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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 2h

I agree that framing and wording and intent are important but the fact that they are fiscally the same is also an important fact!

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 2h

So we agree that the two policies involve every taxpayer paying the same thing in each, but you think they are functionally different policies because they imply something different about "baselines"?

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 2h

For which taxpayers do they result in a different tax bill?

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 2h

Right but a "$500 tax credit for parents" and a "$500 tax penalty for childless adults" are exactly the same policy.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 3h

The problem with the quoted proposal is that there aren't new parents for the kids to be assigned to. It's like how a legal right to housing doesn't help if there are no homes.

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4h

My impression is that decline in marriage is responsible for maybe half the decline in fertility (with the other half being decline in how many kids married couples have and how many unmarried people have kids).

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4h

A different way of putting it is that expressed in wheat prices, Cratchit is making the equivalent of $18/week(!) today, which is close to the "extreme poverty" line used to describe the developing world poorest.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 21h

lol

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 1d

Depressingly, this turned out to be too optimistic.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 1d

The actual number of hours that Americans work hasn't changed much over the last 20 years.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 1d

The stability of modern democracy was a feature of the postwar boom not something about the institutions.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

An interesting range of interpretations here but what jumps out at me most is that sharp economic downturns seem to be associated, with some lag, with the far-right cannibalizing the center-right and thereby threatening democratic systems.

Some implications, perhaps, for democratic system design.

Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · Aug 12

In our - very limited - historical experience of democracy,

(i) states rot from the centre-right
(ii) and it's contagious (via geography/powerful exemplar states)

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 1d

As with other famously dunked on Pelosi quotes, she was obviously correct here.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 1d

this feels like forty years ago but it was 2023

www.newsweek.com/nancy-pelosi...

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Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Racket @racket-lang.org · 2d

Hope everyone had a great RacketCon. Many thanks to the presenters, participants in-person and remote, the organisers and UMass Boston for hosting us.
Please send feedback to the team at [email protected]

Racket

Videos about or related to the programming language Racket, mostly drawn from RacketCon presentations. This channel publishes videos from Racket events and may also re-publish video from other places.

www.youtube.com

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 3d

Many people dislike the large impersonal scale of modern life and the resulting rules-based bureaucracy required to administer it, and they mostly pretend that the challenges involved don't exist.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 3d

The Maple code is quite related to Rust, since it's about aliasing.

The other things are about lower level control in other ways, I would say.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 3d

For a lot of these things we already know how to make it nice, the answer is Garbage Collection. In general the decorated types are about having all of high performance, direct style, and statement-oriented mutation. If you just give those up it's easy. :)

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Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Scott Robeson @indianaclimate.bsky.social · 4d

For timid leaders, poor communication is a feature not a bug

Be very, very quiet: IU's Elmer Fudd approach to transparency

Time after time over the past few years, even for stories generating national attention, Indiana University did not provide anyone, including WFIU/WTIU News, an interview.

www.ipm.org

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4d

I mean, that's the question. One possibility is that just the capex/open to serve current models going forward is too expensive to justify given demand. Then the whole thing gets disassembled for parts like Nevada tract housing in 2009.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4d

I think part of the issue is that there aren't very many people currently who say "I like AI but would only use it if it was much cheaper". Mostly people already use it or don't like it. But the lesson from prior tech is that big price drops do lead to increased demand.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 5d

The problem is that this discourse is conflating conversations about tracking with issues of classroom management and special needs kids who are also high ability and with bullying and with kids not dealing well with the structure of school. And gifted can't do all that at once.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 5d

5. It's fine to use your own experience as a guide, but it's not reasonable to claim that only people with your same experiences can have a view on these issues.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 5d

4. The "if it helps just one kid" reasoning style is just not compatible with running public schools that have many constraints and limited resources and serve a diverse population.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 5d

3. Kids who are extremely far above the norm are of course rare, and g&t programs that serve 2-4x larger populations can't be designed primarily for them.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 5d

2. Being well above the academic norm (you used 2SD as an example) is compatible with being well socialized in a standard classroom, and people who don't fit in standard classrooms aren't always well ahead academically.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 5d

1. Obviously there are some people who can be identified as academically gifted very early on. Denying that would be silly even if reliably finding such people is challenging.

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