I like it. We might want to take some extra efforts to make sure the odometer is accurate, but there's pretty strong incentives to fool with odometers already.
Apparently the average person pays 150-400 in gas taxes per year now. I guess the depreciation from mileage on car is of a similar order of magnitude. And we seem to do OK now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odometer_fraud
I have a technical question: Is there any feasible way to implement a vehicle miles tax without building a massive surveillance state that basically tracks every single place everyone goes? This hardly seems beyond the wit of man, but I'm not aware of any existing off-the-shelf way to accomplish this, other than just having the government promise to delete all records after X days.
Do you have any pointers for better studies regarding test-retake reliability with the MBTI and/or Big Five? The Wikipedia page does not appear to be helpful in this regard. As far as I can tell, every citation is regarding 16 discrete bins.
Sorry, I accidentally pushed it to live before I was finished revising it, then hurriedly (but not hurriedly enough, clearly) pulled it down again. Blame me, not the site.
This is a slightly updated version of the post (new links, slightly less unhinged language, and a link to this MBTI quiz that I made to promote non-binary axes: https://dynomight.net/mbti )
I didn't change the article between submitting and the time you made your comment. I did just add two paragraphs to the end of the "Before We Begin" section to try to clarify this point. (Your interpretation was what I intended.)
Author here. I very much appreciate your polite tone! I'm aware that taxes on items for resale aren't treated like in the toy model. (This is mentioned in the article already.)
Can you please take a look at this article and let me know if it changes your view:
I think it was accurate when it was created. But when I double-checked, I found that something like half the countries had created a VAT in the meantime!
It’s a bit debatable if this is really a “data” problem that could be solved in principle by gathering enough data or more of a “philosophical” problem where we aren’t exactly sure what bias means.
I feel like a lot of people don’t recognize how incredibly hard it is to check bias from data. The problem is that you have to define “subgroups” in a way that’s inherently arbitrary. This turns out to intersect with Simpson’s paradox in a weird way.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...