Hacker News: scientator

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

scientator — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:52:20 +0000

I'm sure any wealth tax would only apply to wealth above a certain amount. For instance, inheritance tax only applies to $15mil and above. Likewise, when you sell a house the first $500K (I believe) in capital gains from the sale is tax free.

I don't think people with savings of $15mil and above (assuming that would be the cutoff) are in danger of going bankrupt in 20 yrs from a 1% wealth tax. Assuming your 3% return, they'd be earning $450,000 a year that wouldn't be touched by the wealth tax.

New comment by scientator in "Solar on canals reduces water evaporation by 70% and algae growth by 85%"

scientator — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:13:56 +0000

Why would environmentalists be concerned about shading canals?

New comment by scientator in "In Blow to Democrats, Virginia Court Strikes Down House Map"

scientator — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:52:56 +0000

The underlying problem is that the number of representatives hasn't increased in about 100 years (not counting addition of Alaska and Hawaii). Increase the number of reps, as was regularly done up until early 20th century, and a lot of this gerrymandering nonsense will disappear. Of course, the powers that be don't want to do this because it would make the system more fair and democratic.

New comment by scientator in "High-income job losses are cooling housing demand"

scientator — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:46:57 +0000

The idea of rent suggests that you're paying a use fee to an owner. But if you live in a house that you own, and therefore lose the potential rental income, who are you paying that use fee to? Is the loss of potential income really the same as rent? Because in that case almost every choice/action in life involves a potential loss of income. There's probably always something more profitable one could have done with time/money.

New comment by scientator in "The Colorado River is running low. The picture looks even worse underground"

scientator — Wed, 28 May 2025 15:26:16 +0000

Water for people isn't the problem. It's water to grow food for cows that's the problem.

New comment by scientator in "Scientists Develop Artificial Leaf, Uses Sunlight to Produce Valuable Chemicals"

scientator — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:36:31 +0000

https://mashable.com/article/ac-units-climate-change-carbon-...

New comment by scientator in "The complex origin story of domestic cats"

scientator — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 15:48:29 +0000

I believe the royal society for the protection of birds studied whether cats are a threat to bird populations and concluded that they really aren't. Obviously cats do kill birds, but overwhelmingly the major threat to birds is habitat loss caused by humans. Also, cats kill rodents, which indirectly helps birds because rodents are a big threat to bird populations, because rats take eggs from their nests. In fact, cats preferentially kill rodents. Something like 90% of their diet will typically be rodents. Birds, for them, are only opportunity kills. In other words, cats are an easy scapegoat because they quite visibly do kill birds, but humans (as is usually the case) are the true underlying problem.

New comment by scientator in "Christianity was always for the poor (2024)"

scientator — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:38:14 +0000

Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman argues that there are many versions of Christianity, and there always have been since its inception. What you are representing as the "core teaching of Christianity" is the version that was primarily articulated by Paul, and that became the orthodox version due to its eventual adoption as the religion of the Roman Empire. But even at the time of Paul there were rival interpretations. There were the Gnostics, the group led by James in Jerusalem, and even those who insisted one had to adopt Judaism to follow Jesus. And significantly, Jesus himself probably wouldn't have recognized the interpretation of Paul.

And looking beyond early Christianity, one can pick any period of Christianity's history and find numerous rival doctrines.

New comment by scientator in "The U.S. Cannot Be Run Like a Business (2017)"

scientator — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:26:08 +0000

We also know there's rampant fraud in the business world: Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, Lehman Brothers, S&L scandal, etc. etc.

Now the billionaires are gutting the government's oversight ability. Business fraud will go through the roof. But I guess that's the plan.

New comment by scientator in "Aliens Cause Global Warming – Michael Crichton [pdf]"

scientator — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 13:43:49 +0000

I think he is wrong that predictions 100 years out are almost always going to be wrong, because city and government planners routinely do this kind of stuff. They predict future growth rates and plan accordingly. They invest in reservoirs, wider roads, bigger power plants and transmission lines, etc. Sometimes those predictions are wrong and they build for growth that never happens, or vice versa. But much of the time they get it right and that contributes hugely to our present-day quality of life.

New comment by scientator in "Working Americans Turn to Food Banks as Fed Inflation Battle Drags On"

scientator — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:15:42 +0000

Their government pay is meaningless to them. They can legally trade on insider information. That's their real paycheck.

New comment by scientator in "The deeper under the Earth's surface, the more species you can find"

scientator — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 19:22:49 +0000

In his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" Thomas Gold argued that life probably originated deep underground. Gold is a pretty controversial figure, but this hypothesis makes sense for a number of reasons: the underground environment is a lot more stable than the surface, and the chemistry to extract energy from the chemicals in that environment is a lot simpler than the chemistry to extract energy from sunlight. So it makes sense that underground chemosynthesis would emerge before photosynthesis.

New comment by scientator in "Biden warns of rising democracy-threatening 'oligarchy' in grim farewell speech"

scientator — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 16:08:21 +0000

I was agreeing with you up until trash pick-up, which I think is a bad example, because there are obvious reasons why it makes sense to have the city contract with one company for that service, rather than having multiple companies with multiple dump sites and different fleets of trucks roaming the city. And if you give people the option to not pay for trash pick-up, that's just opening the door to having people pile up trash around their houses and yards. You know it would happen. So yeah, I don't think trash pick-up is an example of regulatory capture like your other examples.

New comment by scientator in "Study: Dark matter doesn't exist, the universe is 27B years old"

scientator — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 16:15:14 +0000

Although the Big Bang is widely referred to as a theory, cosmologists actually categorize it as a model not a theory. Does that mean it's not scientific? No. It's just that a lot of cosmology isn't testable, per se. The same is true for the historical sciences in general (evolutionary biology, geology). Given the time scales involved, there's no way to design tests or experiments.

New comment by scientator in "The Atlantic Did Me Dirty"

scientator — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 16:15:43 +0000

We have no reliable information about the identity of Homer. All we have are a variety of legends. But there are some decent arguments for thinking that Homer might have been a woman. We just don't know.

New comment by scientator in "Why Is Light So Fast?"

scientator — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 17:18:09 +0000

Yes, after billions of years you would move outside of the sight horizon of the long-lived observer on earth and disappear from view. For you, the traveler, this would happen in mere minutes. But you wouldn't have crossed the universe in that time because the edge of the visible universe is constantly expanding away from us faster than we can travel to catch up with it. Even if we travel at the speed of light.

New comment by scientator in "Why Is Light So Fast?"

scientator — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 17:06:17 +0000

The edge of the visible universe functions for us like a cosmic event horizon. Similar to the event horizon around a black hole. A particle leaving earth at light speed can never reach or go beyond that horizon. Even in infinite time. That's assuming the universe continues to expand. If it starts to contract then, yeah, the horizon is going to crash in on us.

New comment by scientator in "Why Is Light So Fast?"

scientator — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 15:46:51 +0000

Actually, you couldn't cross it in a matter of minutes. In fact, you would never even reach the edge of the visible universe. This is because the edge of the visible universe is expanding away from us at faster than the speed of light.

New comment by scientator in "Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture?"

scientator — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 12:37:05 +0000

This sounds like the old Marxist argument of Capitalists appropriating (or parasitically leaching) the surplus value of the laborers they employ.

But in the case of social media, people get paid not only in money but also with attention and status ('likes'). Actually, the vast majority of users aren't getting paid any money. But we're social creatures, and we'll do almost anything for status and attention.

New comment by scientator in "Are greedy companies to blame for grocery inflation? We looked at the data"

scientator — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 15:32:18 +0000

Getting the best price they can would be fair in a competitive marketplace. But when consolidation leads to fewer competitors, more monopoly, then the constraint of fair competition has been removed. The stores are free to raise prices and consumers have nowhere else to go.