skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you assume the wealth tax has to be paid each year in dollars?

Maybe you could pay it in shares, so no borrowing required.

Or maybe for illiquid assets including non-public stock it could be warrants that you only have to settle at a liquidity event.

It's a strawman to assume a wealth tax will be set up in a broken way when non-broken ways are possible.
This is true and was the case for some people but if you had taken an Uber offer, for example, to Facebook or Google, they would have matched it.
...I mean if someone is dependent on your service and there aren't viable alternatives or a means of making a viable alternative, and your pricing is exploitative and meant to siphon away customer's money so you can get rich at their expense, maybe the issue is that you don't believe 'exploitation' exists because of how much you love money over regular people.
Network transparency meant that when I was doing Finite Element Analysis on the beefiest Sun workstation they sold, running a proprietary application, I could log in from home, run the application on the Sun, and see the results of the prior run.

I could edit the model, regenerate the mesh if needed, and kick off another big batch run, and then drop the X11 frontend GUI.

Over dial-up, from a Windows box to a Sun workstation, in the mid 90s. And it was could be secure, tunneled through SSH.
I mean the population would presumably dip low enough to where fishing becomes too difficult to be profitable before total extinction.
I thought capital gains were when you do realize them, not when you can realize them.
I see! Thank you. We spent a lot of time going over every word in this post, so I am not sure if we can edit that to make it more clear, but I'll take a look.
Libraries. Your local library probably has a large selection of DVDs, and most libraries are part of networks that can request everything you can't find locally. The only downside I've found is for kids' movies, as those are invariably scratched beyond any usability.
Post-Stalin Soviet Union clichés, of course. How do you think the wrongly arrested people confessed to the murders in the first place?

"At his trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and maintained his innocence, stating his confession had been obtained under extreme duress."
Google's 'open letter' is trying to scare Australians
Even worse, another unpredictable aspect can occur within the whole ecosystem, either another dependent species dies as well or something goes out of whack. It's sad to see so many species disappear in such a short timespan.
It has already been ported, that doesn't mean it would be more than a backwards compatibility story.
You're the one who came up with a house analogy.

>In contrast, if you were to take an individual worth $10 billion, whose entire net worth is derived from the ownership of their stock, and were to tax them 2% of their wealth annually, they would have to somehow come up with $200 million every year to pay the tax

If your $10 billion dollar asset isn't returning you much more than 2% per year, it has a terrible ROI, and you need to divest.

>corporate wealth is NOT zero-sum, it's created.

Not absolutely, but the power represented by the percentage of the world's wealth one controls is finite. At the limit if I own 99% of a countries current wealth, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the rest of the citizens of that country to decide that I have amassed too much power and to rectify that by taxation and redistribution.
How does this work? And is it more accurate than YouTube's automatic captions?
Aintcha kinda makin' the opposition's point? That usage case is at a bare-minimum level of dead-simple and minimal-time-in-app usage. Any app with a more involved workflow would effectively be considered obsolete due to being so inferior.
Interesting, so billionaires directly affect the majority of jobs, and the rest of the jobs may be indirectly affected by billionaires and their job prowess as well. GDP growth is roughly 2% a year. Everyone here ok with GDP contraction for our future? How do we fund all the social experiments that many people want?
Not every region follows the trends of the USA/Anglosphere.

In Germany Apple has like 44% tablet market share; Samsung has 33% [0]. (Presumably the rest are all Android tablets, too.)

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/tablet/german...
I'm sure hunters of the Passenger pigeon thought the same too.

Many fish and bird species have shear reprodutive ability as their only defense. In the case of Passenger Pigeons, they had very little defenses against predators, but migrated in huge flocks of hundreds of thousands at a time. No predator could really harm the flock as a whole.

Well, until Humans became too good at hunting anyway. (Also, USA used to be covered in forests. But we cut those trees down to make room for our cities)

As described in 1813 (From Wikipedia):

> The air was literally filled with (passenger) Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.
What I want to see is a Firefox foundation.
After a true collapse, the local stocks may never recover. The removal of one species may impact the ecosystem so strongly that that species is not able to return. Or the lack of numbers may make breeding so difficult/slow that it could take decades/centuries to return to a "normal".
I just read the article again, and I don't see any language in it to support the idea that it's implying you'd have any less wealth than it calculates that you would.
Depends on which upgrades you are concerned about.
I agree that having new os versions supported for longer than 3-4 years would be good, but at least it looks like they will be supporting security updates for longer now, 6 years of security upgrades if I'm not mistaken.
Lets hope its as simple as that. If they go out of business, then I would think the fish would recover. Maybe the next business will want to be more sustainable?

I'm reminded of the jellyfish problem in Japan. Because of over-fishing, the jellyfish polyps aren't being eaten as they used to. So, enormous jellyfish swarms are being caught by these fisherman instead. I had to laugh at the frustration on their faces, cursing all of these jellyfish that they were catching. It was a problem of their own creation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HP0_7_RRwg
The search on my Roku is across services. I'd like to have a cross-service discovery app too, but the in my roku (and even better, on my roku phone app where typing is easier) I can type a movie name and see if it is on one of the services I use, or if not in Amazon to rent/buy).
One more tool for corporations to better manipulate consumers will surely improve the world, and not the opposite.
I'm sorry, but that does not look like Ryan Gosling.
In the case of billionaires like Musk, Bezos, Gates... It's unrealistic to think that the government would make better use of that capital. It'll absolutely be wasted in comparison.

Taking ever more capital from the most effective/productive allocators and giving it to one of the least effective doesn't strike me as a good strategy.

A case like the Walton heirs is another story. I suspect we'd be better off taxing most of that wealth.
This is somewhat misleading, especially the "30% of your wealth bit". What the expatriation tax does is tax you as if you had sold all your property for cash on the day you renounce your citizenship, though it does apply a $600k+ exclusion to the proceeds of the "sale".

Put another way, it's the US saying "you don't get to accumulate wealth in the US and then leave without paying taxes on it." It's not great (I'm an expat, so if I ever considered relinquishing my citizenship, it might affect me), but it's certainly not as terrible as you made it sound.

That said, it is pretty annoying that the US taxes you on worldwide income, independent of residence. And a lot of people who give up their citizenship do so because that plus the enforcement regimes imposed by the US on foreign banks mean that it's very hard to actually live abroad as a US citizen.
Nobody ever seems to model what I think would be the best way to fix the US government - what would happen if we reduced military spending by 90%?
I have also found your material very useful. Thank you.
almost done with drag&drop for touch:
https://youtu.be/tJxyxMyqR9E
Yes, exactly. "Capital consumption" is a standard term in economics[1]. A common (if somewhat outmoded) example would be farmers eating their seed corn rather than saving it to plant the next year. In practice it usually looks more like what you described: Productive durable goods like machines or buildings simply wear out and aren't properly maintained or replaced. The total amount of capital investment thus decreases over time.

[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/capital-consumpt...
You mean like IntelliJ, Clion?

Yes I don't hide what I think out of political correctness, it is up to the receivers to deal with it.
They're both trolls, man. This is looking like a Reddit thread

"BILLIONAIRES BAD"

"JOB CREATORS"

"BILLIONAIRES BAD!!!!"

"__JOB__ GO BYE BYE"
> Woolly flying squirrel uses its furry claws as a parachute to fly

I really wanna see these claws
What's wrong with:

data class Point(val x: Int, val y: Int)

// Later on...

if (p is Point) {
let (x, y) = p
// x and y are of type Int
}

That Kotlin has, already, now?
There are better ways to do this, see a few items below.

Hooking an iOS device directly to the network is useful at times. Large downloads, network testing, and when you have to deal with a lot of devices.

https://redpark.com/iphone-to-ethernet-adapter/

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HMJU2ZM/A/belkin-ethernet...
Testing GNU Coreutils with KLEE
> If your $10 billion dollar asset isn't returning you much more than 2% per year, it has a terrible ROI, and you need to divest.

That's not how corporate ownership works. It's not about the ROI, it's about ownership in the company you founded / are running.

If your goal is just ROI, then you will willingly divest from your own company, at which point your wealth is taxed as a capital gain.
'have practically zero politics' tingles my bs-meter. How would you know how your employees feel about this? There is always politics. Of course not for the ones who cannot be promoted further, but for everyone else. My boss not acknowledging the existence of politics would be a red flag to me.
Do billionaires exist in a vacuum, creating their wealth away from society? What does it mean to be a billionaire? Physically, it means they’ve affected a large amount of the population. For the better, or worse? Take away the companies the billionaires created and imagine life.
Nice! Question for you, how did you make that nice 3D image on the front page with various screenshots overlaid over each other? :)
So the government takes a board seat (or two or three) eventually in the company?

There are a lot of rights and some obligations that come with equity ownership in a company beyond financial return.
That is absolutely correct. It would be an extra tax on ultra wealthy individuals.

That is its purpose. I'm not sure why people think otherwise.

Whether you think that purpose is a good reason to have a wealth tax is a separate argument.
Researchers Doubt That Certain Mental Disorders Are Disorders at All
For me, meditation works quite well.

Once you want to be done for the day, shut off your (work) PC and meditate for 10 minutes or so. This gives all the work thoughts time to go away and afterwards the brain is ready for whatever plans you have for the evening. If you don't know how to meditate, just use one of the various apps, they really help get started. It's not hard.

I also sometimes did this when I wasn't working from home - when there was something that I was still thinking about after getting home. Meditation is generally a good way to put the work-mind away and give the leisure-mind its space :)
Which is worthless without the wealth of the Java ecosystem, but apparently Java is a very bad language.
With the advent of Tunein and similar services, our family has taken WXRT with us everywhere since moving out of Chicago.

We appreciate their culture and it gives us a sense of home no matter where we are.
> you should get diminishing returns from your amazing thing over time

why should this always be the case? If you made wealth, why, after you stopped working (to enjoy said wealth), should it be taxed continuously?
These "old" files are deleted to save disk space. Instead of deleting data automatically, they could give users a disk quota and block uploads until the user explicitly moves or deletes files, eliminating all failure modes in which automated deletions go wrong: it's far from a "black swan" case.
They'll have to renounce their US citizenship. And the wealth will get reinvested in wherever it produces the highest returns, like it already is right now.
Wouldn't it feel like it's a little bit bullshit if the company went out of business shortly after and all that work was for nothing? All of our work is so ephemeral.
This is a great article. So much information and so valuable. I'm still taking it in.
Income taxes are a very bad model. Other societies have a superior tax model that is both less strenuous on the citizens, as well as providing more benefits overall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat

I would be in favor of implementing that system and removing income tax.
I agree with much of this except for the arbitrary conclusion ‘the purpose is control’.

The strategy is control, most definitely.

The goal is to deliver desirable end user features, security being an essential one of these.

I worked in consumer electronics software development during the early 2000s, when Microsoft was still considered the dominant force.

There were many parts of the software stack where no individual entity had control and standards and features were beholden to consortia and standards bodies which were essentially political bodies, all about capturing leverage over one part of the platform or another.

The result was that the user was simply not in the picture, and obvious ways to improve the user experience just couldn’t be executed because every decision about how to do so was a political battle.

Apple’s strategy of vertical integration allowed them to avoid all of this and simply deliver proprietary features that users wanted.

The problem in this case was not Apple delivering proprietary features.

It was Apple’s competitors failure to cooperate to deliver what consumers wanted.

Android is where it is because it became simply a repeat of that early 2000’s failure, and of course Google was forced to abandon “Open always wins” in favor of progressively trying to take back control.

If we want a more open alternative to Apple’s ecosystem, we need to be honest about why they has been successful, and how the alternatives underperformed.

I think Apple’s continued success is contingent on there being no low end disruption (which is definitely not a given), and would be competitors continuing to fail to create a healthy alternative ecosystem of their own.

My contention is that the lack of a healthy alternative is not due to anything Apple has done.

Apple has been on this upward trajectory for nearly 20 years, and for most of that time they were not dominant.

The problem is that the comparing ecosystems haven’t figured out how to work together to make an alternative yet.

If Apple is failing to allow people to play the games they want, and gaming is an increasingly relevant cultural activity, this is an opportunity for growth outside of Apple’s control.

Just as the music industry and the cellphone industry fell to Apple giving customers what they wanted and what was possible, Apple can fall to a competitor to does understand the value of games.

The arguments about not being able to get people to switch are moot. It’s always true that there are switching costs to overcome.

Competing with Apple would take patience, good management, and a lot of capital being deployed.

There is no shortage of capital looking for a place to invest - there is only a shortage of management talent and imagination.

If we don’t hobble Apple artificially, someone will figure this out, and the whole industry will be better off for it.

Remember Apple’s renaissance began with Steve Jobs saying “We have been thinking that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We need to stop thinking that way.”
That sounds like a classic Submarine article (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
As the author of linked article, I'll add 3 things to this mix:

1) For those criticizing the article for claiming capitalism is the result of intentional design, that it was "devised" rather than emerged organically from historically contingent forces, they're absolutely right.

It was just sloppy writing on my part to suggest capitalism is anything other than an emergent phenomenon from a complex stew of factors. That's not my claim, just my sloppy representation of Albert Hirschman's thesis (who doesn't claim that either).

2) But that capitalism was seen as a system that would nullify our passions by diverting attention to our interests, is not my claim, but Hirschman's. If you want to critique that, I highly recommend Hirschman's "The Passions and the Interests."

3) Why was this submission flagged? Is there such thing as the Hacker News Capitalism Defense Force, and might they actually have flagged this for its critical undertones, or did I violate some other rule?
What would you like it to read? There's a collaborative process going on and Mozilla is supporting us. There's no reason for us on that angle to frame it any other way.

Mozilla has been holding the Rust trademark because of history, but also in trust.

Yes, you can apply a negative reading to this, but this is a really big jump. You could also be happy about the fact that not all is broken.
We cultivate all our other food. We don't feed ourselves by walking around the plains of Anatolia and collecting wild wheat. Why should we feed ourselves by dragging hooks through the oceans? The fishing industry is the last vestige of humanity's hunt-and-gather past, and it, too, needs to yield to agriculture. We need better fish farms.
I'd wait a bit and see if this sentiment is common before worrying about it. I found the message clear and believe most others will as well.
That's funny, I would have just chalked it up to "they are using a different sense of the word matrix", knowing that most dictionaries contain multiple definitions of the same word. But nice work making this mental leap, I have never thought about it!

But it's true, you can envision it as a NxN matrix of N terrorists, where the number in cell i,j represent's the strength of the relationship (it's a weighted graph!), and that might actually be useful for something. I don't doubt that "matrix" might actually exist in numeric form in some CIA or military computer somewhere.
I'd also like to point out that we already have a wealth tax for everyone who would otherwise put their income taxes into savings. The lower the savings rate, the higher the effective wealth tax rate on the middle class.

Assuming an absurdly high 25% savings rate on your pre-tax income and a 25% tax rate on that income, boom, there's your 50% wealth tax. So the 45% wealth loss over 60 years in PG's toy example that ignores asset growth sounds totally fair to me in this light.

And with this "absurd" wealth tax on the middle class, why do we still have educated people from all over the world pounding at the door to get into the US? I would posit that it's for the same reasons that a wealth tax wouldn't suppress startups in this country.
That seems to be a mistake in a lot of "city of the future" concept art. All that empty space, tons of long strips of green and trees, very wide streets, huge squares everywhere, looks nice on a drawing or a render but is miserable to exist in because it means everything's really far apart and the scale of everything feels overwhelmingly. A lot of naïve attempts at a "green" city design have the same problem—in trying to incorporate all kinds of "eco friendly" green space they make an area less walkable, spread out the urban footprint, and make it a ton less eco-friendly.
This piece is barely a page long. I've been so disappointed with Paul's work recently, he's just been getting lazier and lazier with his essays and I think his political worries and biases are starting to show.
> decent wealth redistribution (i.e. equalizing especially the disparities between Eastern Europe and Core Europe)

Why limit socialism to Europe? Surely it would be much better with global "wealth redistribution".
So founders do treat some of their investors like this - look at every ICO, and a lot of dumb overseas money, and a good number of friends/family/fools rounds. And conversely, there are some employees that they treat with kid gloves, who basically get the investor treatment. Look at executive hires.

The difference is basically two letters: "No". Most institutional investors have the ability and inclination to say no to a deal. Many executives - or even high-level FAANG engineers - have the ability and inclination to say no to a deal. Your average engineer a couple years out of college does not, or if they do, they don't understand the power of declining a job offer. Start your negotiations with "no". Be curious and open to opportunities, and show a lot of enthusiasm during the interview process, but whenever you feel you're treated unfairly, walk away. People will stop treating you unfairly.
Thanks for this rec! I see it's also actually archived on Apple Music as well, which is nice. Really wish Beats 1 surfaced their non-celeb-hosted shows like... literally anywhere in the Browse interface.
This is like the ridiculous trickle down economics argument all over again..
Both of these comments make good points, but are two ends of a false dichotomy. Not every startup is going to have horrible work/life balance, and not every job at a big company is going to be boring and soul crushing. And there are all sorts of jobs in the middle and to the side of this spectrum.
We may not literally need billionaires for jobs to exist, but we need savings and investment for highly productive jobs. A wealth tax is borne over time by assets that are saved and invested; it obviously isn't by the portion that's consumed. If you tax Bezos' and other billionaires' wealth, Amazon and other firms will face sharply higher costs of capital, which can indeed be seen as a partial "dissolution".
Google "free tax file". It's the top hit. I think it's also on your W2's your employer gives you. I'm not sure if it could be made easier, but open to suggestions.
The irony is poor people will never be wealthy till that start investing in assets and understand the compounding nature of wealth. It's that same lack of understand of compounding that contributes to the argument for a wealth tax.

It's true. US inequality is rising as you stated, but global inequality is down. So you don't have the moral high ground. You have a false sense of entitlement and want to profit on the backs of the rest of the world instead of the people who invest their time and money into those assets.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
There is, but the duration might be longer than 10 years. We grab a bunch of what's endangered, sequence their genomes, construct plans for future repopulation, and be prepared for a future when we're more responsible with these natural resources. The fisheries will exhaust, and demand will shift elsewhere in the short term.

There is no other path to success, as attempting cooperation with those who will fish relentlessly is futile. Preserve what's left today for a future with better humans.
> My sense is that many people advocating for a wealth tax do not understand this conceptually.

or they do, and yet still advocate for it because they know they will never be affected by this tax, but the tax will benefit them (indirectly via more social welfare funded by said tax).