I'm also curious (since this is closely related) whether you favor the tax break to employer health insurance. You wanna talk about my woke focus on words, well well, take "externality." I'm not familiar with these bad externalities of the institution of employer provided insurance of itself, but I can see negatives from the tax break. Namely, by subsidizing my employer's health plan, my private health insurance purchasing power is effectively nerfed. Bit of a stretch to call that external.

Capitalism created the computers whose Soviet copies were Tetris' native platform, it made the languages Pajitnov used and the machines he ported it to. It incentivized people to bring Tetris to the rest of the world, and who knows, it might have spread on its own eventually, just for free, but maybe not.

> All of the inflation we've seen from the pandemic has been the "raising prices" part.

Superficially true, but vacuous. In anyway that matters this is flagrantly and amazingly false. But maybe you weren't aware of the $931 billion US dollars of stimulus paid to individuals, or you may not be familiar with the principle of supply and demand. More dollars in supply, the less the value of each dollar. Prices change to match the devalued currency.

> Being expensive to access out of employment is a feature not a bug.

I think this may qualify as a bug, to which you can credit the Revenue Act of 1954 for codifying the tax break given to companies who provide healthcare directly rather than pay that money as income to the employee. Classic example of a stale law. Now, vested interests may be keeping it in place, but I also see no significant awareness on the voter side of this issue nor the will to reform this discriminatory tax policy.

Which is to say, not uniformly poor?

> I'd also love to do away with tax prep — the government knows what is owed

Sometimes! We would probably have to simplify the tax code first. Otherwise instead of spreading out the work of identifying income and tax credit eligibility amongst taxpayers and such upon them who are most proximal to this knowledge, we would have a centralized body need to know all of the things that you and I know about ourselves, such as how many kids we have, what kind of car we drive, whether we use solar power, whether we invest in crypto, whether we earned money from gifts or gambling or dividends or farming. Or we could just simplify the code, which I would like.

The word you're looking for is "convince," not "force." This whole discussion is replete with misuses of words like "free" and "force," and it's a little worrying.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997061

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Further reading for those interested: https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation Basically all of them restrict government contracting with BDS companies, or pension involvement in some cases, sometimes with exceptions for individuals and small companies doing business with the government. Virginia's is just a condemnation without economic prohibitions.

This seems to be a major stumbling block in the popular understanding of business: contracts, agreement, consent matters.

What you might be implying with the reference to the JWF is that there should be a ceiling for retail contract complexity. I'm just guessing, it's not really clear.

Inevitably the transcriber makes decisions in how to deviate from the reference recording, be it omission of instruments, microchanges in tempo and pitch or articulation. In theory a good transcription is an exact graphical representation of the abstract sonic intent of the artist.

Of course, if you are combining voices, changing chords, it approaches an arrangement which is a more creative endeavor.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892103

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

For example, I'm in theory opposed to the prohibition on crack cocaine, despite its strong consistent effect on personal agency, because of two things: basic moral principles (my body my choice), and the massive (hopefully unintended) side effects of prohibition. Namely, mass incarceration, black markets, decreased drug quality, gang violence, exhaustion of policing resources, the public perception of systemic racism, and tax losses. My guess is the downsides of a hypothetical ban on algorithmically optimized advertisements would be of a very different kind but similar quantity. And again, the other issue is basic moral principles. I'm not comfortable with bracketing free expression with numerous exceptions, rate-limits, inspectors, or whatever apparatchiks would be employed to enforce such a restriction.