Aesthetic preferences exist for a reason, they've also been selected for and would often correlate with health indicators.
In the end reproductive success is all that's selected for, even at the expense of the host for the gene, like in the case of the peacock where their long tail makes them easy prey but also makes them easier to identify for a peahen.
Chris Stucchio wrote an interesting blog post which changed my mind on this. Instead of exacerbating it, a Machine Learning model can actively correct for bias.
Bias correction is possible, but, tautologically, a model whose structure cannot capture a bias cannot correct for that bias. This means that a modeller must either understand the bias, and accommodate for it in their model, or use a model that might be able to capture unknown structures and run the (serious) risk of over-fitting that model.
Can you explain that? How does does the source of the money affect what I do with it (dividends & interest vs. pay from the sweat of my brow & intellectual output)?
If consumption today is more valuable than consumption in the future, why would you want to favor doing something else today, e.g. investment?
You'd always prefer $100 today vs $100 in a year. In order to convince someone to invest you need to offer them more than that in the future.
If the discount rate is 10% (not bank interest, just how much I personally value time) then unless you offer me more than $ 110, I'd rather spend the money now.
For people to invest, discounted_expected_return[1] - capital_gains should be higher than the money in their wallets.
You can play around in excel to understand this better, with a 5% return, a 20% tax on both income and capital gains and a 10% discount rate, $ 100 in income is either $ 80 today or $ 76 in a year.
I just want to emphasize something you hinted at: "expected return" usually involves an additional discounting factor which relates to risk and risk tolerance. An investment with a fixed return of 5% (a predictable $76 equivalent in a year) is very different from an investment with an expected return of 5% but a standard deviation of +-10% (anywhere from about $68 to $84). A lot of investors would treat that as worth a little bit less, because if it happens to go down, that is felt more keenly than if it goes up.
No, capital gains taxed less than wages incentivises investment over working. Which IMO is the wrong thing, because it's fundamentally regressive - young, poor but intelligent and educated people can only work, not invest, so we should encourage them by taxing them fairly.
And you think if you remove the incentive to invest, thus reducing the capital available to corporations, the same number of jobs will exist for those young poor people to work in?
I'm pretty confident that we do tax the poor fairly - in fact, thanks to credits, the poorest get a negative tax rate that nets them sizable "refunds".
Even bigger profits come from selling crap to people.
Especially if you help build and sustain a whole culture that teaches them to have low expectations from what they buy, lure them with BS ads that tout unsubstantial products to high heavens, etc...
>As an aside, I'd be skeptical of Artists who produce "Inspiring work" which refuse to find any takers.
Don't necessarily disagree (although Apple makes some crap too of course, generally the take pride in their products and try to do the right thing even if it hurts their volume sales or margins).
And they might even prove that putting something good out matters -- like several other companies do.
But the general mode of production in 90% of the industry is not Apple (which always catered to the more expensive "high end" of the market).
It's companies selling half-arsed products or knowingly bad products (like tons of crappy food stuff), even when they have tons of margin available to produce something better.
Finance isn't evil; day trading, investment banking, venture capital are all sharing information with the world and trying to move money to places where its more valuable.
There is a case to be made about "negative externalities"[1] but talking about the whole of finance as unnecessary is throwing out the baby with the bath water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...