As someone who has no idea what either of these things are, this reads like a satirical headline. I get an email like this about my company's myriad platforms nearly daily
Congratulations! You’re an adult on a website. If you do t know what something means, you have the ability to click the link and learn, which would’ve taken you far less time than this pointless snarky comment that’s been made so many times already.
I don't know why I torture myself with these kinds of presentations anymore. Aside from the obvious "It's all AI" complaint, it feels like every problem they describe as needing a solution is fundamentally basic human reasoning that they are hoping we'll replace with a non-deterministic interaction with our phones. Splitting a tab by taking a picture and letting AI split it for you? Get out a fucking calculator. Is that really a scenario they think will excite people? Their portrayal of a world where we depend on computers for such simple thoughts is not a positive one.
LMGTFY was an intentionally rude tongue-in-cheek response when someone was asking a question that could easily be answered by a simple search. This is about asking more complex questions that don't necessarily have a single objective answer.
I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negative impacts on how we interact as humans.
I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.
I’ll give you the brutal answer that many of you don’t want to hear.
None of you (including me) matter. The only thing that matters is the sovereignty and security of the nation. The people in power care a great deal about furthering this. All the billionaire’s sing to their tune for money does not exceed power.
Moreover - you are only of interest to the state to the extent you are productive. The moment you cease to be productive, it’s in the interest of the state to diminish your quality of life.
Therefore the state cares about output and progress - not about how you feel whilst progress continues on.
>Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.
I'm honestly not educated on the topic right now since I haven't been in school for 15 years and have some time left before my daughter starts, but is this rule really not in place in most schools? How could any school justify not having this rule at the very least, regardless of how well-enforced it is?
I always assumed it was a lack of enforcement due to understaffing that was the problem
I tend to avoid placing the blame on individuals (parents in this case) when the problem being described is so widespread. People act as rationally as they can, so if it's that common, it's a systemic failure. Scolding the masses is a fool's errand.
We’re talking about underdeveloped minds in the face of excruciating social and physiological pressure.
I’m pretty sure the systemic failure is, in part, that parents are, en masse, abdicating their responsibilities of guiding their children through the minefield of modern technology, from iPad kids on up.
The reasons why vary - and include being addicted themselves.
I’d love to hear any anecdotal evidence to the contrary - not just a dismissal, or being called a fool.
The society that supports phoneless children no longer exists. It stopped sometime in the 2010s. Taking away phones doesn't bring that infrastructure back, it culminates in something new and worse.
One example is the tension between childrens' independence and roaming and the now lack of payphones. Taking away a cell phone doesn't bring back payphones. It either reduces a child's independence or puts them in more dangerous situations. What it doesn't do is return them back to a time when a couple of quarters could call mom or dad.
You're supposing that there existed a virtuous past in which parents taught their children respect and that if we returned to that past, there would be no need to ban smartphones in the classroom, and you believe that even though this virtuous past had no smartphones.
you’re saying the complaint is that in that era it was also thought of as a new phenomenon.
That makes some sense - it’s been a declining slope, with a huge drop-off point.
But was there also evidence of less-competent people coming out of the end of the machine that’s supposed to produce people to keep the civilization functional?
Probably happened at one time or another - but it was probably also considered a problem……
My original “as a default” verbiage is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but is there for a reason.
Huh? The validity of my take is based on some rule you have in your head? What I'm seeing is someone who is desperate to be right.
Everyone for the last 2000 years has expressed the same sentiment you did.
They all feel exactly the same way. The parsimonious explanation is that this is a bias that develops as we age and like any bias, we're especially blind to it and deny its existence as evidenced in this thread.
I know it doesn't feel good to realize you have a bias, but that rational thing is to understand it and account for it. That too is part of growing older.
> What I'm seeing is someone who is desperate to be right.
I’m desperate to understand what your point is - if it’s that I’m just another old fogie biased against the next generation, then you couldn’t be more mislead.
I’m desperate to have a conversation, for the good of this community. That’s what we’re here for.
> Everyone for the last 2000 years has expressed the same sentiment you did.
I’m not expressing a sentiment. We all are. Entire classrooms of kids are ignoring the authority figure as a default.
That’s the topic in TFA.
It’s…not my opinion. Or a sentiment. Or subject to bias.
Whatever bias you think I’m showing: you should name it! I don’t even know what sort of fallacy you’re accusing me of!
Growing older isn’t accepting someone sneering vaguely and unproductively at you.
If that means curbing the comparatively high consumption taxes in WA, then it's for the best. The lowest income brackets pay an outrageous percentage of their income to taxes compared to the upper brackets because of them.
What about this law makes you think any of the revenue is going to be used to curb consumption taxes? Because that's not what any of this money is being earmarked for. Most of it is basically a government slush fund.
> If that means curbing the comparatively high consumption taxes
“Most of the roughly $4 billion a year the tax would bring it would be devoted to the state’s general-fund budget to pay for government agencies and services. A 5% chunk would be earmarked for early education and child care.
Democrats also say they’d use some of the money to fund free school lunch and breakfast for all kids in K-12 schools, though Republicans pointed out that money is not legally earmarked in the income tax bill.
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The bill would also exempt more businesses from paying the state’s business and occupation tax. It also would eliminate the sales tax on purchases of diapers, and personal hygiene products such as toothpaste, antiperspirants and shampoo.
It also would expand the state’s Working Families Tax Credit, which sends annual rebates of up to $1,300 a year to lower-income working families. Ferguson had pushed for the expansion of the program and said the revised bill would make 460,000 households eligible for the payments.”
I grew up in WA and as much as I enjoyed the lack of income tax, it's factual that until recently they held the title of #1 most regressive state tax system nationwide (recently bumped to #2 by FL). Income taxes are much better distributed among income brackets than consumption taxes are. I grew up just over the river from Portland, where there is no state sales tax; we got to enjoy the best of both worlds by crossing the state line to OR for large purchases and living in WA.
Ironically, my home for the last decade (MO) has recently moved forward with a bill eliminating the statewide income tax in favor of a higher sales tax. This is in a state where the two largest cities are situated on the borders of other states, so it's essentially a guarantee that this will backfire.
In Missouri, the current proposal is to put it up to a vote, so Missourians will decide what they want. There are safguards builtin where the income tax is only phased out if there is revenue to replace it. Its an interesting experiment setup.
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The way to make a consumption tax progresive is with a prebate, or if you want to be more complicated, a rebate. With a prebate, every citizen or resident would recieve a check each period for the amount of the consumption tax up to the spending level you set as the curve for regresiveess, such as the federal poverty line.
It would be difficult for Missouri to implement a prebate on its own due to the proximity of the population to other states! (Residents could take the prebate, then travel across state lines to spend it, resulting in a huge loss to the state).
Income taxes are complicated to collect, subject to massive violations of privacy, and generally provide more perverse incentives than consumption taxes.
Given the experience I've had with MO's legislature, I don't have a lot of trust in them to do anything that directly reflects the majority desire. Ultimately they have clearly shown a preference towards Republican dogma than democratic norms, so I fully expect the income tax removal to go through regardless of the balance sheet.
The "free" federal tax filing service I use in Florida, makes their money by charging for state filings. It will add an additional hour or two of effort to every resident of the state, even if they are below the state income threshold which is quite an externality.
>It will add an additional hour or two of effort to every resident of the state, even if they are below the state income threshold which is quite an externality.
Nope, that is false. The language of the bill only requires filing if tax is owed. There will be a handful of folks on the cusp who will need to calculate their AGI to determine their state tax liability but everyone else knows offhand if they need to file.
The language is "Individuals not owing tax under this chapter are not
required to file a return..."
This is one of those things that I question the legality of, but it will never get answered because nobody is going to the Supreme Court over sales tax. I can understand the argument of me sitting at home in State 1, buying something online, and having it delivered to me in State 1, and owing State 1 some sales tax on that.
It is absolutely no business of State 1's what I do when I travel into State 2. Whether or not I buy something and/or the value of that purchase should not enrich State 1 in any way. The only reasonable exception I can think of is if I'm buying things to bring back and resell.
The Use tax is levied when you bring items from State 1 into State 2 and use it within State 2's jurisdiction.
Not State 2 taxing you for using items within State 1's jurisdiction.
As far as I remember from my tax days they are also limited to the difference between the tax you paid for in the originating state and the state you use the item in, much like US federal taxes for citizens abroad.
In practice as well, no government gives a fuck about regular consumer abuse at that level. You get hit for violating the taxes when you either were A: committing other crimes and this was more of them throwing the book at you, or B: are a company or organization abusing the tax difference at large, such as a laundromat in Massachusetts buying 500k of machines in New Hampshire and thinking your'e so clever for tricking the tax man.
> The Use tax is levied when you bring items from State 1 into State 2 and use it within State 2's jurisdiction. Not State 2 taxing you for using items within State 1's jurisdiction.
That's what I understand it to be as well, sorry if that wasn't clear. But to use your washing machine example what business is it of the state where I bought this washing machine? Why does Massachusetts get a percentage cut of this washing machine's purchase price. The electricity is already taxed, the water is already taxed, so hooking up to the grid doesn't seem to be a very good reason.
> In practice as well, no government gives a fuck about regular consumer abuse at that level.
Oh so this is one of those things where the government can just choose to arbitrarily enforce it against entities it doesn't like.
Maybe the government shouldn't be able to pass tens of thousands of pages of law every single year and not enforce them until they decide that you are Bad and, as you put it yourself, "[throw] the book at you." Maybe laws should be like copyright where if the government has a history of not enforcing them, they go away.
> But to use your washing machine example what business is it of the state where I bought this washing machine?
It’s their jurisdiction and they made a law for it. I don’t subscribe to libertarian beliefs so it’s not very hard for me to grok.
> Oh so this is one of those things where the government can just choose to arbitrarily enforce it against entities it doesn't like.
Not for 99% of cases although there are times I recognized it gets abused. It’s not enforced on the smaller violations as a result of it taking X amount of dollars to enforce to only get >X dollars in tax revenue. It’s not a vice tax where they are trying to stop behavior but a revenue generator so there is no reason to waste the money.
You get similar behavior in large businesses accounting departments where under a certain value they will just accept the loss instead of spending the time trying to fix discrepancies in their accounts.
> This is one of those things that I question the legality of, but it will never get answered because nobody is going to the Supreme Court over sales tax
Someone did go the Supreme Court over sales tax on property bought out of state. Henneford v. Silas Mason Co., Inc., 300 US 577 (1937). Text here [1].
Going from a high tax state to a low tax state to purchase goods is not substantially different than going from a state with strict anti-abortion laws to a state with very pro-abortion laws to get an abortion. One is economic, one is healthcare, both boil down to "I shouldn't have to tell the government what I do outside of that government's jurisdiction." I'd rather people have the freedom to vote with their wallets and feet.
Even taking states out of the equation, if I live in a city with a city-specific sales tax, that city doesn't suddenly get the right to lay claim to all my economic activity whether in that city or elsewhere.
That tax is a "use" tax. It is basically for having/using things in the state that you didn't pay state sales tax on.
You don't have to tell the state why no sales tax was paid--maybe you bought it in another state but maybe you bought it at a garage sale or from someone on Craigslist or something like that that doesn't collect sales tax.
The use tax is only legal if it is complementary to the sales tax (which means that the total you pay cannot be more than the sales tax rate) so that if you did buy it out of state and paid sales tax in that state your state can only charge you the difference between what the sales tax would have been in state and what you paid to the other state.
That does mean that you will have to tell the state where you got it if you want to get the reduced use tax rate, but as a practical matter most people only pay use tax on items that they have to tell the state about anyway, such as cars, where they will be telling the state that information even if no use tax is owed.
> Also, I would be wary bragging about buying your goods in Oregon, you technically may owe WA use tax
In my experience, this is well-known around Vancouver and elicits nothing but eye rolls when mentioned. If there is any enforcement whatsoever for that rule (a big if), it's clearly toothless and people don't worry much about it. A Best Buy opened a couple miles north of the river in the late 2000s and didn't make it much more than a year because another one existed in Jantzen Beach, immediately across the state line. The Vancouver location amounted to a showroom before people decided if they wanted to drive the extra 15 minutes.
The great thing about sales tax is that everyone can bypass it. You don't need to be the kind of person who can hire a tax expert to coach you; all you need to do is drive over the state line!
