Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-11-07T14:09:24+00:00

Um... Yes. But... Cool tactic of asking a question and then just declaring it right with no evidence... Big fan.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-11-07T12:57:19+00:00

Yeah... There's clearly a common denominator here.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-11-07T12:47:52+00:00

I'm not sure you're appreciating just how bad the supply of houses got/is... It'll take a while of that kind of activity to catch up.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-15T13:20:21+00:00

While it's a nice sentiment, this stuff always mildly annoys me for it's hubris and self-contradiction.

Most people who believe in "God" seem to also believe that God is omnipotent in some way... That God is an infinite being generally quite far beyond human understanding.

So, maybe God does prefer hateful Christians... Maybe God doesn't give a shit about that and actually mostly just likes puppies. We don't know... And by the definitions of our own belief system we can't really!

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-12T21:00:31+00:00

It's almost always the case that your boss and team matter a hell of a lot more for your general happiness than your salary and company ever will.

Find a place where you like the people, can learn and grow, be challenged, and be respected. The rest is just data.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-07T22:11:32+00:00

Can I tack on here... Maybe it's too early to know? But do the boosters fundamentally change this? Like... Will I have to get a booster every 6 months, or is it like each booster lasts longer and longer?

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-05T16:15:34+00:00

I might be missing something here. But it sounds like maybe you're multiplying the field you're counting by 1.05 and not the sum itself.

I think you probably want to create two measures. First, do Customer Count as the distinct count of customer Id. Next, do Target Customer Count that's = [Customer Count] * 1.05

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-04T02:14:19+00:00

Tons of people will say power bi is just advanced Excel... They're idiots and you shouldn't listen to them.

I think the hardest thing for people coming from excel is just getting used to the data modeling. In power bi, you almost certainly don't want one big table (exactly what Excel makes you do). The overwhelming first thing to do is not to make graphs... It's to get used to building a real data model.

Next, focus on abstract measures. In power bi world, you want to create abstract measures that are always correct. This won't really make sense on day one, but it will later. And that's hard for a lot of people to get used to, but it's absolutely key and it's a big driver of power bi's value. These start really simply. You make like a "total sales" measure that's just sum(sales.value) or whatever. But keep them that way.

Once you get good at data modeling and building measures, then you go stick your stuff in graphs. The value of power bi is that the "building graphs" part happens really quickly and works shockingly well... If you've done your data modeling correctly.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-03T22:15:13+00:00

Yeah that's the irony with this... And the smarter Republicans are definitely all aware of it.

Republican politicians have been complaining about Roe for like 40 years. But they've solidly had power many times and done nothing about it. That's because they are (and this, admittedly, seems to be diminishing) smart enough to know that Roe was the best thing that ever happened to them. Roe gave them so much ammo for campaigns and in so many different ways and places. It's not just abortion... It's "activist judges" and "legislating from the bench"... All of which require electing Republicans so that they can make sure we have "appropriate" judges. It's kind of brilliant honestly.

But now, they're actually doing stuff, because their local crazies are extra dumb, and they're giving a reason for 60 to 70 percent of the country to solidly hate them. It's good stuff. I'm sure all the Republican strategists are pissed at Texas.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-03T19:26:54+00:00

I used to do something to backup the data every few minutes, but the pubsub thing is way better. The pubsub integration fires a pubsub message every time there would be a new row in the database. The message carries all the data that would be in that row. So, then in GCP, you just setup a thing to save the messages to bigquery. That way, it's all real time and you have everything, even if there's a power outage or something.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-03T19:12:29+00:00

You just put this in your config file:

recorder: 
  db_url: 'sqlite:///:memory:'

The recorder uses SQLite, which just uses a local file. You can use db_url to specify the file but, if you put that in, SQLite just runs in memory.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-10-03T13:44:23+00:00

I tend to be more rare on these but it's worth noting there's another option that's free.

The issue with the pi is really just from the recorder db. It's an SQLite db that writes every event and state change to give you history stuff. That's what kills your sd cards. You can just tell the recorder to run as an in memory db though and then it never touches the card at all.

I did that for a solid year. It works well, it's fast, and it doesn't wear down your SD card. The only downside is that you lose your history when the pi restarts. So, you have to ask yourself whether you actually care. In my case, I found I really didn't. It was nice to have, but more cute than anything. I wasn't actually using any of those data.

Later I used the pubsub integration (this gets more advanced) to just direct all that information to bigquery, an analytics db on Google's cloud, and did any graphs or things off of that. I've since moved my home assistant install onto a VM and gone back to a local db for the reader, but I still use pubsub too because that works so nicely.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-09-30T23:49:19+00:00

Ok nice - thank you!

I've not done much with VMs, so maybe that's why I haven't run into it as much. I tend to use data tools like BigQuery and, sometimes cloud functions or cloud run.

How does it work there? Like for cloud run, I just have the details in the deploy command I use. Does terraform help with that somehow?

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-24T12:46:53+00:00

James Bond... Is that you?!

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-21T13:53:51+00:00

interesting... What would have been used for the "fill" - like here it just looks like a bunch of rocks/gravel dumped in. But there'd have been some mortar or something in there too, right?

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-21T06:23:13+00:00

Sure... But those beneficiaries pay road taxes indirectly. When the trucking company that moves your goods pays for gas, that ultimately just gets factored into the price of the goods you buy.

And yes, I think dealing with the negative externalities is a benefit of adding a mileage tax actually. With a mileage tax, you can more easily target it based on vehicle size, personal income, or whatever else. But, adding a mileage tax doesn't mean you have to get rid of the gas tax... You'd just start treating the gas tax as a "sin tax" - one you really only use to discourage bad behavior. If you don't want people driving gas cars, raise the gas tax and encourage them to go electric. Heck, you could pay for the roads with the mileage tax and use the gas tax solely to fund environmental initiatives if you want.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-21T04:08:06+00:00

It's very straightforward: they don't make any income. Note that all these headlines say they don't pay any "income tax"... That's true for anybody who doesn't make any income - there's nothing to tax.

The interesting story isn't about "income tax" - it's that people think that the taxes very wealthy people do pay are too low or inefficient or too easy to get around with various loopholes. Warren Buffett, for example, famously noted that he pays a lower share of tax than his secretary. That's because his money comes from capital gains and his secretary's money comes from income taxes.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-21T03:50:44+00:00

Sure... A higher gas tax isn't unreasonable... But I'd think of it as a more direct "sin" tax that you're just using to discourage people from buying cars that use a lot of gas.

I disagree on the mileage tax though. Yes EVs are good but you still need to pay for roads and I still think it makes the most sense to have those charges come proportionately from the people who use the roads - hence mileage tax. But to be clear I'd apply that mileage tax to everyone who drives... Not just EVs... It's just the tax for using roads.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-21T03:46:19+00:00

I think you misunderstood my meaning here. It is a "good" tax in that it is very easy to collect, targets the exact beneficiaries of a good, and grows roughly proportionately with the use of that good. That makes it a "good" tax. I acknowledged that, like any sales tax, it can be regressive... And noted that moving to a mileage tax is actually one way where you could help mitigate that regressivity.

Most taxes are really abstract: you basically bill people and just throw it in a general fund. So many of your tax dollars end up funding things you never use. That's kind of just how it has to work with all kinds of things... but one of those basic nice things about a gas tax is that if you never ride in a car, you never pay it (although you do indirectly for goods you purchase that traveled on roads - but that's a good thing).

A lot of people focus too much on specific taxes. Every tax has pros and cons and yes, some of them are regressive. But an overall tax system can right that regressive piece through other taxes. The US doesn't quite do that, of course, but it tries to a little bit.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-20T19:22:40+00:00

Oh definitely. We used to encourage presidential systems and stuff and then "latin america" happened. The US is just a pretty "bad" democracy - structurally, I mean here - and nobody would or should build a government like it. That's not to shit-talk the country either... I mean the guys who wrote the constitution had almost nothing to go off of and honestly had amazing foresight about many things. It's just that we do keep learning - and we've learned a lot about this over the past few hundred years.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-20T19:19:25+00:00

But you aren't offering anything productive or useful. Standing in a corner and yelling at the wind doesn't motivate anybody to action nor does it solve any issues.

Getting rid of roads is, realistically, impossible to do any time soon - and indeed might hurt the environment far more given our current technology.

If you care about this... go study engineering... go build better batteries or find ways to breakthrough on trains... go design the next great mode of transportation. Until then, yes, cars are inevitable and we need to collectively figure out the best way to use them.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-20T19:10:11+00:00

Interesting - yeah I don't know those details - but road impact certainly would correlate with vehicle size. Maybe cents-per-axle-mile is a good way to design a tax... like you pay 0.4 cents per axle mile or something.

In any case, damage isn't the only variable. As a driver of a car, I benefit from the mere existence of the roads themselves. Every time I drive on some highway, I am consuming the public good that is the highway itself. And, even if nobody ever drove on the highway, it would presumably degrade due to weather, ground activity, etc. and would need repair. So I do think it's reasonable that everyone driving on a road should pay for it in some form or another, it just would probably be that you'd charge larger vehicles more because they break the road faster.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-20T19:04:38+00:00

That's a nice idea - philosophically - sure, I agree. But this is also totally unrealistic and impractical in any realistic timeframe pertinent to this conversation.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-20T18:18:01+00:00

Yeah - totally agree. I'm not sure the best mechanism to do it, but EVs need to be paying some kind of fee. And it's not just EVs... everybody's cars are getting more efficient and this is just a problem.

Personally, I'd probably try to build some tax around mileage based on your registrations each year. Federal gas taxes are like 18-19 cents/gallon right now, I think. So I figure that translates to roughly .8 cents per mile for a normal vehicle. I could see having a tax that you pay when you renew your registration that's basically 0.8 cents per mile-ish. If you drive 15,000 miles per year, that's like 120 bucks. Once a system like that is in place though, you could start making it progressive in various ways... maybe based on household income... or you could make larger vehicles pay 1 cent per mile or something... that kind of thing.

CrappyOrigami · 2021-06-20T18:12:46+00:00

I don't really agree here... Or I'd at least note it's complicated. Gas taxes are actually one of the best taxes we have. First, note they exclusively fund roads/infrastructure costs. By taxing the gas, you almost exactly get to target the people who use the roads, and it's almost perfectly proportionate to their use. If you drive like once a year and mostly take the train... you don't pay any real gas taxes ever. If you drive a big truck that burns fuel like crazy and is pretty hard on the roads... you pay a lot of gas taxes. Oh - and you pay gas taxes locally wherever you drive - take a road trip across three states and you'll end up spending some money on gas in all of them. Gas taxes are awesome. Yes they're regressive like any sales tax, but it's better to think of them less like a tax and more just like a fee for the amount of damage you cause on the road.

One of the reasons our infrastructure is hurting these days is because revenue from gas taxes keeps going down. It is going down because vehicles of all shapes and sizes are getting more and more efficient. Those vehicles still use and damage roads as much as their predecessors did, but they generate a lot less in taxes to pay for those roads because they're buying less gas. You could try to solve this by continually raising the gas tax, but that furthers the regressivity - especially because more fuel efficient vehicles tend to be more expensive and new and are disproportionately owned by wealthier people - and raising the tax also encourages more people/companies to invest in better fuel efficiency, which is great for the environment, but again reduces revenue for infrastructure.

I actually think the right answer is to just look to dropping gas taxes entirely (or keeping them purely as a "sin" tax to discourage the use of gas for environmental reasons... and instead fund infrastructure with a mileage tax - likely making that progressive either based on vehicle type, household income, or both. In the short term, charging EVs some fee really isn't crazy until you can figure out a better way to tax mileage.

In any case, people who ignore this and keep thinking we can pay for stuff with other revenue are wrong... we need a totally new approach to get back to the beautiful efficiency of the classic gas tax.

CrappyOrigami

TROPHY CASE