That's simply not true. I've spent hundreds of hours listening to his AMAs and he's remarkably good at taking questions that might be confused or poorly worded and respectfully answering the best interpretation of what the person asked.
He does have an approach to certain questions to say that it's the wrong question to ask. For example, to "why does the universe exist?" he would say that the question presupposes that everything needs an explanation for why it exists, and the universe is not that kind of thing. This is actually super common in philosophy, but I could see it coming across as pompous to someone who had never heard an answer like that before. He's not saying that the question is stupid, he's saying that it literally doesn't have an answer.
That is really interesting. To me he does sound very pompous. I still like him, but he treats most questions like the person should be ashamed of having asked something so foolish.
Different interpretations of the same personality I suppose.
I don't have a great sample size but I've never thought he was being dismissive or implying something was a stupid question or someone should be ashamed of asking. However I do still think he sounds pompous, purely as a matter of the way he speaks. It's the pace, the cadence, and how he hangs on or stresses certain syllables and words. It's a recognizable style, not unique to him. Leonard Susskind has a similar one, though I'd say not as extreme. You get a more extreme form listening to various philosophers. (An example as parody here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leQ1bczMu7c) It usually doesn't bother me, as I can filter out the information from the presentation, but I still notice something. Reading is better than listening in part for not needing that layer of filtering.
It was really good through the pandemic and then he got a bit caught up in discussing politics, when I was just there for the quantum physics. (Was around the time after he picked up his new physics/philosophy position and moved towns)
He was very influential in pushing me to favour Many Worlds over Copenhagen, and his interviews with people like David Deutsch were gold. Might have to check out what he's doing these days.
Yes, your property tax is high ($17k) because of prop 13 - you are effectively subsidizing others who have sat on their residential and commercial property for 20-30+ years who are paying 25-50% of what you pay for any similar property in the same calendar year!
Your property tax goes up by 2% of your , guessing (relatively recent?) purchase price, and theirs goes up 2% of a much smaller base due to prop 13.
They have no incentive to move, downgrade. And they often use trusts to pass this tax base down to their kids. It’s feels like icky European feudalism.
Again i’m emphasizing that this goes for both residential and commercial buildings.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but one clarification: you don’t even need a trust to pass the tax break down to your kid when you die. Sure, a trust can streamline that process, but it’s not required. At least everyone lucky enough to inherit benefits, not just those whose parents had the foresight (and the means) to create a trust.
They go up much more than 2% in literally every other state, California is the cheapest place to own property for >10 years.
You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
While I think the goal of Prop 13 is laudable, a few reforms would cut some of the biggest downsides: it should be be for primary residences, where the named owner is the primary resident.
This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
I’m not sure why people are downvoting (without commenting), but I agree.
The main selling point of prop13 was a real problem: rapidly increasing values were driving up taxes so fast that long time residents (of modest means) were being forced out.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to have some policy that attempts to protect people living in their primary residence from rapid tax increases they can’t afford.
It really isn't. You could—and we did!—solve that problem by letting people defer property tax payments or borrow against their equity. California literally has a property tax postponment program for seniors. If we just wanted to keep people from being pushed out of their homes by rising house prices, we'd just expand that program.
The point of Prop 13 is to let people have their cake and eat it too: you get to keep the equity you gain from increased housing prices, but not pay the property tax that comes with them.
With postponement you then can get the opposite problem of people getting stuck in their houses because if they sold they would have a huge deferred tax.
The approach in Washington works well. There is a senior property tax exemption based on age and disposable income. To qualify in King County (where Seattle is) in 2027 you need to be 61+ and have a household disposable income under $101k.
That gets you (1) a freeze on the assessed value for taxes equal to the current assessed value, and (2) an exemption from the statewide school tax and from "excess levies" (basically city and county levies that are voted on).
If income is under between $76k and $89k they also exclude from tax 45% of your assessed value or $70k, whichever is larger, but not more than $200k.
If income is below $76k they exclude 80% of your assessed value or $80k, which is larger.
The income levels are based on median county household income so vary from county to county.
Disposable income is basically everything that goes into AGI plus a list of other things (like any Social Security that is not already in AGI). There are also a bunch of deductions, mostly medical including Medicare premiums, with a $7500 deduction you can elect to take instead of taking any of those specific deduction. Income includes all adults living in the house.
In my county the levies that are not "excess levies" are county roads, sheriff, conservation, mental health, veterans relief, fire district stuff, public utility district stuff, and regional library. The "excess levies" are a couple of school district levies. Overall the excess levies are about 28% of the property taxes in my county. The statewide school levy that is exempt is another 10%, so the bottom line is that the property tax rate for seniors under the income limit is about 60% of the non-senior rate.
So people were getting so wealthy that they couldn't pay the property tax on their wealth. Yes. The problem is, if you let them decide to tax other people instead of themselves for the spending they themselves approve, they will.
That makes it sound like the increase was due to some inexorable natural force. California's per capita budget is over twice Arizona's, and they're running a huge deficit on top of that. If taxes are too high, cut taxes. If that means you need to cut spending, cut spending. But don't play "hey, let's tax the other guy!" games and expect that to work.
A lot of this also comes down to prohibiting growth. In Seattle, every time we build a new building, everyone else's property tax payments decrease. High growth years lead to lower bills. The same would work in California, they just don't build much of anything because they've made it nearly impossible to.
It's exactly the right measure to use if the claim is that they "slashed spending". They didn't. They continued increase may or may not have kept pace with other measures (GDP, population, whatever). But they didn't slash spending.
As it turns out, even your new goal posts fail the test of facts. In the years immediately following prop 13, the GDP grew at an APR < 15% [1] while the budget grew and an APR > 15% [2]. The per capita spending did slump briefly in the early 1980s (as shown in the graph on this article[3]) but that was more of a reversion-to-the-trend (which continued upwards thereafter.
While there may be some remaining tortured reading of the data under which you could claim they "slashed spending" it would be manifestly disingenuous to do so. At best the rate of increase slowed briefly.
It's also a solved problem by not deferring anything unless that person is past working age and low income. Letting people sit on wealth that they cannot pay a wealth tax on is generally bad for everyone with less wealth.
You realize government services that support that home cost money, right? You act like if you own your home that your living there doesn’t impose any costs on your neighbors.
I do own a house in California and I pay closer to $30k in property taxes. The previous owners of my house paid $7k. My neighbor—who has a bigger, more expensive house!—pays $9k.
It's pretty clear that this kind of tax policy is going to totally mess up the housing market. It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
If it wasn't obvious from the article, this is an implementation in the same thing in rust, ergo significantly faster. This was enabled, I presume, by the upstream react introducing code a rust version in source ( but they don't produce a standard binary last I checked )
Agreed, there's zero connection to his biological fathers story and how he grew up. The student visa thing is even more bizzare, it's just a bunch of incongruent sentences
Claude / Codex ex tensions inside of VSCode give you what you described. I ageee, I find people that use only the CLI barely read and review the code the agent creates until it's too late
Feels like we're well past the point where a new node is mainly about clocks. Power density is the real constraint now.
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