I pretty much agree because all really creative art will have some kind of novelty to it which a LLM wont be able to generate cause its outside the training data, except of course the initial burst of novelty from when the tech was new, which is more novelty being introduced into the field than most artists will ever accomplish.
I would love to try this experiment with something basketball sized out in space. Like we build an enormous basketball detector behind a double slit inside an unobservable black box. If thr basketball started acting like a wave I would be sooo freaked out
> The largest entities for which the double-slit experiment has been performed were molecules that each comprised 2000 atoms (whose total mass was 25,000 atomic mass units).[19]
The entanglement theory would imply that if you build a detector that turns the gravity interaction into a finite piece of data observable by an (amplified) system, then gravity will act as an observer and collapse the waveform when it reaches that point. That's my take on the whole thing... It's almost like information theory. If the information is lost to the sands of time (below noise floor if you will) then the entanglement can continue.
I moved from Australia to the USA (be careful who you swipe on dating apps) and went from paying 50% tax to 15% tax for basically the same job with basically the same quality of life. Tax in America is outrageously low which is no doubt why it cant balance its budget (though I approve of cutting government spending aswell).
What is your bill when an ambulance brings you in? When you have a legal problem at your workplace? What will be your pension? How is the mass transit system? What do you pay for child care, how is your school, how safe is your neighborhood, how do the number of murders in your area compare?
Counterpoint: I’m in the US and my effective income tax rate is in the mid-40s, with my marginal rate over 50%. And I’m not in one of the few states with the highest state income taxes.
The highest federal bracket is 37%, the highest state bracket in the US is California at 13.3%, Medicare at 2.9% if you're self employed, NIIT caps out at 3.8% - so even earning well into seven plus figures, with punitive NIIT, only puts you at a max of 47% marginal. Social security taxes stop long before the brackets kick in.
NYC has combined local and state top marginal rates of 14.776%, to go up to 48.476%.
I call BS on marginal rates exceeding 50%
Edit: even the new 2024 California payroll tax cap lift and mental health tax on seven figure incomes put it at 49.1%. Marginal rates that high don't exist in the US. Even then that requires paying payroll taxes and NIIT on the same income, which I'm pretty sure is impossible.
Thanks for the correction- I did some math and my marginal rate is something like 46%, which, while it’s indeed not over 50%, still is pretty discouraging when weighing whether it’s worth putting in enough effort to get another raise.
A single W-2 earner making $1 million has a 33.49% effective federal tax rate (OASDI, Medicare, Income) taking only the standard deductible and doing nothing else to lower their taxable income (no tax advantaged accounts, not spending enough in categories that allow itemization, etc.). A single non-W-2 earner (has to pay the employer part of payroll taxes) has an effective rate of 34.84%.
If they're married the rates are 29.62% (W-2) and 30.97% (non-W-2), under the same assumption that they do not do anything to qualify for either reduced taxable income or any kind of rebate or credit.
Most people don't make $1 million, and those that do have ways to reduce their tax burden quite a bit without much trouble.
EDIT: Small modifications to the numbers above, they were off by about 0.4% to 0.5%.
Social security is 6.2% and is capped (you only pay social security taxes on a max income of $168,600). So if your income is 168,600 you pay $10,453 in social security taxes.
And if your income is $1,000,000 you still only pay $10,453 in social security tax.
$176,100 this year, and you should also include Medicare which is 1.45% and has the same cap. That does mean a base 7.65% federal tax rate for most W-2 earners. But when you work out the math on the effective tax rates for income tax (not payroll) it takes a lot to hit 25% as your effective federal income tax rate.
Around $350,000 gets you to a 24.8% effective federal income tax rate if you're single and only take the standard deductible, $700k if married. That puts you in the top 3% and 1%, respectively, of incomes in the US these days.
But that gets reduced when you include things like tax advantaged retirement accounts, various tax credits, dependents, paying for health insurance, possibly being able to itemize (more likely at those incomes than the US median income). So really you have to be making something like $400k-500 as a single person to hit 25%, and $800k+ for a married person.
In US, employer pays their share of social security + medicare taxes, which is about 7.6%. If you are self-employed, you need to pay both the employee and the employer side (about 15.2% taxes, mandatory).
When we briefly had a balanced budget (kinda, if you squint just the right way) we had 1990s tax levels and a major economic boom.
We’ve since had two major rounds of tax cuts by republicans, so a balanced budget isn’t feasible even in booms and when we’re not deficit spending on two stupid wars. And now we’ve got all the interest on the debt from those tax cuts and wars to worry about.
If only anyone could have predicted this. Oh wait, everyone who knew anything about taxation policy did.
Like all things it depends on the terms, in my mind though China would probably be incentivized to give us a good deal - Im sure they would be very amused delivering real hardware while the USA continues to demonstrate their incompetence at shipbuilding. It would also signal that Australia wants to sit out any USA/China war, which might be hard to do politically (which is maybe why Im not PM) but its certainly the position I hope Aus ends up taking should these 2 buffoons start a real blue
We need to pay the money to USA as tribute so its a write-off anyway, but I have low confidence we will ever see working hardware from it. However I bet China would actually prioritise delivery of some new subs if we pivoted to using them as our naval supplier, to win mindshare in the west as an alternative to America or Russia as an arms supplier. and we set up the next 100 years of paying off bigger countries to leave us alone, which honestly worked well enough the last 100 years
And European leaders drunk on atlanticist koolaid brainwashing them into thinking that they're allies / partners instead of vassals is why they're in this mess to began with. It's always been medievil beneath the veneer.
Americans all have this attitude that theyre "on the hook" for everyone elses defence as if theyre the white knight defending the world against evil. Its more like the local mob tough guys who have been taking protection money for the last 40 years backed down when a rival gang finally decided to make a move
I'm American, and I don't have that view. So it's clearly not literally true.
So perhaps you mean that it's "mostly" true. Then I'd ask, what evidence do you have to support that? Is there some poll of public opinion you can refer to? That's something we could meaningfully discuss.
Actually, your view is true even if there exists even just one person with your view. In reality what matters is the distribution of views. Furthermore, what matters is the distribution of views by the decision makers because those will be divorced from public distribution and informed by other secret plans or information unknown to public. So in a sense, it doesn't matter whether he is right or you are.
Most cancers didnt grow because some high and mighty body willed it into existence, they did it within a system of biological laws and conditions that admittedly the body does generate
Teenage girls as a group probably have more chemical imbalance than any other group alive, Im not sure what is surprising here, we have the medicine why not use it. I bet a bunch of mostly male adult programmers will have a truly deep and nuanced understanding of this issue though
"Chemical imbalance" is the wrong model and asserts culture over nature, but sort of like menopause being a biological control to prevent resource competition between younger and older females in populations, I'd wager that behaviors that create conflict or distance between newly sexually mature offspring and parents/family could serve the role of decreasing the likelihood of incest.
> "Chemical imbalance" is the wrong model and asserts culture over nature
It's the model in use. Calling it "wrong" is at odds with the medical community. I get it, but it's not a compelling statement.
Regardless, coinciding with tighter tracking of populations, especially from schools, the last few decades have shown that young girls are at high risk for depression and suicide. Some calling it an epidemic. I'm sure you can find the TED talks, news articles, etc
Notably, this is backed by CDC data. It is not stated what is causal nor how effective anti-depressants are, as a treatment, but they are an option that many parents and children choose.
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