I was wondering about this too...
From the actual press release:
"Apple will also establish a fund to assist small US developers, particularly as the world continues to suffer from the effects of COVID-19. Eligible developers must have earned $1 million or less through the US storefront for all of their apps in every calendar year in which the developers had an account between June 4, 2015, and April 26, 2021 — encompassing 99 percent of developers in the US. Details will be available at a later date."
> The main idea of the non-compete agreement is that employers want to stop people from walking off the job and taking trade secrets to rival companies. If companies weren’t able to secure those protections, they’d need to pay lower salaries, and we’d all be worse off.
Anyone else confused by this statement? How do you make the leap from non-competes to higher salaries, or conversely, that a ban on non-competes would result in lower salaries?
I mean I think I can see the author's intent (that the company would need to divert funds from wages to somewhere else to protect their IP), but it seems like the rest of the article disagrees; namely, linking the Californian ban on NCAs to the innovative success in that state (and high salaries) would suggest that banning NCAs might foster higher wages. Intuitively, it feels like, in absence of a non-compete, a higher salary is the biggest deterrent to losing trade-secrets to other companies via poaching.
I think the idea is that the non-compete increases your value to the company, and that your salary is strongly tied to your value to the company. Both of those are pretty questionable.
By stressing "federal income taxes" I assume that you mean that there are local taxes on wealth.
I do not know how it is in USA, but in most countries there are taxes on wealth, typically at least on houses, cars and land.
Wherever I have seen the amount of those taxes, they were already too high in my opinion.
Moreover, the inheritance taxes are also a kind of tax on wealth and they are also quite high in many places.
In my opinion taxes on wealth should be reduced, not increased, because I have seen cases when someone happened
to be jobless for some time, thus having no income. While without the burden of taxes on wealth they could have lived decently for a longer time, waiting for an opportunity, the necessity of paying the taxes could force them to sell their property at loss and risk becoming homeless. I do not think that is right.
On the other hand, when someone owns much more wealth than would be needed to ensure a decent life until dying of old age, then I would accept that it is right to tax the excess wealth.
However, I have seen too many cases when the introduction of taxes on wealth was justified as "tax for the rich", but in the actual law the taxation thresholds were so low that the taxes affected mostly the lower end of the middle class, not the really rich.
> However, I have seen too many cases when the introduction of taxes on wealth was justified as "tax for the rich", but in the actual law the taxation thresholds were so low that the taxes affected mostly the lower end of the middle class, not the really rich.
Don't be deluded. These taxes are targeting the middle-class and the upper-middle-class (which is considered the "rich").
The "very rich" like Bezos have most of their wealth in stocks. These stocks will considerably go down if you had a wealth tax, and as a result bring little tax income.
How much wealthier would you be if you paid no taxes at all in tax year 2020?
An example with some made-up numbers that could apply to some HN users:
Let's say your net worth was $500K at the start of the year, you earned $200K income in the year and spent $50K. Without taxes, your end of year net worth would be $650K. However, you pay $40K+ in taxes, which makes your net worth <=$610K. So effectively you paid $40K/$650K = 6.1% of your wealth in taxes.
"Regular" people build wealth through income, while wealthy build wealth through appreciating assets. The point I take from headlines like these are not "US executives illegally avoid taxes", it is "tax rules favor the wealthy". Increasing tax on appreciated assets by raising capital gains rates, removing step-up basis, or (maybe) taxing unrealized gains could shift some of the tax drag on wealth from income earners towards asset holders. All of these would need to be done very carefully to not overly hurt small business owners, perhaps through something like a lifetime capital gains exemption (similar to gift exemption, apparently existed in Canada in the 80s[0]).
I'll admit, I read it as income. But it does make me start to think about the disparities in how wealth is generated across different classes of Americans. For me, wealth is almost 100% generated by my income, so I would say my income tax is basically a wealth tax.
You could calculate your income tax to wealth ratio though right?
The reason it’s important is that these executives are not paid “income”. Their wealth increases because it’s largely in shares of their companies and then they use non (or low) taxable events to get cash to buy their stuff.
This sort of activity is not available to people whose only source of cash is income.
I’m not sure it’s worth the unintended consequences of changing the tax laws to change this but it’s not poor journalism to point it out and start the conversation.
Edit: I just calculated mine and depending on how you value my home it’s between 5-9% for 2020.
From my point of view, it is poor journalism to use a clickbait headline ($13.6 billion is not little-to-nothing) and misleading presentation of data (incomes taxes of X on wealth of Y).
It's also lazy journalism as it just piggy-backs on top of the illegally-obtained IRS data from ProPublica, and produces all of its quotes from Twitter or other news media sources.
I don't. Property that is held (which can be held in a variety of ways by a plethora of entities) is targeted separately, just as income is, just as capital gains are, which property can also generate.
Real property (houses, land, etc) derive much of their value from the surrounding context - roads, population, jobs, etc. these are paid for collectively, so a property tax to me is more like HOA dues to the city/county that help make it livable.
However, if the property tax is higher than those infra needs, then a portion of it is totally a wealth tax. Just haven’t seen that in CA.
I don't know much about this field (and I did not purchase the full article), but it seems like quite a leap to assume this is a source of the gender-gap. First of all, you're talking about 80% of one standard deviation difference in reading-to-math scores between males and females - that doesn't seem like enough to study it as the cause of anything.
And how does being better at reading steer people away from STEM? There is just as much reading going on in STEM as out, and arguably more intensive reading in.
It seems like the score difference is probably related to the gender-gap somehow, but I doubt it is a cause. I would be interested in reading the article if it was freely available.
The funny version I heard was basically that girls are like super humans compared to boys. They're good at Math but they're also good at non-Math too. The boys on the other hand are bad at Math compared to the girls. They're also bad at non-Math but they're not equally bad. They're really really bad at non-Math and merely bad at Math.
What to do? For the boys the choice is easy - go with what you're best at. For the girls on the other hand it's harder - what do you do if you're good at everything? The answer is to do whatever you enjoy the most. So all the boys go into STEM and the girls spread their talents all over the map.
It's probably not a true deception of reality but it's certainly a funny one.
I’ve had this thought that intelligence and talent is actually very limiting. You need to be a little stupid to sit in front of a computer for 10 hours straight. You need to be a little stupid to go into a coal mine, or work on a fishing boat, or chase down criminals.
As much as we like to think talent = productivity, maybe it’s more of a curve? You need to be just talented enough to maximize productivity. Too much talent and you never get anything done.
It's a thing, and well-studied, at least on some levels. The top achievers in any given high school cohort usually aren't the kids with the highest measured IQs, for instance, and the kids with the highest measured IQs aren't usually more successful after graduation.
> that doesn't seem like enough to study it as the cause of anything
Unless I'm mistaken, their measure is basically Cohen's d, and 0.8 is indeed considered a large effect in the social sciences (look at the table in [1]).
Facebook is the entity creating this work, and is the root of the problem (by contracting a 3rd party to perform work that they very well understand the consequences of). The article is suggesting that Facebook should be held accountable for the detriment (trauma) that their work is causing. I think the article even argues that the contractors aren't equipped to deal with a problem of this magnitude/seriousness. Facebook is in the best position to rectify their moral accounts, but we all know that's not going to happen because they are evil and so forth.
There is a lot of sensationalism (see title of article) and high, anxious emotions around facial recognition right now, which really is to be expected at this point. But it is muddying the rational conversations we should be having about it.
Can Amazon lessen Rekognition's bias towards white people (ie. bright pixels)? Yes. Get over that.
This article completely whiffed on an important point regarding police use of facial recognition (or maybe I missed it) and that is _police_ bias. We are talking about one of the most culturally and racially biased concentrations of power in the country. It's important to note that they will NOT be training the models or writing the algorithms that drive their tools.
We have a chance to let some brilliant engineers create deliberately unbiased tools that can only improve the situation in America's police force.
PLEASE do not let your fears win. It will be used for evil and it will be used for good. That is not something that should be banned.
Sorry I started getting a little emotional.
The problem I have with your statement is that it seems to put 'brilliant engineers' on some kind of magical pedestal.
Engineers, much like police, are humans. Therefore they hold biases, they can be short-sighted, and they may not understand many of the long-term ramifications of their jobs.
All this does is move the power and bias up the chain from police to engineers while simultaneously making some very, very powerful decisions about what privacy is and what your rights are in society with 0 oversight from the actual society. In fact, police are (in theory) beholden to politicians and the voting public right now. If piss-poor decisions are made based on faulty software from software conglomerate A, who do we hold accountable?
>We 100% benefit by moving the power up the chain from uneducated people to educated people.
Most cops are college educated?
>They will have biases, but not the same ones police have and far less racist or sexist ones.
I honestly am going to need citations for that statement.
>Your average engineer is far more intelligent and introspective than your average police though.
Again, this is nothing more than a magical belief. There is nothing about the field of engineering that makes the people doing it inherently better than other fields.
I'll say it again, all you do is shift the biases from a publicly accountable (in theory) position to something hidden behind a corporation and unaccountable to the public. This is not a solution, it's just a shell game.
At least the cop and the engineer have BS in common, apparently.
As an "engineer" myself, I don't think my peers are in general much better or wiser people than the rest of the world, and I'm not at all comfortable with implicitly handing them an ever-increasing level of power within our society.
Ya they probably are a little different... a BS in CJ probably included more liberal arts and sociology classes that forced the student to think and talk about things like race and class, and looked at specific historical examples of social injustice etc. The engineer rolled their eyes at the required non-degree classes.
Intelligent, possibly. Introspective, I'm not so sure.
Being educated can help protect some against abuses of power, but do you believe engineers are immune to abuses of power? I don't think so. The mechanisms are the same.
What would lower abuse is deescalation training, dedicated, well-founded mental health care, decriminalizing drugs, and most importantly breaking the blue shield: holding officers accountable by actually trying officers that have committed crimes, increasing the power of agencies regulating them, weakening the power of the police union so they can actually be accountable.
Facial recognition just vastly increases the likelihood to locate a suspect. What happens after that, from detention to arrest through jail and trial remains unchanged, and is still conducted by humans in the criminal justice field.
I was inspired by Da Vinci in my younger days to become a modern Renaissance Man. Then I discovered that the depth of knowledge in any given field had become far too deep to ever hope at becoming expert in more than one. Sure you can still make art, and study mathematics and astronomy, and so forth, but it's almost impossible to reach the level of mastery that Da Vinci reached in his day. No one hires Renaissance Men anymore :(
In my career I've found that knowning "enough" about a lot of fields (often self taught) has led me to invent valuable things that experts in any given field would have never discovered. Things with many millions in sales.
Also I've found that experts in some field will say something is impossible that I, not knowing it's "impossible", will try to do anyway and find a way to do it by applying techniques from outside the field.
I feel these are my "secrets of success", other than a lot of hard work and persistence. :)
A more modest goal would be to remain open to the wonders of fields you know little about.
As one example close to my heart: there is a streak within the tech community that rejects anything that isn't "pure" science. To quote the only good joke from the Big Bang Theory: "Oh, the humanities!".
If you read Feynman, one of the more modern Renaissance Men, you will see this streak in action. He deeply appreciate fields rather far from physics, including linguistics, music, and art, and even succeeded in some of them independent of his main career. He also showed that "appreciation for" does not require uncritical believe, specifically minting the term "cargo-cult science" for what he saw as a weakness in the field.
Leonardo wasn't an expert in all those fields, if he had to ask how to square a triangle. The point of a Renaissance man is following your curiosity in all kinds of different fields, not being a master in all of them.
Becoming a deep expert has too many diminishing returns IMHO.
Just look at Japan where it is often the goal to become a deep expert at your career. I once watched a documentary about creating buckwheat soba, and the guy making it said something along the lines of "I've been making buckwheat soba noodles for over 20 years, but I still have another 20 before I'm a true master"
That's great some people are willing to go for the gold in an extremely narrow field (like buckwheat soba), but I'd rather have silver or bronze in as many fields as possible than a single gold.
The wider the breadth of my knowledge, the more I can use one domain to solve a problem in another.
I found this to be true as well. But I think having broad knowledge is helpful regardless to construct new mental models in the work we do. You may not go super deep anymore but understanding the basics of different fields of study is still super useful.
Something else that is sometimes forgotten - LDV's notebooks were for his personal use; none (that I recall) were ever published during his lifetime, and then they were "lost" (squirreled away by others would be a better term - ie, "lost" as in "stuffed in an attic in the back corner and forgotten about until passed - yet again - after the owner died") for a long period before being rediscovered and finally published much later - more for curiosity sake than for any knowledge contained in them, as most of it was out of date and/or rediscovered by then.
I doubt that he would have cared, either; his interest in bettering his knowledge and more were for his own sake and nobody else's. Many of the things he noted down and learned, then expanded upon, were actually well-known concepts and such that just hadn't been "written down", or if they had, they were generally done in a far inferior fashion.
Ultimately, though, they were for his own study, and maybe for the few others he (possibly) showed them to (students and/or people he asked questions of would be my guess) - to convey ideas very clearly, as if the actual device or object in question were in front of him or another. Most of the prior attempts at conveying such information could be termed more as "schematic" than as representative of actual form. Some weren't even that clear.
As others have noted, I wouldn't bother with trying to become an expert in everything today - that's a near impossibility. Rather, focus on bettering your knowledge about a wide variety of subjects that interest you. Learn how to apply knowledge from one area to solve problems in another domain. Learn how to integrate knowledge across domains to also solve problems, or come up with creative solutions or further ideas in another domain. In short, treat learning and creativity more like a child; play with it, and enjoy it.
That's a large part of what it means to be a "Renaissance Man"; to me, it doesn't have anything to do with being an expert in any number of particular fields, or even one field. Rather, to me it means having a broad knowledge base, and finding joy in applying that to learn in other areas and solving problems new to me using that - and, when I can or when asked - passing on what I have learned.
The invention of writing systems, numerical systems and mathematics, etc were huge boosts to human’s cognitive capabilities. Have those tools kept up with the explosion of available knowledge?
I wonder if entrepreneurship is a counter example?
True, people looking to hire someone are almost always looking for a specialist.
But if you are starting a business, you are almost required to perform many different kinds of roles at the beginning, until you grow to the point where you can hire specialists for all the various functions of the business.
But were they ever? All 'Renaissance Men' were extremely exceptional in their own time, and not exactly any sort of normal. They also seem to have made their own jobs rather than being hired.
There has never been a human being who "knew everything" in recorded history, though there have occasionally been those who were given the title.
The goal isn't to become an expert and know everything, the best people tend to be the "T" shaped, or "π" shaped in HR terms. Where you know an extensive amount about a small number of subjects and know a small amount about an extensive number of subjects. Strive to be able to carry on a 5 minute conversation about anything and days of conversation about a few things.
Of course it is! Finding joy in the learning and application of knowledge - for it's own sake, and for applying it to other areas of study, learning, or practical use - that was a key part of being a "Renaissance Man" (as we term it today); making money is - or should be - secondary to those goals.
"Apple will also establish a fund to assist small US developers, particularly as the world continues to suffer from the effects of COVID-19. Eligible developers must have earned $1 million or less through the US storefront for all of their apps in every calendar year in which the developers had an account between June 4, 2015, and April 26, 2021 — encompassing 99 percent of developers in the US. Details will be available at a later date."