Depends. Where I live outgoing mail goes into the closest blue USPS bin. And given that most days all mail I receive is slop, removing the slop would remove the need to come to my house.
Of course, where I live the USPS person stops in a general area and does all the outgoing deliveries on foot, but it's conceivable that some days an entire block may receive no incoming mail. Also, we need to take into account things like fuel costs for planes & such throughout the entire supply chain.
Even from a pure financial perspective, given one benefit of these countries is you generally actually get useful benefits out of your tax dollars unlike the USA, wouldn't a better way of looking at this be some sort of weighted metric?
Imagine there's country A where i get a net salary of X and Y units of value out of my tax money. And country B where my net Salary is (X-M) and I get (Y+N) out of my tax money. Depending on the values of M & N, country B could be a clear winner at the end of the day.
You'd have to break this down into "archetypes" because like 90% of what you pay for is specific:
- retirement
- healthcare: negligible expense for most young people (for instance, about 80% goes to the 65+ in France)
- unemployment (a little more universal, with some large variations still)
Then there's everything to do with children (from direct subsidies to public schools or kindergarten slots), education (not everyone goes to university, for instance), and other subsidies that are income-dependent (two common ones in France are rent subsidy and a salary top-up for low-but-not-too-low incomes).
Plus, ultimately, 100% of what comes in goes out (modulo administrative costs) at the global scale, so you can't just average this or everywhere looks the same.
As someone that moved a bit through the EU, that's actually a pretty complex calculation, that's hard to distill into a single number.
My second biggest recurring expense is childcare. Having a child is something you are in control of, so the weight you might give to childcare benefits is something that wildly depends on your life plans.
Same with unemployment benefits. Would you rather a strong safety net and 8% unemployment (Like France), or a weaker net and 4% unemployment, like the Netherlands?
I think that depends on one's definition of disposable income. I think technically it's more or less what I was calling "net". But many people use it to mean "after I pay my mortgage, and my utilities, and my other thing". The further we go in that second direction the more it captures what I'm getting at.
As an example, if I have kids who need daycare and one country provides free daycare and another does not, then we need to account for the cost of daycare in our equation. And that may or may not fall under one's definition of disposable income.
The further you go in that direction, the more you have to include personal circumstances and values and the less useful it is for general comparison. Of course, the whole premise of looking at just average net income is a bit odd, so looking at expected quality of life makes more sense anyways.
100%. To use my daycare example, if someone didn't have kids, they're not realizing any value out of that.
So sure, there's an even more nebulous "value to society" concept, but since TFA is trying to get to dollars and cents I was trying to focus it on overall personal value. But even then one needs to not treat tax dollars equally.
My thought as well. If you have a kid and one country offers free daycare and the other does not, you ought to also do the math on how much you would have to pay for that for example. Or lets say one country has dirt roads and no public wster system and the other has top noch public infrastructure. One is going to be cheaper for the state.
The truth is that the tax rste alone is utterly meaningless.
Because you know where you don't have to pay taxes? If you live as a hermit in a desert cave. But that also means you won't benefit from the society around you. If you ignoring culture and which countries style of living you prefer (a werod idea, but ok), wouldn't it be wise to consider both the tax rate and what kind of society and surrounding it offers you in return?
It is also exactly these same people of the USA whose thinking is going to matter for determining what happens next, not anyone else. It is immaterial what "everyone else outside the borders of the USA" thinks in the context of the country.
Yes. And for the context of this conversation, the people in the USA are what matters. It's not like this regime is going to give up just because other countries dislike them. Their core fan base think it's going gangbusters.
The tension is that QA is important. But most QA practitioners are not good. The world is filled with QA people who couldn't make it as an SWE and now are button pushers. But high quality QA people are amazing. These are the ones who understand how to break apart a system, push it to its limits, and engineer the quality plan.
This is an area where I expect AI to create a bimodal future. The smaller group of high quality QA people will now be able to offload the activity to agents instead of the QA drones. They'll still be worth their weight in gold, whereas the drones will be redundant.
I've worked with a lot of QA folks that just repackage up the unit tests the dev already writes. And I've met a few that strikes out on their own and comes up with real tests.
The latter is much more high touch, but they're often worth their weight in gold. The former is kinda pointless.
In the US at least it's pretty common to see bars using cheater pints. They look like 16 oz pint glasses but with a few tricks wind up only holding 14 oz
This is a conversation from 17 hours ago and was written in the context of that time. Threads are living conversations, and taking the effort to complain about discussions occurring at that specific time (over 17 hours ago) seems equally unneccesary as well.
The guidelines ask us to avoid complaining about downvotes because a downvoted state on a comment is often temporary, whereas the comment is permanent.
> The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become.
If you're going to participate here, you need to stop poisoning HN like this. People have worries about their future wellbeing as a result of the dramatic changes currently happening in the industry. We can debate the validity of those worries without trashing the community, which is specifically against the guidelines. The guidelines, and the work that many people put into upholding them, are the main reason this site has ever been anything worth defending.
The guidelines you're breaching in this case are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Of course, where I live the USPS person stops in a general area and does all the outgoing deliveries on foot, but it's conceivable that some days an entire block may receive no incoming mail. Also, we need to take into account things like fuel costs for planes & such throughout the entire supply chain.
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