Now, suppose you have two taxing bodies, how would you set tax for a system where income going into tax should be tax-free? is nominal federal tax, is the nominal state tax, and is the proportion of income paid to either taxes and is the income pretax. Let be proportion paid to federal government, and be amount paid to state.

If both governments refuse to tax money going towards government, then the effective tax rate as a function of the two taxes using the formula from the tax-free-tax system would be:

Let’s consider a bullying federal government that stipulates that California cannot tax its residents unless United States exists, therefore the federal tax takes priority. California still refuses to tax income paid to any government as tax. We apply the formula in the tax-free-tax system twice.

Producing this expression:

Finally, what happens when California retaliates by taxing the money paid into federal tax, but maintains that it does not tax income used to pay Californian income tax?

So the effective tax rate under inconsiderate governments will be:

Understandably, the effective rate increases as the government ignore each other’s taxes.

There are, of course many other ways to skin this cat. We can consider one simplest one. Suppose California and USA disagree very strongly that California says it must have of the incomes of individuals of the state. (The state income , If we were doing VAT, in which case we tax the gdp) and the federal government demands of that income. The argument proceeds until California decides that it is give me fair taxes or death and begins its secession from the union.

President Trump calculates that USA will save annually from not patrolling California coast, etc. Governor Newsom stipulate that California contributes to non-California USA income (again, easier if talking about GDP) by some . Trump then retorts, yeah but you spend of your state tax money on interstate commerce that you will not be spending. (This is arguable post facto assertion will stick, since all calculations are made not only to secess from union but also to dissolve California. In this case, there will be no or )

The loss USA stands to experience is and the loss California stands to experience is . So, dividing the saved loss in half, both side may agree to share loss of the tax money. This means

And federal government gives California of the taxes it collects from other states in addition to providing the existing services. But in reality, this type of analysis is complicated by the fact that the state and federal budget may both exceed tax revenue! And of course we’d never agree on what and are.

Wow!

Jonathan Frakes directs.

Wow

Did they just like step this TV show up by three notches or what? Wow the music, the conversation, the fight scene. Everything I complained about is like… really good now.

I have never ducked while watching a fight scene in any Star Trek Series until this one.

Pike looks real now. Spock’s sharp wit… the realistic groans from heavy punches… the tasteful use of wire-fu… Admiral Cornwell, the dialog flows so naturally and so believable. Like, I don’t know what effects director has, but it’s like they changed out all the actors for better ones, or something. Even Martin-Greene’s Burnham, already top-botch acting, now seem to blend in to the other great acting, accentuating it, feelings ebbing and flowing,

Airiam, dead… that longing music followed by silence, and no preview for next week… the end… the end to a sad series of unfortunate events… the tragedy of a lifetime wrapped up in a few supporting role scenes, but so central and so powerfully done.

Wow, what did just happen here. This is like really high quality Trek. Damn! It’s like, really high quality drama. Do they give oscars for tv series? I’m not too ashamed to nominate this show now, if only for this episode. Wow!

Now let’s see what they do with AI. As I always have, I doubt it will end well. I’ll end up hating Trek more for poor treatment of AI.

Alas, at least they’re getting humans and aliens right…

S2E4. I’m trying to dissect the #1 and pike scene. I just don’t get it… the conversation is a little off, like literally one actor waits for the other holding breadth and the responses come maybe 50-200ms too soon. Maybe they think and speak faster in a few centuries, but it feels wrong. Probably the most smoothly flowing dialog is Reno with Stamets and Tilly. And seriously, Stamets has the right swagger, confident, knowledgeable, collaborative, Tilly is very convincing, not that nervousness is hard, but her whole role, for some reason feel more realistic and she seem one of the most real person on the show. Reno, seem to be most experienced in delivery. Her lines are delivered without those odd synchronization problems. Phillipa, and her empress anti-self both are dutifully performed with the right swagger. Dignity, power, respect, Picard-like, comes to mind, ignoring her speech. You feel her expectation when she gives an order. Not so with pike.

Burnham and Saru are of course very convincing characters and their powerful scenes in this episode is very good. I wish the episode could have highlighted this aspect… some how with more plot…. I’m watching this scene for the third time and seeing their emotions more. (Also, kind of mumbling “eat it” when it fell off) but there are so much going on… btw, did the makeup for Saru change to make him look more muscular? He looks so much tougher after the ganglia are offed. Hear that biting speech, “knowing that my people were lied to…” the anger is so real, man, so good. Deliberate generational deceptions !! Wow! That’s awful!! And it all came through through a completely covered faces and hands.

Even data had swagger. Press of a button is accompanied with bodily followthrough sufficient to suggest the sheer massiveness in computation or energy transfer it caused. The actors eyes focuses on their screens and it takes time to look back and Picard. And all that human subtleties seem amiss in this episode.

The ensigns of Discovery doesn’t respond to orders firmly enough, with the military style–like they are usually akin to bark, “ayae, sir!” as if it is required to save their lives.

And at conclusion, one feel the need for euphoric “set the course for,…, engage” and even though they engage in warp… I mean c’mon, give us the warp-shot, and fade in music. The slow stretch, and let us stare at the star field, to wonder a bit… all these things, seem amiss. Do they know this series is really different from TNG and TOS?

But admittedly though, applause must be given for the giant leap in story telling. The intimate relationships of future human and aliens, and I don’t mean just physical intimacy, the personal growths, discovery of historical cultural fabrications that inhibited the growth of a whole civilization, techology, rules of law, diplomacy and espionage… These are powerful stuff, all packed in one hour. I mean, this story feels like The way I would write it. (Or I wish I could come up with all this really great plot) But, as I would have it, they packed everything in and demand viewer to be smart enough to keep up. And I kind of did, but my emotions are not agile enough to flip through the scenes and context switch to produce a good feeling at the end of the episode.

It sucks! Tilly is abducted. Like all that goodness, first/last contact, Saru, Spoke, #1, and I’m left concerned for Tully’s suffering. This sucks!

Michaels smile is very pleasant to see. This is a great addition to her character. Her pronounced frown, which still happens a lot, but it does not become her as smiles do. The smile after the sneeze, the smile when she sees her father. Nice!

Sarek, perhaps the make up or natural aging has drastically improved this character. His head doesn’t bobble in that very unvulcan way any more…

There’s something off about Pike. He’s got swagger as we expect, but there’s some strange delay between his dialog and other folks. There are a few successful interactions, but overall it feels so disconnected.

Anyways, I guess the lack of focus is most painfully highlighted when it is regained. “We got him, right？ladies?” And the ladies responds, affirmatively.

Maybe it’s because the bridge crew doesn’t look at Pike. Recalling chekov and sulu days, they turn their whole body towards the captain, full eye contact… Locked gaze till dismissal. Data, Troy, no other their fancy sofa chairs, Riker with his tilted head but all the faces till pointed at the Captain. Man, Gene Rodenberry’s indelible mark on star trek is fading away…

I don’t know, they may all have looked, but it just doesn’t feel the same. Pikes speeches. What’s wrong with them? They sound great. But I don’t get it. The words don’t sink in like other speeches do…

At some point, we have to admit that we are limited beings. Our present systems of ownership and reward dictates that owners enjoy and suffer gains and losses proportional to his share of ownership. (For example, most directly, shareholders of a public company, bond holders, inventor of a machine, etc.) as we have seen elsewhere, this system tend to benefit larger owners more when things go well. If there is a maximum amount of ownership beyond which ones happiness can no longer be enhanced, then the larger owners will always reach it before others. But we are endowed with the capacity to contemplate fairness. We have enough free will to demand fairness for ourselves. We have gained the confidence that this is achievable by making decisions and taking actions collectively.

It might be worth the time to distinguish all that the world’s opportunities afford us over a life time from those benefits given to us as a part of our social contract with that which governs. The government does not promise us the world, it does not promise us food or health care, it does not guarantee that we will have jobs. The arguments for big and small governments are alike in that they offer to make limited efforts to render fair and just service in the role of a government. I suppose you could say that they also offer the judicial system to challenge the government’s effort in terms of fairness and justice, to seek out remedy when lack thereof. So it is completely obvious and reasonable to me that it is right for us to offer up a thought system in which we fundamentally plan on the government rendering limited service with known limits to these service. What is, then, the most fair service it may render to each individual? We therefore identify this upper bound on government services in developing novel ideas of fairness.

One is inspires to think of a different kind of fairness. Suppose we do not concern ourselves with how ownership and causation align with incentives for agents, and only consider fairness. One can imagine a system as follows. Let be a maximum foreseeable measurement of benefit for an individual at state at time . (And we should say by measurement we mean the best determination of the quantity of quality benefit) We should seek an action that equalizes the expected time of achievement of such benefits among all equals of the population. For the next action, to be fair, we should try to achieve it. Let’s say that this expected time to arrive (ETA) is calculable using a function , then we assert that all choices should be made in an effort to balance:

So, for a practical example, one way to achieve identical ETA is to reach for equal decrement deciding each action. Suppose my detriment (it’s negative as a measurement of my benefit) from being part of this governed union is my effective tax rate, then the next annual change to the tax code should be required to change my tax rate by the same proportion towards the ideal tax rate as a very well-off person. My tax rate at time is 50% and his tax rate at that same time is a cool 10%, and the country needs an effective tax rate of 20% to operate efficiently, then the change to my tax rate and the change to his tax rate should satisfy:

Simplifying, the change to my effective tax rate should be three times his tax rate in the opposite direction.

If this is equality is satisfied for the whole population, then we have made a fair change under the Bounded ETA Matching Fairness(BETAM Fairness).

[[Upon rereading this, I suppose it’ll be easier if is explained as the same additive change we make a plan to effect on our tax rates over a number of periods before reaching the expected ideal, necessary and equal (for this example) target effective tax rates simultaneously.]]

At a very high level, the proportional improvement approach seems to be an overdetermined system that can never be satisfied. There are equality constraints for different levels of effective tax rates. It also remains to be seen whether an system can stipulate negative taxes for some and positive taxes for others while moving towards total equality. These are very interesting problems that seem to have very concise mathematical answers.

Another aspect of this idea to point out is might take on different values for each individual. How can this be? A simple and often quoted resolution is that people should get what they need, a 5-foot tall man needs different clothes than a 6-foot women for making garment. So it is within my reason that the optimal gain by each person from its government is different from others even when measured by very universal surrogates of value such as money and status. It might well be that Gates, or Bezos/Gates/Musk/Page/Jobs/Brin/pick_any really should get billions of dollars and I should only get a few million(again mixing gains and detriments resulting from entrepreneurship, labor, malfeasance, politics and membership in society, as we do in theses types of discussions during the early 21st century, for no obvious reason, except for sharpened contrast here). This model does not itself stipulate that everyone is equal. One certainly can set the optimal benefit from government to be equal for each natural person when using the BETAM Fairness as a matter of normative ethical dictum. But one can also set them to be unequal values as a result of whole-society all-pairs negotiation–by whichever means it is carried out, the resulting target for each party(persons, governments, corporations, etc.) is used to compute BETAMly Fair action or policies.

So, we have described an approach to fairness in which the goal is to optimize everyone’s happiness so that they are expected to climax at the same time. Some other time-sensitive measurement of benefit from government might be concerned with things like:

• life-time benefit extremes: biggest tax bill/benefit check each person gets.
• The gap between max/min benefit.
• Smoothness of an individuals benefit transition: losing $10/day for ever versus losing $160k in one trade…. err, in your IRA…
• Total lifetime benefit: for example, youth pay more taxes than elderly. Elderly benefit by getting money from the government. Over a lifetime, these benefits averages out.
• General shape of a person’s benefit curve should grow in a positive direction over time…
• Etc.

Ps., and certainly one can also request that the QIM is changing in a BETAMly fair way. But we should probably look into each specific metric to ensure that such an approach is actually physically, socially, economically and politically feasible. Ideas like being fair to the government treating it as a subject deserving fair and just treatment, ideas like taking tax payments from the richer and giving to the poor in the same tax year based on the poorer wage-earner’s income that year, ideas like universal measurement of the quantity of quality benefit to the (very) heterogeneous but deserving subjects, these must be lunacy beyond those exhibited by the storied exploits of Robin Hood and his merry men.

Pps. It is not lost on me that an old data-science adage may hold: measurement of metrics decrease their objectivity. If we insisted that there be income equality, it might be very easy for the world to create expenses for the formerly poor such that their actual quality of life does not improve as the numbers next to their AGI field does, and that they still have no meaningful disposable income to spend. It is a sort of unfair inflation may take place due to radical social-economic adjustments. But it still isn’t so bad an idea to document these ideas for prosperity to puzzle over and maybe they will want to start an enterprise to realize these ideals.

Ppps. it is pointed out to me that business folk have their own sayings about effects of measuring a metric in “what gets measured gets managed” and that “what gets managed gets done”. But in this case it’s probably more like the third one that says “what makes profit gets made.” If there’s no financial gain in this it is very difficult to accomplish by business means. Perhaps there is a faith-based approach to promote equality and fairness. The faith-based organization might get further with these ideas than a business venture.

A curious thought came to mind. I answered my own annoyance at the 30 minutes it took for me to search and calculate the electric-only and gasoline-only energy cost of chevy volt with an imagined google that just answers the question for me when I asked “what is the electric only mileage of a 2018 chevy volt?”

The marketing folks and the EPA mucked it up with “mixed mileage” which is useless to me to decide whether the charger I’m sitting at is cheaper or more expensive than filling up at Costco with my gas rebate Visa card.

Now, my demand is pretty special, but I am protected as a human being and economic agent to optimize my expenditure. The EPA and car makers want to sell cars, and is therefore free to express the information which ever way they want to.

In the future, my AI can certainly read their publication and answer my question(including the answer, “it cannot be determined from available information). But one wonders what happens to our language and culture, when one party has so much freedom (and incentive) to bias the represented ideas that it becomes effectively impossible or at least economically irrational for a second party to take on the expense of understanding what is said to my own advantage. In fact, the training that goes into this have awesome sophistication, the communication is produced in good faith to offer help information according to our social standards, they stand ethically unchallenged and is profitable for the producers to produce them. I.e. what I earn in 30 minutes (plus subsequent time used to complain about it) is more than the 2 cents that I saved for the duration of my ownership of this car at this particular charger at the current Costco gas price provided BoA/AAA doesn’t terminate my gas rebate card program.

There are a lot of people trained in this kind of communication. They include branding folks, they include sales people, they include public relations people. They also include those skilled at encoding it into the HTML my browser received. In the future, the marketers may have the skills to create an AI-document, a product2vec, or advertisement2vec, if you will. My own AI will be compatible with that standard of communication(like my browser can read html), and it interprets the marketing vector it receives and understand it and presents it to me in place of the browser. My AI of course understands my economic needs and my preferences. It will therefore dig for things I need and want.

Since obfuscation occurs in human languages and expressions, one wonders how much obfuscations will be embedded in those future AI marketing vectors? Will it be economically feasible for humanity to figure out the right amount of obfuscation to allow?

Alternatively, this might be the fall of AI, if our consensus comes to that we are all very unhappy and this whole social order built on internet and computer technologies should just fall. Technology will just fail to unite humanity and move us onward. I would have no problem with that. People have to change for the system to change. Not everyone can be like RBG and change the system before people changes wholeheartedly.

😦

Attended the Stanford HealthAI 2019 hackathon last weekend. This was an a very stimulating event and I learned a lot.

(An aside, I got a new phone after ditching my pixel II. But I think my typo problem is mainly with google’s keyboard and not their phone. This iPhone Xs is visibly slower at everything than my one year old pixel II, loading web, download speed, any task, it feels a decade older for some reason. But! I can type on the Mac keyboard as fast as I can move my fingers and it comes out right. It came to me as a shock because I also had Gboard installed and the last paragraph was very painfully typed on that.)

Anyways, back to hackathon, which was a blast! Generally speaking, if investors were to analyze innovation and entrepreneurship, the criminal investigation techniques is a concise way to describe it. There are three elements:

1) motive

2) means

3) opportunity

The hackathon is 3. Myself and the other attendees presumably are the means. Commitment requires the additional ingredients of motive and the act itself.

The business of health seems to be a vast sprawling monstrosity that span sciences, technologies, species, markets, and politics. What drives it? Who’s in control? Who has reliable information? It depends who’s asking and why.

The motive is tricky. There seem to be the following types of entities:

• Providers (docs, hospitals, clinics)
• Insurance (ppo, hmo, Medicare, Medicaid, …)
• Providers’ providers (Pharmacological makes, Medical equipment maker)
• Regulatory agencies, state and federal.
• People <– customers of the health industry, pay for health related service.
• Scientists and their surrounding industry (university, grant giving orgs, peer reviewed publications…)

Hope I didn’t miss any one.

I am a consumer, part of People. But I got to sit with two MD’s and work through the business cases among a lot of scientists and entrepreneurs. The keynote speakers gave very touching perspectives from their own practices.

One doc reminisced regrets of curing hair loss patient to grow half a head of hair, it made life worse for her (!) another doc exasperated that all his smarts and youth are wasted, in his capacity as a doctor at hospital, on keeping patient alive and paying. These are very wise and deep lessons that I take from hackathon with glee.

I definitely learned a ton in a small space of time.

I’m watching AFV S23E22 finale, available on Disney+, where a black child just won the grand prize for being recorded crying after realizing he accidentally took a restaurant cup. The short video shows him begging his mother to take him back before the police shows up.

I cannot believe in 2020 Disney would allow an episode to show like this. That is absolutely not funny that a black child is so fearful of police for even a minor misdemeanor. Because these years, we are a lot of black people being killed by white cops on TV without administering due process of the law. That such fear can and most likely is real, and that it drives a child to tears, is not funny.

I am offended. This is terrible. Why would anyone in their right mind laugh at that ?! Disney oughta be ashamed of itself for showing something like this in this context.

Little dragon really loved to play. His parents allows him to play both in the water and in the clouds. He loved belly flopping into the water making huge waves. He loved flying head first into a cloud and then summersaulting to break it into many small pieces. He does it 100 times a day because it was just so fun.

One decade, a town was experiencing terrible draught. No crop grew for many years. It became so dry that grass doesn’t even grow. The sheep and cows has nothing to eat and made no wool or milk. The town finally decided to send a brave young man to seek the help of a dragon. The young man braved the long travel to arrive at ocean’s edge and asked the ocean to bring a dragon king for him to speak to.

The ocean looked at the scrawny young man who came with no offerings, it looked at the young man’s small town with no temple to welcome dragon, and it looked at the small number of animals and people impacted by the draught, and the ocean said to the young man, “mmmmn, okay I’ll bring you a dragon.”

The ocean brought the little dragon who loved to play. The little dragon asked what the young man wanted. He explained that his people needs the dragon to produce rain for his town so that they don’t starve from the draught. The little dragon thought a little bit and said “okay, can you wait here for a moment?” And ran off with no explanation.

He got home and cried in nervousness to his father: “oh dad! I spent all my time playing when I should have been working on my dragon ways. I don’t know what to do when they need a real dragon.

“What do you mean?” Said his father, “you are a real dragon!”

Little dragon whimpered: “no I’m not big dragon, I’m just little dragon… all I know is how to play in the water…”

“O-M-G,” said his dad, “oh son, my poor boy, you are a real dragon. Your sneeze and tear is a huge storm for people. And if you don’t sneeze or cry when you need water, just play like you normally do, that’s rain for them too.”

“Oh!” Said the little dragon, wiping his tears, “oh…”

He went back to the little man, still tearing, and to his bewildered surprise, said, “okay, let’s go.”

The little dragon sneezed as soon as he got to the town, the draught has removed much of the nearby ground cover and huge dust storms were blowing. But the sneeze rain lasted a good six hours of rain.

“Oh no, it’s too much water! The land is not protected by vegetation, so the heavy rain is causing mudslides!” Yelled the young man, “can we take a break from this rain?”

“Sure, said the little dragon,” still sneezing and tearing. He looks around and find a a large dried lakebed. So he goes over and sheds the rest of his tear into the lake.”

After a few days, the land awakens from the rain, but the sun does not shine as brightly as it used to. Nearby factories have polluted the air so much that there is a constant smog looming over the town.

“Can you make that smog go away and rain again?” Asked the young man.

“Sure!” This time the little dragon knew just what to do. He flew into the smog, summersaulting 100 times, just as he did in play, and broke up the smog. The irritating acidic cloud made him cry more into the lake… the environment is so badly damaged, he thought, I’m going to have to do something about this, he thought to himself. Then he splashed and played in the lake he has created, and rained on the town again. The plants and livestock and people of the town was enlivened by the little dragons rain. They too came out side to play in the water.

The town was saved. The young man thanked the little dragon. On this day, the little dragon learned: All a real dragon need is play.

So… If one were to have control over ones children, what would one wish for? A few things come to mind. You probably want them to have along and meaningful life. High and steady quality of life. Educated and learned so that they could face what you did not fathom they would face. You want hem o live the good life. Some people wish their children are nice people in addition to good people. This includes a lot of things, like not tripping siblings, not pulling chair from under classmates, cleaning up a mess on the side walk just out of the niceness of their person, to things like not being part of a Nazi party, maybe not killing, maybe not causing other people to kill, not hacking computer accounts or networks, not lying or deceiving, not taking property from others unjustly, having no excess powers,… etc. Along these lines.

Honestly, in this day and age, it’s hard to decide what one wants. There are a lot of (apparently) bad and (apparently)nasty(not nice) people who have (apparently) exceedingly high quality of life, learned, and definitely doing very meaningful things. The paradox of orthodoxies arise. Many schools of thoughts regarding what a truly good life should look like from many many aspects of life.

The old ones are still around.

New ones may talk about it like math equastion: being characterizable by certain bounds within which one is good: minimum income, minimum number of sex partners, minimum degree, maximum calories per day, minimum steps, networth, number of kids, donations to charity, amount of social activity and the depth of social relationships, diversity of income and investments, etc… So many views…

If one maintains those metrics, one is good.

For people who think about it, this may be an open problem or it may be a closed book.

It is interesting to think about one in a while. But honestly, it always seems too great a problem when you try to solve it, and it alway seems like the world’s most urgent problem when you encounter nastiness and badness.

So, if we refer to the Moral Hierarchy, one can see that we can perhaps distinguish our desire for nice and good behavior in my own weakness. This does not mean that we necessarily require that we, ourselves, are Strong(within out strength) in a nice/good way. Case in point, let’s have nukes to enforce world peace.

But, in the same breath, to keep peace with the pc-monitor, it is quite conceivable that a practically implementable stable society everyone has largely symmetrical strengths and weaknesses. Meaning, in the real world, if you want others to be nice to you you pretty much have to be nice back.