Staking “Income” Should Not be Taxed

Staking income from tokens should not be taxed. Since staking income is generated by inflation it doesn’t create new wealth but simply lowers the total value of the token. Thus staking income is really just a transfer from non-stakers to stakers. Abraham Sutherland covers the law and the economics in Phantom Income and the Taxation of New Cryptocurrency...

3h

The canine model of AGI

Who or what has superintelligence manipulating humans right now?  Babies and dogs are the obvious answers, cats for some.  Sex is a topic for another day. Let’s take dogs — how do they do it?  They co-evolved with humans, and they induced humans to be fond of them.  We put a lot of resources into dogs, including in the form of clothes, toys, advanced...

10h

Signs of encroaching mental GPT-dom

1. You use the word “token” more than you ought to, for reasons that have nothing to do with crypto. 2. If a friend says something incorrect, you tell them they are “hallucinating.” 3. You phrase your google queries like GPT queries, for instance using question marks. 4. “Please say more” is your new mantra.  “Answer step by step” is another. 5....

20h

Tuesday assorted links

1. The Steph Curry practice story. 2. Forthcoming metascience event at AEI with myself, Heidi Williams, others.  And Cato job opportunities, including editing their new on-line magazine in the works. 3. The great Barett Strong has passed away, RIP. 4. International trade, value chains, and Austrian business cycle theory. 5. Russ Roberts on Jewish...

22h

Fewer Visitors to the US

International travel to the United States is well below pre-pandemic levels, huring our tourism industries, and embarrassingly long times to get a visitor visa are probably part of the problem. Hat tip: Alec Stapp. The post Fewer Visitors to the US appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

1d

Alex Epstein’s *Fossil Future*

Bryan Caplan asked me to read this book, and Alex Epstein was kind enough to provide me with a copy of it.  The subtitle is Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less. My overall view is this: it is a good rebuttal to “the unrealistic ones,” who don’t see the benefits of fossil fuels.  But it does not rebut a properly...

1d

Did the Covid housing boom induce the Great Resignation?

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. labor force participation declined significantly in 2020, slowly recovering in 2021 and 2022 — this has been referred to as the Great Resignation. The decline has been concentrated among older Americans. By 2022, the labor force participation of workers in their prime returned to its 2019 level, while older workers’...

1d

Commercial applications for ChatGPT

Here is one take from Nicola Morini Bianzino, written up by Sharon Goldman: “Knowledge companies tend to store knowledge in a very flat, two-dimensional way that makes it difficult to access, interact and have a dialogue with,” he told VentureBeat in an interview. “We tried 20, 30, 40 years ago to build expert systems. That didn’t go really well because...

1d

Monday assorted links

1. How children influence parents. 2. Do the Berman amendments prevent a TikTok ban? (WSJ) 3. Signature markets in everything. 4. Hypergamy in Norway yes. 5. Have CBO projections been too optimistic or too pessimistic? 6. Baidu to launch a ChatGPT-style service in March (Bloomberg). 7. A wearable cardiac ultrasound imager. The post Monday assorted...

1d

This is actually quite a common attitude toward science

On Christmas morning, Scarlett Doumato took a break from playing with her new toys, marched into the kitchen, returned with plastic bags and started collecting evidence — the half-eaten Oreo and a pair of munched-on carrots she’d left for Santa and his reindeer the night before. Scarlett, a 10-year-old from Cumberland, R.I., could see teeth...

2d