Plus, why do people act like the “incumbent advantage” is some magical advantage? It’s a cargo cult mentality, especially in this day and age where all the old “rules” about elections have gone out the window.

I mean, I remember the day where being twice-impeached and a convicted felon would be unrecoverable political death, yet here we are staring down the barrel of a possible second Trump term.

Biden is a historically unpopular president, who is behind in basically all polling in basically every key swing state, and who just had the mother of all “the emperor has no clothes” moments on national television, losing the confidence of his own base. Even Democratic congresspeople are calling on him to step down now.

There is simply no path forwards for Biden to win in November. He’s cooked.

As for replacements, personally, I think Gretchen Whitmer is the best choice. Relatively young, good compromise candidate between the progressive and moderate wings of the party, current beloved governor of Michigan (key swing state!), competent technocrat, no significant political baggage, and made a name for herself protecting abortion rights in Michigan after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.

Exactly. I’ve seen it with faaaaaar too many tankies and even populist leftists. Instead of advocating for empirically-driven policy that would measurably improve the world, there’s a ton of rhetoric about how we just need to punish capitalists/fascists/landlords/neolibs/billionaires/etc. harder to fix the world’s problems.

At this point, I think it’s just a deep-rooted flaw of the human psyche that we’re just inclined towards trying to force our solutions through by punishing those who oppose us, rather than trying to deeply understand the dynamics at play and changing the underlying structure to incentivize the outcomes we want.

And if we fail to address the tendency towards knee-jerk, brute-force, authoritarian “solutions” to problems within our own ranks, we’ll meet the same fate as every other revolution-turned-brutal-dictatorship.

The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.

Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.

Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.

It’s not, though. The classical factors of production, whence we get the concept of “capital” as a factor of production, has land and capital as clearly separate:

Land or natural resource — naturally occurring goods like water, air, soil, minerals, flora, fauna and climate that are used in the creation of products. The payment given to a landowner is rent, loyalties, commission and goodwill.

Labor — human effort used in production which also includes technical and marketing expertise. The payment for someone else’s labor and all income received from one’s own labor is wages. Labor can also be classified as the physical and mental contribution of an employee to the production of the good(s).

Capital stock — human-made goods which are used in the production of other goods. These include machinery, tools, and buildings. They are of two types, fixed and working. Fixed are one time investments like machines, tools and working consists of liquid cash or money in hand and raw material.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production

And it’s an important distinction. The fact that land is not made and inherently finite makes it zero-sum. Meanwhile, the fact that capital such as education, tools, factories, infrastructure, etc. are man-made and not inherently finite makes them not zero-sum. This distinction has truly massive implications when it comes to economics and policymaking. It’s the whole reason LVT is so effective, so efficient, and so fair: it exploits the unique zero-sum nature of land.

I got a positive one for you

You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.

Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

Property taxes != Land value taxes

Further, it’s not a tax on capital; it’s a tax on land. It’s very explicitly designed to target land, as land has distinct economic properties that make it a prime target for taxation.

And yes, it does target speculative investments like those of Blackrock:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/54q68

They are taxed, but I think they could be taxed more and better. Specifically, we should implement a land value tax (LVT).

As for why LVT? In short, it’s just a really good tax. Progressive, widely regarded by economists as “the perfect tax”, incentivizes efficient use of land, discourages speculation and rent-seeking, economically efficient, and hard to evade. Plus, critically regarding landlords, land value taxes can’t be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

As for the difference between LVT and property taxes? This video explains well how property taxes enable land speculation and disincentivize housing development, and how replacing them with land value taxes would alleviate these issues.

Further, even places (such as the Australian Capital Territory) that have implemented quite milquetoast LVTs have seen positive impacts on housing affordability:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

Better than a wealth tax is a land value tax. Key properties are that it doesn’t cause capital flight (you can’t move land), it’s almost impossible to evade (you can’t hide land), it’s economically efficient (it literally doesn’t even harm the economy in the slightest to implement it), it can’t be passed on to tenants (both in economic theory and in observed practice), and it’s progressive.

Plus, it incentives denser, transit-oriented city development and disincentivizes wastage of prime real estate (which contributes to the housing crisis). All in all, a terrific policy that people aren’t talking nearly enough about imo.

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

Oh yeah, I understood this is a pro nuclear meme. I agree with your meme.

Friendly reminder that air pollution from fossil fuels kill ~9 million people per year

It’s funny how people always use play it like “oh, it’s just differing opinions” when what they’re actually defending is indefensible malarkey like nazis and tankies. They know if they made a meme saying we should “try to understand” nazis and tankies, they’d be downvoted to oblivion. And so they hide behind a shield of “differing opinions”.

These cretins have a right to post nazi and tankie shit on their own instances – them’s the beauty of the fediverse. But I also have a right to not want hate speech, genocide denial, and Hitler/Stalin/Mao simps polluting my feed. It’s not mere “differing opinions” when one person’s opinion is “Holodomor didn’t happen, and if it did, the Ukrainians deserved it” or “Holocaust didn’t happen, and if it did, the Jews deserved it” or whatever apologia they wanna peddle.