Hacker News: jeffreyrogers

The Affordability Discourse

jeffreyrogers — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:42:49 +0000

Article URL: https://thedispatch.com/article/affordability-crisis-healthcare-housing-childcare/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599188

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

AI-Native Firms

jeffreyrogers — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:53:00 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/orgRem/status/2067318661669372196

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587302

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "AI is slowing down"

jeffreyrogers — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:53:19 +0000

I'm sort of an AI skeptic but I have been seeing this guy's essays for years now and he has always been super pessimistic on AI progress.

I think a much more reasoned critique of AI is that of Tyler Cowen, whose argument is basically that most processes aren't constrained by lack of intelligence but by organizational and social factors which mean for AI to be useful you have to redesign organizations and work to take advantage of what AI is good at. Since most organizations are fairly bureaucratic that takes a while, especially in the large industries that are the most economically important.

Ed's criticism of the large AI companies seems particularly misguided to me since they are the ones actually advancing the technology and seem to have real moats given their access to large amounts of training data from their users. I don't see any possible future in which 5 or 10 years from now there is less AI than we have now and I would expect usage to be much higher.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

jeffreyrogers — Sat, 23 May 2026 18:32:12 +0000

There have been a few proposals to close that loophole. The main reason it exists is because debt isn't counted as income since it has to be repaid.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

jeffreyrogers — Sat, 23 May 2026 18:27:08 +0000

> What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?

Setting aside money to pay for a relative who can't provide for themselves, protecting assets if you are professional who faces high chance of being sued (e.g. surgeon), providing for children from a first marriage if you get married and predecease your second spouse.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

jeffreyrogers — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:17:26 +0000

Perpetual trusts are different from irrevocable trusts, which have legitimate use cases. I don't really see how irrevocable trusts would be gotten rid of. In most states all trusts are irrevocable by default and there is a huge body of law dealing with trusts. Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

jeffreyrogers — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:15:20 +0000

I think the limit it can reach without carried forward losses is 20% because that's the top long-term capital gains tax rate. The other thing I can think of is if you sell a QSBS business, then your capital gains are taxed at 0, and you wouldn't pay income tax at all on that money either. So it's in theory possible that someone could make millions tax free from selling a business, but that's a rare case and one the tax code explicitly allows for.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

jeffreyrogers — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:07:20 +0000

There are all kinds of irrevocable trusts that exist to remove assets from your taxable estate so that they can be passed to heirs without paying estate tax. Raising the estate tax (which is already 40%) would just make planning to use these techniques more attractive.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "The sigmoids won't save you"

jeffreyrogers — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:06:32 +0000

I find him more interesting when he talks about non-AI topics. Lots of other interesting people are like this too. I'd rather get my knowledge on AI from people who have unique insights into it. Scott has a lot of unique perspectives of his own, but his views on AI are bog-standard for his social group.

Reactions to "We Have Learned Nothing"

jeffreyrogers — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:07:03 +0000

Article URL: https://reactionwheel.net/2026/05/reactions-to-we-have-learned-nothing.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076466

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "Agents for financial services and insurance"

jeffreyrogers — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:36:29 +0000

I don't think it's obvious that you were talking about health insurance, which I consider fairly distinct from property, casualty, liability, and life insurance, which are all quite large markets in themselves. The reason I made a distinction is because health insurance is quite different from other lines of insurance because healthcare is federally regulated while other insurance is regulated at the state level.

As mentioned the problems with the US healthcare system are numerous, complex, and interrelated. I don't think they have a simple solution, nor do I think they are insurance problems at their core. For example the cost of drugs in the US vs the rest of the world has very little to do with insurance.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "Agents for financial services and insurance"

jeffreyrogers — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:00:04 +0000

What does a better insurance process look like? Outside of health insurance, which is complicated for a variety of reasons, most insurance is pretty easy to procure. I got an umbrella policy recently and it took about 30 minutes of talking with an agent and answering pretty reasonable questions.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

jeffreyrogers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Can you point me to an example then? It's not linked in the article as far as I can tell and it's not easy to find on their website if it's there. I don't count simulations because I used to work with simulations regularly and they often fail to translate to the real world.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

jeffreyrogers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:38:54 +0000

They've never translated it to the real world though. So saying the problem is "too easy" when they have no public (as far as I know) demonstration that they've solved that problem is a stretch.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

jeffreyrogers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:58:16 +0000

> But frontier models have become really good, and running vending machines is too easy for them now.

Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines unprofitable? Not aware of any demonstration that it can actually run that business successfully.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements"

jeffreyrogers — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:14:03 +0000

The only time I see non-competes as reasonable is when someone sells a business. It seems fair to put a territory restriction on a seller so the new owner doesn't have to immediately start competing against the person they bought out.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "The first 40 months of the AI era"

jeffreyrogers — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:50:19 +0000

Yes, here, reddit, X, at work in people's emails and status reports.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "We Have Learned Nothing"

jeffreyrogers — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:08:13 +0000

He's a pretty successful angel/early stage VC investor so he's not some random guy. His point doesn't seem to be that there's nothing to be learned building a successful business but that the existing methods are so formulaic they drive profits down since everyone copies the same ideas. Looking at the recent batch of AI companies that are being funded this does seem to be what's happening.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to defer US taxes"

jeffreyrogers — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:10:04 +0000

No, you can do cost segregation to classify some of the real property as Section 1245 (which is accelerated vs Section 1250). People doing this and then selling is how they get unexpected tax bills.

New comment by jeffreyrogers in "How to defer US taxes"

jeffreyrogers — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:07:15 +0000

I don't know how these specific loans are structured but in real estate it's relatively common for a loan to be interest only with a balloon payment (the principal) due some number of years in the future. So in theory you could just pay off the balloon payment with a new loan and repeat the process.