We're massively cutting back on our business with Russia over their atrocities in Ukraine, but when it comes to human rights in Tunisia, we're willing to let this stuff slide. Sure, there's no war, but handing a country money to enforce their deadly anti-refugee violence is very bad.
This article was written during a time where the idea of a semantic web was still bright and strong. Scrapable HTML websites would have been at the forefront of interchange ideas then.
Gitlab implements this compensation model openly(to the point where there is a calculator for it!) - I don't remember how well it was received when it was first announced, but looks like Google is applying a similar idea.
I don’t think the calculator is public. It used to be and last time I tried it the results were terrible for my area I guess because there just aren’t any other technologists here so nothing to compare to - but that doesn’t say anything about me or how much I’m worth! Also when you looked in the data file you could see little pockets of higher paying areas - I guess if they can’t recruit you they create a little higher paying bubble for you. So I don’t think it works well and it’s also possibly open to distortion.
My sense from looking at it a couple of times was that there was more and more "exception handling" over time, primarily to handle relatively high CoL places, e.g. nice college towns, in generally cheap rural locales.
Right - and I guess the way you got an exception made was by making a fuss… which means it’s just as personality driven as before and isn’t really the open system it thinks it is.
You really can't make a categorical statement like that. I prefered living in an apartment because the housing density meant I had a grocery store, a farmer's market, and multiple other commercial hubs within walking distance. It also meant that street planning gave priority to public transport and pedestrians. There were plenty of jobs available within reasonable commute times. My neighbours gave me an easy-to-access network of people that you could befriend and somewhat rely on.
There's so many positives to living in an apartment that are pretty much direct effects of the denser housing.
No, you can't just move - the US collects taxes from citizens even if they live and work outside of its borders. You could renounce your citizenship, perhaps, I don't really know if/how that works.
If you feel so compelled to remain a US citizen that you don't want to renounce your citizenship, then again, you are choosing to pay the costs expected of being a US citizen.
And what if no other country wants to accept you? Perhaps you have leprosy or advocate crazy political views or something. When someone immigrates illegally as a child we don't dare kick them out because that would be evil and cruel, though their country of origin would accept them back. But if you're just born here, with even fewer options, the logic gets flipped on its head and you're supposed to accept the social contract under total duress.
As for McAfee, I would guess he did explore his legal options and they were probably no easier to swallow than the path he took. E.g. personal bankruptcy if he could even afford the taxes before he would be allowed to renounce.
I don't know what you're expecting to accomplish as a rugged individualist if you're incapable of holding your own land against more organized outside forces.
Is that sarcasm? I don't know many people who'd describe the US immigration system as welcoming. But sure, hypocrisy is often the result of nice consistent reasoning. Bend the law in favor of those we want to favor and against those we want to disfavor. Goals like integrity and fairness require a more consistent process however.
Not sarcasm. More a thought about "ratchet" dynamics, memes, and Markov chains, with some anthropologically-flavored cynicism thrown in. If you're a meme named "B", and you can make P(A -> B) >> P(B -> A), then you're going to have more mind-babies. The steady state distribution will have more "B". So norms that favor A -> B over B -> A are interesting.
Not sure if "meme" (US civil religion) or "organization" (US government) is the better description of the actor here.
Also a thought about how apparent inconsistencies, or hypocrisy, can sometimes be explained by finding an underlying true "motive" that explains the various "inconsistent" behaviors. (One example: People who are liberal in their adopted country but conservative in their home country, can be understood as simply being self-interested.) Though in this case the "actor" is not really a person, but an organization or memeplex.
> I don't know many people who'd describe the US immigration system as welcoming.
That's a fair point, which undermines the idea. Well, it's debatable, but I get what you mean. Yes: The (blue-state) norms ("welcome everyone!") don't match the reality (actually it's pretty hard). Say, if you're a high-skilled student from India you wait years in a queue; that doesn't seem particularly "welcoming". (On the other hand, it's easy to win the visa lottery if you're from Kazakhstan. I digress.) On a relative scale we might still call the US welcoming though; its identity is much more built around immigration than other countries' identities are, citizenship requirements are much lower than many other "developed" countries, and even the language -- a mishmash of Romance and Germanic, with a phonetic alphabet, inherited from a trading empire -- is easy to use at a basic level (though its inconsistencies do pose problems for mastery), which again helps spread/assimilation. And in the US you at least can't openly act like your country represents a specific genetic/ethnic group (unlike in many other countries, where that identification is tacitly and unapologetically assumed).
It's the "cultural/mimetic dynamics" aspect that was interesting. The "P(A -> B) >> P(B -> A)" thing.
That this is additionally connected to tax revenue is also interesting. Money enters. Which is another fascinating subject.
These things -- populations, memes, capital flows, births, deaths, conversions -- all flow and swirl and transmutate around, like the weather. I am on the lookout for absorbing states.
It is interesting to view as a kind of state machine though I don't know about treating it as a meme. Certainly a cold calculation. I've long thought that US immigration queues reflects the simple fact that from an individual perspective, if the average person wants to join a group far more than the group wants them to join, there will necessarily be a difficult hurdle to enter and a long line. I suppose this is pretty obvious, but an important fact of life. Also a different case of P(A->B)>>P(B->A). And highly-skilled students from India probably know better than we do how the high-tech pay rates in the US compare versus other places they might more-easily immigrate to.
You most likely do - founding a corporation is trivial in most European countries and the US. But you don't even need any of these things to get "access to the same loopholes" as "the 1%" - buy some stocks and hold them. You've now achieved the same tax "avoidance" that the ProPublica article is talking about.
One of the most jarring things about violence in SA is that the crimes are usually property related, but there seems to be a complete disregard for life by the perpetrators. Robbers will quite often gun down their victims or security, even if they're not trying to actively resist. I don't really know what the cause for this is.
It's difficult to compare crime statistics due to the nature of what is criminalized being different, but the numbers for South Africa are stark enough for this to not matter.
I can see that there were 22k murders on a population of about 60 million.
I couldn't find USA crime statistics for 2020, which has seen a surge of murders; but the 2019 statistics show 19k murders on a population of over 300 million. Even taking the increase into account, that's a factor difference of x4-5.
No way. Modern research has demonstrated how unstructured and unscientific our reasoning is, easy to fool and game, falling prey to a plethora of biases. If anything, rejecting your own and other people's personal experience should be the default, because the information we gather when not taking the utmost care to calibrate our instruments is pretty much garbage. A quick example of this would be how unreliable eyewitness testimony is in trials, but of course the sightings of various unproven phenomena(sasquatch, loch ness monster, etc) are also a great example of our "personal experience" being put to the test and found to be useless.
To me, it's more plausible to believe that the world we "experience" practically does not exist, and our memories and perceptions very rarely match reality, than to concede that these particular collective personal experiences amount to evidence of anything.
no offense but I think you're unfairly and inconsistently dialing down your personal reliability for your subjective experience in this topic because this topic has the implications and emotional and psychological baggage that it does but you would be much more likely to trust yourself in your everyday life with the things that you already know. And I think that's reasonable. if I had some experience where there was a UFO or aliens I would definitely be doubting myself. But I think given time, or given repeated experiences, or given other people who had similar experiences and if I reflected on it I could definitely come to trust that what I experienced was true. Maybe that makes me unreliable... I mean I am unreliable my memory is unreliable my logic is unreliable my interpretations are unreliable my senses are unreliable. But I still have to piece together an existence just like everyone does. Just like I think you'd believe the things that happened to you in your everyday life. and I don't think we can discount other people's experiences so easily. Particularly if yeah so many experiences. Even if you have an unreliable sensor or sparse signals you can reconstruct an accurate picture, particularly if you have enough sensors. I'm not saying that all of the people's experiences means that it must be aliens I'm just saying it means that something is happening and I don't think it's honest for people to judge that as oh well this just means these people are unreliable. If that's true then it's just as equally likely that your judgment of them is unreliable too. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The evidence in question is shaky at best, but even taking it at face value, it's evidence of...something. Our limited understanding and ability to collect and categorize information, perhaps. It's quite the stretch for it to be evidence of aliens, particulary of the kind that can be covered up by a government conspiracy. The whole theory is based on incredibly shaky foundations - we struggle to define what is sentience(what if we're not sentient? what if stars are?), what is life, whether there even is life in the solar system, what that life would look like(why would it use spaceships?), whether it would be even detectable with our senses and apparatus, and many more questionable assumptions to arrive to our concept of aliens "visiting" us.
"Somewhere in the middle" would be "yeah, I don't know what causes that, but neither do you" - that leaves us pretty much nowhere, very very far from aliens.
I agree and that's where I think we should be. I don't agree with your interpretation that it's only evidence of our inability to collect evidence I agree with your ambiguity. I have no idea what this is about I have no personal experiences of any of this but I don't doubt the people who say they have. What I doubt is the so called program insider whistler blower testimony. maybe that's ungenerous of me but I just suspect that it's probably easier to run a disinformation campaign with a small number of vocal so-called insiders actually just disinfo agents than it is, to get all of these people making up stories.
Tho as other people have said maybe they're just copying other people. Which I think is a good point but I'm reluctant to believe that. I genuinely trust the people who come forward and say this crazy shit happened. Because there's so many of them and it's gone on for such a long time. Also, i see there's no motivation to fabricate, not because there's no money and no fame, not because people are uninterested in money and fame, it's just because I don't think that so many people are so morally corrupt that they would just invent this stuff as a way to get money and fame for themselves. I guess I just have a little more faith in people perhaps a little too much faith than to think that.
