I'm not an accountant or tax lawyer (in fact, I'm not any kind of lawyer). My layman's understanding is that value -- from goods and services -- is taxed when it moves between legal entities, be those people, estates, or corporations. This is not a prescriptive legal framework as far as I know, but is a descriptive framework which I have observed and which makes sense to me morally.
You paid income taxes on the money when you earned it because it left your employer's pocket and went into yours: the ownership of the value (money) has moved. You paid sales tax when you bought it because you exchanged money for the ring: the ownership of value (money, and a ring) has moved. And you pay an estate tax on it when it transfers from your estate to your children because, you guessed it, the ownership of value has moved.
I haven't been following the vector db space closely for a couple years now, but I find it strange that they didn't compare their performance to the newest generation serverless vector dbs: Pinecone Serverless, turbopuffer, Chroma (distributed, not the original single-node implementation). I understand that those are (mostly) hosted products so there's not a true apples-to-apples comparison with the same hardware, but surely the most interesting numbers are cost vs performance.
I've been lucky enough to have a couple big adventures in my life, including living in China for a while as a teenager and later hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (from Mexico to Canada). This has been exactly my experience.
On the PCT, in Mount Shasta while my friends and I were waiting to be seated at Black Bear Diner, an older gentleman came up and asked us about the hike. After talking for five minutes he told us he wanted to buy us breakfast and handed me a 100 dollar bill. I have dozens of such stories -- it was always easy to find a hitch into and out of town and often I would be offered a room to stay in. It's hard to describe but when you're an a quest, big or small, people just really want to help. Over the course of the trail I came to agree with the author: these people were doing me a kindness, yes, but I was also paying with experience, stories, levity.
I agree with the other commenters that one can't always be a kindee. Next time you're driving up the west coast and see a dirty hike with a dirty pack, pick them up :^)
My complaint about Ed Zitron is that he's _always_ shouting into the void about something. A lot of the issues he covers are legitimate and deserve the scorn he gives them but at some point it became hard for me to sort the signal from the noise.
You paid income taxes on the money when you earned it because it left your employer's pocket and went into yours: the ownership of the value (money) has moved. You paid sales tax when you bought it because you exchanged money for the ring: the ownership of value (money, and a ring) has moved. And you pay an estate tax on it when it transfers from your estate to your children because, you guessed it, the ownership of value has moved.