> Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties.
I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of
- feed kids
- rent
- insurance
because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)
I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.
Rather than subsidize the poor person being poor via insurance, we can subsidize them by say, building public housing nearby their place of work, or direct payments.
Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance.
Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice!
One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, but it's potentially still expensive for Alice. Because of her injuries she can't work for a few weeks. She works hourly, so now loses wages. Luckily with FMLA she won't necessarily lose her job, but she needed every paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, because her car is now gone. She can't drive to work anymore. She can't drive to groceries. She can't afford a car, as a huge chunk her savings went to cover those medical bills and missed paychecks. She's pretty SOL huh.
Sounds like we need to let Bob off the hook for inflicting all this on Alice. After all, he needed to drive without insurance.
No. We should just make it possible so Bob didn't need to drive in the first place instead of excusing his choice to still drive when he couldn't really afford it. We should structure the incentives so Bob doesn't want to drive if he can't afford it.
People driving without insurance ruin lives like Alice's all the time.
That scenario is completely missing the point. Bob has to drive because of the lack of good public transportation and the fact that he can't afford a house near his work. Not to mention if he can't afford a car with insurance it's because his job simply doesn't pay enough.
It's much more likely that external factors put him in that situation, rather than himself. Yet you propose we should punish him personally and paint only Alice as a victim. That's naive. Both are victims.
These are systemic problems and trying to solve them with individual punishments is only going to hurt individuals while not fixing the underlying issues that really matter.
I'm fully aware Bob is the victim. That's why I'm saying the solution is to make it so Bob didn't get in a car. He is a victim of car dependency. Subsidizing insurance to make sure Bob could always afford it isn't solving that. Ensuring he can always afford insurance just furthers his victimhood.
But the only question that really matters in the end is: is that profitable?
If we really cared about safety many people would not be allowed to drive in the first place. Tests would be much more strict and rightly so. But it's way more profitable to let those people spend money on cars (and eventually kill people) than it is to provide good public transportation.
Especially with the auto industry, they have basically won the lobbying game. Most people can't even imagine a world where cars aren't in the center of it, so we keep moving the goalpost...
Beaglesses, insofar as there are sides to take here, I like yours. I would hope only that you had the option to include your children in some of the building activity-- your comment suggests you did.
Building the family's house alongside Dad sounds much more valuable than anything they would have learned playing on the school's soccer team.
All of which is strong argument in favor of replacing all income tax with land tax.
The idea starts to make a lot of sense once you look at its framing. This includes the argument you make above (why can't you hire help out of pre-tax income, like any other business can?) and more on the legitimacy of taxation.
>why can't you hire help out of pre-tax income, like any other business can
Leaving aside the obvious fact that your personal activities are not a business[0], you can indeed hire help out of pre-tax income -- in the U.S. no one pays income tax on their gross income, only their taxable income. By the time common tax credits are factored in, a married couple with children may easily have $30-40K of gross income each year not subject to income tax.
Many, if not most, homeowners do not need to go out and work extra hours to pay someone to do work to repair their property, any more than they need to work extra hours to pay for food and clothing, so looking only at the marginal tax rate is misleading (as in the example above of earning an extra $167 to have $100 after tax).
Further, work you pay for that improves the property (as opposed to repairs) is added to the tax basis of the property, reducing future taxable income when the property is sold. Along with the potential to exclude up to $250K/$500K (single/married) of gain[1] from selling the property is a huge source of pre-tax income.
[0]and even businesses can only deduct expenses for people they hire for services that are related to generating a profit.
The decision to work extra in order to pay to outsource a task vs doing it yourself (as was framed above) is exactly the type of economic decision where the full marginal tax rate applies.
I've looked a bit at military history and it is interesting to see how consistent they generally are. They'll have a squad of about 10, though the variance can be up to 50%, grouped into companies of ~100, grouped into legions of ~1000, into armies of ~10,000. It wasn't until the 20th Century that armies could become really huge. But the most all-purpose and independent units tended to be in the 100-150 range. Big enough to have enough people to do everything you typically need to do with adequate redundancy.
Dunbar's numbers are good enough rules-of-thumb. Some people have better social memories and so will have larger Dunbar number capabilities, just as others have smaller.
In the bc era Chinese armies routinely had 50000 warhorses let alone ground-pounding infantry. Your data is ... incomplete. I would recommend looking a bit more at military history, quite a bit more.
Anecdotal, I have been using 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500,... as the 'break points' where organizational structures need a rethink. So far, it has worked for me. These also match the lines on a log graph.
I wonder if there is a maximum or plateau, beyond which it doesn't matter. is there a difference between 30 million and 300 million, 3 billion to 30 billion?
Ah! We are entering "paperclip factory" territory here, with your question ... :)
> is there a difference between 30 million and 300 million, 3 billion to 30 billion?
In organizational terms? That is, terms of how you would go about organizing or operating ...
... I would humbly only go as far as saying this: I feel there has to be (some) upper limit beyond which any "structure" other than a "self-organizing" structure will collapse or be unmanageable.-
PS. DAOs (which, sadly, seem (?) to be on the wane), were at (some) end of that spectrum, methinks ...
PS. For all we know, the first thing a superhumanly intelligent AGI might do is "forcibly-self-organize" us into a DAO, doing away with the political system. I, for one, would welcome that :)
> The Sci-fi part of my brain finds parallels in feudalism
Elsethread - when talking abou how the Mongols almost overtook Europe - the claim was made that - to a point - part of the reason the hordes had to stop is that "descentralized" (as opposed to centralized clan-leader-ruled) feudal structures made it hard to make advances.-
... so feudalism came up, as a somewhat advanced form of decentralization. Which was neat.-
That feels at least directionally correct. And it even goes up from there. An organization with a few thousand people is quite different from a 20-30K one.
I'm not sure about the math and exact numbers (which probably vary depending upon the situation anyway) but it's pretty clear that things are quite different at different scale points.
It's complicated by the fact that larger organizations/cities/etc. can be effectively agglomerations of smaller entities with tighter or looser coupling. But, yes, in general.
You can see some of this in your examples.
US DoD is, of course, actually part of the US government but relatively few DoD employees ever really interact with people in other US government branches. Ditto with Walmart store employees and the "mothership."
Voting for a position at the government of my ~3M people city is completely different from voting for a position at the government of my ~300M people country.
Logically, it makes sense that the situation keeps changing. But it still feels weird. How many different kinds of relationship are we capable of?
> How many different kinds of relationship are we capable of?
Kinds? (qualitative) ...
... I think you very much upped the ante there :)
I'd posit a (cheap, easy) guess: Infinite.-
PS. Of course, taking the "cheap" way out in thinking about this of assuming each one-on-one relationship (not to mention one-to-many, and many-to-one and many-to-many, like mentioned upthread) to be a unique "kind", is an easy way out: As many types of relationships as people, because no two people are alike, and so is their relationship. Heck, considering each of the individuals (themselves) involved, might subjectively experience a different relationship, there's even a "two to each pair" pairing of relationship types to participants, to be considered ...
Now, when, IMHO it gets interesting is if we - a bit more rigoroulsy - attempt a "taxonomy" of relationship "types".-
(And, then, again, I am sure anthropology has studied and catalogued those to death ...)
Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck about 70K years ago. As a result, there is more genetic diversity in a troop of chimpanzees than in all of the employees of Google.
So it depends how you define "diversity". I can see how from your view (range of life choices) humans today are more diverse than most species. However, if you go back not so long ago, there are species of ants with more worker roles (40+)than your typical midieval village.
[Submitted on 24 Mar 2023]
Double Descent Demystified: Identifying, Interpreting & Ablating the Sources of a Deep Learning Puzzle
Rylan Schaeffer, Mikail Khona, Zachary Robertson, Akhilan Boopathy, Kateryna Pistunova, Jason W. Rocks, Ila Rani Fiete, Oluwasanmi Koyejo
Double descent is a surprising phenomenon in machine learning, in which as the number of model parameters grows relative to the number of data, test error drops as models grow ever larger into the highly overparameterized (data undersampled) regime. This drop in test error flies against classical learning theory on overfitting and has arguably underpinned the success of large models in machine learning. This non-monotonic behavior of test loss depends on the number of data, the dimensionality of the data and the number of model parameters. Here, we briefly describe double descent, then provide an explanation of why double descent occurs in an informal and approachable manner, requiring only familiarity with linear algebra and introductory probability. We provide visual intuition using polynomial regression, then mathematically analyze double descent with ordinary linear regression and identify three interpretable factors that, when simultaneously all present, together create double descent. We demonstrate that double descent occurs on real data when using ordinary linear regression, then demonstrate that double descent does not occur when any of the three factors are ablated. We use this understanding to shed light on recent observations in nonlinear models concerning superposition and double descent. Code is publicly available
Maybe not the computers we would buy or like, but you can buy plenty of computers for a couple of hundred dollars.
Hell, you can buy a mobile phone (a computer that fits in your pocket!) for less than that. And don’t get met started about raspberry Pi and the likes.
We are genuinely living in the future. We just don’t realize it all the the time.
I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of
- feed kids - rent - insurance
because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)
I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.
Unless we made the fine proportional to income?