I've never seen a concrete or comprehensive description of the Georgist scheme.
Say I own 5 acres of undeveloped forest, valued by the market at $100k. Can I immediately know what my tax bill will be, given the tax rate in my district?
What happens to my tax bill if I cut down the forest and build a factory? Or a grocery store? Does my tax bill remain unchanged?
What if I do nothing with my woods, but the guy owning the adjacent lot opens a supermarket? I'll pay more then, right? How is it calculated?
Is there a Georgist story about incentives to preserve natural ecosystems?
Amazon wouldn’t exist without Bezos. It’s kind of a stretch to say he’s leeching off his employees when his vision and drive literally gave rise to Amazon.
Also I’m pretty sure Bezos doesn’t collect much salary. His wealth is tied to how much Amazon is worth. He’s essentially taking nothing from his workers because his net worth is based pretty much entirely on how much someone else is willing to pay for his shares.
Amazon also wouldn't exist in their current capacity without all their warehouse workers. I think the idea is that Bezos could have either sold some of Amazon stock over the years and paid his warehouse workers a better wage or he could have put some of his shares into an options pool for his warehouse workers. If he did that maybe he would only have $10B in wealth today, but many warehouse workers would be better off.
Instead, he kept all those shares and has more money than he could ever spend and many warehouse workers have worked incredibly hard and been unable to build any wealth over the years.
Is it unproductive spending? What makes you think that workers who want to live a decent life are spending unproductively? Why is it more productive to spend money on space flight initiatives?
> I think the idea is that Bezos could have either sold some of Amazon stock over the years and paid his warehouse workers a better wage or he could have put some of his shares into an options pool for his warehouse workers.
The board of directors can allocate stock to warehouse workers and/or pay them more. For that matter, you could send your money to these warehouse workers and yet you don't. This idea that Bezos should personally give up his fortune to increase warehouse worker compensation is a bit absurd. Amazon isn't a charity and its employees are not a registered 503c, either.
Yes, the board could have absolutely done that. And Bezos could have asked the board to do that as well, but chose no to. If the company did that, I argue it would have been just as successful (if not more) and many of their low wage workers would be more loyal and would have more wealth. The primary difference would be Jeff Bezos having a smaller fortune.
For profit companies can pay their workers better and still prosper. No one is suggesting Amazon should have been a non-profit. The suggestion is just that their CEO could have shared the wealth more with his workers. Workers who helped him build his fortune.
Microsoft wouldn't exist without Bill Gates, but that doesn't mean he's entitled to any and all benefit derived therein to divide up between his employees. It's funny how justifications for the wealth of these people usually fall to unquantifiable metrics like "vision" rather than concrete labour, which is the sole standard ordinary workers are judged by.
To use a metaphor, a slave owner having the "vision" for a palaestra including all its designs does not mean that he does not exploit the slaves (who, remember, wouldn't have a job if it weren't for him, nor would the palaestra exist). In the philosophy of exploitation, exploitation can occur even in mutually beneficial relationships.
I don't think anyone proposes that Bezos is "entitled to any and all benefit" that Amazon produces, either. Indeed his wealth is tied merely to his initial ownership with almost no additional wealth flowing to him in terms of cash or stock from Amazon. Whether or not warehouse workers should get paid more seems to be a very different issue than whether Bezos deserves to continue to own the stock he literally created.
Also your metaphor sucks. If you think that wage workers are on par with slaves, I suggest you look a bit more into what slavery actually is.
The metaphor is not formally equating wage labourers to slaves, it's an illustration of the principle of exploitation in relationships where, in a technical sense, both parties benefit. That's why it's a metaphor, not a simile.
You’re defending your absurd metaphor by turning to pedantry about definitions.
You metaphor still sucks because it doesn’t say anything useful. It’s purely an emotional appeal. You could apply your metaphor to literally any employment relationship and it’s no different. The CEO is (over)compensated for vision and so everyone else is exploited, from the Executive Vice Presidents down to the receptionists.
>The CEO is (over)compensated for vision and so everyone else is exploited, from the Executive Vice Presidents down to the receptionists.
The argument is not that employees are exploited because the CEO is over-compensated for vision, but rather that it follows naturally for such relationships to work at scale. Nevertheless, it's useful as a thought experiment, since it ought to make people consider the nature of modern work and life in capitalism. Indeed, some philosophers do apply this to all employment relationships[0], the most extreme argue that they are exploitative, the less extreme only inquire to the nature of our desires in the employment relationship[1].
If that's where the argument leads then that's where it goes.
The argument doesn't lead there. You started it there. Your initial premise is that wage work is akin to slavery. I disagree, and your response is "well, that's where the argument leads". No, not at all.
I'm a bit confused by your statement that "it [exploitation] follows naturally for such relationships to work at scale". If this is how it naturally works, then is there a viable alternative? I also don't agree that this is (necessarily) exploitative. Perhaps we have differing opinions of what "exploitation" means. If we have a business partnership that is mutually beneficial, but you profit from it more than me, is that exploitative?
I'd argue this is how it "naturally" works for the current epoch with the current division of productive resources, that is to say, it is a historically conditioned state of affairs, and like any historical period it is overcome. As in, the current distribution of property is to blame, but it's not clear that simply switching to a different model of distribution would overcome exploitation at large.
I think that exploitation can, in general, be defined as when A exploits B, A takes "unfair" advantage of B. In order for this to be the case, there must be some mechanism by which A has the ability to exploit B, which I see as defined by the distribution of productive assets necessary to live. It gets more complex speaking of how we define productive assets, and whether exploitation exists as a matter of class (neo-Marxian sense) or as a matter of profit (the Marxian sense).
> Microsoft wouldn't exist without Bill Gates, but that doesn't mean he's entitled to any and all benefit derived therein to divide up between his employees.
More people have become millionaires by being Microsoft employees than by any other mechanism. Via stock options, Microsoft very much shared the gains with their employees.
This is HN - home of wannabe Bezoses. It's a hard sell to try to tell a forum of founders and hopefuls that they aren't special and instead largely a result of circumstance and opportunity.
The problem is that if the state were to provide secure public-private key cryptographic identity, there would be absolutely no need for PoW or PoS. Eventually we'll figure that out, and all of this work will haven been useless.
Miners probably have a bit of a sunk cost fallacy, since there's a fixed cost associated with acquiring the hardware. Plus, if they're still bullish on bitcoin, the short term loss is probably worth it in their eyes.
I think you nailed it, although I don't think miners even need to fall for a fallacy for your argument to work: some major miners have made big capital expenditures (efficient hardware, cooling, etc.) to keep variable costs low over the long term. Even if the price drop means they'll never mine themselves out of debt, it could still be the rational thing to do for them to keep the machines on, as long as their reduced variable cost is still below than the market price.
Do most people have more than one theater that they visit frequently? I'd personally be fine with a subscription to just one chain, since almost all chains have almost all of the content.
Well, there are standard theaters that have the blockbusters, and you are right that the chain really doesn't matter, but there are also art theaters that have the more intellectual films not shown in the big theaters. Those generally aren't owned by chains. Currently MoviePass works with both the chains and the indies in my area. Which is great for as long as it lasts.
I only have 3 chains near me, but I visit different ones based on schedule. Theaters are a commodity to me, except for a few drafthouses that play special movies.
Emulating classes hierarchy using prototypes while always keeping on mind what "this" means right here right now at this very call stack/context, without async/await basically any resource loading (unless you use some lib that is hiding nasty pieces from you), no enforced object structure/properties and passing them arbitrarily and then in the next version needing to add/remove some property everywhere, and many more.
Dunno, wrote games in JavaScript that left people gasping for air it was possible in a browser, wrote most algorithms in some image/vector processing tool you might be using in your business right now where I had to interleave JVM, JavaScript, WebGL and GLSL in areas nobody tried before; wrote facial/emotion tracking system with advanced computer vision in a browser etc. Maybe I am not a noob you think you are talking to?
I wrote code in way better and more productive languages than JavaScript. I can somehow tolerate JavaScript when I write code alone, but once I have to deal with the fart-mess that most JavaScript developers write, I have to eject. There are very few JavaScript projects that are well designed and I always need to debug and fix them as I put most of them into their knees when they aren't working anymore. You have no idea how far "the best JavaScript" libraries are quality-wise from what you'd expect from a well-designed C++, Java or Scala library.
My bad. By the way, I didn't think of you as a noob, I just wanted to see if you have explored JS to the point of being able to use it predictable while managing a few developers.
In my defence:
I haven't worked on webGL or facial/emotion tracking system with CV in a browser yet. My experience has been more towards apps that tend to be very heavy in functionality, and are written with a specific personas of users in mind.
I have been using JS in a functional manner for quite a few years. And I have found that JS works best when you don't have to deal in classes when writing domain-specific code. Using "functions-as-first-class-citizens" is what I have found works in scalable way. And I generally get any new junior dev up to speed on basics of functional programming before working with them.
EDIT: By the way, I mentioned tensofrlow.js because with it, if you have a dataset, you can prototype the emotional recognition thing in a week or two. Just don't have the need/time to spend that effort at the moment. Needed to share that information in order to see if i'm correctly gauging the complexity of the type of work you mentioned.
No problem. I usually learn a new language by picking a very challenging idea and then implementing it; that way I can see how the language performs "under stress", though I might have skewed view for normal use cases. Still, companies seem to be more interested in the weird cases I am forced to explore (much to detriment of my happiness), and JavaScript was making me quite grumpy at times.
Right, with TensorFlow.js (or even better Keras.js) you can write a simple CNN in a few hours that given a good dataset of facial keypoints can allow you to build a fairly accurate (80-90%) emotion detection framework, and it's pretty fast. I am past this stage though; right now I have e.g. a working state-of-art model for detecting offensive visual content on the web based on very deep DenseNet, which might be difficult to fit into a browser implementation and the more Titan Vs you throw at it, the better; Python only then.
I agree, with functional approach, especially with the recent additions to ES, it seems like JS is becoming a quite OK language, though the issue of having somebody using ugly old hacks is not going away, unfortunately.
Usually in teams I worked before for anything more complex we used transpilers from one language to JavaScript and relied heavily on our IDEs to allow us debugging. Kotlin seems to be pretty popular in that space right now; if I haven't had some personal gripe with its authors I'd have probably used it as well ;-)
Good luck with your company, keep your eyes open for things to come! :)
And by the way, using python for training is a must right now(though JS is going to become an alternate for this in a few months, as tensorflow.js is being ported to node with bindings to actual tensorflow's C++ layer). Using tensorflow.js, I'd have been able to use saved models in the browser.
ARPANET/the Internet was developed to facilitate communication, remote access and data sharing between different computer systems. Are you sticking with "Why not just use a phone?".
If I can convince a user to click that, and then login, I can steal their username, password or anything else. Basically anything they do in that window after clicking that link can be compromised.
It may get logged by the server but if it's designed to be parsed client-side, there may not be any server-side code examining or sanitizing that value before the SPA gets to it.
DOM-based XSS is when JavaScript running on the client takes data from a "source" (URL parameter, DOM content, cookie, LocalStorage, etc), manipulates it, and then executes it on a "sink" without properly escaping it. Examples of "sources" and "sinks"[1].
I've reported DOM-based XSS on a website that parses user-generated comments for URLs then converts the comment by adding hyperlink markup to the URL. It was done insecurely, so I managed to use combinations of spaces and other HTML attribute delimiters to inject an "onMouseOver" attribute and collect a bounty (about $2000 IIRC). In my case, the payout was large because the data was stored on the server (therefore it was persistent XSS), but with URL fragments, it's possible for the server to never see the content that is passed to the "source".
The argument is not that everybody sees the same value in everything, but where that value comes from. I think the value of the food comes from the food (to the extent that somebody eats it). I don't think it comes from a thought.
The value for that speciffic food is nil (for you), but food in general is still valuable and has intrinsic value. There are people alergic to peanuts but peanuts still add value and nurture for lots of people.
Regardless, I fell like you're begging the issue. Not all value is relative, some thing are more practically valuable than others and sone, if you look at them objectively, are almost worthless.
So value is intrinsic if it meets some vague criteria of stability? How stable does the value of something need to be for it to be intrinsic?
Can you enumerate these "reasonable assumptions"? The idea sounds pretty dubious to me.
And yes, I would say that if the sun exploded, killing all Earth life, nothing would have value, at least not from a human's perspective. This doesn't seem to help the case for intrinsic value.
Sounds like a game of semantics to me. Value is a human concept, so eliminating all of humanity doesn't prove anything with regard to the nature of value, intrinsic or otherwise. That's like saying "poison is not inherently dangerous because without life on earth it ceases to pose a threat". Ok, that's technically true, but you're not saying anything meaningful since nothing has meaning outside of the human context. The point of labeling a quality as intrinsic is to point out that the quality being described arises from the fundamental nature of the thing regardless of how it is perceived. Food has inherent nutritional value because nutrition is a function of an object's physical composition. Nutrition has inherent value because nutrition is necessary for survival. The ability to survive has inherent value because it is a fundamental need of all living things.
I agree that food is pretty darn close to having a constant, stable value to all humans.
However, the edge cases aren't imaginary, and they give us a chance to refine our ideas.
Say there is a huge harvest and a town now has much more food than it can eat. A food merchant passes through the town and wants to sell some of his goods, however obviously no one is interested. Has the merchant's food lost its intrinsic value? Why doesn't anyone want it?
We can also consider the vastly different food preferences found all over the world. And so on...
Being a bit pedantic, food isn't really a specific thing, it's an amorphous category. It's literally defined as "anything people eat that provides nutrition", so it almost feels tautological to say that food has intrinsic value.
Finally, almost any other concrete, specific example I can think is much less universal than "food".
