I'm tired of hearing it's not that simple. No. It is. It's not easy, but it is quite simple.

States should do it. When the legal challenges come, good. It doesn't fucking matter if it sticks or not.

Maybe it'll slow them down. Maybe we just need to flood the zone like they do with nonstop, ridiculous, clearly illegal BULLSHIT.

We shouldn't take action because it would invoke a constitutional crisis while recognizing we already have had them (and should have had MORE)?

They're LITERALLY interfering with the machinery of our democracy, and we don't even have enough fucking conviction to TRY FUCKING WITH TAX REVENUE to stop them because 'it's not that simple.'

They TRAFFICK AND RAPE CHILDREN but let's make sure we only do things we know will absolutely work. The kids can wait.

It's honestly a super subtle difference and only structure heads like me care about it. It matters on the edges. My advisor gave sage advice that I think more people should take to heart. To paraphrase: every experiment has limitations and assumptions baked in assumptions. That doesn't mean their results are invalid/irrelevant, but you need to know what they are so you know when they are violated or don't apply.

It's a spin on the "all models are wrong, but not all models are useful

/pedagogical soapbox

It's a great use of AI / machine learning tech. Incredible. Turns out biology reuses structure a LOT. Structure is function in biology, and there are a LOT of shared, essential functions in Biology. Their models are actually incredibly accurate at predicting the individual atom placement for side chains (the bit of an amino acid that makes it unique from other amino acids). Side chains do chemistry for proteins, so this is highly salient for research broadly. It's just far from being a "solved problem" like they would have you believe.

The main thing to keep in mind, is that alphafold is not predicting structures based on first principles (that is to say, based on the underlying physics and laws of nature). It uses sequence similarity between proteins with solved structures to make probable guesses as to the structure and how it folds. Solely based off current experimental data-driven structure models.

This works surprisingly well even for proteins that don't have much actually in common with the amino acid sequence of the protein. But because structure is function, we can still trace and track the divergences in sequence over time while still being confident the overall shape is the same.

But for things that there are not enough sequence diverse examples of, or for things that there are no examples, alphafold regularly just spits them out like a literal ball of spaghetti - because the assumptions it relies on are invalid. There's not enough statistical evidence - for those examples.

I don't have a handy reference offhand, it's been a few years, but there is this image from their blog posts ( ref ) that shows whe I'm talking about. My understanding is that AlphaFold is an incredibly accurate and effective homology modeling strategy (how can we model structures we don't have data for based off similarity to structures we do have).

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in structural prediction, homology models, machine learning, structural determination via crystallography or cryo-EM. I'm more experienced in consuming them for understanding the structure:function relationship.

Not knowing your expertise, I'll risk making a fool of myself.

But first, for everyone's sake: ALPHAFOLD ISNT AN LLM

That isn't what alphafold is. Under no circumstances is it anywhere near close to a "database of every way ... proteins can fold." At all. And to construe it as anything other than an attempt at a way to predict or simulate the potential three dimensional structure a protein can adopt will mislead people.

A protein does not have one shape. It has multiple. They're dynamic. They change shape. It's how proteins represent information. I'd argue that the ability of proteins to change their shape is one of their most important properties. (Analogy: play a song on an instrument with one note. Hard-mode: consider silence a note)

Everything in Alphafold is a GUESSED MODEL and not reality. Crystal structures and cryo-EM structures are also MODELS. But they're based on empirical evidence.

Alphafold is based on statistical evidence. It is evidence, but it is weaker. If we don't have an example of how a protein might fold in the structural database, alphafold will struggle to predict the structure. At least not without it sharing some type of sequence similarity.

I see this in the AI drug companies and how they just treat predictive models the same as 2 angstrom crystal structures and it pisses me off.

Here is how it concerns you:

By restricting what people can and can't do (by removing features you don't use), they slowly restrict our collective ability to independently verify their claims or to independently serve our own needs - making us more reliant on them.

It's small and minor, but it's just like with the DMCA and the new ID laws. It's about slowly erecting barriers that impede our ability to act collectively or anonymously under the guise of it being "for our own good."

So your answer is "Trust me, bro. We don't need to study this. It's obvious bro everyone knows or. Just don't do it. Don't raise wages bro it's bad. I promise. Everyone already knows this. There's no research for it But we know it's true. Trust me."

I just want to make sure I understand your logic correctly.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

95 is not that high For 20 years it was over 90

And not one person that has complained about the percentile has asked about what the top bracket would be.

Are you really going to argue that a 95% tax rate on every $1 over $1,000,000 is not comparable to a 95% income tax when fully contextualized to being their one million and first dollar made in a year?

Find me a place where raising the minimum wage devastated a local economy. I legitimately can't find one so I'm hoping you can help me learn. Here's a write up about how Walmart devastated local economies though.

Honestly? The fact that we can even entertain, in America, that a state would have a median income of 25k shows truly just how fucked we are.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

95 is not that high For 20 years it was over 90

Now I know I hear people in the back "but it was world war time!" True. True.

How long have we been at war? Since Vietnam? How many fucking desert storms have we had? Cold war?

And not one person that has complained about the percentile has asked about what the top bracket would be.

Are you really going to argue that a 95% tax rate on every $1 over $1,000,000 is excessive or "wild"? Or does it actually represent the marginal utility of income?

Because the first 80k someone makes is waayyyyyyyyyyy more impactful than the next 80k. One makes sure you don't die of starvation and exposure. The other is all pleasure.

I like your counterpoint about the wealth tax being more about monopolistic power. Hadn't considered that angle. I do believe that the government must be larger than the entities it governs. If we ever want a smaller, more agile government, we need to shrink what it's supposed to govern.

Here is why I argue for a wealth tax: Most things in life are not simply exponential. They're logarithmic. At least for biology and natural systems. We need some corrective force that pushes back aggressively against wealth accumulation -regardless of source.

I believe they do think this through. I think your mistake is thinking they want to help the country.

They want to help themselves. They think they'll be just fine no matter the damage, because they have all the power and control so they can pilfer all the resources until they're "secure."

And they're right.

No one is stopping them.

No one.

95 % upper limit for income tax.

Don't argue against things I didn't say.

You don't see an exodus of homeowners for their property tax.

Why is that? Hmmm? Is it the case that rich people wanna be where money is? And nice services are? Where the culture is? Where the art is? Where their family is? Their friends? Their children's life?

Show me a study that unequivocally shows that raising taxes leads to mass capital flight. I haven't seen one yet. At best, its mixed.

They say this about minimum wage "you can't raise it to $15 business will leave and go under!"

And every fucking time states or cities increase the minimum wage, that doesn't happen.

Stop fucking carrying water for the rich

They don't leave. At least, not in the scary mass exodus they always try to imply.

So nothing?

We truly are creatures of habit and prefer something known. Also, people just don't have the fucking time to know anything but passively absorbing it. We've collectively gone from requiring 40 hours of work to support a whole family, to now needing 80, as a minimum, for most families.

Who the fuck has time to research candidates policies? Lmao Susie needs to be at soccer practice 5 minutes ago. We've allowed ourselves, bit by bit, to have our time stolen because of all the wage theft we've allowed by not keeping the minimum wage pegged to inflation automatically. Every year they push on 2% inflation target. And every year they didn't raise the minimum wage, they stole 2% from us.

It also makes any progress we make for ourselves, so brittle. Before, you could have two part time jobs help support a family for a bit. Now being out of work could mean homelessness.

I've got the same jade. It's nice to be realistic, but knowing that there might actually be solutions some day keeps it from becoming nihilism.

Every fucking year hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans pay a tax on an illiquid asset: the property tax.

Don't fucking tell me "oh it's too difficult, there's too many effects." Tax. Them.

Progressive tax rate on long term and short term capital gains. 95 % upper limit for income tax. Kneecap their bullshit "buy, borrow, die" cycle.

Get back to the fucking WW2 tax levels, back when we had a middle class, and then we can maybe finally have a balanced budget, at least.