Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. Of course nobody thinks that only money has value. If only money had value, why would anybody exchange money for, say, a bread?
What many people are wondering about, is whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return.
Because if it would be equal, then one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
You don't have to wonder whether or not it returns value to the tax payer. The Irish government already monitored the pilot program for two years, publishing all of the details and findings. [1]
"The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"
This came about as a mixture of greater economic activity from participants, cultural impacts that saw public-facing artist activities increase, and improvements to wellbeing of participants that reduced their requirement for psychological interventions by the state. The state also predicts that the further roll-out of this program will benefit consumers with lower prices for artistic works, as there will be more supply overall.
The scheme has been quite popular here in Ireland. Given the history of Ireland when it comes to art (both in the sense of spoken and written word, and in other mediums), it makes sense to introduce a scheme like this to safeguard and uplift those who produce art.
Thanks for linking the CBA. I hadn't seen that before
> "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"
Okay, so if you read the CBA, the net fiscal cost of the pilot was:
* Gross pilot cost (2021–2025): ~€114 MM
* Tax revenue: ~€36 MM
* Social protection savings: ~€6.5 MM
* Net fiscal cost: ~€72 MM
So for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received 37¢ in fiscal return. So it's an unambiguous fiscal cost, a net loss.
Of the "Total monetised benefits", €80 MM of the benefit was in "wellbeing gains", as measured by the WELLBY test, which is calculated based on a single survey question:
> “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?
The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decided of whether this pilot was a net positive or a net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point is deemed to be worth €15,340.
That's it. There's no economic return - it's a proven economic cost. There's no proven social benefit. No demonstrated effect on art prices or availability.
The pilot was successful - if you consider it to have been - solely because the artists who received payments as part of the pilot had an improvement in Wellby satisfaction score when they were asked via survey. If you remove this factor, the pilot was an abject failure.
Nicely set out. I completely agree with you. I'm also pretty certain - and I say this both as a lover of the arts and as a taxpayer - that I will see no benefit whatsoever in my life, or to society in general, from the works produced under the aegis of this programme.
You know what would have been a worthwhile use of that €114 MM? Improving the pay and conditions of our naval personnel. That way, the nation might now be able to put more than one patrol boat out to sea at a time.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
In this case isn't it more that:
Every sculpture that is made, every picture drawn, every bed left unmade, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
From where I'm sitting, this is theft, its forced wealth redistribution, from people that are potentially already struggling,to people that choose to slum it as artists. Its not even means tested, this really will result in money transferring from those on the edge of poverty to rich art school kids.
There's currently 16,000 homeless / at risk people in Ireland, including 5000 children [0]. I can think of at least one better use for that money.
I think you two are using different definitions of society.
In this comment society seems to mean "the government, and its tax revenue profit/loss statement"
In the previous comment society seems to be construed more broadly and encompass both non-economic activity and economic activity outside the collection and disbursement of tax funds.
> In this comment society seems to mean "the government, and its tax revenue profit/loss statement"
No, that's not correct. I specifically separated the pure economic impact from the society impact, but the only societal impact used to quantify the success of the pilot scheme is that the people paid a basic income by the scheme had higher life satisfaction as measured by a single survey question.
That is the basis used by Government to claim that it's a social benefit.
Personally, I support the arts and I think that culture, health, housing accessibility, safety, fitness, happiness, and companionship are all better measures of a society than GDP or other fiscal metrics.
Right now, we have a health, housing, and social crises desperate for resources - resources that are allocated exclusively through Euro budgets. This pilot scheme has not demonstrated any cultural or social impact at all. Only the aforementioned increase in recipient satisfaction.
Meanwhile people in dire situations face multi-year waits for operations, or dying of a treatable stroke/MI due to a lack of ambulances, or death by suicide as the mental health services are overwhelmed.
Is the WELLBY score of these artists more important the WELLBY score of parents awaiting their kid's operation for the second or third spring? Or burying their children? Or raising them in hotel rooms?
Ireland is only economically successful. We are failing our citizenry abysmally outside of fiscal terms and basic income for artists should be allocated while hundreds of more pressing needs are left unmet.
> Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here.
From reading your comment I think this observation applies to your own understanding, not the gp's.
> whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. [...] one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
You might not see it but this is effectively equivalent to thinking only money has value, because you're describing a system whereby value is defined by money. Your dichotomy assumes anything that cannot be sold has no value, & anything that is sold is only as valuable as its price. The emergent conclusion from that formula is that only money has value.
It's worth noting that it also follows from this that value is defined by people with purchasing power. If for example the only cohort who value any given piece of art cannot afford to financially support the artist creating said art, not only is the art & the artist's work without value, but by extension so too are the perspectives, autonomy & - ultimately - the lives of that cohort without value.
You’re making a logical leap, how can you say only money has value when things are worth money? That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value. It’s likely you’d be able to find people who are willing to trade some electronic device you have for another equivalent one (some iPhone for some Android) without exchanging any money. Money is just the measure of value, it’s like saying something cannot be 5ft tall without the existence of a measuring tape. Societies have existed before money they were just inefficient.
> That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value.
> Money is just the measure of value
Money is the measure of market value. If you believe it's the measure if inherent value, you believe anything outside of the market has no value. E.g. that human lives have no value outside of waged labour (or heck, even slavery).
The point here is the monetary value is a model of value, not the definition of it. If you are defining an item's value by it's market price, then you believe what the gp was describing: that "only money has value" (since it defines all value).
Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively. That's literally the entire basis for it. Might as well ask why "only the taxpayers who care about a new highway can raise funds to buy it" and then we're back in some weird, system of no central government because someone can always claim "why not just like, let people donate money" because it's a simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough to work out just how much they've benefitted from the system as it's been constructed.
> Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary?
I think simplistic cliche's deserve derision - if you don't like that, perhaps don't use them? It's hardly a shot at the writer to suggest that what he wrote is mediocre.
> I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line.
No, your argument was that I should fund things myself directly. I pointed out that that's an inane and boring argument. If you want to debate other things, then do that in the first place.
> so I’m struggling to follow your argument.
It might help if you re-read your own arguments first, instead of trying to make them into new ones. Things people want funded by the government get funded when they vote for them to get funded either directly or via representatives - if you don't like those things, there is a clear way to change the algebra. In no case is suggesting people just like, "pay some extra taxes, man" a useful are additive observation.
Then it would be a popularity contest and depend on the artists' ability to market themselves in a capitalist space. The one with the best TikTok channel would get the money. That doesn't lead to having diverse, interesting, and challenging art.
That’s not what they’re saying. Only the funding source would change; the funds would still be split evenly to anyone who meets the criteria of being an artist.
How does the government solve this problem? Why can’t a private organization replicate that? How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
The same way it solves all problems: poorly, yet better and more fairly than corporations do.
> Why can’t a private organization replicate that?
Private organizations are driven by profit motive. Profit motive is usually in a negative correlation with fair results in these sorts of situations. If you mean a church or non profit, then, because those don't represent a region of people, and there's no petition mechanism to change their behavior if they're bad. "We'll stop giving them money" great so you're back to my original point then: profit motive.
> How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
Hard to say, but there sure is a lot of it, from as long ago as ten thousand years, so personally I think it's safe to say there were lots of reasons beyond either an S Corp or 501(c) buying popular art, or a liberal democracy funding it.
I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits.
Clearly the artists somehow managed to convince government to support the scheme, why can’t the same people form a non—profit and convince ordinary members of the public to support the same scheme in a non-profit structure?
That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with!
Nobody has to argue about money being spent on things they don’t care about. Everybody is happy.
> I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits.
I assumed that was an angle people were going for: charities and non profits rather than governments.
I'm not convinced the artist fund happened because artists were good lobbyists with transferrable sales skills, just socket in either Big Government, Big Church, or Big Nonprofit and they'll happily churn away art. Seems it's more a government initiative, sourced by the public out of a desire for more art, or to live in a society where artists can focus on making arts.
Personally I thought the whole point of improving automation and increasing productivity was so that we could all just hang out and paint or make music or whatever.
> That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with!
It doesn't make sense to only privatize art, then, because all things that taxes are spent on are things some people don't care about. What you're arguing for is a total privatization of everything, and functionally the elimination of government (since some people won't want their taxes to go to, for example, the police or military or even the president's burger budget). So, an anarcho-capitalist argument.
Some people would be very happy in that world. Most wouldn't.
If you specifically want to single out art and ok with, idk, roads and fire departments being funded by taxes, then that just means you disagree with your neighbor about the kind of society you want to live in, since the only way to build a society based on your values in a liberal democracy is through government - private markets are concerned only with profitability, which is often negatively correlated with having a fair and comfortable society.
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
Because the skills and effort needed to market and sell your art to an audience are not equal to the skills and effort needed to produce good art [1].
I agree that there could be other complementary or better solutions compared to this scheme. But as long as the above premise is true, not every good artist will want or be able to sell well.
[1] However you define this. Supposedly, Van Gogh was a lousy salesman, but a good artist.
Nobody pays to view a mural, but a lot of people view it, and property values go up as a result. It cost the artist time, effort, and money to make it, and if you hire an artist specifically to make a mural, it's prohibitively expensive for an individual.
Better to amortize the cost across the population and have public works. Like we do for infrastructure. Seems to work just fine.
Isn't this arguing indirectly for national taxpayers to prop up the value of certain properties? Why not just have a local collaboration with a local artist and people pay directly?
That's just an arbitrary separation. Both places benefit from the federal highway system that allows goods to be delivered across State lines. Both benefit from the maintenance of shipping lanes, the national power grid, the submarine cables connecting them to Europe and Asia, the...
This is why hyper privatization will fail: it's impossible to separate out all the intricately intertwined systems in such a way that people are throwing pennies in a million directions to pay exactly enough to each stakeholder involved in the functioning of their society.
There are many things that are valuable to people, but which they would rather not pay for. They include public goods and externalities, like infrastructure and education and a reasonable amount of military. It makes a lot of sense that people would rather enjoy art for free if they had the option, and since the majority of art experience can be easily duplicated and transmitted, why pay for it yourself? There is also another benefit of art stimulating further intellectual and creative development of a society, perhaps yielding second order benefits that are hard to quantify. Thus overall, it can make a lot of sense for government to pay for art as a society.
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money
"Public goods" like parks, museums, bridges, roadways, transit, nature preserves, community spaces, and public safety services produce both direct value to their immediate users as well as substantial diffuse value to their community. Direct value can be captured by user fees, tolls, subscriptions, etc but capturing diffuse value is challenging. A park raises surrounding property values even for people who do not visit the park. Good transportation infrastructure increases the value of surrounding land and and productivity per capita even for nonusers. Relying solely on user fees may force some of these entities to close or fall into disrepair, thereby reducing overall value by substantially more than it would have cost to maintain them. And in some cases shifting the cost burden to direct users substantially lowers the diffuse value, for example back when fire fighting companies would let houses burn unless their owners paid them, ultimately resulting in more overall community fire damage.
In these cases, subsidizing these public services with taxes (optimally Georgist land-value taxes) is an economically rational decision.
One could plausibly argue that artists similarly produce diffuse value e.g., raising the profile of their nation or culture, making their neighborhood a more desirable place for people with money. Not only do artists typically struggle to collect a share of this diffuse value, as renters the very value they create often ends up pricing out of their community. I could imagine cases where it is a net benefit for a government to subsidize such entities if such subsidy is less than the fraction of the diffuse benefit that ends up being collected by taxes.
I have no insight as to whether this scheme in particular is net positive, please see sibling posts for that. I'm just explaining that such arrangements are both economically rational and extremely common in high-functioning societies.
Your argument makes sense, but a park has a measurable scope. We all want it to be X sqft, with Y trees, and it will cost Z dollars. Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
Expect something? Yes. Enforce it? Not sure for the first tranche, but make it a prerequisite for continued funding.
One big obstacle is, of course, how to define what to expect from each artist. For example, you can't expect the same level of output from sculptors and musicians. Another big obstacle is obviously the expected quality of output.
I don't pretend to know the solutions to either of those obstacles, but they should be surmountable [1]. I think it's fair to expect some output in exchange for funding, but it doesn't have to be a high expectation.
Personally, I like the idea of hiring artists as full-time with particular projects in mind [2], but intentionally leaving ~50% of their time to personal projects.
[1] Perhaps artist communities themselves could discuss ways to make this exchange work for all parties.
[2] Murals, restorations, beautification of public spaces, etc.
A little late, but this is something that I've been considering a lot lately. When there's a limited resource (funding) how do you determine who will receive it?
For something like this I think a citizens assembly[1] may work best. Take all artists receiving funding and are NOT up for renewal. Select a number of them randomly to form the assembly. This assembly then reviews submissions from artists up for renewal and determines if they meet a minimum standard for funding to be renewed.
I don't think there's any evidence that those obstacles are surmountable, unless it's something like the Pope telling Michaelangelo to paint a ceiling. A bridge has defined scope and budget (ish) and a defined benefit attached to it, which many people will sign off on before it is commissioned, and it might take years to do, but it will also serve the local population for potentially hundreds of years in a practical way.
Actually, you provided an example where the obstacle was somehow surmounted [1].
The expectation doesn't have to be too specific or unrealistic. If you agree on some common ground [2], everything else can be fair game for the artist.
Your analogy with the bridge would apply if art also had a minimum viable version. Collapsed to its functional requirements, you could say that visual art is something to look at. But I doubt either party, especially the funding body or the public, would be happy without inserting some quality requirements (i.e., what makes something nice to look at).
Many artists do commissions, so you can see this as a commission with deliberately underspecified requirements.
[1] I won't get into the disagreements between the Pope and Michelangelo, and it's certainly not an example of a good contract, but we can assume that both parties were somewhat satisfied in the end.
[2] For example, both parties need to like it. Or the patron doesn't have to like it, but it needs to appeal to some public audience.
> Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
My understanding is that the Irish scheme doesn't force any specific work for the three year period, though I'd expect any artist who takes a three year, ~$60k grant and uses it to do literally nothing may find it hard get a grant in the future, potentially ending their art career. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a few recipients end up doing that, in which case it's an economic question as to whether the net loss from such freeloaders is more or less than the cost of the bureaucracy necessary to prevent them.
The economic question will be whether the Irish taxpayer gets enough value out of the art produced to warrant its total cost, including artist subsidy costs, administrative cost, etc etc.
Note that my response above was solely responding to the question of how to handle freeloaders.
Of course the more fundamental question is whether the whole scheme is even worthwhile. Clearly the Irish government believes that their trial in 2022 demonstrated a positive financial return, but my guess it that it will take decades before we can truly answer this question.
Trump has openly stated that there would be no military retaliation by the US in case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Only an economic one. And we have seen what that is worth after the Krim was taken. It lasted a few years and then sanctions started getting dropped.
So the time of military US protection is behind us.
I believe you mis remembered it. He didn't rule out military intervention.
In an interview reported by Reuters, he said he’d impose 150%–200% tariffs if China “went into Taiwan,” and when asked about using military force against a blockade he said it “would not come to that” because Xi “respects me” and knows he’s “crazy.”
Won't that entire DOJ archive already be downloaded for backup by several people?
If I'd be a journalist working on those files, this is the very first thing I would do as soon as those files were published. Just to make sure you have the originals before DOJ can start adding more redactions.
> However, another brain region saw lower volumes – suggesting the impact cannabis has on the brain is complex and nuanced, requiring further investigation.
> there was a single brain region where we saw that higher cannabis use was actually associated with lower brain volume – the posterior cingulate, which is part of the limbic system and is implicated in processes like memory, learning, and emotion. That said, some research suggests smaller posterior cingulate volume is actually associated with better working memory, so it’s a little unclear what this means.
That's nonsense. The main security threat for the EU is Russia, a state with a GDP roughly equal to Italy's. We only need to keep up our military spending with that.
> according to TechCrunch, this language has been included in the privacy policy since Aug. 2024, and wasn’t changed in response to the Trump administration’s latest escalation of immigration enforcement, and is “primarily there to comply with state privacy laws like California’s Consumer Privacy Act.”
This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.
> The virtues of APL that strike the programmer most sharply are its terseness — complicated acts can be described briefly, its flexibility — there are a large number of ways to state even moderately complicated tasks (the language provides choices that match divergent views of algorithm construction), and its composability
I had an introduction to APL in university and what I absolutely hated was this terseness. I guess when you're a mathematician APL is more natural but to me, as a programmer, I much prefer to have some extra verbosity to make my code more (human-)readable.
Terseness is easier to remove from a programming language than verbosity.
You can use a source preprocessor to enable you to write APL programs by using keywords instead of any symbols that you do not like. You can also use a source preprocessor to expand any traditional APL source, by converting symbols into keywords, so that it will be easier to read for you.
Using symbols instead of keywords is a minor feature of APL, which was inherited from the standard mathematical notation, from which APL was derived.
The important features of APL are the expression syntax and the set of available operators, not the symbols used for them.
Moreover, if you have difficulties in following complicated expressions, you can always break them in smaller subexpressions.
When someone presents an "incomprehensible" APL program, they show a huge expresion without comments.
A decent APL program, like in any other programming language, would need good comments, but here comments are frequently desirable at the level of subexpressions.
> A decent APL program, like in any other programming language, would need good comments, but here comments are frequently desirable at the level of subexpressions.
I guess that might be true for APL, for other programming languages that's not true at all. The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory. Of course there might be some implementation choices that need a comment. Or in some cases the problem is so difficult that this is not possible.
But readability should be the goal and most of the time this is feasible without comments. E.g. by using descriptive variable and function names. And by breaking up your program into logical and cohesive parts, using functions, objects, modules or whatever construct your language is offering.
> The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory.
That depends on what you're doing and who you expect to be reading your code, doesn't it? Sometimes what the human needs and what the computer/runtime needs are too far apart.
Serious question: Why is readability so important? For me consistency is far more important than anything as subjective as readability. I’d rather be able to reason about a code in its own logic than feel comfortable browsing code without much consistency. In the end all code needs to be understood for its internal logic and notation is secondary.
- in a corporate environment, your code is going to be read by many other people than just you. Your team mates, the guy after you left etc.
- also, by making your code more readable, you're making your own life easier as well. You might have thought at first that your code was fine, but by structuring it properly and possibly removing some redundancy, you might find that you were overlooking some things.
In my experience code reviews are generally cursory and the emphasis on “readability” is more about a culture that seeks to treat programmers as fungible. Also complaints about APL’s lack of readability are never about its lack of structure. So I took “readability” to mean something else as should be clear from my previous comment. Is your complaint about its lack of structure? If so would you mind elaborating?
What you say about readability is right, but it is something completely orthogonal to the syntax of APL expressions. All those things can be done in any language that uses the APL expression syntax.
For someone who knows the APL symbols, what an APL expression does is self-explanatory. Someone who does not like symbols can replace them with keywords, that does not change the APL syntax.
The only problem is that you can write a very complex APL expression, which may be equivalent with a page of text in other programming languages. In such cases it is still easy to see what the expression does, but its purpose may be completely obscure, e.g. because you are unfamiliar with the algorithm implemented there, so you need comments explaining why those operations are done.
In many cases you can do like you suggest, you can split a very big expression in many subexpressions and store intermediate results in temporary variables to which you give names that are suggestive for their purpose, instead of adding comments.
However, I see this solution as inferior to just providing short comments for the subexpressions, which give you the same information as the intermediate variable names, but without forcing the compiler to choose an expression evaluation strategy that may be suboptimal.
I completely agree that "The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory".
However, regardless of the programming language, it is very frequent to see programs where it is clear what is done, but you cannot understand why that is done. In most cases you already have precise expectations about what the program should do, but you see that it does something else, without any apparent reason. In many cases, the program does certain things because there are certain corner cases that are not at all obvious from the existing system documentation, or worse they are not documented at all anywhere, except for the presence of a mysterious program section that handles them. Even worse is when such mysterious program sections are present only because of some historical reasons, which are no longer true, and now the code is superfluous or even harmful.
These frequently encountered situations can be prevented only by adequate comments about the purpose of the code, regardless how self-explanatory is what it does.
> The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory.
If one doesn't know the programming language, no program will be clear, if they do know the language, any simple and well-written program will be clear. Clarity is a property partially of the reader and partially of the program, not the programming language.
yes I agree. In case of APL, if your readers are mathematicians, I guess it could well be the language of choice.
And yes like I already said, self explanatory code is not always possible but more often than not it is. It just takes a little extra care and thought.
I don't follow this part, can somebody maybe explain?
> Yet on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated prediction market, traders have wagered vast sums on longshot contracts with historical returns as low as 43 cents on the dollar.
On prediction markets traders can bet both sides. E.g. on Polymarket I can currently bet that Greenland will be acquired by USA before 2027 and get 4:1 odds: or I can bet that this doesn't happen, and give 4:1 odds.
If these odds are off, doesn't this mean that one side gets a bad return on investment, however the other side gets an equally good return?
On balance the average return on investment by traders should just be 100 cents minus the margin of the prediction market, which tends to be only a few percent.
In fact traders have to be there for both sides. The article means approximately that on 1c bets on unlikely things the people betting 1c to get a dollar if it happens do worse than those betting 99c to make a dollar if it doesn't happen.
I'm not sure that means betting 99c to make a dollar is a great business though - your money is tied up, often the volume is low so if you can only bet say $99 to win $100 it may not be worth the hassle to make $1, and you are vulnerable to the bettors knowing something you don't - maybe the unlikely event isn't really that unlikely but you don't know.
Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. Of course nobody thinks that only money has value. If only money had value, why would anybody exchange money for, say, a bread?
What many people are wondering about, is whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. Because if it would be equal, then one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
reply