If turbulence wasn't such a pain in the butt, we wouldn't exist.
The article reads like there's a more rigorous proof of some classical renormalization results. I wish it had connected the renormalization results to empirical utility for applications.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
Were that delivery driver using a car instead of a bike, then your wife would likely be dead instead of in the ER.
(At least in the US, having a driver's license is in no way, shape, or form an indication that the driver is capable of driving correctly, much less their willingness to do so.)
Perhaps if there is a no bikelanes and cyclists are bothering you on the sidewalk you should walk in the middle of the road, as the real danger is bikes, right?
Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits. Unless the speeding is bucketed, this alone is enough to skew the results to say motorists are worse than bicyclists. Remember, speeding tickets are a revenue source and the incentive is to set limits that produce revenue.
> The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk - which is because of cars, and it doesn't happen when there is a bike lane
This is still illegal. Blaming it on cars is lame-- these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
A motorcycle likewise can ride on the sidewalk to avoid car congestion but it doesn't because it's illegal and we would hold the driver accountable. Bikes, not so much.
> Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits.
>> The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk -
> This is still illegal. Blaming it on cars is lame- these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient
???
The dissonance is insane
Also, between cyclists and motorists, which one is always grown adults, who passed an exam to use their vehicle, and which one includes children, the mentally disabled and all of those who can't drive and their right to the road cannot be stripped away?
Whoops, I gave it away.
You can in fact blame it on cars
Actually, do you remember that the report mentioned bike lanes solve this problem? You can blame street design, too. Except if cars weren't there, you wouldn't even need the bike lanes.
> Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits.
And you think the average driver is qualified to make that assessment on a moment-by-moment basis?
Hell, I don't know you, but given the chances I'm gonna go ahead and say you don't know the intricacies of road design either. Most drivers do not even fully grasp the concept of line-of-sight, much less anything more complex than that. Hence, the easy to understand speed limits decided by experts.
But hey, go ahead, tell me specifically where the speed limits are commonly too low in your opinion and why.
> these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
No, "inconvenient" is e.g. what drivers find yielding to pedestrians. Riding a bike amongst cars is dangerous and unsafe.
> A motorcycle likewise can ride on the sidewalk to avoid car congestion but it doesn't because it's illegal
Speeding is illegal too, so clearly "illegal" is not the reason. It'd be unreasonably dangerous to pedestrians to operate a motor powered vehicle on a sidewalk in a way that a bicycle isn't.
> Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits.
This is still illegal. Blaming it on what you feel the speed limits "should" be is lame - these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
...okay, okay, that's a bit too forum-argument, but hopefully it demonstrates the contradiction here.
Further, I'd argue that, while speeding is universally a response to perceived inconvenience, sidewalk cycling can sometimes be a response to perceived safety problems, not just inconvenience.
Obviously it's still illegal and unsafe for pedestrians, but I think handwaving car-based lawbreakers and assuming their violations are justified, while also assuming the least generous intentions for cyclists... just hammers home the initial claim: people perceive car lawbreakering as forgivable when it's common and rare when it's worse, and cyclist lawbreaking as both egregious and universal, because they emphasize more with drivers than cyclists.
I have seen as many car drivers punished for running a red light as I have seen cyclists running one--zero in both cases. Enforcement of traffic laws is painfully lax.
Was absolutely not intended as an excuse for bad behaviour. I just care about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater: just because someone on an e-bike displays bad behaviour, it's still preferable to have people switch from cars to e-bikes.
Yeah, just imagine. I did. For hours yesterday evening I imagined.
Had a car killed my wife or unborn child, there would have been a legal trail and insurance.
Had the e-bike killed my wife or unborn child, there was neither. I doubt I could ever find the killer of the unborn child if the baby died later due to injuries-- there's neither license nor registration on an e-bike.
Pushing powered transportation into the unregulated, uninsured space is madness.
You would likely be unhappy if you saw the outcomes of almost all vehicle manslaughter cases. It’s the easiest way to kill someone and get away with it consequence free
Having been a juror on a civil trial against the MTA, I assure you that the New York public is perfectly willing to hold people accountable for injury.
Drunk driving was reduced over my lifetime [1] by calling attention to it (e.g. MADD), shaming the practice, lowering BAC thresholds, and increasing enforcement.
Similar approaches could be done for pedestrian injury by vehicles. Sure, it takes more time (and does not scam $9 from my pocket in the meantime) but public behavior can be changed.
The perpetrators of most vehicular homicides face little to no consequences.
You'd have to be an utter asshole (like a kid totaling three cars in a year, all going 70-100+ mph on urban streets), or the world's dumbest criminal (motorcyclist out on parole running a red, killing a pedestrian, fleeing the scene, and ditching the motorcycle in a field) for killing someone with a car to be more than a 'whoopsie daisies, at least nobody important got hurt'.
In my town, just last year, a cop running down a young woman when she had right of way in a crosswalk, while doing 74 mph in a 25 mph zone at night, with no sirens, got a $5,000 fine for it.
That's how much the life of a grad student is worth.
---
Look, I'm all for traffic enforcement, but anyone who thinks that bikes are the big problem on the road is nuts.
Reckless behaviour in traffic should be prevented, and
The same reckless behaviour is more dangerous when performed in a car. (People rarely actually get killed by an e-bike. It happens all the time with cars.)
In other forums there are lots of complaints about the NYC crackdown on e-bikes. NYC has taken steps to discourage their use. Maybe not enough, but definitely more than in most other parts of the country.
Beyond the obvious lack of registration plates, it's basic physics.
A fat guy on an e-bike is what, 100+30kg of mass? How fast do they go, maybe 35km/h (22mph) tops? That gives us the kinetic energy of roughly 6242J.
Let's compare with a silly lightweight 1,400kg car + 100kg driver moving at the same speed: 72,030J - 11 times greater.
At 50km/h (31mph) that becomes 144,907J - 23 times greater.
70km/h (43mph)? 46 times.
100km/h (62mph)? 94.
So the worst case possible for an ebike compared to the best case for a car has the car be 11 times more dangerous. More realistically, a car will be over 20 times more dangerous, with essentially infinite potential for more (do cars in cities travel at 31mph tops?).
Now, in another comment [1] you went ahead and said speed limits are set too low and mild speeding is all good and fine. Does it still seem so?
Look, I don't care if there's a spherical cow in a vacuum or a witch with a broomstick going at 0.98c, your fat guy on an e-bike can endanger people and property if he's in the street.
Whatever $OPERATOR on $CONVEYANCE at $SPEED works out to, I would hope that each jurisdiction has a vested interest in safety on their roads. Indeed, the lack of registration plates, and the lack of licensing is a huge impediment.
I find that motorists with licenses tend to obey all relevant traffic laws. They are not prone to running red lights or swerving around or otherwise operating their cars dangerously. And I attribute this behavior mostly to the fact that driving is a privilege that can be restricted or revoked.
If you fine a pedestrian for jaywalking then they can pay that fine or not. You cannot prevent a pedestrian from walking around in the street. You apparently cannot prevent people from riding bikes or scooters, either. Since there is no licensing and no "privilege" to do so, it's more or less anything-goes on the streets with such conveyances.
Nevertheless, I've been that fat guy on an electric scooter, and I'm telling you, it would not be surprising to maim or kill a vulnerable pedestrian (and my own self) if I'm going along at 17mph in the road.
Perhaps the cameras can't catch or target them, but hopefully some enforcement can be brought to bear on such dangerous activity.
It would be interesting to force eBikes to be registered which the owner then receives a number plate that must be placed on the bike. The owner would be subject to fines any rider of the bike incurs unless the bike is reported stolen so that the video is proven to be after the bike was stolen.
Gotta give those automated systems something to use
> Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
It sounds like measures to limit the danger of electric bikes might be warranted, but that’s a separate issue. Even if electric bikes are a problem I’d be shocked if they came anywhere close to causing the pedestrian fatality rate of cars (even when controlled by frequency of use) in an urban environment, not to mentioni the additional impacts of things like emissions (including non-tailpipe), noise, space, etc. of cars. I don’t know much about motorcycle statistics. I can imagine the group that rides motorcycles might be less likely to hit pedestrians than those of e-bike riders, but I don’t know.
If we have to choose only one of these problems to tackle at a time—which we don’t!—I’d rather they tackle the one which is killing hundreds of people a year.
(Traffic deaths / km driven) was NaN for most of human history. It's a dumb metric with dumb units.
There should be a well-defined unitless quantity that's real-valued across human history, say normalizing by population size and total human travel. I am not claiming that fixes the NaN, just that the NaN is a smell.
Another smell is that everyone being horribly maimed but never killed would not be a victory for safety though the above metric says it'd be great.
> We report on a data-driven method for learning a nonperturbative guiding center model from full-orbit particle simulation data.
> Then we describe a data-driven method for learning from a dataset of full-orbit α-particle trajectories. We apply this method to the α-particle dynamics shown in Fig. 1 and find the learned non-perturbative guiding center model significantly outperforms the standard guiding center expansion. Our proposed method for learning applies on a per-magnetic field basis; changing requires re-training.
Is this interpolation at its heart? A variable transformation then a data fit?
Anyone know which functionals of these orbits are important? I don't know the space. I am wondering why the orbits with such nuance should be materially important when accessed via lower-order models.
Haven’t read the article yet, yet alone the paper but based on what you’ve quoted these are ongoing challenges with regards to confinement. Think tokamak vs stellarator. Magnetoplasmahydrodynamics is hard because you have all the complexities of the navier-stokes combined with Maxwell and thats just scratching the surface. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions has never been so sinister as in plasma confinement. Orbital perturbations quickly lead to turbulent instabilities which lead to containment breach which can lead to multi-million degree hyper velocity jets tearing a hole through your multi-billion dollar toy in seconds.
Are these sorts of instabilities harder to control in a tokamak as compared to a stellarator, or did you just bring those up as examples of magnetic confinement?
I’ve since gone back and read the article, haven’t looked for the paper yet.
> Are these sorts of instabilities harder to control in a tokamak as compared to a stellarator, or did you just bring those up as examples of magnetic confinement?
I was just shooting from the hip in the earlier comment alluding to your question and bringing them up as examples of two different approaches to addressing the said issues with instabilities that lead to the complexities of confinement. I think its just a terribly fun thing to think about because of its complexity. Stellarators are attempting to solve the issues passively through design. Tokamaks on the other hand with active control. Theres trade offs to both and neither has reached break even output yet.
I’m personally largely bored with them and think linear is the way to go, even though the laser based inertial confinement reactor at Lawrence is the first to reach breakeven output… experimentally at least.
> Now inequality is high and keeps getting higher.
Gramm et al's book, or at least the first couple of chapters, are worth reading on this topic. Oft-quoted official statistics neglect taxes and transfer payments. There is definitely a large uptick at the top 5% but the spread across the lower 80% isn't as strong as it often is stated, according to Gramm and his co-authors.
That doesn't necessarily negate the point that inequality is high and keeps getting higher. It all depends on what your definition of inequality is. Ironically, it is the transfer payments which Gramm decrees that wind up enriching that top 5% the most, they are basically farming the lower classes to line their pockets at the expense of the middle and upper middle, who pay a disproportionate share of the taxes.
Robert Ekelund, one of the authors, wrote pro-smoking articles for the tobacco industry. It's hard to trust someone like that and any data they present. It would take a lot of work to read those chapters and not only confirm the data they present, but also find data they aren't presenting, or deliberately omitting to make their case.
Is there another book making the same argument that doesn't have this baggage?
Yes, one such book is Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" 5th Edition. Page 209 says...
> A simultaneous rise in rewards for work and a growing welfare state that allows more people to live without working virtually guarantees increasing inequality and earnings and incomes, when many of the welfare state benefits are received in kind rather than in money, such a subsidized housing or subsidized medical care, since those benefits are not counted in income statistics.
Sowell's arguing that neglecting to include welfare transfers makes inequality look worse than it is. Especially when there are stark differences in earnings as a consequence of working.
If you earn $5 and the state gives you $45 in assistance, you practically have $50. If I earn $200 and the state taxes me $100, then I practically have $100. The income inequality is 40x but the practical inequality is 2x.
Current common metrics would report 40x, in this contrived example, is the point Gramm and Sowell both make. Their observation that transfers and taxes are neglected when measuring income inequality is self-evidently true and frequently overlooked. Be careful with income inequality conclusions.
The first chapter of Gramm's book calls out that difference between the hours worked in the various income quantiles is large. Sowell makes the point that the age demographics vary considerably across the quantiles with very young and very old people working less and therefore frequently in the lower quantiles. Sowell further points out that different US demographic groups have different mean ages so that one can explain some seemingly-demographic-related inequality by age differences.
True, but even “least bad” is not correct unless the public is well informed [as in not being fed misinformation] and in a rational state of mind [as in not scared of or trained to despise the jews, immigrants, woke etc.].
The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
Perhaps it would be more useful to consider "least bad" over a reasonable period of time. That is to say, there are probably times when, due to the factors you mention, the people steer democracy to do something bad that a strong dictator or group of elders would not have done. However, over a given period of time, it's likely that a democracy does less bad things then the alternatives.
That's a hell of a dangerous phrase. Usually, it means that the speaker is frustrated that the broader public is not curatedly informed in a way that makes them vote how the speaker wants them to vote.
The great, and terrifying, thing about democracy is that everyone can be informed however they're informed and usually we don't literally burn everything all the way to the ground.
You can relax, I specifically mentioned misinformation.
That is what is dangerous. People can get their news from different outlets with different priorities and that is all well and good.
What has happened at a large scale more recently is that bad actors actively feed people factually wrong stories and those are increasingly the only stories they get.
There were always those who sought to do this but the vaccine was that they could never monopolise people’s attentions the way that has become possible lately.
It is perfectly fine for people to have different opinions and vote differently, it is just very important that it is based on factual representation of the world.
> What has happened at a large scale more recently is that bad actors actively feed people factually wrong stories and those are increasingly the only stories they get.
Powerful actors spreading incorrect information to serve their own ends is nothing new. Remember when the consensus was that the Earth was the center of the solar system? And when Galileo was prosecuted for spreading misinformation? That was about 400 years ago.
"Misinformation" implies "It is inconvenient for someone to hold the perspective because it threatens my power". Otherwise, we just call such notions wrong, incorrect, lies, falsehoods, invalid, etc.
"Misinformation" is just as dangerous as "well informed". What we now collectively know as a species was not infrequently once wrong according to some powerful historical consensus.
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. I said it is not new but the scale and pervasiveness and especially the personal targeting is new.
And yes, that is what misinformation is, lies and falsehoods presented as news.
Remember, honest reporting of events can emphasise different aspects. That is well and good.
It’s the dishonesty and disregard for truth that makes misinformation.
> "Misinformation" is just as dangerous as "well informed". Much of what we now collectively know as a species was once wrong according to some powerful historical consensus.
This is just like saying that ignorance is just as good as education because sometimes theories are invalidated when better information comes along.
So why bother at all then, kind of mindset.
My point is that "well informed" and "misinformation" are dog whistles implying the speaker presumes they're superior, they know absolute truth, and clearly the unwashed masses are too stupid to understand their own best interests. They must be saved from themselves. Etc.
"Informed" and "falsehoods" serve perfectly well. Inform people don't fight misinformation. Correct falsehoods don't well-inform the public.
> True, but even “least bad” is not correct unless the public is well informed [as in not being fed misinformation]...
You opened by saying that democracy is not ideal unless the populace's information diet is carefully controlled.
By whom and in what way? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What happens when they deem misinformation rampant or the public not well-informed?
> I think you might be projecting...
I am indeed projecting. I find those specific words only in use among unreasonably self-sure people who aren't terrified by the implications/risks of concentrating power to answer those consequent questions.
> The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
But my projecting isn't unjustified. Quoted above, you also began by stating the 2020s electorate was duped with misinformation. Had they only known better, understood their own best interests as seen through the eyes of the self-assuredly enlightened, listened to the nascent Ministry of Truth, etc.
> You opened by saying that democracy is not ideal unless the populace's information diet is carefully controlled.
By whom and in what way? Who gets to determine what is misinformation? What happens when they deem misinformation rampant or the public not well-informed?
No. I said it works if people are not fed misinformation.
The actual truth decides what is misinformation. Sometimes one can’t know it but sometimes one can.
As an example: “Ukraine started the war” is misinformation by virtue of being false.
Fun. I can imagine motivation-money curves would look a lot like stress-strain curves [1]. A "fair wage" might be akin to the yield strength. Work hardening under cyclic loading probably is similar.
You could have done the same thing with a margin-enabled brokerage account, e.g. Interactive Brokers or Fidelity.
It's not particularly hard. Just have enough collateral to not get margin called. And, like the margin interest rate better than the tax hit. Shop around for rates. Notice, you don't have to pay the entire down payment this way.
If you have amassed 6 figures of stock and are buying a house, you're qualified to educate yourself on these topics. It's usually worth reading up anytime you incur that sizable a taxable event.
I am not saying this is a great idea, BTW. Just, it's an idea within many people's reach.
If it's a bad idea, it's a bad faith argument - why would you suggest it? The tax laws shouldn't favor the gross accumulation of wealth, nor the starvation of the treasury, so the laws need to change to force the rich to pay their fair share.
I believe the GP is just cautioning rando HN readers that they should not rush out and make their down payment in the manner described, as opposed to liquidating some of their stock options for "real cash" like the GGP had to do.
They are just explaining a reasonable method that the (above) average HN reader could use to be in the same situation as Bezos of having a 0% tax on their down payment.
In the US, there's a pretty massive exemption (well, deferral) for capital gains tax on the sale of a primary residence, so once you have one home to work with, the down payment is (kind of?) tax-free anyway.
They definitely shouldn't. It's absurd to suggest that because a middle-class homebuyer can get a margin loan through iBroker means that we should let the richest people in history dodge taxes in this way. If no one would actually do that, then it really doesn't matter that they technically can. The obvious solution is to take away the privilege from the wealthy and make them abide the same rules as the rest of us.
Another very rational reason for such a margin loan for a home down payment is if the stock you wanted to sell hadn't been held for a year and therefore its sale would not yet qualify for long-term capital gains rates.
You might choose to pay margin interest for up to a year so that the stock sales become taxed at the much lower long-term capital gains rates instead of like income.
That might make sense for someone in the 24% federal bracket which ends at just under $200K of annual income, depending upon how much longer one needs to hold the position to achieve the more favorable taxation. Certainly far below the yacht-owning bracket.
Bezos gets a much better margin rate than you or I would ever get on IBKR. And IBKR doesn't margin call, they straight up auto liquidate. Bezos's lender would never do that to him.
And withdrawals from margin accounts should cause taxable events too. Honestly it is up to the industry to justify and propose a workable tax scheme that makes margin accounts feasible. Withdrawals triggering taxable events seems fair to me, though.
It's such an odd argument - the wealthy always seem to know what their net worth is. We could just make them declare it. If they lie, straight to jail.
Do they? I think exactly the opposite is true - if you ask any sufficiently wealthy person, they’d need a team of people working for a bit to arrive at a very hazy net worth number. Private stock is extremely illiquid and doesn’t usually have a good mark to market, ditto most artwork. My impression is that even most public stock doesn’t generally have the depth of liquidity to absorb a founder selling any significant fraction in a short timeframe without cratering in value.
How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?
I'm not defending billionaires and I believe they should be heavily taxed, and huge inheritances should be outlawed, but what's Elon Musk's net worth, for example? He surely doesn't have $369 billion in cash. Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year? It's tricky.
> How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?
They get to tell us what they are worth. Generally speaking, if you want to lie about your net worth you are choosing between tax fraud and insurance fraud. There are some areas that are tricky, like pre-market startups, but we have things like 409A valuations that help with that. Penalties should have no statute of limitations - if you lie about it, you get to look over your shoulder forever. It's not perfect, but as you have clearly recognized, there is no perfect system that allows for a reasonable degree of freedom.
> Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year?
Not really tricky! He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2. If the value goes down 99%, you pay way less tax (or none if he's no longer wealthy enough to qualify). He can sell his shares to pay it, and I honestly do not care if he is not liquid enough to do that - that's a situation he put himself into. No he doesn't get a tax break on the loss - the rich have a sense of entitlement that their wealth belongs to them free of charge, and I think they should have to pay maintenance. Without public utilities (roads, electricity, air and sea traffic control, etc) and social stability, most of these billionaires would lose their wealth to warlords very quickly.
> He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2.
That doesn't make any sense. If I have $8B worth of shares and I have $2B in cash, and if the wealth tax is 20% I will have to pay all my cash this year. If my shares goes down to zero next year I'm broke. I couldn't just sell $2B worth of shares in the first year either because that would have affected the value of the shares. This is not how taxes should work.
Everyone agrees on income tax or capital gains tax because they are both cash, and the tax is also in the same currency. If we can find a way to tax wealth in the same "currency" (for example 20% of your share portfolio, plus 20% of your cash) then it might work. Obviously the state may not always be able to use shares to fund infrastructure, and cashing out those shares would diminish the value. Also it's still hard to do that for, say, real estate investments.
What doesn't make sense? He'd owe $1.6B the first year, and then he'd be shit out of luck because he drove the stock to 0. Not my problem. And you should stop putting yourself in his shoes - you will never be a billionaire, and you probably won't be a mega-millionaire either. Start worrying about your own situation.
In any case, the whole thread about "net worth" is really besides my original point, which is that collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event. The only reason we got into net worth was because I said I'd only apply it to high net worth individuals, since they have almost exclusively benefitted from the economy over the last 10-20 years. This is also super achievable because to get the bank to loan you money, you have to declare the value of the assets and the bank has to agree with the valuation - super easy to determine tax on that number.
I don't feel that strongly about it if he is just sitting on the assets, but if he's leveraging them to buy Twitter, OpenAI or to donate money toward overthrowing the Democratic order, then yes, he should absolutely pay taxes for the privilege.
I'm not worrying about billionaires. I'm discussing about hypothetical ways we can tax them. They own the government, and obviously your idea of potentially making them homeless will be immediately rejected and we will be in this status quo forever.
> collateralizing stock for loans should be a taxable event
> They own the government, and obviously your idea of potentially making them homeless will be immediately rejected and we will be in this status quo forever.
Disagree. We've been negotiating from the middle. We got the New Deal because the alternative for the wealthy was facing a socialist revolution.
I'm all for threatining them with a socialist revolution if possible. However, I'm afraid they are better prepared this time. In today's world a (metaphorical) guerilla war that targets one small win at a time might be more prudent. The wealthy is not necessarily smart. Not all will see it coming.
The article reads like there's a more rigorous proof of some classical renormalization results. I wish it had connected the renormalization results to empirical utility for applications.
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