Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48503527

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Target selection is much more networked, automated, and adaptive than it used to be. Missiles can talk to each other.

Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time.

The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.

One of the issues here is that there are many people with strong opinions that don't understand the thing they have strong opinions about. Which is the normal state of human affairs.

If I was more cynical I would suggest that this is being used as an end-run around encryption, since the encryption doesn't have backdoors for the government but this gives you access to all the same data.

When this backdoor is inevitably exploited in some very public fashion, it won't be the EU regulators that required the backdoor to exist who will be blamed.

The main difference is that TV dinners were designed to be heated in an oven rather than a microwave, back when microwaves were less common.

Many traditional foods from around the world have relied on nasty, toxic chemical processes since before chemistry was a real science. If anything, modern understanding of chemistry has made the removal of nasty chemicals much more complete and precise.

A natural cornerback isn't going to be "quicker and faster" over that many miles without a different kind of conditioning that probably favors different genetics. That said, I do think the game would translate well for some cornerbacks in some roles.

I think a core issue is that US and Mexican teams rarely have an opportunity to compete against teams significantly better than themselves. Furthermore, structural constraints within both leagues limit the amount of talent separation that can occur between teams, so it looks a bit like being stuck in a local minima in terms of talent development.

You have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had.

Quite a few assets can never clear a market — they have value in some abstract sense but no concrete sense. For example, assets that are legal to own and transfer but illegal to buy or sell.

Some commodity assets have value that it is nonetheless not always transferrable. A common example relevant to wealth taxes is intangible assets where value is bound in who owns it and not the asset per se. Most of the value vanishes the instant you transfer to e.g. the government.

Another common issue is that wealth taxes can directly conflict with existing load-bearing contracts. As a practical matter, these government can’t just void most contracts, including contracts the government is a party to, for the purposes of generating tax revenue.

All of which is why most real-world wealth taxes limit scope to a handful of liquid, legible securities and similar. But as a percentage of wealth, these are pretty small so you don’t collect much revenue.

You could pay for these using the 30% of the assets that have some practical degree of liquidity but now you are putting massive downward pricing pressure on those because it is essentially a leveraged liquidation. Effectively, the total percentage of assets that are non-liquid would increase.

People tend to underestimate just how non-liquid the assets of the wealthy are. Most of that wealth isn't in stocks and bonds.

A single minimum wage was definitely a poverty wage in the 1970s even at the 1970s standard of living. I have no idea where you would get the idea you could raise a family on that.

We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.