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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @note_bene 12 Jun \ on: Forget ‘no tax on tips’ — increasing the minimum wage would deliver ... econ
Partisanship and PR masquerading as "economics".
Why not Double Raise the Wage Act? By doubling the proposed raise in the RaiseTheWageAct, workers get $1,400B instead of the paltry projected $700B in the original bill.
[Insert Bar Chart showing 14 > 7]
Of course when answering why we don't just Double Do (or even Triple(!) Do) a Good Thing we now have to answer that there are tradeoffs. And there's very obscure and uncertain calculations trying to figure this out for 200 million different people.
I'm reminded of the Dave Chapelle observation that "man would live in a cardboard box if woman would fuck him".
He then extrapolates that civilization is downstream of this pressure: woman desires, man produces. And as Stacker News would note, the economies of scale that produce these cheap industrial goods (e.g. $0 water that comes out of your sink and leaves your toilet) are only available in a high employment participation society. (See also: South Africa, Tesla humanoid robots)
Another satirical and more wholesome critique that comes to mind is E.B. White's Walden essay, a response to Thoreau's frugal cabin in the wood's lifestyle:
The expense of my brief sojourn in Concord was: Canvas shoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.95 Baseball bat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 ) gifts to take back Left-handed fielder’s glove . . . . . . . . . . 1.25 ) to a boy Hotel and meals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.25 In all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $7.70 As you see, this amount was almost what you spent for food for eight months. I cannot defend the shoes or the expenditure for shelter and food: they reveal a meanness and grossness in my nature which you would find contemptible. The baseball equipment, however, is the kind of impediment with which you were never on even terms. You must remember that the house where you practiced the sort of economy which I respect was haunted only by mice and squirrels. You never had to cope with a shortstop.
Thoreau and Hickman (the OP essay) make us ask what is the human cost of making a living? Chapelle reminds us of the social / collective cost of everyone pulling back. And White reminds us, what is cost to those we love when chose to live by contributing so little?
You might be right on the big picture...I'm not there
Looking at the small picture, I'm assuming there will something like box 65b where you'll declare your total income from tips. Basically incentivizing people to fully to even over report.
Thinking more about this, I think a lot of individuals will attempt to roll "grey economy" stuff into box 65b. Because the IRS has always loves to go after people declaring $8k yearly earnings who bought a new BMW.
In essence the gov't is buying a valuable economic survey with by giving "qualified immunity" on a debt they've rarely ever been able to collect well anyways.
Are you guys hanging out with the same bartenders and waitresses as me? These people are not exactly George Washington level truth tellers, especially when it comes to paying out money at tax time.
Grok tells me:
In the 1990s, the IRS estimated that up to 84% of tip income, totaling approximately $500 million annually, went unreported.
So basically it's already tax free in practice, and the amount of cost and grief the gov't needs to go through to assess and challenge these small fry earnings is extremely high. There's this plausible deniability due to pooling tips from the waiters to cooks and dishwashers "tipping out".
I'm on team "nothing ever happens" w.r.t. this bill; meaning service economy continues unchanged, ceteris paribus of course.
Interesting side-point: the arsonist burned the home because he had used Apple’s Find My iPhone app to locate his stolen iPhone in the vicinity of the victim's house. (It was a false positive, the phone was not actually at the burnt house).
Geo-location technology brought the wolf to the door and then brought the wolf to justice. Strange times indeed.
To act collectively we establish collective illusions. This could be quite anodyne like all these kids at the music recital are talented, which even if they all the kids are not talented, allows us to put on the recital and have everyone feel good.
Once we've established the illusion it get exploited: machiavellian individuals can use the illusion to wield power and coercion, usually by coaxing naive individuals to spiral into delusion.
This triangulates those disempowered by the social belief, motivating these "outcasts" to attempt to controvert or overthrow the illusion. This causes a reaction among the believers who see the outcasts as attempting to undermine the premise of collective action itself.
In essence,
- collective action is more powerful than individual action
- we need to believe things (some of which are false) to act collectively,
- collective beliefs create power dynamics which inevitably are exploited, making them unstable
-
Progressive: removal of choice.
- Everyone must take the vax
- Everyone must wear a mask
- Every business must stay closed
- Nobody can homeschool
- Nobody can own firearms
-
Right wing: exclusion of subgroups.
- if you weren't born here, you're not really part of this small town
- Women shouldn't vote
- Gays can't call their unions "marriage"
- Infidels out of the Holy Lands
- Only Samoans can be real Hawaiians.
What we called liberalism is probably (and the USA has been pretty good at) is
staying away and moving away from either of these polarities - both the Left's removal of choice and the Right's institutionalization of exclusion. Until recently of course.
This is pretty normal since the 60's. People just didn't call it "poly".
Think about the tv show Friends: all the men and women paired off at different times. Same thing for How I met your mother or Rent. This kind of thing is very commonly in the restaurant business, resort staff, among frats / sororities, and of course FTX/Ameida (ba dum tss).
The difference with GenZ is this behavior is being explicitly codified into this monstrosity of all the worst aspects of HR/pop-psychiatry/family-law. It was always messy before we started calling it a polycule, but alleged solution seems (to this cranky old man) to be worse than letting it play out.
He's not really a moral (or even "amoral") actor like you're trying to portray.
He a mildly austistic big-picture systems thinker, but extroverted and inclined to action and risk and at times machiavellian.
Being mildly autistic, he is not as susceptible to groupthink and social consensus. Since the current social consensus is solidly progressive, if you're blue you will view his rebellion as amoral to evil, and if you're red you will view him as having integrity. But really Elon is just following the calculation of his first principles systems thinking, which at root both sides share: human flourishing.
I 50% agree with the consensus here:
- Agree: Women's behavior is Not a bug, it's a Feature. You are the product of several hundred generations of women aggresively exploring and picking their best option. Just as you're the product of several hundred generations of men persevering and innovating. You need to learn to fit into this inexorable facet of life.
- Disagree: I think many posters here misunderstand how dramatically the field has tilted in gender relations for people under 25, especially with social media / online dating. The level of mis-match is civilizational threatening and is not salvageable from a bottom-up exhortation to "man up". Where we go from here is an open question, but telling some young 20's kid to "stack sats" is not it.
Travelled down to Palm Beach to meet an old friend.
Ended up meeting a solana dev in a cafe: "I was looking for a lightning guy like eight months ago". Ofc showed him SN.
He was telling me how most L1's have grants for projects on their coin (usually $5k-25k). Has anyone tried these out?
Agree 100%. Why can't there by an e/acc charity that takes in a billion? What isn't there an e/acc channel on stacker news?!
A lot of people are catching on to this school of thought.
Some interesting ones of note:
- MacKenzie Bezos to Social Justice Inc
- SBF to Anthropic (which possibly led to getting enough compute to make Claude3 on par with GPT4)
- Jack Dorsey to various Anti-Racist / BLM initiatives
- Dustin Moskovitz to EA
- (what else?)
Beyond just today's headlines, there seems to be a long history of the non-profit sphere being infiltrated and subverted by a progressive agenda - Ford and Rockefeller foundations are usually the go-to examples. But overall, even twenty years ago it felt like charitable giving was more centrist where something like United Way - which would fund a mix of both religious-type and social worker type approaches - was much more common than today. But maybe that's because the super rich were more traditional industrialist types, rather than today's technologist / futurist set.
What are these mega donors buying for their billions? I would speculative psychological motives as: MacKenzie wants to be liked by cool people, Dorsey and Buterin want to be principled and visionary, SBF and Moskovitz want to expand their sphere of influence.
Beyond whatever policy recommendations are promoted by FLI, I think it's worth examining what makes these nonprofits so seductive to their benefactors mindset when choosing which of the thousands of organizations that could use the money.