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5 years ago:
A tax regime that replaced capital gains taxes on domestic property and financial securities with a 1 or 2 percent wealth/property tax would be superior to both the current regime and a universal wealth tax. This would also apply to primary residences which are often capital gains exempt.
economicspolicy
luke posted a question about the view:
I'm interested to hear more about this, and particularly how it might alter the economic incentives behind investing. (Also, it's interesting to me to note that typically, asset managers operate exactly on those terms, charging 1% of assets yearly, regardless of returns.)
5 years ago:
Customers should cancel their Prime accounts due to the way Amazon treats warehouse laborers, delivery contractors, etc.
moralitysocial justicecommerce
luke replied:
I think there's evidence Amazon cares a great deal (more than most retailers) about customer satisfaction. I think they know their success is due in large part to their fulfillment reliability and customer service both being so good. So I think they are likely to respond to customer activism more than, say, Walmart might.As to competitors, I do think retailers that use unionized courier companies or postal services for delivery are better in key respects. However, I think that as a society we need to pressure our governments to hold all employers to a higher standard. There are clearly powerful incentives for all companies to subcontract out manual labour to increase profit and avoid liability, and we can't rely on altruistic capitalism.
+ 1 more comment
5 years ago:
The public would be better served and more informed if news stories were selected based on the aggregate impact of all similar incidents, rather than by the novelty and drama of rare outlier events. For example, mass shootings will affect far fewer people than suicides by gun.
media
luke posted a comment:
I think this is more or less the vision statement of thecorrespondent.com, ("an online platform for unbreaking news") and it's certainly a perspective I agree with, but it can also feel a bit like journalism as whole grains and fibre — something is good for us, that we should all get more of, but not necessarily that tasty or appealing when compared to the alternative.

The word "news" itself seems to suggest that we've always focused on the novel rather than the ongoing, and I suspect as humans we are instinctually drawn to — and more likely to remember — stories that surprise or shock us. I think any journalist has to reconcile that human bias when it comes to trying to report news that deals more on aggregate impact. Some of the "explainer" stuff happening these days struggles to matter I think because it tends not to actually be continuous (don't just explain to me once, keep explaining over time and maintain my interest!), and it tends to lack any particular additional reporting (the explainers are often kept in a separate pen from the reporters).
5 years ago:
Other than in extreme cases of abuse or neglect, almost all of the long-term impact that parents have on their children’s long term life outcomes (happiness, income, intelligence, health, etc), can be explained via genetics rather than parenting style.
parenting
luke replied:
Fair enough. I guess it depends what you count as abuse or "extreme neglect" — just looking at myself and the people I know best, it seems like we were all influenced by our parents' treatment in key ways, both positive and negative, and I suspect that "a relatively broad normal range" still includes a lot of questionable stuff! (That is, we're all terrible at parenting in one way or another, but probably some of us more than others.)

Obviously in terms of how similar we end up to our parents, that could be highly genetic, but I'm thinking more about the way many people either directly rebel against their parents or who more generally try to compensate for things they feel like their parents did poorly.
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5 years ago luke agreed with:
People are right to be concerned about economic inequality because, while wealth is not a zero sum game, the political power that the wealthy can exert *is* a zero sum game.
economicspoliticssocial justice
5 years ago luke disagreed with:
Expresh should allow users to freely post claims rather than moderate them.
meta
luke posted a reason to disagree:
Reddit seems like it's done a better job building (somewhat) healthy forums for discussion than other places on the internet, and my sense is that it's because there is a clearer expectation for defined rules and moderation.
5 years ago:
Most individual conservation acts, such as recycling or composting, don’t have a meaningful impact on climate change. Instead, they can give people the false sense that they are making a difference.
environment
luke posted a reason to agree:
I mostly agree with this in that I think larger scale regulation and institutional action (e.g. a large company shifting its behavior) has a much larger impact, but I do think there is a connection between individual action that reaches the level of a trend and thus influences larger actors to change.
5 years ago luke leaned disagree on:
Citizens of a country should have a special right to access that country’s labor market (ie. no open borders).
politicseconomics
luke posted a comment:
I think there's an argument to make about citizens/residents having special access to social benefits (or at least it being tied to some period of residency — the "equity" @andrew mentions), but I can't see much if any benefit of restricting labour, except with the asterisk that I think it requires strong labour laws that enforce societally-agreed minimum standards (to mitigate the effect of poorer newcomers being willing to work for less and employers therefore being incentivized to hire cheap, migrant labour).
5 years ago luke was undecided on:
At a worldwide scale, people will simply not go far enough with conservation to meaningfully slow down or stop climate change. We should instead focus on technologies to try to clean up or otherwise mitigate the effects.
environment