Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

jacobinmag.com

Intellectual Property Is Real Money

Want to reduce income inequality in the US? Dismantle its onerous system of copyrights and patents.

[collapsedsquid]

Dean Baker’s been doing this whole “Kill intellectual property“ thing for a while, and now he’s published it in Jacobin.  He’s also getting an amusing amount of pushback elsewhere about how he’s condoning theft.

My dark fear here though is for software. The way them to deal with this shit is to make everything a subscription service, and already too much shit is subscription service.  I want to only have to pay once for something.

[mitigatedchaos]

Thing is, there’s a lot of ground between axing all the intellectual property and just reducing some of it.  I bet the greatest freeing up in resources would occur from removing the first 10% of bad intellectual property law.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

This got long and I didn’t want to just drop it into your askbox as an unformatted multipart wall-o-text.

…I also have concerns about relying heavily on land tax, depending on implementation.  If it’s based on current value, then: 

You’ll have poorer people being priced out of their homes and being forced to move if where they’re living ever becomes more valuable.  That’s pretty shitty, even if the land could be put to more “efficient” use.  Yeah, it already happens–I think that’s the real issue with gentrification, more than the “character of the neighborhood” changing–but that doesn’t mean we should put more pressure in that direction. 

1. Forcing people to move is a pretty heavy cost that’s worth at least trying to avoid imposing.  Having to move can mean having to find a new job, losing any location-based community, your kids having to change schools and leave behind their friends, plus the expense and hassle of the move itself.  In the worst cases it might mean being homeless.  It upends your whole life.  Even if a move is voluntary it upends your whole life.

2. It means telling people, “You don’t deserve to live somewhere nice.  If where you already are becomes nicer, you’ll be kicked out”.  That’s a hell of a message.

3. Knowing that you’ll have to go through all that if wherever you’re living ever becomes more desirable seems liable to create perverse incentives.

I’ve seen you express some disdain for the idea that, and I’m not quoting here, just paraphrasing based on memory, that people have a right to stay in the same place forever with nothing changing.  But I don’t think people are unreasonable to want to be able to carve out some degree of security and to not have yet another factor outside their control that can potentially fuck up their entire life.

Additional items:

You’re taxing based on value that’s purely theoretical until someone tries to sell.  In a way this is true for any property tax, but I think it’s more true for land; it’s hard to directly compare different parcels of land because the location itself is what you’re selling, more than the actual square footage.  And it can change without the current owner necessarily benefiting from the “increased” value.

Also, if revenue from land tax is specifically funding services in the area, you get a situation where anywhere cheap to live has underfunded services.  In the US, a large chunk of funding for public schools is from local property tax, and it works very poorly.

Anyway.  My thoughts on land tax.  I think you could avoid some of this–for example, by the tax being a fixed amount based on the last sale price (i.e. if you buy it for $x, then the annual tax is fixed at $y, a percentage of $x, until you sell it–at which point $y is readjusted to reflect the amount you sold it for).  But that wouldn’t necessarily be in line with what it seems like you want land tax to do and represent.

[mitigatedchaos]

It strikes me that part of what you’re after, dear owl-friend, is the moral basis for this taxation.

Either that, or simplifying the taxes.

I don’t think either is really optimal.  People will create “moral” arguments against any kind of taxation that is devised, and most likely the burden of taxation should be somewhat diverse in its sources partly to make evasion harder and partly to cause less distortion.  It could be simpler and altered in many ways, but having only one tax is probably a bad plan in some way.

And as for the moral basis, we both know that property and law are just force one step removed.  Those claiming a higher moral standing on “taxes are theft” are just fooling themselves.  (And in part, this can be chased down to a disconnect on the justification for where to root causality, where consciousness is being used to mark personhood to even attempt such philosophies in the first place, but not as the final causal root, which is incoherent.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

GiveWell is like a test case for a centrally planned and managed economy; if they can accurately assess the return on investment and direct funding in the most socially profitable direction in a non-market driven way, then that demonstrates that at least some economic activities are amenable to this approach.

[gcu-sovereign]

Disagree on the first sentence.  Givewell’s planning is not substantially different from the planning executed by any ordinary firm, as the crucial distinction between a planned economy and market economy is use of force.  Givewell has no guns, interest in using coercive force, or a democratic mandate, therefore it is not a prototype for a managed economy.

[mitigatedchaos]

The distinction is perhaps more that more unprofitable organizations die and profitable organizations are rewarded. That’s the real magic. Property is defined by control and exclusion through force, that’s how it exists in the real world. Force was not actually removed, just moved a step back - the case with all law.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ryanlewisandclark]

Seriously though, the amount of inherent ways I capitalism is garbage.

[americansylveon]

So, when bananas are regulated to the point where bananas are discarded for failing to meet arbitrary requirements, you blame capitalism. Brilliant.

[e8u]

I doubt it’s regulation.  Probably people just don’t want to buy misshapen bananas when there are prettier ones right next to them.

I’d like to see OP’s proposed solution here.  Tell grown adults, “You’re going to eat this ugly banana whether you like it or not!” and send government thugs to beat them up if they disobey?

[im-a-map-im-a-map]

I mean a simple solution is have companies buy them for a reduced price, have them sell for a reduced price Then people who are poorer can eat more fruits and veggies and others who dont care how they look can get a deal 👍👍 and companies can make some profit too

[e8u]

That’s exactly what you’d expect to happen.  For some reason, it didn’t.  I was speculating that there might be some weird psychological effect making it impossible to sell ugly bananas in the same room as pretty bananas for a profitable price.

But fortunately, @americansylveon came back with a source.  Apparently EU regulations require that bananas be “free of malformation or abnormal curvature”, but then specifies that class 1 or class 2 bananas are allowed to have “slight defects of shape”, or “defects of shape”.  Presumably that’s interpreted as a relaxation of the minimum standards? IDK how much of a defect is allowed.

Then they go so far as to regulate the number of bananas in a bunch. To which I can only say, “I hate the fuck government.”

@oktavia-von-gwwcendorff this is your sort of thing I think.

[neoliberalism-nightly]

Keep in mind that in this case the cost of transportation may not make it economical to even ship the malformed bananas if flooding the supermarket results in a really high price reduction.

[mailadreapta]

What I’m perplexed about is why no one builds a processing plant close to the growers and uses it to process the excess bananas into various banana products that don’t care about presentation. Banana flavoring, banana puree, etc. As I understand it this is what happens to second-grade fruit in most industries. Why not here?

[wirehead-wannabe]

Wasn’t there a post about how processed goods are taxed differently than raw goods, keeping e.g. Africa out of certain markets?

[mitigatedchaos]

Speaking of governments and Africa and development, this presents an opportunity for a government or NGO to buy the misshappen bananas and distribute them to poor people in other countries who won’t give a damn about the shape, bringing money into the source nation’s economy. EA might want to look at this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Single-Payer Health Care Thought Experiment

[simonpenner]

Today I saw this

http://khn.org/news/tab-for-single-payer-proposal-in-california-could-run-400-billion/

I’m working on a higher quality blog post for the main site on this, but for right now I’d like to point out a novel idea. Consider this quote from the article

A single-payer system likely “would be more efficient in delivering health care,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (California Healthline is produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

But the proposal expands coverage to all and eliminates premiums, copayments and deductibles for enrollees, and that would cost more money, Levitt said. “You can bet that opponents will highlight the 15 percent tax, even though there are also big premium savings for employers and individuals,” he added.

We always hear this. “Single payer health care will save so much money because of all the efficiencies that you can get from central management”

Is this true? Well it just so happens we have a real-world example: HMOs. For example, Kaiser Permanente, the entity referenced in the above quote.

(an aside for non-US readers: in the US, health care is generally privately provisioned, and fee-for-service. That is, if you want a doctor to do a thing, you give them money, and they do the thing. Most people have some kind of health insurance, and this tends to take one of two forms: HMO or PPO.

PPOs are standard, and flexible. In a PPO, the insurance company develops a “network of providers”, a set of doctors who have agreed to work with the insurance company. You are strongly encouraged to go see one of these doctors. If you choose to see a different doctor, “out of network”, your insurance will cover a smaller fraction of the cost. This remains fee-for-service, it’s just that insurance pays.

HMOs, on the other hand, take a very centralized approach. They are one large company responsible for catering to your health needs. In an HMO, you can only go to doctors at facilities run by the HMO. If you need a specialist, you must get a referral to a specialist who works for the HMO. Since everything is integrated, it’s easier for multiple doctors to coordinate and work together. However, your choice of doctor is severely limited. With a PPO, if you don’t like your doctor you can get a new one. Under HMOs, your choices are limited)

The description of HMOs sound a lot like single-payer health care writ small. You give lots of money upfront to an organization like Kaiser (you pay lots of money in taxes to the government to support health care), and in return you go to Kaiser-affiliated facilities (government-funded hospitals) where all of your care is provided to you by one entity. The centralization facilitates efficiencies as bureaucracies are cut, and your needs are taken care of as best they can.

So, approaching the problem from a different point of view: Single-payer government-provided health care is more-or-less the same as if everybody signed up for Kaiser. 

This gave me a deliciously trollish idea, an argument to bring out whenever relevant. Let’s say you’re arguing with some commies who insist that single-payer is the best/only solution. Pose to them this hypothetical:

“Would you be in support of a law that gave $HEALTH_INSURANCE_COMPANY a legally-mandated monopoly in health care, at the cost of forcing them to become a non-profit organization?”

Imagine one way to implement single-payer government-provided universal health care:

1) Give Kaiser a legal monopoly on health insurance

2) Legally require Kaiser to be a non-profit.¹

I suspect that most of your commie friends would be incredibly opposed to this idea, and yet it is fundamentally the same thing as a state-run single-payer health, with two caveats

a) You aren’t legally required to opt-in. You can still pay expenses out-of-pocket instead. 

b) Instead of the health system being run by whoever is friendliest with our elected representatives, it’s run by people with a proven track record of success in that field. 

I suspect this argument generalizes, too. You could apply it to any realm of government service provision that you can think of. It might help a handful of the smarter, more intellectually ethical folks see things from a different perspective.

---

1. Kaiser IS ALREADY A NON-PROFIT. So much for “greedy health insurance corporations ruining everything in their greedy corrupt quest for more profit”

[collapsedsquid]

The way single payer works is that it negotiates prices with providers which it can do because it’s the only buyer.  It’s the same way Singapore does it, it’s just there they set legally prices but don’t pay them. Maybe you should look at how this shit works instead of just imagining how it works.

[mitigatedchaos]

I still laughed. TBH I don’t understand why the Repubs don’t spring for healthcare vouchers. Well, okay, I understand why but …

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[theunitofcaring]

Popehat pointed me to this distinctly Orwellian transcript from a federal court case, in which the defendant, who wants to plead guilty, asks if she has to affirm in the plea agreement that her public defender did an adequate job when he’d actually missed all their meetings, missed key court deadlines, and couldn’t answer questions about what she was charged with:

The Defendant: What I meant to say is that at the end of the plea, it says that I have to submit and say I have been … that “I am satisfied that my defense attorney has represented me in a competent manner,” … I don’t want – I’m scared to go to trial because I don’t think that he’s going to, you know, put a fight for me. Your Honor, he didn’t submit any pretrial motions at all.

… Do I have to have the clause in there about my attorney? [referring to the part of the plea colloquy where she’s asked if she’s satisfied with her attorney's representation]

[Prosecutor]: Yes. You’re asking me?

The Court: Yes, you do. Who are you asking?

The Defendant: Just – I don’t know.

The Court: Well, you turned to [the prosecutor]. That’s part of [Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure] 11, ma’am, because you have to be satisfied with the representation and understand the terms and conditions of your plea agreement. 

But in terms of satisfied with the representation, it doesn’t
mean – There’s – In terms of competent representation, it doesn’t mean that [your public defender] has to look at and touch every single aspect of the case. If [the prosecutor] reached out to [your public defender] and said,
okay, count number one and count number ten, which happen to be what we’re seeking your client’s guilty plea on, here’s the discovery information that directly relates to Count 1 and Count 10. If he reviews that,
that’s a diligent lawyer who’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing.

…

The Defendant: Why is it the fact that even if I’m willing to take the plea, that clause about him, about my attorney? Why do I have to submit to the fact that he competently, you know, advised me in the matter?

The Court: Rule 11, there’s certain things that must happen if a person says I wish to plead guilty. As part of Rule 11, you have to believe that your lawyer is competent and has represented you properly.

The Defendant: Your Honor, I don’t believe that, but at the same time I’m scared to go to trial with him because I don’t think that he’s going to do me justice.

The judge says that if she doesn’t want to go to trial and probably get life in prison, she has to plead guilty, and she’s not allowed to plead guilty until she affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel. If she will not agree that she was competently advised, it goes to trial, and her trial lawyer will be the one who missed meetings with her and a life sentence is on the line.

She affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel.

The whole thing is just nightmarish, but to me the most nightmarish bit is that it was over a marijuana dealing operation. She was facing life in prison, she got 121 months with the plea, this whole charade of a just system charaded along, over her boyfriend growing and selling weed.

So, uh, have your usual reminder that fuck the American criminal justice system.

[mitigatedchaos]

Now imagine the incentives of privatized for-profit prisons and prison labor on top of that - TUoC surely has, but there are still too many people that support it.

This probably wouldn’t even be that hard to remedy if they just allocated more money to hiring public defense lawyers, but who will do that?  (Certainly not the state where they tried to draft the governor in due to a chronic shortage of available public defenders.)  Republicans don’t actually believe in good government - they believe in the myth of bootstraps and tax cuts.  Democrats don’t believe in it either, so instead of solving it we’ll just get some other bullsht social program that empirically doesn’t work, or schools that don’t discipline bad behaviors until they end up on the wrong end of a cop.

This all undermines the public’s faith in the justice system and the state generally, which makes policing itself harder, likely increasing crime.  (For instance, similar failures involving simultaneous under- and over-policing continue to undermine the inner cities.  Some people there now believe it is done on purpose, and they likely wouldn’t believe prosecutors could protect them from drug gang retaliation - so why would they cooperate to get rid of the drug gangs?)  You can try to get around that with propaganda, and indeed to a degree they do, but it has to bottom out at reality somewhere.

Even imagine a simple rule like “as much money has to be allocated to your defense as they spend prosecuting you”.  I bet most Americans would even consider that fair.  But where will the political will to materialize it come from?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[quoms]

it’s implicit in mainstream conceptions of nationalism/national liberation that a nation can attain the fullest expression of its freedom as a nation without ‘interference’ from anyone else, i.e. in an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous state. like that’s the ideal venue for free expression, cultural flowering, etc.

[mitigatedchaos]

Not everyone has the same experience as you, and not every Nationalist is a cultural-isolation-maximizer.

The Japanese have managed to remain Japanese while changing, flowing, adapting concepts from around the world, and they have an entire subset of their syllabulary used to represent foreign loanwords.

And yet… the lack of crime, the lack of Islamic terrorist attacks, being able to trust children to ride the train to school, carefully queuing up to receive supplies in the wake of a massive natural disaster… in other, more multicultural places this either isn’t the case, is only the case for the wealthy, or is enforced by the iron hand of a soft authoritarian state.

Culture is a wave, not a water, but that doesn’t mean we have to blur all of them together.  Diversity isn’t a terminal value.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

All white people owe poc reparations

[ratherbeinspacewithotherstars]

This isn’t a debate.
Your guys’ ancestors enslaved us and treated us like property that could be disposed of easily.
Now you continue to mistreat us.
Pay up
You reparations show you are sorry for your ancestors racism and the current racism.
So pay up

[anti-sjw-movement]

My ancestors didn’t though, in fact most people ancestors didn’t. A tiny percentage of the global populace owned slaves and the majority of that was in Africa where it’s still happening today… do they pay reparations too? By your logic. Yes they do.

[sighinastorm]

I do think reparations were owed, but the only sound way to do it, that I can
think of, would be for reparations to have taken the form of (at least partially) education and higher vocational training, beginning immediately during Reconstruction.  Even today, I think a program like that could do a lot of good, but with what we’re doing along those lines now, we begin too late.  College is too late.  We need to be assigning scholarships to preschools and grade schools.

“Your guys’ ancestors“, though?  Please. 

[anti-sjw-movement]

I don’t think reparations is owed at all, for a start the white people today who’s families did indeed own slaves at one point are not at fault for that, they didn’t personally own slaves and they could very well be upstanding members of society who would never do wrong, why should they suffer whether financially or made to sit in a classroom to be told how they’re bad.

Secondly whilst slavery was a disgusting part of human history, it was the social norm and people then were accustom to it, those who weren’t stood against slavery firmly.

Thirdly, many many many white people gave their lives in war to free slaves, no one ever mentions this, acknowledges that these people died to change the world.

All of this and more reasons are why reparations are unjust and unneeded.

[sighinastorm]

When the slaves were freed and then basically just left to figure out 
what to do for themselves, a self-perpetuating underclass was 
created.  This has left a black mark (no pun intended) on our social 
history, and a brake on our nation’s progress in countless fields.

For the ever-present “race issue“ to not be a thing that exists America, what would that be worth?  For racial division to have never have been such an issue
in justice, imprisonment, crime, poverty, sciences, arts,business, ownership, housing, city settling, finance, what would that be worth to a country?  

Reparations isn’t just some moral absolution for a sin (yours, mine,
or somebody else unrelated’s).  The goal was integration, which,
foolishly, was thought to be obtainable for 40 acres and a mule.

>> why should they suffer whether financially?

A cohesive society benefits all therewithin.

[mitigatedchaos]

That isn’t what the reparations people actually want, though, and the reparations people will never agree that any sum of money is enough, so the right move for the national government is to never pay any reparations on this matter.

The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity as a terminal value, and would mean in some ways result in the dissolution of what has effectively become an ethnic group within the nation.

Can you imagine the enormous left-wing freak-out if they caught on that that was what were doing?  Re-activating the melting pot within the nation on its own groups?  Further transforming “American” into an outright ethnicity?

It would be worth an utterly enormous amount of money, more than it would actually cost, but no one in this country is capable of actually executing it.  The ones that want to do it won’t do it correctly, and the ones that don’t want to do it don’t want to pay for it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

I’ve been seeing in professors the result of the cutoff and scoring obsession and weird focuses of the NIH grant system.  If I were head of NIH, I would say “We’re obsessing about the scores of these grants to level that exceeds our ability to tell good research from bad.  How bout we just take an amount of grants that’s 4x the amount we can fund, and just randomly draw ¼ of those.“

Also, when I am Comrade General Secretary of the Socialist States of America, that’s how I’m allocating capital.

[mitigatedchaos]

> not assigning members of your government allocation funding blocks that they can bet on research outcomes

Bad post OP

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[taxloopholes]

libertarians: there’s a small elite class of people that shouldn’t have such a huge amount of control over the economy

me: yah

libertarians: it’s only the public sector

me: nah

[triggeredmedia]

Have you ever met a libertarian?

You are describing liberals. They believe public sector rules and we need more govt.

[taxloopholes]

…that’s not what this means. i explained it here: http://taxloopholes.tumblr.com/post/160617784322/the-libertarian-transhumanist-the-only

[triggeredmedia]

So you are against wealth?

Do you believe someone else being rich prevents you from being rich?

Do you believe their is any govt regulations that help people gain wealth?

Do you believe people do not have a right to be wealthy?

[taxloopholes]

that’s not what I said.

I’m pointing out that the argument from libertarians that it’s governments making corporations push their interests against the public good is bullshit because it disregards how and what brought about basic regulation in the first place and what corporations do overseas WITHOUT regulations protecting workers.

I also said it’s ridiculous that just 8 people have more wealth than 3.6 BILLION people is a bit ridiculous, especially considering Western corporations rely on global poverty for cheap labor. so yes I have a problem with multi billion dollar corporations paying people starvation wages and pushing the narrative that they earned that money without exploitation. even billionaires admit to this which is pretty ironic.

if you already disagree there’s not much I can do to change your mind, though.

[ranma-official]

The “8 people have more wealth than X billion” statisic is a bit disingenuous if I’m right about the exact statisic you’re citing.

It’s not that we can just redistribute that wealth amongst these X billion and fix poverty, because these X billion actually have zero or negative net worth, meaning it won’t even make a dent. So that’s a completely different problem that needs a completely different solution.

I’m not sure what kind, though.

[mitigatedchaos]

Only what is produced can be consumed. Need to keep teching up and expanding production.

Were I in charge I might also pursue development programs in stable militarily-allied countries in order to build a high-powered international bloc, transforming the national interest into one that could justify this kind of investment, buuut much of the Left would despise me.