Everything is easy if you can get everyone to agree. World peace, end of poverty, end of inequality, end of hunger/starvation, end of climate change.

Turns out this isn’t a very productive line of thinking. All hard problems are coordination problems.

There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.

Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.

Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.

She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.

Should’ve eaten some sauerkraut and fried onions! The manliest of all vegetables! Has the bonus effect of repelling ladies up to 5 feet away!

Taxing profits just means the company will borrow from investors (by issuing bonds) and then instead of profits paying out as dividends the company shows losses from interest payments.

I would rather try land value taxes.

Putting a huge percentage of a company up for sale on the open market is going to tank the price no matter what the fundamentals are. It’s simple supply and demand: you’re putting a huge glut of supply on the market and not putting similar demand. All those sell orders will begin expiring as the offers drop in price.

The largest owner of shares putting everything on the market at once is strong signal that the stock is overpriced and so buyers will react accordingly.

By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.

I’m neither defending nor attacking capitalism. I’m just pointing out that putting heavy taxes on illiquid assets leads to huge disruptions.

The increase in value of shares above book is called unrealized gains. They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Taxing makes no sense unless you’re going to reimburse the taxes if the shares drop in price.

The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.

How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.

Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.

Shares aren’t always given to you as a reward. If you are the sole founder of a company then you create the shares yourself and decide who to give (or sell) them to. If you choose not to take your company public on the stock market, then what your stake in the company is worth is unclear. Sure, the company may have assets (equipment, properties, resources) but that’s only the book value. The true market value of the company might be much higher.

Look at a software company. The software they create might never be sold, only used to provide services. The market value of the company could far exceed the book value of all the desks, chairs, computers, and other stuff the company has at the office. But you don’t really know that if the company never goes public. So how do you tax it?

if he were able to convert all of his $241.8B to cash

That’s the assumption everyone makes but it’s a false premise. If he tried to sell all his shares it would cause the stock price to collapse, his wealth would plummet, and his companies would be in jeopardy. Far from being able to give all of them $1.6M, they would all likely lose their jobs.

That’s also the issue with taxing them. If someone owns a billion dollar company (based on the price of their shares of stock) we call them a billionaire but they might not have very much money in cash (say a few million). Suppose we want to tax them 10% of their wealth: that’s $100 million! They don’t have enough cash to pay for that, so they have to sell shares, which causes the share price to go down, which negatively affects the company and the workers.

I think the issue is with how we view ownership of a business vs other things, like a yacht. The yacht can be sold to pay taxes and it won’t affect other people. The company cannot. In a lot of ways, the company isn’t just a possession of the owner, it’s a responsibility. These days I feel like we don’t talk enough about responsibility.

Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.

What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…

No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.

Just dealing with this tonight!

You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!

This process began long before Reagan. I think it started with the automobile manufacturers, and General Motors in particular, in their war on public transit.

The death of the streetcar brought with it the death of streetcar suburbs and mixed-use zoning, which was the foundation upon which most third places rested (neighbourhood pubs, cafes, and barber shops).

Anyway, definitely watch that video if you have the time. Compare the vast landscapes full of roads and parking lots with the old-fashioned neighbourhood of Riverdale, with its narrow streets and cozy houses huddled together on small lots. It’s easy to see which one is more conducive to community, civic engagement, and good government. The car-dependent landscape looks like some dystopian nightmare by comparison.

That’s because the US is not only deeply polarized by party affiliation, it’s deeply segregated regionally by political stripe. Look at how few “swing states” there are and how all the rest are “solid red” or “solid blue.”

Increasingly, people know and have personal contact with fewer and fewer members of the other side. We’re witnessing the creation of the Morlocks and the Eloi, groups that neither interact with nor understand one another to the point of being separate species.

As much as we all would love to see it happen, such “laws” are known as bills of attainder. The US constitution explicitly forbids these.

My rabbit never bit me even once over his entire life. He gave lots of kisses though. And he loved coming over for pets and then running and jumping and spinning around in the air.

Every rabbit has a different personality. They aren’t the smartest pets around but they can be trained not to do the things you don’t want them to do, such as biting. They remember best when you get their attention with something that provokes a fear based response, such as a sharp “no!” That’s all it took for my bunny.

Jeez that is awful! People: if you want a vegan pet, get a rabbit! They are so sweet! There are tons of them in the shelter system, especially after Easter.

I swear they’re the funniest and most affectionate four legged friends around!