skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problems, inefficiencies and personal objections to the tax system and government expenditure are all valid.

What is not valid is to use those objections to justify not paying tax.

Too many people use these objections to justify avoiding tax.
This is exactly how it is in the USA too, for about the past 20ish years now.

Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).

This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total.

So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
Once you add in Norways's VAT (equivalent to a sales tax) of 25%, which applies to most purchase and services, the effective tax rate is significantly higher than 51.75%. For most Norwegians, the effective tax burden is close to 75%!!!
You're looking at it as the customer being the people buying things off of amazon. They are in a sense, but not the sense that is important here.

The the sellers on amazon are customers of their marketplace. Much like Colgate and Crest might fight over ideal shelf space in a supermarket (and be changed accordingly by the market), the sellers on amazon must pay the price to be on amazon. Amazon has the power to set prices of appearing in their marketplace, where, and for what keywords. Amazon is also now selling their own merchandise on those same (digital) shelves. There are few alternatives to amazon for online retailers. So, to reach customers, many retailers must use amazon, despite the rent-collection they do. The next marketplace for online retail is walmart.com, which, and lets be honest, when was the last time any of us went to walmart.com...
There's a huge difference between discriminating against a day and a gay: you can discriminate against a day because it's Saturday, but you can't discriminating against a person because they're gay.

It's ok for Jews to be Saturday-intolerant, just as many Christians are Sunday-intolerant. Days don't have feelings or human rights. And there's not a long history of discrimination and institutionalized biases against Saturday, the way there are against gays.

Monday, maybe, but definitely not Saturday.
.. then try doing the same journey at the same time by car. More comfortable but much slower. And you'll have to pay more to park.
Body Area Network! Hahahaha love it, going to use this :)

The pump is actually just in your pocket usually, with a big cord hanging out ready to catch on things hehe. The CGM/pump sets are adhesive but not as much as you'd want sometimes.
With FICA and the 0.9% Medicare surtax in the mix, in California, I think you'd need an income of about $2,300,000 to have an effective tax rate of ~50%.
Would be funny to see Iran get really snug with China like Pakistan has... I don't think Iran would mind at all and neither would China... and would pretty much destroy the US's control over Iran's economy.
No clue. You opened yourself up to some attacks that weren't possible before. Is that worth the 2% interest? I can't say.
Not even days. I lost $24k today, and $60k since last week.

The thing that keeps you calm though is that sometimes it’s amazing how much money you can actually make in a matter of days, or a single day.
> An argument which implicitly assumes that the status quo is the only possible solution. Nice try.

I'm not at all opposed to considering changes to the status quo. But libeling (yes, libeling) taxation as theft is not going to persuade very many people to consider such changes.
The chances of every CDN in the world jumping on the bandwagon is vanishingly small. The Daily Stormer managed to find hosting. Even child porn manages it. That doesn’t mean Cloudflare has to be the one to do it.

That there are minor exceptions to the First Amendment doesn’t mean we should throw it all out.
OK. tariffs => printing money, so tariff is the root cause, no?
It ends with China being cut off from SWIFT and correspondent banking.

That would probably make them re-think their approach to economic warfare.
With the EU coming into its own

In what possible world is the EU 'coming into its own'? It's losing its second largest contributor and still relies on the US to defend its eastern states from Russia.

EDIT: to be clear I would love for the EU to provide a credible deterrence, its in the interest of global stability and peace. But the fact remains it can't.
>What you get from Brooks Law is really that one should never put more people on a project? (Late or whatever?)

Where did you got this idea from what I wrote (in fact, from my direct quote of Brooks' law)?

>That's an insane idea (it does lead to the conclusion that the optimal team is zero sized)

That adding people to a late project makes it later doesn't "lead to the conclusion" that "optimal team size is zero".

That's what's actually insane (one common form of insanity is following a logic to extremes without caring for nuance and limits).

Just that more people is more overhead (e.g. managerial and communication and agreement overhead), more people later equals more time to bring them up to speed and hand-hold them until they're ready plus the added overhead (related with more people) even when they're ready.

Brook's law doesn't say you should never put more people on a late project. It does say that you should not realistically expect the project to finish at (or sooner) than the initial estimate because of you adding more people.

In other words, for a late project with X persons working and M estimated months to completion. The real completion with X persons might be MR months, and with more persons X' it could get to MP. Adding extra programmers won't (per Brook's law and based on typical observations) ever help it reach M.

Sometimes adding more persons will make things worse, where MP > MR, other times they can help finish faster than the "actual" (not the initially estimated) finish date, so that MP < MR.

So it might still be advisable to add extra people -- it just wont (per Brooks law) get you to finish in M, and in some cases might even get you further from MR.
Same. At least they fixed the issue (years ago, to be fair) where you could log into your Citibank account and tweak the URL to see other customers' data...
The US Fed would simply buy the dumped treasuries as an emergency measure.

The Fed already owns twice as many treasuries as does China, so it could also just pause the balance sheet reduction program.

It wouldn't dramatically hurt the US long term.
The Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Thousands of Tardigrades on the Moon
I don't know about that. What makes China's political situation difficult is that the control and censorship they impose on their people is easier to justify when the economic fortunes of the average Chinese person has risen for decades. "Why complain? Life is getting better!"

Authoritarianism is a lot less appealing when the ruling party doesn't deliver.

In the US there is a sense that the political system is certainly influenced by corporations, lobbying groups, HNI, foreign actors, etc. but generally we are to blame for electing idiots as president. We did this to ourselves.
It depends on the company. Amazon values MBAs highly enough that it would probably we worth it if you wanted to work there in management. Most other modern tech companies, probably not.
A company that has a monopoly has to follow more rules than other companies because it can do more damage. Certain kind of moat-building is severely restricted for them, such as exclusive contracts or deliberate technology lock-in, while other methods are still legal, such as brand recognition or a rich partner ecosystem or simply a superior product.

>Apple guilty of refusing to deal with certain companies

Apple does not have anywhere near a monopoly in any of the markets they are in [+], hence the anti-trust rules do not apply to them. By contrast these rules do apply to Microsoft and Google, for example.

[+] in the eyes of the law monopoly means control of a market, and market is comprised of interchangeable goods. In this case iPhones and Androids are interchangeable - a consumer is free to buy a Samsung or an Apple phone and neither company is running the risk of excluding the other. Hence the consumer is in no danger of being deprived of choice, and there is no monopoly.
> In Germany, for example, gigabyte connections—which handle more than 1,000 megabits per second—are rare.

Probably gigabit connections? More than 1000 megabits / second requires hardware that is still rather uncommon in consumer grade routers and computers.

> Telecom giants in France and Portugal were already rolling out all-fiber networks early in the decade, in keeping with a 2010 European Union report that recommended that national carriers invest in fiber.
How Fast 5G Mobile Internet Feels

But Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s dominant operator, took a less costly route in 2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a technology called vectoring.

Such kind of stupid short term greed driven decisions slow down progress by decades. I've seen somewhere, that Australia suffered a similar problem, where government decided that copper will be good enough, and halted deployment of fiber optics. And now it's becoming a big problem.
Yes considering the US prints hand over fists amounts of money to deal with its economic woes, it's sort of a joke where the emperor wears no clothes, but no one says anything because he's the emperor.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/090915/quant...

> "In theory, currency manipulation and a monetary policy like quantitative easing aren't the same thing. One is interest rate policy based and the other currency focused. However, as central banks began their QE programs, one result was the weakening of its currency.

> Intentional or not, it can be argued that QE is, in some way, a form of currency engineering. Whether its manipulation that will always be up for debate."
I wish they mentioned https://github.com/dessant/buster which I love using
> Who's talking about North Korea?

The person I directly responded to was talking about China, which is YAGFTR (yet another gun-free totalitarian regime).

> No society is perfect, but it's quite possible to have a safe and free society.

That also lasts a long time without lapsing back into being YAGFTR? Japan was YAGFTR less than 75 years ago, same with a lot of currently "safe and free societies".

I am skeptical that a gun-free society can last hundreds of years without it lapsing back to being YAGFTR but I suppose time will tell
>You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity. Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was.

Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos there (referencing not only the ideology they learned from the site, but even the in-jokes of the people cheering for it on the site) before doing their own shootings? And then after that, do those sites regularly completely refuse the concept of doing anything to try to prevent repeats?

I'm sure that other sites have been guilty of bits and pieces of that, but the combination makes 8chan on another level than any of those.

I'm in the same boat as DonHopkins. I've seen people who used to be friends get sucked into far alt-right stuff through 8chan specifically. Maybe it happens with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, but I haven't seen it and haven't seen many people here bring up any experiences like that.
I run a consulting company for Amazon suppliers. We have roughly 2-dozen Amazon suppliers and our first-hand experience is that Amazon is absolutely stifling competition/business to the detriment of customer.

The biggest problem is `agreements that restrain trade` is a monopoly practice that happens across the board. They're a black box AND have tiny support systems for their marketplace.

One recent example. A client was on track to be selling $X-million this year of some appliances. Our client was forced to to stop selling because of trump tariffs. Amazon won't accept a "higher price" from our little company that only sells $Xm/year. I guarantee they're talking everyday to the teams at frigidaire/honeywell/GE/etc.

If their systems would transparent this wouldn't be a problem but their algorithms have blackbox variables for the big brands.
You mean like a ski mask? Because I instantly imagined someone biking while wearing a Beagle Boys style mask and got confused as to why that would help.
Using R to map how grid-aligned US roads are
If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.
Is that really still an option the bigger Amazon gets?

At what point is it a defacto monopoly? A huge share of people shop exclusively on Amazon, particularly when compared to 10 years ago. There's no sign it'll stop growing any time soon.

Choosing not to, or being prohibited from selling on Amazon effectively blocks you out of a significant share of ecommerce sales. There's no way around that.
Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
OneSignal, the Market Leader in Push Notifications, Raises $25M Series B
Extreme speech fosters more extreme views and welcomes people who would otherwise not feel welcome anywhere else which might bring them back to a more socially acceptable train of thought. 8chan and the like instead make these people believe that their ideology is normal and that there's a big community of like-minded people out there.

It's toxic and intolerable.
“It will happen” and “we are okay with it” are not the same thing.
Okay, no, Germany can't manipulate its currency as they don't have their own, they use the Euro. Germany does have large influence over Brussels being the economic powerhouse of the Eurozone currency union, and the European Central Bank is in Frankfurt but really accountable to no-one, being led by an Italian man from Goldman Sachs.

And yes, these 'currency manipulator' designations are a point of political convenience and are not evenly applied.

Monetary policy for the last decade worldwide has been outright currency manipulation and market interventions using devalued currency.

This excess currency has fueled bubbles in all markets: Rental, housing, stocks, venture capital, startups, art, crypto, government bonds, corporate bonds, junk bonds, collectibles, you name it.
"universally understood to be reprehensible" therein lies the problem, there is virtually nothing universally reprehensible across all cultures
This means you have about a million dollars in stock investments alone, which you put you in a different class.
Yes, but software project hardly ever tree-ize so neatly.

Talking to your team boss is good for high level guidance, but wont do anything when what you really need is the details on the workings of X a colleague knows.
Sales tax does not apply to most grocery purchases, so you'd have to be eating out or buying lots of stuff for sales tax to become a large percentage of your total tax liability. You must also then compare the 0%-15% US sales tax rates to the 25% Norwegian VAT rates.

Property tax rates are in the single digits (or very rarely, the low double digits). And only apply to property owners.

Payroll taxes are distinct from income taxes but reduce taxable income so shouldn't be split out separately...

So, TLDR: you'd still need to be making more than $300k+ each year for your annual total tax % (all inclusive) to exceed 50%. That puts you in the 0.1% of Americans.
> I'd bet my next paycheck you won't get a response.

Donate that paycheck to a good charity, I just responded.
Interesting. Where did you come across that stat?
That's a bold statement. We're talking about over $1tn in treasuries. While the US debt is already around $22tn, that's a pretty huge weight
Irrelevant.

Most of the people working in the State department do not serve at the Secretary’s pleasure.
Well, normally morality is "decided" by a social process, which also shapes the rules, so they don't often diverge by much. But my point is to separate the two issues: society decides the rules; who "decides" morality is another discussion.
Some real-time payment infrastructures to compare to:

UK - Faster Payments Service (2008) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

EU - SEPA Instant Credit (2017)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...

Australia - New Payments Platform (2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Payments_Platform
What are you even talking about? You get a magnet link off TPB, you put it into the torrent app or the seed box. No Tor needed.
How about we meta-compare instead:

http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/12/amazon-to-take-almost-50-per...

And that's e-commerce, if you add in offline shopping:

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/compare-brick-and-mortar-store...

So yes, Google has a much larger market share of "search" than Amazon has a market share of "commerce".
Look at their longitude and latitude. Those two are on the edges of Bucharest (which is why the one that you linked was set up in the 1950s, and the other in the 1970s). The longstanding temperature station is in the center of the city.

I think that what you are most likely seeing is the urban heat island effect rather than any incorrect measurements on the part of any of these stations. Areas undergoing urban expansion get hotter as they are built up.

The 2013 cutoff may be a limitation of the Berkeley data in general.
>I've always interpreted this "law" to mean just throwing resources at a problem without understanding the root cause will make things worse.

It's more about communication and coordination overhead as teams get larger (and new additions need to be brought up to speed etc).
For the record, asking such questions in a job interview is illegal.

Though it definitely still happens. Probably a lot.
This is just nonsense. All central banks "manipulate" their currencies. The FED did that by printing trillions in QE. The FED did that in 1973 when they went off the gold standard. The FED did that in 1935 when they changed the value of the dollar.

Funnily enough, the only way other major currencies can stop depreciation is by having more dollars. The way to do that would be more exports. But trade-warrer-in-chief just slapped 10% tariff on Chinese exports. If their exports go down, their currency will go down.

So, in effect, Trump caused the Yuan to devalue? So Trump is the manipulator, not China?
> and aren't expected to make a profit

Sorry to be harsh, but this "no profit" trope specifically when it comes to Amazon needs to die in a hot fire.

"“Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins.” “What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.” “When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.” Jeff Bezos is very focused on this “absolute dollar free cash flow metric.” You will see many people talk about Amazon’s focus on “growth” vs. margins, but the right focus is instead absolute dollar fee cash flow."[0]

Amazon optimizes for FCF and continually reinvests its "profits" back into the company. Check out their FCF: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/...

> Amazon is similar to many of the modern tech companies in that they're super well funded

So you mean Amazon is funding their growth with their customers cash flow? I don't get how that's a problem.

If you want to talk about Uber, Lyft, WeWork...that's another thing. The unit economics are just simply not there. Amazon should not be in the same discussion as those companies.

[0] - https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-fr...
The problem is that, in 2019, most obvious methods of scanning a laser with moving mirrors should be covered by expired patents from 40-30 years ago.
>Sure, we can say 1 + 1 = 2, and that's objectively correct

even that can't be objectively correct because it based on agreed upon the definition of 1, definition of 2, definition of + and the axiom.
In every rerun of this topic on HN, I've heard two countervailing viewpoints:

1) The 737 MAX is a perfectly viable airplane without the MCAS, whose sole purpose is to not invalidate the type rating;

2) The 737 MAX has dangerous, uncertifiable flight characteristics without the MCAS; namely, the stick force gradient inverts at high angles of attack. One comment[1] in this thread has even linked the relevant legislation[2].

So, which is it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20607242
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.173
So we should have just thrown away the first computers because inputting problems into them wasn't that much faster than doing it by hand?
Silicon Valley’s Latest Unicorn Is Run by a 22-Year-Old
Exactly! Saying that one moral code must be "superior" for we to push for it is injecting universalism (in the form of a single ladder of moral codes) into the discussion, which is exactly what we moral relativists do not find credible.
This article is pretty bunk and politically/ideologically motivated.
China's government policy and central bank tightly control the exchange rate and only allow it to fluctuate within certain predetermined bands.

"An official re-adjustment of the mid-point rate for the trading band is announced by the country's Foreign Exchange Trading Center at 9:15 a.m. each day, Shanghai time."

https://www.fxcm.com/uk/insights/how-does-china-control-exch...

So each day the government says what the currency should be and gives traders very little wiggle room.

As for the first question should they or shouldn't they do it, I don't know.