegal. People don't go to jail for white-collar crime, generally.

If you want to go to jail, try shoplifting.