I work in this area and I really dislike it when happiness is plotted against income only on a log scale, as is done here. The log scale effectively conceals the flattening-out of the relationship, which is the thing that shows you how progressive taxation + redistribution make the average person better off.
Whether it's a straight line up to $75K followed by a flat line from there on, or a curved (log) relationship all the way up, seems to me to make rather little difference.
Fig 2 of [1] shows high variance of happiness while income variation has only a small effect. There is roughly a 5 % (percent it is?) happiness delta for an income delta of about $ 500.000. However, the happiness delta between the different happiness levels is about 25 %.
Would “Income and emotional well-being: It doesn’t really matter” be a better title for the study? Or do I miss something?
I don't think you want this, but just in case you do :)
def encapsulate(mod):
import types
out = types.SimpleNamespace()
def replace_global_scope(f):
# via https://stackoverflow.com/a/1144561, but tweaked for py3
return types.FunctionType(
f.__code__,
out.__dict__,
f.__name__,
f.__defaults__,
f.__closure__,
)
for name in dir(mod):
val = getattr(mod, name)
if callable(val):
val = replace_global_scope(val)
setattr(out, name, val)
return out
This is like when you walk into a super complicated legacy code base and immediately have the one magic architectural change that will simplify everything...once you rewrite it from the ground up.
The music metadata situation is pretty bad, but the source of the problem is not really carelessness or greed or avoidance of responsibility (although those are all true). The true source of music metadata complication is the insanely complex copyright regime that music operates under. It's a legacy codebase about a century in the making that is constantly being patched up by congress, mostly by trying to change who is being protected from whom. (Among the folks favored at different times: labels, publishing companies, performing artists, song writing artists, radio stations, streaming music services, live venues, ...).
Perfect compliance with these laws is effectively impossible, so everyone is just doing the best they can. And any attempts congress makes to change how things work end up being gigantic legal battles because it's a zero-sum game and the more money in the "right" hands (e.g. these artists being ripped off) is less money in the other "right" hands (e.g. the unprofitable streaming service we all love).
"Old Town Road" is a useful modern reference for what we could have in a world without Copyright. That sample behind everything is from 34 Ghosts IV, one of the tracks in Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album.
Strictly just pasting it into a song and selling it wasn't legal (presumably after this went viral somebody paid Trent Reznor a bunch of money and put his name in the metadata to avoid nasty legal consequences) but everything up until selling it was legal, all the raw PCM data you'd want to take the samples apart without painfully cutting it out of the entire Ghosts recording was uploaded with the Ghosts I-IV album as CC-NC-BY. This is how our culture was _supposed_ to work if we weren't still trying to find ways to put more money in The Man's pocket.
Wait are you using the “Can I Kick It” analogy to argue in favor or against greed stopping art?
Because that example is a really weird grey area. The label didn’t clear one of the most obvious samples of all time. The original artist did not prevent them from releasing the derived work, but Tribe didn’t get paid for one of their classics.
Honestly I'm rather against needing to clear samples at all. I think the art should come before any concern that it would put someone into debt via a lawsuit—it should never result in making no money off it when the value is clearly in the product of the sample + performance.
This is a great example of what Marc Andreesen called the Moby Dick theory of big companies [1]. Paraphrased, the behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside. And from the inside, too!
It was an interesting read; do you know which company the author is talking about in that part :
> I am thinking of one high-profile Internet startup in San Francisco right now that is extremely promising, has great technology and a unique offering, that did two big deals early with high-profile big company partners, and has become completely hamstrung in its ability to execute on its core business as a result
Lawmakers should resist treating this unusual surge of IPO tax revenue as an ongoing thing. It is an unusual occurrence that is unlikely to be repeated every year, or even every decade.
I reckon I'll need a couple million to retire in the next several decades. As I'm still pretty young I have a personal pension liability of a couple million dollars.
My point here, what's the practical impact of this number? It's a scary number that's thrown out a lot, but is this number going to break the budget, or will pension spending as a fraction of the total budget be fairly stable?
I don't think anyone really knows. A lot of it depends on the stock market - if it keeps going up, things will probably be fine. But if there's a big downturn it could wipe out a lot of money in the fund. At that point you could be looking at benefit cuts and/or tax increases.
The CalPERS money is invested. In recessions, the pension fund shrinks and tax revenues shrink at the same time. The fraction of government spending needed to cover pensions increases as a result.
In Los Angeles, the percentage of the city budget going toward funding of pensions is about 20%. Fifteen years ago, it was around 5%. Will it keep rising? What other spending is crowded out? etc...
I used to know a girl who I suspect might have some kind of "hyper-phantasia." She said that when she thought back on memories it was literally like hitting the rewind button on a VCR.
Spotify seems to have gone up in the months following IPO, which suggests there is enough liquidity on the market to absorb stock sales by employees and a lockout period is unnecessary.
hard to say with just 1 event. i could see interesting things happening if uber were to direct list without a lockout. there's a lot of hype, value, and losses.
