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> Folks typically list income tax as an advantage but property and sales taxes more than make up the difference.

No, not really. Texas is still below average state taxes and you can see the breakdown of each state here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax#/media/File:S...


Yep, exactly what I mentioned, more than makes up for it especially once you factor in the higher Case Schiller on recent years causing increases to property taxes since 2022 (date of your image).

I'm not "left", but I liked Bill Burr even though he's fairly uneducated and populist.

That's because Bill Burr is a hypocrite for it. He complains about billionaires and the rich, complains about not enough free speech (but Saudi stipulation was censorship about royals and religion), and complains about other people doing exactly what he did[0] (still sleazy if he says he'd do it too). He acts like he's Carlin, rants about other people's $ but he's really only about his own $ too.

People thought he held sincere ethics and would speak on them. They're disappointed he's just another greedy rich guy he was complaining to everyone about.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/comedy/comments/1nt1umd/comment/ngq...


Keynesian Bernanke on famed Austrian Milton Friedman:

"Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. His seminal contributions to economics are legion, including his development of the permanent-income theory of consumer spending, his paradigm-shifting research in monetary economics, and his stimulating and original essays on economic history and methodology."

https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...


Milton Friedman was not part of the Austrian School. Rather, he was part of the Chicago School. While both schools promote free market economics, there are differences. In fact, one of the biggest differences has to do with their views on central banking, with the Austrian School generally being against fractional-reserve currencies while the Chicago School being more sympathetic. Milton Friedman was a monetarist.

Milton Friedman also rejected one of the central Austrian tenets, the business cycle.

Friedman was a Chicago monetarist, not just an Austrian hack. Pure monetarism doesn't always work, as it ignores irrational behavior, but it's not _useless_. Monetary models work great in steady-state conditions for fine-tuning and in cases where the monetary supply results in high inflation.

The 2008 economic crisis demonstrated that brilliantly. The IS-LM model correctly predicted the outcome of fiscal expansion (lack of inflation, despite trillions in stimulus) and the futility of monetary measures (negative rates in Europe did not result in economic growth).


As someone else said Friedman wasn’t an Austrian. Not even close. The only real similarity is that they both are proponents of free market capitalism. Friedman was a mainstream economist who used mathematical modeling and statistical methods. The majority of Austrians don’t use either and prefer reasoning about individual actions from first principles.

Bernanke's opposing views on the Great Depression??

"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." - Bernanke

https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...


Read "Conflicting Lessons of the Great Depression"[] chapter of Ben Bernanke versus Milton Friedman The Federal Reserve’s Emergence as the U.S. Economy’s Central Planner for a summary of differing or opposing viewpoints.

From the introduction:

  ...As Bernanke, while still only a member of the Fed’s board of governors, said in an address at a ninetieth-birthday celebration for Friedman: “I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again” (2002b). This seeming similarity, however, disguises significant differences in Friedman’s and Bernanke’s approaches to financial crises...
https://www.sjsu.edu/people/tom.means/courses/econsymposium/...

> Not the premise.

Literally this thread shows that there are many people who refuse to accept the premise of any risk.


A 300 IQ alien will have outmaneuvered you so well, it wouldn't even let you get to a point where you think you might have to turn it off.

Not one person?

Here's Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Bill Gates, Vitalik Buterin, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Norvig, Ian Goodfellow, and Rob Pike:

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_on_AI_Risk


It's amusing that this is not an summary - it's the entire statement. Please trust these tech-leaders that may or may not have business with AI that it can become evil or whatever, so that regulatory capture becomes easier, instead of pointing out the other dozens of issues about how AI can be (and is already being) negatively used in our current environment.

Bengio is a professor and Hinton quit Google so that he could make warnings like this.

And this is just to highlight that there are clearly many familiar people expressing "worry about AIs taking over humanity" as per GP.

There are much more in depth explanations from many of these people.

What's actually amusing is skeptics complaining about $-incentives to people warning about dangers as opposed to the trillion dollar AI industry: Google, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, all of VC, trying to bring it about. Honestly the $ is so lopsided in the other direction. Reminds me of climate change, all the "those people are just in the renewable energy industry lobby"...


But the trillion dollar industry also signed this statement, that's the point - high ranking researchers and executives from these companies signed the letter. Individually these people may have valid concerns, and I not saying all of them have financial self-interest, but the companies themselves would not support a statement that would strangle their efforts. What would strangle their efforts would be dealing with the other societal effects AI is causing, if not directly then by supercharging bad (human) actors.

I may be cynical but I’ve seen a lot of AI hype artists warn about the danger as a form of guerrilla marketing. Who knows though.

You really think this worries Sam Altman?

I actually agree that mitigation of AI risk should be studied and pursued. That's different from thinking the AIs will take over.

Most of the worries I've heard from Geoff (and admittedly it was in 1-2 interviews) are related to how AI will impact the economic workforce, and the change may be very disruptive as to completely change our way of living, and that we are not prepared for it. That's much milder than "AI taking over humanity". And it's definitely not any of the following:

> Due to alignment difficulty and orthogonality, it will pursue dangerous convergent subgoals.

> These will give the AI a decisive strategic advantage, making it uncontainable and resulting in catastrophe.

The economic damage will not be due to AI, but due to the humans controlling it (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc), and due to capitalism and bad actors.

Even in the interview I heard from Geoff, he admitted that the probability he assigns to his fears coming true is entirely subjective. He said (paraphrased): "I know it's not 0%, and it's not 100%. It's somewhere in between. The number I picked is just how I feel about it."

Finally, that statement was in 2023. It's been 2 years. While in many ways AI has become much better, it has mostly only become better in the same ways. I wonder how worried those people are now.

To be clear, I'm not saying I think AI won't be a significant change, and it may well make things much worse. But "AI taking over humans"? Not seeing it from the current progress.


> You really think this worries Sam Altman?

Yes.

"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could." - Sam Altman

He's had more recent statements along these lines. But personally, I believe his fault is that he thinks careening towards this is inevitable and he's hoping the best thing to do given the wildly diverging outcomes likely is just to hope the emerging intelligence will come up with the alignment.

On Hinton: "I actually think the risk is more than 50%, of the existential threat."

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dslspe/geoffr...


I know Sam says stuff, but I don't think he actually is worried about it. It's to his benefit to say things like this, as he gets to be involved in setting the rules that will ultimately benefit him.

As for Hinton:

> He said (paraphrased): "I know it's not 0%, and it's not 100%. It's somewhere in between. The number I picked is just how I feel about it."

I'm not claiming he's not worried about it. I'm providing context on how he came up with his percentage.


I think it's plausible he is lying about believing that in order to get more money from investors

How to find your ideal place to live in the US: https://exoroad.com

I think this is a really cool idea! I will say that I only used one search but the results seemed only vaguely accurate.

Lower returns isn't accurate. Small Cap Value as an asset class has actually outperformed the returns of the total market over the long term: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all...

I know there's consensus that smaller caps are actually higher beta and thus higher risk. However, I don't believe there's any consensus on value being lower beta, less risky, or less returns. After all, large cap and mid cap value also outperformed total market: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all...


Interesting. Added a * to my comment.

I think it's still accurate to say that you'll lag the total market during the run-up, right? So anyone buying value should be prepared for that feeling of FOMO, in exchange for long-term peace of mind.

Then again, the beta on your small cap portfolio is 1.04 (higher than your mid/large cap portfolio .93). This matches my intuition: going for value means lower beta, but going small means higher beta. So for small cap value, these effects sort of cancel out and you end up slightly above 1.

Altogether, small cap value is an interesting choice. Not bad.


No that wouldn't be accurate either, as a total market bull run like '91 - '96 or definitely '01 - '07 still had value outperforming. There's enough uncorrelated returns that it's too tough to say how it will behave during each decade.

Huh, I guess that's so.

Well, can we at least agree on the part about most structured products being a rip-off?


Yes, I agree 99% of financial funds are rip offs with 1% fees and dubious payout. Personally, only 0.10% or less total market index funds make sense to me, but Small Cap Value as a low cost index strategy could be an ok addition.

Great book and a great shortened synopsis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...


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