- bumbyThe Marine Corps has/had KLR 650 dirt bikes converted to run on diesel, kerosene, or JP8.
- >That is literally the system that exists today
Agreed. But the difference is I'm saying a better solution is to adjust the incentives rather than just keeping the same incentives but making it more transparent.
I would be in favor of higher pay for Congress given the limits of the job (maintaining at least two residences in DC and their home state, for example). Perhaps we just disagree on the level. I don't want it to be "lucrative" as you said originally (ie I don't want it to be a way to get rich), but it should be high enough to not be prohibitive to go into service. There are also some knock-on effects that would need to be managed; for example, I think overall civil servant pay is pegged to Congressional pay limits. Other solutions may be to have designated Congressional housing (so at least they can't use the housing cost as an excuse).
- That’s a bit of a strawman considering I was deliberate in saying hardware interfaces are limited and not saying they are zero. The number of interfaces in software is often going to be orders of magnitude greater. The network effects and failure modes will often increase geometrically with the number of interfaces. In fact, big construction design firms have tools to easily identify and mitigate the “clashes” you bring up and those tools tend to work well because there is a finite number and the designs are well-documented (as opposed to software where changes are relatively cheap and easy so they often occur without documentation)
Saying incompetence is the reason is a trivial rebuttal that ignores the central claim about complexity. It’s like saying “the reason why we don’t have a theory of everything is because we don’t have competent physicists”
- Something often overlooked in cost/schedule estimates is the nature of joint probability of actions slipping. Action A slips and causes action B to slip. I think software is tougher to estimate because the number of interfaces is often much higher, and sometimes more hidden, than in hardware.
- You’re saying finding the people most incentivized by money is the feature we should be optimizing for?
If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?
Maybe a better system for selecting civil servants is…I dunno…a system that optimizes for that “service” part? It’s shocking how in the last few decades we’ve convinced ourselves that money is the only filter that motivates people and is the inherent driver of all human action.
- I think if you look at the numbers, it doesn’t make sense. For Toyota to have a similar market cap at their current PE, they would need to sell something like 95% of the total cars worldwide. So unless people think Tesla will have a worldwide automotive monopoly, they are paying for something other than what they’re doing with cars.
- >The only reason people make money off of stocks is because at the end, someone gives those companies money.
Small quibble. The reason why people make money off stocks is largely because people think people will give those companies in the future. People aren’t just trading on dividends, they’re trading on PE ratios.
Otherwise, companies like Tesla would be worth much less than Toyota (which gets more revenue, higher gross profit, and higher profit margins).
- I’m only playing devils advocate here but the counter argument is society is very complex and it takes time to understand it to a sufficient degree. Short term limits would mean a Congress making impactful decisions without fully understanding the ramifications, or they just rely on unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists to tell them what to do.
The counter counter argument is that you could be a career politician working your way up: two terms at city council, two as mayor, two as governor etc…and by the time someone is voted into the national stage they presumably have decades of experience.
- I’m not defending congressional trading, but there are potentially other confounding variables (emphasis on potential). Leaders may tend to be older, have more appetite for risk, or leadership may correlate with wealth/status because “the connected” can also raise more money etc etc. Unless those types of variables are controlled for, it should temper how strongly we draw conclusions.
- I didn’t get a chance to read the entire NBER paper, but an important nuance is that it takes an industry-normalized perspective.
It could be possible that someone in Congress has insider information about a specific industry that helps them, but not about a specific stock. For example, if I knew about specific legislation that would impact auto manufacturers I may have a better idea to get in or out of that sector without necessarily knowing if Ford will do better than GM.
To your point about meta-analysis it would also be useful to know if members are worse than normies at picking industries as well.
- What bothers me is when people treat the third as some sort of virtue. I think operating in the ethical gray areas makes them feel smart instead of unethical.
- That link is more marketing than substance. Is there any data on how well these models perform? For example, how well does their predictive maintenance work, how much risk-adjusted money savings does it provide, what data streams does it require?
- Ethics, in simple terms, is how we treat each other. If you claim it’s intrinsically attached to something like decentralized power, it’s at the least a misunderstanding and possibly a misapplied dogma.
- Except the current premise is largely based on constraining humans to the drudgery that AI cannot do. Current AI is more focused on creative works, not on folding the laundry and replacing faucets.
I had a professor decades ago who was near retirement who related how when he was an undergraduate he had to write a paper about what humans would do with all their newfound free time since they would only need to work a dozen hours a week. I’m sure similar conversations were had at the onset of steam power and electricity; we’ve been crafting the same pipe dream for generations.
My point is that we should care about quality of life as the main measure. Economic output is a proxy for that, and sometimes a poor one.
- I never understood why in these types of discussions, things seem to be shoehorned into a context where usefulness is only measured in some sort of economic ROI. Economics isn’t an end; it can a means to one, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
- I wonder how much of that is driven by poor performing behavioral models. There was a HN article from a few weeks back and it only had an accuracy of about 70% determining if someone was awake or asleep. I would guess that the secondary behavioral data used in this data (like cardiovascular fitness) are much harder to predict from raw sensor data than being awake or asleep.