It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.
The buy/rent decision is quite complex for many reasons, but two overlooked factors are:
1) When a bank loans you $1e6 to buy a house, they are effectively deputizing you to act as a money manager: they allow you to make an investment that will hopefully appreciate more quickly than the interest rate. There are many other investments that have this property (e.g. the stock market), but banks won't loan to you to invest in them!
2) A mortgage acts as a forced savings rate: you pay the bank every month, and when you're done after 30 years, you have a large asset. So a large mortgage is (for some people) a good psychological commitment mechanism that imposes financial discipline.
Many commenters seem to be appealing to an almost religious defense of present political borders. That attitude is untenable: there is nothing sacred about national boundaries, they are mere political artifacts like rules, regulations, tax codes, etc. If the people want to change them, they absolutely have the right to do so.
OK, but there are some logistical issues here- let's say Alberta votes to secede and this is somehow legally viable. All of the Albertan voters who didn't want to secede- including the native tribes- could then by your rules vote to secede from Alberta and join back to Canada. It'd be a mess. Towns and counties would split themselves in half, and so on.
What would happen if a landlocked town within Alberta wants to rejoin Canada- how would you handle that?
It's like having to belong to a higher imposed authority (either the original country or the seceded territory) is bad for the individual that doesn't want any of that. If only there was a solution to that problem...
Russia is currently placing Russian citizens in the occupied parts of Ukraine exactly for this reason. If there will ever be a vote whether the Donbas Oblast or the Luhansk Oblast want to rejoin Ukraine, you can bet the vote will be pro Russia.
The huge problem is that geographical borders don't nicely line up with cultural/ethnic/attitude borders. Let's say you let a province (or US state) secede over political/cultural issues. What happens to all of the people who don't want to go along for the ride? They're now at a huge risk. Those dissenters might even be persecuted or, at worst, cleansed, depending on the laws of the new seceded country.
So then you say, ok let's do it by county (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) instead. Same problem. Even within a county-sized area, you're going to have dissenters who are at risk in the new country. Even within a single town. You can't draw geographic borders around and write laws for swiss-cheese-shaped clumpings of individual people.
I live in a pretty "red" area in a "blue" US state. If Team Red decided that half of my state (including my home) was going to secede into their own Red Utopia, my family would legitimately be in fear for our lives. I don't think secession is ever going to be a viable option in the real, polarized world where political beliefs are peanut butter spread across the geography.
> Let's say you let a province (or US state) secede over political/cultural issues. What happens to all of the people who don't want to go along for the ride?
Well, thats politics? The people proposing this are supposed to be considering that. And the people in that position are supposed to be considering that.
Every day there are votes with outcomes people dont want to go along with the ride for. But they do, or they resist, or otherwise.
Politics? Is it? Or is politics a grand word for whining and adults in a perpetual small world? Law, history are at least more grounded as a basis to argue for or against.
Let's not let politics' meaning become so diffuse it's just free speech by another name. Herein "politics" seems to be too inconsequential for a far more consequential result than cycling out party A for B for a few years would have.
I've half joked before that brexit was the only solution Cameron et al saw left because they didnt have a way to hold Brussel's paper pushers to account. Taking your ball and going home is not bold leadership: it's an admission one's argument and solution is weak.
In this case though it's a conflicting view. Let's say 40% of the province don't want to be separated, so they vote to rejoin canada (or form their own thing). Does the now independent Alberta allow it? If not, then why are they allowed to split from Canada? If they do, now this opens up the door for a infinite amount of splits.
Well, it would depend on how the new Alberta is structured. It would be its own country with its own rules. Practically speaking, it would highly depend on whether those 40% are geographically separated from the rest enough to geographically split the new Alberta.
> Well, thats politics? The people proposing this are supposed to be considering that. And the people in that position are supposed to be considering that.
People are very bad at considering stuff like this. Both voters and politicians.
When I left the UK, a former acquaintance was very confused that their support of something they thought was "just politics" led to me having no interest in continuing to talk to them.
I very much doubt that David Cameron or Theresa May expected a newspaper to have a front-page headline calling judges "Enemies of the People"[0], similarly for a half the politicians who have been milkshaked[1].
The area of England that I'm in voted remain, as well as all the other districts around us. It might fracture England (which may not be a bad thing) but I would be fine with southern England joining Scotland.
Yes, also the right to self-determination is an unalienable human right.
I find it sort of fascinating because people really do have a fanaticism about this that they don't have for other political artifacts. Nationalism is a powerful force. And people will special-plead themselves silly arguing why one group should be given self-determinism and others shouldn't, including invoking federal laws, untestable predictions about future events, etc. But when it comes to other politics, they revert back to a globalist position.
On the flip side, separatists are often driven by nationalistic interests as well - look at Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries as fantastic examples of this.
No, not tyranny necessarily. If it's malign morphing into hate speech, racial or genetic seregation, imposing religion, esp. backed up by state power that's a problem. For example, the US has a senate to balance out the house while at the same time California's take on something cannot be rejected out of hand reflexively as tyranny
Yes, and here "Canadians want" is used to say "the people within 100km of the St. Lawrence want". (That's actually part of the problem.)
Claimed identity isn't a suicide pact and consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed.
AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development. The justifications for those policies (whether you agree with them or not) matter less than the fact they're being imposed from a condition of moral hazard.
Hence, the people of AB might vote to ban the people of ON/QC from imposing their laws; that's what separation is and why it happens.
> AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development.
Not only that, but the Feds typically use their outsized tax revenue from Alberta to “invest” in Quebec to buy votes via propping up unviable businesses, subsidies, outsized proportion of public sector jobs, and federal spending in general.
Hey, the little old lie that Québec, which does get an outsized proportion of the political attention, gets an outsized proportion of the federal money, which it doesn’t.
You can find many examples of specific programs where Québec gets the federal government’s money in incredible amounts. But you add all these programs together and you still come up short per person compared to Ontario. Why?
The only possible way to come to a conclusion as wrong as yours is by looking at gross instead of net federal spending by province.
When you consider the tiny detail of actually contributing to federal finances, in the past 20 years alone Quebec has received ~360 billion more than it contributed, whereas Ontario has received ~232 billion LESS than it contributed.
Nearly half a trillion difference between the two, and nothing to do with the auto industry whatsoever.
Before you rag Quebec too much, note that they are at least practicing being independent. They maintain a police force, they have foreign services. They collect their own taxes. See what Alberta thinks when they have to pay their own way rather than letting Canada handle things. While they rent the ramp I doubt they’re handling their pensions. QC runs its own pension.
And all the First Nations treaties are with the Crown and predate Alberta.
Where do we draw the line of “people want to change them”?
I’m 100% with the political philosopher Bertrand Russel on this topic: borders are arbitrary, and a benevolent world government/federation of cultures would not restrict your movement or sense of belonging.
But! But how many people must vote yes? What percentage of abstention? If 60% vote to leave, but half the people didn’t vote, only 30% of the yes is valid.
I don’t think this should be taken lightly by populist movements. To me, Brexit has shown us exactly what the dangers are of a non- or weirdly-qualified majority.
That's fine and all, but leave all by yourself. A territory isn't owned by the people that happen to be there. It's bound up in the systems and institutions they found and accepted, ingrained into a much bigger machinery. Alberta's own referendum already shows this: a court halted the petition because First Nations weren't consulted, because their claims predate any popular vote.
Unless you get everyone with a stake on board, which is hard, and accept it will take a long while to unwind, it's irresponsible. And if you aren't willing to do that work, just pack your bags and leave.
Sure, and history deals the cards we're given and so on and so forth. Why don't we have referendums on keeping the US Constitution every year? That would be democratic as hell.
>If the people want to change them, they absolutely have the right to do so
Not so fast. They are in a union with other provinces ergo they have a say.
If nonetheless in some asinine way they secede, will they take their portion of Canada's debt, and other liabilities?
Won't all other provinces require them to negotiate a border, security, and trade policy? Surely they can't expect to be separate yet equal to BC or even the NWT?
Cool. I suppose we'll see the U.S. support referenda in the Basque territory in Spain, Northern Ireland, the West Bank, Gaza, and Texas soon. Maybe in Guam and Hawaii, too.
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.
Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.
I don't think that's a very mainstream view amongst historians. I can only name two popsci authors, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, that espouse that thought.
Ok, but try the same argument with sedentary societies. Those seem "superior" despite all the negative side effects, right? But here comes one of a number of steppe nomad tribes to show up and decimate their "superior" neighbors.
The vast diversity of human societies refuses any kind of rigid hierarchy of development. There are many branching paths, and no paradigm wins for long.
America cannot, as a country, discover a reasonable approach to managing health care costs because Americans do not have a sufficient core set of shared political values. The solution is to end regulation at the federal level, and allow the states to determine what regulations they may deem appropriate. As a New Hampshire libertarian, I do not want Californian progressives telling me how our state must manage health care spending, and I am sure they feel the same way about me.
I think the vast majority of people agree on the generalities and care enough about solving the issue to be able to come to an agreement on the particulars. The problem is that the people who get rich off the current system won't agree to any solution that reduces their profits, and have thus far managed to fillibuster attempts at such a solution through a combination of buying politicians and propagandizing certain segments of the population into rejecting solutions that would benefit them.
Slavery was estimated at ~12% and "hey, you need to lose a few % of your margin and actually pay those people" started a war.
Now, there's an argument to be made about ideology, geographic concentration of industry, etc. doing a fair bit of lifting kicking that off (their own neighbors telling them to stop surely would have gone over better than a bunch of smarmy northerners in their ivory towers telling them the same thing). But the fact remains that you cannot make a large fraction of the country take a haircut without causing strife.
The only way to fix this "nicely" at this point is to boil the frog over decades.
I'll accept your first sentence for the sake of argument. You are still better off with a localist / federalist approach, because state governments are much less vulnerable to corruption and bribery. It is far more economically efficient for the bad guys (whoever they are in your view) to bribe a few DC legislators than dozens of state politicians in places like Montpelier and Hartford. Centralized, unaccountable power in DC means that when big rich corrupt companies bribe the right people, they can force the entire country to followed their preferred policies. A good example is how Purdue Pharma bribed the head of the FDA to approve OxyContin, leading directly to the opioid crisis.
> It is far more economically efficient for the bad guys (whoever they are in your view) to bribe a few DC legislators than dozens of state politicians in places like Montpelier and Hartford.
State politicians are much cheaper, and no one from the New York Times pokes around when you buy off the state representative of East Bumfuck, Montana.
so, your answer is OMG, they are making money!11!
It's not a money probelm, it's a resources problem. We simply don't have enought hospital resources to serve everyone in the us. it's not making money, it's not having enough beds and skilled people to do the work.
Get an MD and help out, then you'll discover how you really DONT want the government to tell you which patients to serve.
Honestly, after stories like these, I don't want a corporation telling me which patients to serve even more. At least government is theoretically accountable for their decisions.
This is one of those things that, if it weren't already a public service, could never be implemented as one today. Add to that list public schools and public libraries.
The fact that the hospital doesn't know what a procedure costs (they make it up based on deals with medicare, medicaid, and individual insurance companies) should give you a hint.
Yes, the patient needs skin in the game. People need to take care of their own health. Most procedures are given to grossly unhealthy people.
Yes, completely privatize it. Make people pay for their care so their daily decisions are weighed against what affect it will have on their overall health.
“ The fact that the hospital doesn't know what a procedure costs (they make it up based on deals with medicare, medicaid, and individual insurance companies) should give you a hint.”
The hint here is that the random pricing needs to stop. Same procedure for the same price. No market can work if participants don’t know the actual price. Insurance and hospitals probably have a very good idea but patients are being kept totally in the dark. You are expected to just accept what this opaque machinery comes up with.
So what if someone gets cancer or some other potentially fatal disease despite eating healthy, exercising, not smoking, etc, and they can't afford to pay for treatment?
Ah yes, more fragmentation. Surely that will lower the complexity and administrative burden, thereby leading to reduced costs!
The reason healthcare in the US is expensive is very simple: too many cooks in the kitchen. Private insurance simply should not exist. The undeniable reality is that the only way to achieve maximum efficiency is top-down administration.
I understand that that makes libertarians uncomfortable. But what we all have to acknowledge is what we have is not working. Other countries have worked it out. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel here.
I'm not sure if this is the direction the OP is going, but I would love to see a world where local small-time investors can get a bank loan, rent a facility, set up a bunch of computers, and run open-source cloud software on them that provides 95% of the features that most businesses need.
Running a cloud data center could be a business like operating a self-storage facility or a car wash. Small investors love this kind of operation.
This brings back painful yesteryear memories when consultants would push Microsoft Small Business Server for an on-prem all in one IT solution and charge extra to move to the cloud(colocation). A Linux-based alternative appeared named Clark Connect.
then private equity moves in, buys up the small and inefficient local data centers, and consolidates them into a massive conglomerate that can charge whatever they want
Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway.
It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.
I don’t think Americans would enjoy the alternative of defaulting on that debt, or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
> or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
I'm pretty sure most of us would enjoy a different timeline where we didn't sink over $1 trillion in the Iraq war or another $2 trillion on the F-35, where we didn't mindlessly increase the military budget every cycle, where Republican administrations didn't cut taxes on the wealthy every time they won the presidency in the last half century, or where the TSA and DHS weren't created.
Every item I mentioned either increased government spending or reduced its income, both of which contribute to increased deficits and debt.
You're welcome to argue whether I'm correct that americans would be better off without any of them, but it's simple math that every single one of them contributed to our current debt.
> It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.
Why, in your view, doesn't the same thing happen to them?
Simply put the people in those countries who spend the money care about the people who gave them the money.
They view themselves as stewards of these resources and genuinely want to spend them optimally to ensure the best return for everyone in society including future generations.
That isn't the case in America and will never be the case.
I would not put this on America being a failed state. Rather the more 'successful' European countries are far more homogenous in demographics than America ever will be. In Denmark, nearly everyone has the same cultural background and similar values, and are striving for a relatively unified vision/goal for the country. In America, there is such an overwhelming diversity in values and cultures, and added animosity between different groups of people that there is more infighting over government&private resources and less efficient use of them.
> Rather the more 'successful' European countries are far more homogenous in demographics than America ever will be. In Denmark, nearly everyone has the same cultural background and similar values, and are striving for a relatively unified vision/goal for the country.
Can you explain this reasoning without implying American political leaders (or perhaps broader society) are racist?
As a counterpoint France, Germany, Canada and Australia are far from homogeneous, but offer far stronger social safety nets than the US. IIRC, 1 in 4 Australians were born elsewhere.
Downvote all you want, but y'all still haven't explicitly named the linkage between demographic diversity and American tax policy vis-a-vis threadbare social safety. Instead of asking the reader to fill in the gaps, I challenge anyone who believes it to explain the mechanism linking the diversity prior/stimulus to the tax policy result, and why it only happens in America.
Sure. But it is brought to the surface due to diversity. I imagine many European nations are close to if not equal in their racism but are not brought face to face with it because their cultures are not quite as diverse.
> But it is brought to the surface due to diversity.
If Americans continue to believe that racism is inherent in them (and everyone else, including Europe), then I see no hope[1] for achieving any kind of reform that benefits the majority with regards to social safety nets.
> I imagine many European nations are close to if not equal in their racism but are not brought face to face with it because their cultures are not quite as diverse.
This smells like a variation of the just-world fallacy; European countries harbor some fervent animus towards the Romani, but not enough to cut their nose to spite their face as Americans do.
1. My lack of hope is somewhat tempered because America has proved that it can overcome some bigotry from the past: lots of formerly targeted groups are now having a much better time in the present: the Chinese, Irish, Greeks, Italians, Japanese and Jewish people. So, things can change.
In a place as diverse as America, democracy starts to resemble a racial headcount. Elections start to hinge on explicit appeals to particular ethnicities or sub groups. Political parties are very loud about this and they don’t try to hide it at all. I thought it was clear why this only happens in America (the aforementioned diversity).
If some groups are disproportionately benefited by certain social spending while a different group is disproportionately impacted by the associated taxes to fund said spending, you get a divergence in the ability to burden share across groups (this is the case in the United States). As a result of this, spending is funded by debt.
Is it really on just the political leaders and not the society at large that supports them?
One need not go that far back in history to learn that codified in the legal system was the concept of separate but equal, red lining,, etc. Lynchings were often ignored and thus a public spectacle.
Today you still see the public discourse about women’s rights (e.g potentially jail for abortion in certain states…regardless of the reason), debates on mass migrations/immigration (e.g. little sympathy for legal citizens being deported or killed by ICE, etc).
Public agreement on these issues is a prerequisite to social safety nets.
American history is plagued with examples such as these that have contributed to the culture of rugged individualism.
Perhaps the closest period where some semblance of social safety net wins were achieved were in the FDR years (eg social security), and that was mainly through labor unions / working class pressure.
Do those counterpoint countries have similar histories? and were their social safety nets not from the side of labor vs capital?
That's not the only way at all; all I'm saying is it becomes harder to convince the whole of society to adopt social safety nets if they positively affect people that look/act different from someone. I'm just trying to be honest that many many many Americans are racists.
>It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit.
This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.
That's like increasing your going out budget at the same time as moderating your excessive drinking.
The more money that's up for grabs, the higher the incentives for fraud and general abuse.
I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain. Instead it's always the promise that just [X] more billion from [billionaire] and we could solve homelessness
>I think the people that believe in a more efficient welfare state should look to reallocate the money. No one would complain.
Are you simply calling the entire government a "welfare state" or do you believe that something like military spending is off the table for making more efficient? Because people very obviously would complain about shifting military spending to social programs and military spending is almost certainly the biggest differentiator in spending between us and those "'social democracies' such as Finland, France and Canada" that OP was talking about.
Of course you should make military spending more efficient. But again, to avoid partisan bickering, you should shift spending in the category. Don't cut waste in department A and allocate to department B. Maybe shift from buying fewer jets and more drones. It doesn't have to be political, it's not a money problem. Government takes more than enough money.
Again, percentage of government money that goes to social programs is less relative to military, but only as a percentage. Look at things like spending on public healthcare (Medicare / Medicaid) or public education, America spends as much as social democracies in absolute terms. Just relative terms its less because we're a wealthy country and produce a lot of wealth that we tax. It's not a money problem
> But again, to avoid partisan bickering, you should shift spending in the category... It doesn't have to be political, it's not a money problem.
We can't really have this conversation from the mindset that the status quo is inherently apolitical. The US spends more than those "social democracies" on the military in both absolute and relative terms. Since total spending is the same, that means we also spend less on social programs in relative terms. These are all political choices and refusing to revisit a previous political choice is an active political choice.
Military spending has been trending downwards the entire time I’ve been alive. All that’s happened is increased spending elsewhere and even more debt. With very little apparent improvement to those social services spending outcomes. Usually the the opposite.
I might agree with cutting military spending if it’s an actual measurable impact to my finances. But I sure wouldn’t be for reallocating it to the black hole that is other federal spending. Fix the outcomes first. We already spend more on healthcare than most of those social democracies. Show me similar outcomes per dollar spent and then we can have a conversation about increasing it. Until then, it’s just more money funneled to the fraud and grift machine. Not that the military isn’t that too, but the difference to me is once you get the population “hooked” on such budgets you can never reduce it. The military is at least able to be reduced as shown in the past 30 years. Everything else is growing faster than those reductions.
I would also be generally for cutting military budget if it was 100% reallocated to reducing the debt. But that’s almost impossible since money is fungible.
TLDR; we’ve already tried reallocating and utterly failed at showing any reasonable outcomes.
Maybe we should approach this from the opposite angle. If it isn't military spending, what do you think the differentiator is between the US and those "social democracies" that OP mentioned? Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?
> Do you think Americans are inherently more corrupt than the French?
I'm not who you asked (and I think the levels of military spending in the US are a huge problem) but IMO Americans are not inherently more corrupt than the French but they are currently much more tolerant of corruption than the French.
It is hard to imagine the level of corruption currently being openly flaunted by parts of the USA government happening in France without the country burning down.
Whether or not this tolerance is inherent or is the result of both learned helplessness and real disempowerment through the US government having already failed the average citizen for so long is up for debate.
> they are getting supported by the 5% who pay most of the taxes
The same 5% who in many cases run massively profitable companies that pay their workers on the bottom so much less than a living wage that they are forced into tax-funded social safety net programs like SNAP to survive.
That 5% can cry me a river about their tax burden.
> So just manual memory management with extra steps
This is actually the perfect situation: you are allowed to do it carefully and manually for 1% of code on the hot path, but you don't have to worry about it for the 99% of the code that's not.
I don't disagree with these principles, but if I wanted to compress all my programming wisdom into 5 rules, I wouldn't spend 3 out of the 5 slots on performance. Performance is just a component of correctness : if you have a good methodology to achieve correctness, you will get performance along the way.
My #1 programming principle would be phrased using a concept from John Boyd: make your OODA loops fast. In software this can often mean simple things like "make compile time fast" or "make sure you can detect errors quickly".
Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith.
(This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).
reply