skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> having massive wealth and valuing it in dollars may seem nonsensical, and at some level it is, yet it is the way that everybody operates.

If this was true, then why is nobody talking about imposing a tax on the market capitalization of corporations? Think about how much revenue you can raise by levying a 1% tax on Microsoft's market cap. But this is absurd, because the market cap doesn't represent actual money, it represents the theoretical value on all shares outstanding.

> In the rest of the economy, there are few VCs, and for a lot of profitable, but smaller businesses, capital is super hard to come by.

This is manifestly untrue. In the last 10 years of near-negative interest rates and quantitative easing, capital has been almost too easy to come by. Everyone and their mother is lending money.

> A person who sees a future in, for example, electrification retrofits of homes and has several good ideas about how to make it cheaper and more economically efficient, is going to have a really hard tome getting going.

Not true at all. Most banks and credit unions would extend dirt cheap loans. We are arguably over-leveraged on these kinds of loans.

> I don't really hear many people talking about friends, family, and fools rounds these days because the game has changed. However if we had more people that could use their knowledge of the local lay of the land to invest more wisely, we'd have far greater wealth generation.

The reason for this has everything to do with globalization and 21st century communications technology. It is no longer sufficient to be the best electrician in your neighborhood, you now need to be the best electrician in the country or perhaps even the world, given how easy it is to reach consumers today.

To give you a sense for how the scale of globalization has made it difficult to compete locally, consider how easy it is for a new business to reach every American today. There are 330 million people in America. You just need to provide $3 of value ONE TIME to every American, and you become a billionaire. Likewise, on a global scale, there are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you can get 1% of them to pay you a penny once a year, you're making $780k/year.

"Inequality" is inevitable in this world, but again the wealth isn't zero-sum. We're not remotely close to "central planning", because the wealthiest person on the planet (on paper) only represents ~0.5% of the annual GDP of the US alone. And that's not even an apples-to-apples comparison because the paper wealth is accumulated over years, whereas the GDP occurs every year. The accumulation of Bezos' wealth over the last 20 years is about 0.05% of the accumulated gross-product of the US, alone.
Crucially, you do not have to do it immediately.
Is the blog post "against taxing very wealthy people"?

Literally, it is a demonstration by mathematics of the effect of a tax on capital.

Polemically, it is an argument by induction that a higher level of such a tax will discourage junior entrepreneurs from attempting to create start-ups in a jurisdiction.

What's clever about the polemic strategy is how it appeals to the hopes and fears of young entrepreneurs who have not yet accumulated great wealth, to recruit them to support the interests of older entrepreneurs who may have done so in the absence of the tax.

"Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties" gets you hooked. You readily identify and strap yourself in for the ride.

"if you live for 60 years after acquiring some asset" appeals to your fears by tapping in to your understanding that once you are older, you will not have boundless energy, and unbridled understanding of the zeitgeist. You'll need protection then.

The young entrepreneur, with little wealth accumulated, consults the table, reads linearly down from the top to the lower right, building understanding, until bang 95%! At this point, he or she viscerally feels the pain of losing 95% of his or her capital, which, at this point, still being meagre, is unbuttressed by the psychological accoutrements that great wealth affords its owners.

The conclusion is genius.

"Even a .5% wealth tax would start to keep founders away from a state or country that imposed it. That's more than a quarter of your stock." Ouch! The budding entrepreneur must now pack up and move to have any chance at a decent life. The tax must be resisted!
> Hey, I agree with you that walking is cheaper than bikes in all ways, and I surely advocate walking.

I'm going to back-pedal just a little bit. Pun intended :P I love walking as a means of transport, but...

Biking is the most energy-efficient form of transportation by a long way. https://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/humanpower1.html#:~:te....

That answers a bunch of the questions asked in this thread. Another relevant answer to why biking is useful is that it extends the range of accessible daily activities around 10x compared to walking. You can bike further than you can walk in a given period of time.

So one of those hidden externalities you like to account for @jodrellblank, of walking vs biking is that walkers require more food consumption to sustain a daily commute of a given distance compared to bikers commuting the same distance.
> The reason wealth taxes have such dramatic effects is that they're applied over and over to the same money. Income tax happens every year, but only to that year's income.

Ah, but that is not even true. Because you spend some of your income during the year. When you spend your income, it becomes someone else's income. Then they also spend during the year.

If we could put a trace on a given specific dollar, we would find that it changes hands a few times in a given year, and is counted as income more than once for the purposes of taxation.

That dollar could pass through the same hands, even. I pay you to fix my plumbing. Then you buy from my grocery store. From the bartering point of view, we broke even. From the government point of view, we both have income to declare, even though my "income" is just getting back the money I gave you for the plumbing job.

The idea that income tax is "just that year's income" is dangerously misleading. It's that year's income, N times over again.
There's nothing to repeal. The aberration is not Citizens United, which has always been the law in the US. The aberration is the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act, which Citizens United overturned. The relevant law is the First Amendment to the US Constitution. McCain-Feingold is the thing which tried to limit this, and was tossed out by the Supreme Court in Citizens United.

Most countries do not have strong protections on speech. The US does. There's no way to distinguish Fox News Media, a for-profit news organization with a distinct partisan slant, from One America News, a money-losing, overtly partisan news organization, from Citizens United, a political action committee trying to air a political documentary critical of Hillary Clinton on Pay-per-View.

You can't donate unlimited sums to candidates, but you can spend as much as you want on political media, including advertising. I'd love to hear how we can overturn Citizens United, but maintain things like Fahrenheit 9/11, a different political documentary critical of George W. Bush, and released right at the height of the 2004 election campaign.

Lawrence Lessig has a proposal to offer political donation vouchers to each and every private citizen. I think this is a great take on public financing that would help to level the playing field, while maintaining this country's strong protections on speech.
So 5% - 3% = 2% real annual growth.

So 1% wealth tax is equivalent to 50% tax on the return of the asset, every year.

Say what you want, but this makes holding the asset or investing a lot less attractive. It will affect people's decisions and willingness to invest. Maybe we're OK with less investment but we shouldn't assume there is no impact.

In addition what if this is a volatile asset (read: startup) whose value goes up and down? Will the gov't give you a refund if it loses 20% of its value 10 years in?

What if the asset is illiquid (again:startup)? Who will lend to an otherwise not-wealthy startup founder 1% of their company's paper value every year to pay the tax? Because if the startup fails most founders will have to declare bankruptcy (having paid years of paper wealth taxes with no positive outcome in the end).
What a well preserved fossil! I've always liked trilobites
Hi cs-szazz. I remember being in your situation; it's frustrating because you can't Google for answers. Here is advice I was given when in a similar situation.

- Find the other people at the company in your situation (size of grant, type of options). Share your learnings with each other. Consider getting professional advice, the Bay is full of attorneys and CPAs for whom this is a familiar situation.

- If you're at a unicorn, you probably have co-workers who are veterans of other unicorns and have been through this before. Ask them for advice (or an introduction to their source of professional advice)

- As a group, consider asking your board to arrange a limited second market sale to cover exercise costs and taxes. Many institutional investors are happy to buy a little extra stock, especially if it helps with keeping senior staff happy and focused on the right things.

- If you're going to be doing anything involving stock without board approval (like trying to build some kind off house-of-cards, pseudo-legal collateral package for a loan shark) you really need to hire an attorney.

- if you only have options, you might not be a shareholder. Your rights and access to information might be different once you've exercised a share.

- You can't extend the 90 day exercise window on ISOs, that's a federal law thing. The company can convert to NSOs to extend the window, but the setup for that conversion is complicated and expensive.
The drilling mud used to lubricate the equipment was a clay called bentonite with small amounts of a polymer additive, according to Facebook. It’s biodegradable and nontoxic, the company tells The Verge. Bentonite on its own isn’t usually bad for the environment, John Dilles, another professor of geology at Oregon State, tells The Verge in an email. It’s sometimes used to absorb toxic metal at sites that need to be cleaned up or where waste needs to be contained, he says.

In the case of an accidental release, however, the drilling fluid components used at the site should be prevented from “entering sewers, waterways, or low areas,” according to safety data sheets published by the state. Facebook opted to leave 6,500 gallons of mud in place to “minimize the risk of leaks,” it wrote.

Facebook also left behind a drill tip, tools, and 1,100 feet of pipe. It’s not uncommon for companies to leave behind pieces of broken equipment when digging it up is more costly or could cause even more destruction. There’s a risk of losing more equipment when working through hard rock, according to Goldfinger.

Not much to discuss here.
This is a topic people are very emotional about, so it's unsurprising to see a lot of hair triggers on the downvote button. I've definitely felt myself fighting the urge to flick to a downvote whenever I see a comment that frustrates me.
Inequality in your country has risen dramatically the past 30 years. That's what your legislators are trying to address. A lot of value is created in the early stages. Should that be exempt? Remember, companies don't exist primarily to pay back investors, their first objective is to contribute to society.

My €0.05
Trump Administration Finalizes Plan to Open Arctic Refuge to Drilling
You're a super recogniser (https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=Prosopagnosia%20%22super%...).

I wouldn't mind a bit of what you've got.
Fair point, I misread that. But even so, the inheritance tax is still a delayed wealth tax and a 100% tax would generally be easily avoided with gifts -- still taxable, but presumably not at 100%.

(Edit: if we had a combination of capital gains + personal income tax that effectively achieved the same goal as a wealth tax, wouldn't that be basically a maximum wage? Seems even harder to sell. It seems to me the main difference would be that a capital gains tax still encourages holding on to assets and a wealth tax encourages spending.)
They can, and do, borrow against their shares.
@thomasdullien Re: "Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax.". Yes, but the problem is the other countries contemplating implementing a wealth tax want to have their cake and eat it. They want to implement a wealth tax whilst not making any tweaks elsewhere. All take and no give does not make for an attractive environment, especially in this globalised world where resettlement of people and businesses elsewhere is not as difficult or time consuming as it might have once been.
The chromecast screensaver is the background on the TV in my Airbnb. Multiple guests have told me how much that screensaver makes them feel at home when they travel, and makes the world a little less strange.
Maybe some references help to clear this up. GP apparently did get his geography mixed up.

The term Pacific Islander [1] seems to not include the Philippines and Indonesia, as these islands are generally considered to be part of South East Asia [2]. One logical connection is that the Philippines and Indonesia are tectonically on the Asian crust [3], while the islands to the east are on the oceanic crust.

Thus the original statement of 500 million people fleeing to southeast asia makes geographically no sense, but I guess the intent of the people of Indonesia, Philippines etc. being cut off of seafood remains clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Islander

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ocean#/media/File:Paci...
As much as I hate google, I use gmail for this only reason. Outlook or thunderbird was always buggy and never trusted them.
Stem Based. DIY Style. For Children. For USA
Welcome to Code with Repl.it (10 onboarding tutorials)
Yes, I felt the lack of motivation. It seems that the closer interaction with others helped me stay focused. (Within limits - too much interaction and I can't get anything going because I'm interrupted all the time.)

But the same kind of thing happens now that I'm going back to the office, but nobody else is here.

Sorry, I don't have a solution...
My main concern with third party backups is the privacy aspect. I never want to worry that some silent TOS change means that ad companies are scanning all my documents. Does backboaze have any options for e2e encryption or some sort of iron clad privacy policy without a “we can change it at any time” clause?
Yup, it’s super helpful. An alternative abbreviation of my name is one I typically associate with shitty people (never met someone who went by that version of the name that I liked), so whenever I find myself wanting to engage in some form of negative behavior (even tame, like being a little lazy) I tell myself that that’s what [abbreviated name] does, not me. Works pretty well.
Billing records in particular are highly sought after as they allow existing identity theft schemes, like tax return fraud, to be amplified to a much higher level. If you can find individuals who have undergone expensive treatments that will result in large tax refunds and you have access to their SSN, you can file for the tax return before they do and cash in.
I had an article on the front page of Hacker News last year that had about 17,000 real visits, as determined by analysing my server log files. I was also using Google Analytics at the time, which told me I had 10,000 visitors (of which only 7 were using Firefox!).

Obviously there's a gap between what trackers say and reality, bigger for some demographics than for others.
We asked for a basic inventory management product that would have uniqueness constraints, mainly relational data, and be used by a small group of users. Our devs wanted to test out angular to see if it would speed up development on other projects (fair enough), and pitched dynamoDB on AWS. Angular took just as long or longer as their usual methods, required outside consultants for extra cost, and dynamoDB got us a product that failed uniqueness constraints all over because the devs were unfamiliar with NoSQL as well. I guess it helped with adapting the software quickly and adding fields as new requirements popped up though. Nice experiment, but definitely not something you'd want to have to deliver on a schedule to a customer with strict requirements and a competent QA team.
Not to mention broccoli probably doesn't feel the conscious terror of its imminent death.
I'm confused by the comment "also confiscates a fixed portion of its residents’ net wealth every year" that is followed up by "each additional SFr1m ($997,000) the richest Zug residents put in the bank incurs an annual tax bill of SFr3,000". So...is it based on net wealth or how much is in your bank account. Most of the article seems to revolve around net wealth. Most billionaires don't have billions in a bank account, it's in stock. The actual net worth calculation is non-existent in the article.
As I recall, Backblaze does what some other companies have also figured out: amortized maintenance costs across racks.

Long ago we hit a point where power and cooling, not floor space, were the biggest bottlenecks for many data centers. Those numbers shift around, but during that era a bunch of people noticed that it's less labor intensive to fill an entire rack at a time. Put a few extra racks in as spares, and as hardware fails you power them off and power up new machines in the spare rack. When X servers in a rack are dead, you migrate everything else out of the rack, then strip it to the rails and put brand new hardware in it. You increase your server density twice in that case.

Event-driven maintenance is disruptive to other work. It tends to have a ticking clock involved, so you likely assign it to more experienced people, which is 2 opportunity costs in one. Rack-at-a-time is batch processing. You can schedule it, you can assign multiple people to it, and speed is less of an issue. I might have the new guys stripping a decommed rack, use building a new one as training for four people and one teacher. You put a third of it together, I'll come tell you why the wiring is wrong, lather, rinse, repeat.
If we had the political will, we would have had weekly mass testing by now. The US has spent trillions to try and keep people afloat when they could have used that money to try and keep people safe by stopping the virus.

A combination of ignorance (throughout society), what seems to be FDA incompetence, and of political games is what is killing the economy and thousands of lives.
Sure, but my point was about similarity/compatibility. It might be the case that Android has suitable alternatives to Java's features, and it's possible that they're even more suitable for Android's needs, but the point is that while the two platforms were quite similar ten years ago, and a single language could target both with few if any tradeoffs, this is increasingly becoming tenuous as the two platforms become dissimilar in fundamental aspects. A language that attempts that will increasingly find itself needing to make tradeoffs that it didn't need to, say, five years ago, or even today.
>If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.

Nonsense. Chinese people aren't an unthinking monolith. Like anywhere else, some people believe whatever the government tells them, some people believe any old nonsense on social media and some are savvy and sceptical.

The only thing more effective than Chinese censorship of the internet is the efforts of Chinese citizens to satirise and subvert it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html
Yes -- it runs super fast!
this is why we need to park a guillotine in front of Congress. To remind them who they serve. Term limits NOW.
But what winds me up in the UK is how rarely i even have the option of eating sustainably. If i go to a fishmonger, or a decent-sized supermarket, sure. But in a small supermarket, or a pub or a fish and chip shop, it's always the standards: cod, haddock, skate, rock, plaice (and to be honest plaice is a pleasant surprise).

Of those, haddock is the only one that's really okay (scores 2-4): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Haddock

Cod is okay if it's from the far north, but most of the time you have no way of knowing (scores 1-5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Cod%2C+Atlan...

Plaice is okay if it's from the east coast, but even then, the fishing methods are damaging (scores 2-5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Plaice

Rock salmon is critically endangered (scores 5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Spurdog%2C+S...

Skate is endangered and illegal to fish (scores 5): https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search?name=Skate

Now, given that rock and skate are endangered, i have to admit i'm a bit confused about how they end up on menus. Are they being imported from other parts of the world where they're legal to fish? Or are they actually other, similar and legal, fish being sold under incorrect but familiar names?
I do not want that option. Especially non-tech users really do not care for side loading.

Fortnite tried pushing people to side-load on Android is a perfect example.

Even though that step failed, still a lot of people did side-load without knowing what they were doing and that's a problem.
The Role of Principal Engineer at Auth0
Could it be that there is some separation between the concepts of "residence" and "wealth cache"?

As in, you can reside where it is nice to reside, and park your wealth where it is nice to park your wealth?

The truly rich don't reside in any specific place; they summer here, winter there ...
Especially for a thing that you're new to. I find that "hello, world" is always the hardest program to write, because the kinds of mistakes you make result in nothing happening. You get very little to go on for debugging. Often, there may be nothing to Google. "I type run and nothing happened."

You can't really properly hate a language until you're an expert on it. Young developers love to hate languages, because it's the thing right in front of them, without realizing any of the actual challenges that go into software development. Which include living with the fact that writing "hello, world" is frequently incredibly frustrating.
Money is a poor form of meritocracy because once you have it you can tilt the board towards you and yours forever regardless of future merit.

Worse the portion of wealth from true merit is cover for just how much is graft, rent, and corruption.

The end point of any system whereby power gives one the ability to further consolidate power needs to be balanced with redistribution else all power naturally concentrates in a shrinking few.

No man is self made. Billionaires are generally the children of lesser wealth.
Ubooquity does support OPDS search.
When are people going to start acknowledging the elephant in the room: there are too many humans for us all to live western lifestyles, and unless we want our descendants to live vastly poorer lives we need to give serious attention to population control now.
Not in the short run but in the long run everybody would win. If you lower demand I assume people would find another way of living that would be more sustainable.
Thats right, an evolutionary advantage from birth defect does not 100% result in a successful lineage. It can just die and not even pass it on, then later the same defect can appear again and again until if results in a lineage.

Its an advantage to see better, but it does not guarantee survival just a slightly higher percentage (which is enough to thrive)
I feel like this is the only actual ELI5 answer so far.
SoundSource: A Superior Sound Control for Mac
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201310
An Introduction to Functional Design