RichardGibbons

I agree that DEI is not the broad sentiment yet (except institutionally) and Canada's racial problems are small compared to the USA (and almost entirely related to Indigenous people.) But the smallness of the real problems are what makes it particularly egregious that most Canadian governments' are sprinting headlong into promoting race as the primary attribute that distinguishes people. There's really no sensible way to interpret insane policies and luxury beliefs like Gladue, this, this, this, this, this, this.... There are bucket-loads of examples--deeply shameful things that our Canadian governments promote. What's more, the negative second-order effects of deliberately implementing systemic racism and encouraging Canadians to view the world through a racist lens are likely to be severe, particularly as young people's standard of living plummets.

Yeah, and I think that to the extent to which discrimination and bias is deliberately introduced into the system, it should be on such dimensions. For instance, if economically, you and your family are worse off, then you should get systemic advantages (though not to the extent that achievement is discouraged, as that would have the effect of pushing people down, rather than helping raise them up.) That's the whole point behind things like bursaries and progressive taxation. The way I see it, if there's inequalities between racial groups, then that gets resolved by a larger proportion of a particular racial group able to avail themselves of those systemic advantages. And, governmental messaging on race should basically be, "At our core, people are essentially the same, and it's abhorrent discriminating based on race." (As opposed to now, where the government messaging in Canada is essentially, "Race is super-important thing that should divide us. Certain races are less competent, dangerously fragile, and kind of pathetic. And some are also evil. So, it's only sensible to be a racist.")

There's some particular irony there too. The racism inherent in British colonialism likely had many negative impacts on your ancestors. But now, because ethic Indians have among the best outcomes in North American society, DEI is implementing systemic discrimination targeting your niece and nephew as well.

It's quite clear at this point that DEI is the antithesis of fairness and equal opportunities. Among other things, it's racism re-branded, yet again. It amazes me that after so many injustices, humanity just can't seem to tear itself away from the horrific idea that skin colour should dictate outcomes.

I think the reason for this is the impact of incentives on growth. If you have, say, 3% growth, then over the course of 25 years, then your economy will growth by 109%, and your poor are likely to be better off by 55% if they get even half the growth of the economy. If you punish the more intelligent, hard-working, and creative members of your society, then you disincentivize them, which impacts growth. So, suppose you disincentivize the successful, hurting your growth by 2 percentage points, but in return are able to boost the incomes of the poorest by 20%. Then your economy grows by only 28%, and even if the wages of the poorest grow at the same rate, they still only make it to 48%. Therefore, you basically screw over everyone, including the poor, when you create onerous regulations and taxes that impact your country's growth. But that doesn't stop governments from doing it, I think largely because people aren't very thoughtful or proficient at math, and envy is a powerful emotion.

Yeah, I think that's largely because China is the country that today seems most likely to become an Orwellian dystopia, when you account for the social credit stuff. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."

This year, I bought C March calls on October 25, rolled the profit up in the second half of November. I think it's about a 700% gain today. On UAN, I made about a 14-bagger on reasonably large initial position of shares and calls (with a lot of rolling of options). That took almost two years, but was my biggest dollar gain. A portion of my FFH calls back in the day went to 30 or 40x--I can't remember which. To my (weak) recollection, that was over the course of about 8 months, and I imagine those calls were probably my highest percentage gain on a single position.

The headline on this one is nicely deceiving. The implication is "yachts and jets", but they're actually referring to you, Sanjeev. Their cutoff is U$140K in income (and I imagine that's likely household income.) Though, to be fair, I guess you did take a jet to Europe.... So, while, based on your headline, you're supposed to think yachts, you should really be thinking about the upper middle class family in Canada, America, or Europe driving to work and heating their home. I suspect the headline is deceiving because the math doesn't work if you just include the yacht club. There aren't enough billionaires to make the carbon numbers impressive, so it's necessary to talk about the global 1% instead, so you can scoop up the top 10-15% of North American emitters. Spek is also bang-on with his analysis. To me, it feels like Oxfam/SEI started out by wanting to blame wealthy elites for climate change. But then they did the math, and realized their thesis wasn't convincing, so they had to start playing tricky with the numbers and massaging definitions. (I think it's actually a terrible tactic by progressives, trying to tie climate change to unequal outcomes. I think climate change is a big problem, but by trying to tie it to world inequalities, they lose credibility. It suggests to me that they don't actually see climate change as a real problem, but rather just another tool for advancing Marxist views.)

I used to play quite a bit, and got into the 1900 range, but don't play anymore. My top chess highlight was beating a master in a tournament. My second highlight was when I largely crushed everyone at work for months, but then lost badly seven times in a row against a random co-worker. Then he revealed that he was the third best player in Canada.

Yeah, I feel as if it's a bit like the "brain in a vat" scenario. It's plausible that you are just a brain in a vat, with electrical inputs supplied to brain to make you think that you actually have a body and exist in this world. There's no reason to be completely confident that you aren't just a brain in a vat being fed stimuli. But, on a practical level, you're likely to have better outcomes (i.e. a happier brain) if you use the heuristic that you aren't just a brain in a vat, but rather act as if you were a brain in a body roaming about on a giant spinning sphere. Similarly, I think you're likely to have better results investing if you have some concept of "intrinsic value", even if you know that the word "intrinsic" doesn't actually exist with the 100% confidence that seems to be implicit in the word "intrinsic".

And by induction, anything created by commodities is also a commodity and therefore speculative. And any business that relies on selling something speculative is also speculative because it could disappear in an instant if the speculative value of its output falls to zero. Therefore everything in the human universe is speculative and nothing in existence has intrinsic value. Including bitcoin. And the USD dollar. There, ValueArb. To help you out, I've proven exactly what you've been stretching toward. The key, I think, is to start with the premise that commodities that people use and are willing to expend both resources and human effort to acquire don't have intrinsic value.

This is actually quite a pragmatic response. So at least we know ErnieBot is pragmatic, even if Xi isn't....

That makes me wonder if the best thing for the world would be the Ukrainian war lasting for a decade. Horrible for Ukraine, but if nations began to believe that any war is likely to last many years, consuming many lives and resources, I think there would be fewer wars.

Wow, thanks Viking!

Do you happen to have a source for this? (Not because I doubt it, but rather because I'm curious about the underlying math.)

I agree that equality is awful. Much, much worse than the situation we have now. It's very clear and obvious that you have to maintain incentives or everything breaks. a) I think reducing immigration is sensible, but stopping immigration completely is not good. I think immigrants are self-selecting to be much more likely to be hard-working, ambitious, and entrepreneurial than the average citizen. So, I think it makes sense to let in the immigrants with needed high-value skills, and block the others. Then you don't have the immigrants competing with the poor for resources and jobs, and but still get people that add more value than the average American. (Though this would likely be mildly inflationary.) b) Works for me. c) I agree with your analysis of the current situation, but if you do this, I'm not sure how you ensure that the economic bottom 50% have the ability to get a higher education. Education is highly correlated with income mobility. But I don't have a better solution than yours, either. d) This is interesting, because I didn't think it was possible to do this without blowing up the national debt, but I think it is. I'd guess that you'd lose only about $200B in federal tax revenue doing that. Neat idea. e) Very reasonable, though I'm not a fan of your second item because I think it would increase prices in Canada to the same as the USA, rather than the reverse. And I'm a Canadian, so that would suck. LOL. f) If that's the actual math, then that makes sense. It's critical not to break incentives. g) Yep. Thanks for the response. I'm certainly going to adopt some of these as reasonable strategies I'll argue.

My baseline outcome is Bernie and AOC wailing and gnashing their teeth that billionaires have too much money, billionaires wailing and gnashing their teeth and spending resources to try to avoid the tax. I think it wouldn't negatively impact small entrepreneurship much, because I don't think young people will decide not to get rich because their kids won't have the chance to be billionaires. I'm not sure the extent to which it will effect big entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos, but it doesn't seem to me that Musk and Bezo's motivation is to make their kids rich. I suspect it will largely impact the decisions of people who are older than 50 with children, but I think those decisions aren't that important for innovation and can be counter-productive (like monopolies leveraging their position), and it's a toss-up for me whether their reaction will be a net positive or net negative for society. In broader society, I think there will be an increase in social cohesion which is the key to the good outcomes in societies. I think there will be efforts to get the well-educated kids of rich parents to start their own business while they can lean on parents for help. I think people will become more tolerant of billionaires. I think monopolies will be harder to sustain. I think there will likely be more tax revenue. I think there will likely be more focus on innovation and more entrepreneurialism as youth will have more resources to mess around with. a) Can't know for sure, but I think maybe not. But it's super hard to predict these things, so I wouldn't bet any amount of money on it. Second- and third-order effects in taxation are hard. Does Elon stop innovating after PayPal because he's worried that his 15 kids won't get an inheritance? I think not, but I could easily be wrong. b) Yeah, people can totally do this as long as they pay the exit tax at a marginal rate of 99% on amounts over $30M. You have to move when extreme wealth is fairly certain, but you haven't achieved it yet. c) Well, I think most successful people don't get off on willful destruction because not doing that is a significant part of why they're successful. I'd be pretty surprised if Buffett destroyed Berkshire in a fit of pique. (And if he did, it would be neat to see which companies would rise up in its place, and what the people you paid $170M would build with that capital.) Just out of curiosity, what's solution do you have to combat growing wealth inequality? I'd be happy to adopt your solution if it seems more sensible than mine. I think it's quite a hard problem to solve without breaking capitalism, so I'd sincerely love to hear of something better than my proposed strategy. (If your solution is, "do nothing", I think that's an awful solution in a country with human rights and the second amendment. If wealth gets too skewed, I think life for everyone, including the rich, becomes not much fun.)

The problem is that this stuff doesn't actually do what you want it to because it assumes a static world. The world isn't static, and in a non-static world capitalism wins (for everyone, not just the rich) because incentives matter. Suppose that a country is getting 4% annual growth from a capitalist society, but the bottom 90% is only getting 40% of the output. If you put in your socialist changes and the bottom 90% now get 60%, but it costs you 2% of your growth, then in the year you do it, the bottom 90% have a 50% higher standard of living. But in 17 years, they have the same standard of living. And in 30 years, the bottom 90% in the capitalist society have a 50% higher standard of living than those in the socialist system. So you have to be careful not to break capitalist incentives, and studies show that higher capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, and high-income taxes do that. China is a pretty good example, because you saw the CCP destroy their country for socialism, adopt capitalism in the 1990s to dramatically boost their standard of living, and now you'll see them destroy their country once more by breaking capitalist incentives. The two Koreas are similar. Or, a less extreme example is the difference in Canadian and American economic paths. I think the actual solution is massive inheritance taxes (like, 99% on amounts over $30M) combined with taxes and jail time on people attempting to subvert those inheritance taxes. Allow the brilliant risk-taking entrepreneurs to allocate capital and do their thing for their lifetime to improve everyone's standard of living. But nobody gets to be a billionaire except through their own efforts.

No big deal, I didn't take it the wrong way. I think the big problem with North American politics now is that countries prosper when there is high social cohesion--when everyone shares a common broad vision and everyone tries to act in good faith to achieve that vision. Politicians and media, however, seem to believe that destroying social cohesion is good for their careers. They seem to want wedge issues, polarization, and villainization of their political enemies because it leads to engagement. The problem is, I suspect if you destroy social cohesion, you also destroy democracy.

Yeah. But, the corruption and abuse on the Chinese side is at least an order of magnitude (and maybe two) worse that the that in the "free" world. You might want to "both sides" it, but the CCP is obviously much more evil, just like the Nazis, Khymer Rouge, and Soviets were evil. The kid who shoplifted the chocolate bar from the store was a criminal, and so was Jeffrey Dahmer. Really, both of those two were criminal. Just like poverty in the US and running people over with tanks are basically the same thing.

I don't scoff at it at all. I think it's atrocious. The government has effectively said, "Because you publicly disagree with our policies, we're going to take away your ability to feed your family." This is a huge overreach by the government. So, I think my opinion matches yours on that issue (or maybe I'm actually more extreme than you on the Emergency Act invocation. I'm against it to an extreme degree.) On the vaccine mandates, I'm on the fence. I think there shouldn't be mandates outside healthcare, but I'm on the fence whether a healthcare worker should have the option of not using proven prophylactic measures. (Like, should they have the option of not washing their hands or not wearing masks during a surgery?) I think I probably settle on exactly how proven the "proven" measures are. I believe in liberal values, but there's no doubt that the Trudeau government is authoritarian and very far away from liberal values. I think there's a reasonable chance that because of this government, I'll never again vote for the Liberal Party of Canada. (I really didn't like Harper because of his anti-science stance. But now I wish I could vote for him today.)

Do you view the CCP committing genocide against the Uyghurs and grinding peaceful protesters to a pulp beneath the treads of tanks as harmful to societal development? I suspect not, because the CCP said this was a good idea, right?

I agree 100% that we should both team up to pound that straw man into the ground. For instance, I haven't enslaved or genocided anyone this year, though human historical practices indicate it's a good idea. And I think that's the right decision (for me, at least. Don't want to judge....)

Yes and yes.

LOL, yeah, science--correlation is not causation, and it's interesting to speculate about underlying causes when you have a strong correlation. Spanking kids was pretty standard in my lifetime, though it's abuse now.