By "there" you mean "the money will remain in California". To an extent, yes. You can live in Austin and found a company where most of the workers are in San Jose. That's just inefficient and a pain. It makes it more likely that, at the margin, a founder will decide Austin is good enough, and hire there.

Can't let that slide. Wealthy people pay the lion's share of income and capital gains taxes, both federally and in California. They pay both more dollars and a higher proportion of income than poor people. The myth that billionaires pay little in taxes is just that, a myth.

FICA, sales, and property taxes may be a different story. There are instances where a rich person pays little but those are the exceptions, not the rule. California in particular is very vulnerable to stock market downturns because capital gains taxes plummet and Sacramento is left with an enormous budget hole.

It gets a bit murky when you start talking about who actually pays corporate income taxes. Some part of it is paid by consumers through higher prices, some by employees through depressed wages, and some by investors through lower dividends and capital gains. I don't think there's general agreement who pays what share of corporate income taxes.

That's the crux of the difference of opinions when people talk about gig work.

(Side note: if a job is easy to get, it's not going to pay super well. Supply and demand, and all that.)

My understanding based on interviews with actual gig workers is substantial numbers of them are just supplementing their income with gig work. The canonical examples are students who need beer money and retirees who want to supplement retirement income and get out of the house for a bit.

I have no doubt there are also people who are trying to make a full time living doing gig work. Driving a taxi was never a great job in terms of income, I don't see why we'd would expect driving for Uber or Lyft would be any different.

We also have to realize not all gig jobs are the same. At one end of the spectrum is food delivery: that's a low skill, relatively low value occupation. No kidding it doesn't pay well. I got paid a pittance when I washed dishes because anyone could do it if you could put up with the sweat, exhaustion, and smell.

On the other end are people like freelancers and the factory workers in TFA. Those are high skill, high value jobs which people really do hold as full time positions. But there are many people who apparently don't want to work full time 9-5. That's not me, I like having a steady job, but that's the point: my preferences and the preferences of those people are vastly different. I don't see any reason why I should have any say in what work arrangements other people are willing to agree too.

It is bestowed from upon high: Washington DC and various state capitals. Labor law enshrines eight hour days, five day workweeks as the One True Schedule.

This is why I find all the restrictions on gig work so odious. Clearly some people prefer flexibility over a 8x5 work schedule. Why in the world would we want to force both employers and employees into a schedule neither one is thrilled by?

Yes, it would be nice if the article drilled into whether the declines were in certain degree programs or broadly spread across all fields.

TFA does mention this was a survey of "research institutions" and has a picture of MIT's Great Dome so we're intended to think this is STEM programs. OTOH, Harvard is a quite respectable research institute which also has Graduate School of Education.

Not entirely. Some people go to college to goof off for a few years. I have a number of nieces and nephews who aren't using their college degrees for anything. Granted they were not in PhD programs but still, learning is not necessarily the primary reason some people attend college.

In addition, not all learning is equally valuable. I just saw some stats about what degree programs produce what lifetime earnings, the most objective way we have to measure educational value. Engineering degrees were on the top, education was on the bottom.

But let's assume the article is talking about PhDs in STEM degree programs. Perhaps this is a good time to consider whether we want to depend so much on federal funding. Perhaps STEM schools need to make a case to private donors that, since their degrees are so valuable, the donors ought to fund them directly. Not only would this get politics out of education, it would reduce the number of strings a nefarious administration can pull.

For two reasons:

First, that the wealth will be shared. It'll be squandered on various boondoggles.

Second, that the Trump administration won't want a second bite of that apple. I think if you tell The Orange Man that he has to do something because he agreed to it, he'd give you that confused head tilt dogs do.

The US Federal government owes about $114,000 per capita. That's your cut. Make your check payable to the US Treasury.

(Note, that'd just debt held by the public today, not inter-agency debt or unfunded future liabilities.)

AI data centers are evolving rapidly. You want to be able to rip and replace gear all the time. That's expensive to do in orbit.

Managing heat in a data center is a huge issue. It's very hard to dissipate heat in space. It's a lot easier to dump waste heat into the air or a river.

Communication between nodes, racks, and rows is a fundamental limit to AI performance. Spacing rows hundreds to thousands of kilometers apart is going to add speed-of-light delays and bandwidth limits. I don't see how you maintain performance in that environment.

All in all, this seems like an incredibly impractical idea. It really screams "I have rockets and want to find uses for them." But Musk is a smart guy, I have no doubt he's thought more about it than I have.

I can't read the article, it's paywalled.

What's the theory? How does better recordkeeping reduce recidivism? Does this enable, say, better interactions during parole? Or does it help make better decisions about who to parole? What facility to confine prisoners in?

I'm all for better recordkeeping but I don't see how exactly that will help.

Every little bit helps, especially when building your credibility. I think what you're trying to say is you don't mind paying your taxes but you'd like other people to be happier paying more so other people (and perhaps you but you haven't said that) get more services.

I am grudgingly willing to pay my taxes because, for all its flaws, I think democratic government is the best and our democratic government had decided what I owe. I'm not thrilled because I think the California government is very wasteful in its spending. If it was more careful about how it spent my tax dollars to provide social benefit as efficiently as possible, I'd be less grudging. Is that nuanced enough for you?

Having actually read some history books (see your ask below), I'm skeptical charity was always inadequate. Americans are extraordinarily charitable, now and historically. What the increased welfare spending of the last 100 years has done is crowded out charitable activities. Americans historically used charity to great effect. But you also need to view those efforts in historical context. Charitable giving in 1900 was never going to bring poor people to today's standard of living because that was entirely impossible. JP Morgan himself didn't have today's standard of living in many ways. No kidding poor people of 1900 didn't have a car and air conditioning.

Americans are also extraordinarily self-supporting. We, and I assert you, seem to forget that. For most of our history, it was assumed that government's purpose was to set the conditions that allowed people to provide for themselves, not to do the actual provisioning. There are tremendous advantages to that arrangement. When we get in a situation. About 1 in 7 Californians use SNAP. The War on Poverty, started 60 years ago, was supposed to lift people out of poverty so they wouldn't need food assistance ("A hand up, not a handout"). Perhaps it's time to reconsider whether social welfare spending is actually achieving its goals or perhaps we might need a different approach.

We have two different visions of what a civilization can be. My view is one where people live happy, productive, and independent lives, free to make their own life choices and responsible to themselves for the consequences of those choices. Life is complicated, dynamic, and unpredictable so I think we need millions of daily experiments to figure out what works for each individual person. I'm quite confident that most people, over time, will figure out a life path which works well for them, and that you and I can't figure that out for them. I also think there will be a very small number of people for whom they're never going to be able to support themselves and as compassionate, sociable people, we ought to provide for them. I expect I think that number is much, much smaller than you do. Finally, I think there are a large number of people in a grey area, where they can't really provide for themselves now but quite reasonably could given the right support and incentives. These are the hand up/handout people referenced above. The Clinton era welfare reforms really targetted updating social spending along those lines and that was, IMHO, a great move. We seem to have forgotten that approach.

Let's keep personal insults out of this, although I assert you're the one with the naive attitude. "I want free stuff and I want mommy and daddy to pay for it" isn't especially mature or nuanced. At least I provided citations with data. Please do the same.

I minored in US history. I've read some of Senator Warren's writings and near as I can tell they're riddled with economic misunderstandings. But I'll also throw a recommendation at you, The Triumph of Economic Freedom by Senator and Doctor Phil Gramm (did you know Phil Gramm is a PhD Economist? I didn't.) and Professor Don Boudreaux.

Cool. If you live in California you can voluntarily pay extra money to the state. Most of that money goes to pay for Medical, not billionaires.

Virtually no one ever does that so I don't actually believe you.

I'm lost. How exactly has Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia) ripped you off? What did he trick you into buying for more than it was worth? How did Tim Cook snooker you into buying an iPhone you didn't actually want?

You know who's ripping you off? The California government. They can force you to give them money and squander it on overpriced low income houses, trains to nowhere, and numerous other boondoggles.

Cool. Let's have an informed conversation about how much taxes Californians pay and what we get for it. Let's start with California's budget. Do you realize the inflation-adjusted California budget has roughly doubled in the last 10 years while the population has been more or less constant? I don't see us getting twice the value from Sacramento compared to 10 years ago.

But perhaps I'm blind. I don't have a reference but my understanding is a huge chunk of that came from expanding MediCal. I'm not poor so perhaps I don't see how much that benefits people. But I find it difficult to believe that many people were able to get by without aid in 2016 compared today.

I'm also at a loss how a one-time cash infusion (this tax is a one-time deal, right?) will solve a long term budget hole. Spen toding is growing on an exponential curve. Seems we need a long term answer, not a one time patch.

Let's address the "fair share" argument. Huh. What exactly might "fair" mean? I found this interesting article, breaking out tax burden by income bracket. We see that sales and property taxes already more heavily affect lower income brackets than higher income ones. This makes some amount of sense, especially sales tax. Income taxes are already quite progressive. The overall burden is much flatter than I expected (although the fine article points out that California is fourth most progressive of all states, go figure). Perhaps there's room to just increase the income tax brackets?

(Note, I think it's pretty important to look at these figures using income after transfers. If I pay $1000 in taxes and get a $1000 MediCal subsidy, I've effectively paid no tax. I don't know if this report accounts for that.)

Every time there's a recession and the stock market drops, California suddenly has a budget hole. Every time pundits point out that most of California's revenue comes from wealthy people and it's fiscally dangerous to so heavily rely on a volatile tax source. And yet we want to tax the wealthy more, making the state's income even more precarious. Is that really a wise plan?

I'm happy to have a nuanced discussion of taxes and spending in California. "Make the rich pay their fair share" isn't nuanced. Neither is "abolish all taxes" or "cut spending by 50%". But to have a nuanced discussion, perhaps we should both know the basic facts about what taxes California collects and what it spends it on.

Really? You don't use Google, YouTube, iDevices, Instagram, AIs? Do you think those things just sorta happened? I'll give you a hint: they wouldn't exist without founders and C-suite people.

I'll repeat the off-repeated statistic: founders capture something like 2% of the value they create. Customers get the other 98% by way of products which are more valuable than sales price. Maybe we should tax that too: Google searches don't cost you anything but clearly have more than $0 in value. You should pay tax on that value you got without paying.

...that Roku really will be an open-access platform for competing networks.

The temptation is going to be really big at Fox to make Fox content more prominent. The comfort of Roku is it isn't tied to any one content provider. OTOH, I used to work at EMC when it owned VMware and we managed to not screw up VMware by making it only work with EMC gear.

Ah well, my current Roku stick has worked great for over five years. I've got my money's worth out of it. If I have to buy some other vendor's streaming client because it's become better than a Roku, I'm not going to shed many tears.

Yup, that's what I use it for. Streaming Spotify to my sound system too.

Eh, I use the Roku Channel now and again. My wife and I like to watch some shows which we can only get by subscribing to a niche channel and it shows up in the Roku Channel app. I'm not sold on the service and will use whatever gets me the shows.

I've wondered about this for a while. I was considering getting solar panels and a home battery and this is an option there. But then I thought, I'm buying the battery to tide me over a blackout. If power drops, I want that battery topped off at all times. I don't want to use it as a grid smoothing device because that's just leaving me vulnerable to not having the power I bought it for.

Same thing for an EV. I still have range anxiety. I want the battery always at 100% full when I leave my garage. You'd have to pay me a significant amount to let you drain my car's battery to handle the late afternoon AC surge.

I know, I know, I don't need the full range on the EV every day. It still would cause me anxiety to not have it topped off.