Western European nations have gotten a pass in recent history because they've been deferential to the US, are liberal democracies (ideologically aligned), and are not especially rich in strategic assets like oil. The same could be said of South Korea and Japan, highly civilized and in ideological alignment with the US.
In its history the US has engaged in military action against western and white majority nations: Great Britain (twice), the Confederate States, Spain, Germany (twice), Italy, and Yugoslavia. Not mention the perpetual rivalry against Russia/Soviets since the end of WW2 which has meant doing things like backing the "brown" mujahedeen against the predominantly "white" Soviets. Today it backs Ukraine against Russia, arguably making that war of "white" nations more deadly than it otherwise would be.
The US may have never fought against lilly white Scandinavian countries but neither has it done so against "brown" India or sub Saharan Africa.
Anecdotally, the person on my team who is producing the most output and the highest quality happens to explicitly shun LLMs and is also relatively young. Other team members embracing AI spend their day being misled by chat bots, trying to get their agents to work properly by toying with contexts (just needs a little more knowledge!), and producing verbose code that's hard to review and with obvious bugs when you actually think about what it's doing. My favorite is how everything is excessively commented but more than once I've caught the code not matching what the comment said it would do!
FWIW I find it useful if I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to prompt it than type it myself. Also for research and building understanding it's generally good. I still catch it being wrong on details of you're really paying attention or literally contradicting itself between prompts. That gives me a lot of pause about trusting things it told me that I just accepted as fact without having enough knowledge myself to question it.
Libertarian principles encourage relationships built on mutual consenting parties rather than coercion. This implies that both parties have the freedom to choose. Imagine being stuck with a small dating pool of undesirable partners, the choices may not be good but that doesn't make it authoritarian.
The shortcut is fine if it's a bog standard canonical arrangement of the piece. If it's a custom jazz rendition you composed with an odd key changes and and shifting time signatures, taking that shortcut is not going to yield the intended result. It's choosing the wrong tool to help which makes it unreliable for this task.
I also like the idea of sales taxes over income and especially wealth taxes for a number of reasons.
1. It limits the opportunities for the government to use force on the general population. Today, if you do not file your annual taxes, men with guns come and put you in jail. A sales tax does not require this level of enforcement to be inflicted on the average citizen.
2. It's voluntary to a degree. Today if you don't like what the government is doing and want boycott paying taxes you cannot practically do so because of point 1 above. With a sales tax you can decide to defer unnecessary spending as a form of protest.
3. In theory it's vastly simpler to reason about and plan for. The myriad of tax advantaged accounts that have proliferated over the years in the US is daunting: IRAs, 401k/403b, 529s, FSAs, HSAs, Trump Accounts, Roth variants. We ask citizens to best guess how to allocate investments between these vehicles for goals decades in the future. If you need emergency access you're often looking at paying penalties. Not to mention the poor user experience baked into many of the designs. 401ks put the burden on your employer to restrict your investment options to their curated choices and their chosen plan administrator. You have to leave your job and roll it into an IRA to finally have the freedom to pick your own investments and who you have the account with. FSAs have the annoying use-it-or-lose-it rules. 529s are bizarrely state sponsored but you can choose a plan from any state. Like your state's plan but want to have the account at your broker? Too bad, you have to use the administrator your state chooses.
4. It's widely understood that if want less of something you should tax it. By taxing income and wealth it discourages work and saving. A sales tax discourages consumption instead, which encourages saving and is also pro environmental.
5. Changing asset allocation is free. Today, changing investments in a taxable account, where there are gains, triggers a taxable event. This discourages the movement of that capital to other investments.
6. In theory it's harder to dodge taxes as the simpler system has less loopholes.
7. On average, people with more wealth should have more expensive lifestyles which translates to them paying higher taxes.
I understand the arguments that sales taxes are regressive, let rich people dodge taxes by living frugally, etc. I accept all that may be true and I'm ok with it. Many seem fixated on using the tax code as a mechanism to level inequalities, as if that were its primary function, and a sales tax doesn't advance that goal enough for them. I think I can accept that some people are going to be vastly wealthier than me and are going most likely live a much easier life because of it; much like I can accept that some people are going to much prettier than me, taller than me, less genetically disposed to certain medical conditions, have been born to better families/circumstances and those things can all provide significant advantages in one's life.
If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals. This seems to be a hard thing for many to understand or accept because it is largely a second order effect, the capitalist primarily concerned with their own personal gain but winds up improving the lives of others as a side effect.
This is the essence of Adam Smith's often misunderstood invisible hand metaphor. Of the individual he observed: "By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Second order effects stack up and improve quality of life for more people better than trying to do so explicitly.
Multiplying capital creates abundance and that abundance allows for improved standards of living for and the means to spend excess resources in support of charitable endeavors. Growth is good because it means more abundance and opportunity. I would argue that pursuit of growth is not an ideology but a force of nature. Life is opportunistic and will expand to wherever there is fertile conditions, and often adapt even when they are not. We are part of nature and understand this intuitively, seeking growth opportunities. As an example, one is better off being part of a growing company (more wages and opportunities) than one that is stagnant or declining (fighting for scraps and survival).
Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.
Netscape 6, which was released in 2000 and based on the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) recommended 64MB of RAM. The Mozilla Suite was the basis of the Phoenix project (later renamed to Firefox) and they shared the same technological underpinnings: Gecko engine, SpiderMonkey JS engine, XUL interface, XPCOM, etc. Phoenix/Firefox was about using the Mozilla technology to deliver just a browser, independent of the suite, with aim of being lighter weight. So while Firefox didn't exist yet its heavier predecessor did.
How I yearn for when their marketing had everyday people touting how "Windows 7 was my idea!" Every Windows release since then has felt like they are hostile to user input.
I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.
The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.
It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.
It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.
The very top and very bottom are a 55% to 45% split in either direction. It's not a heavy skew, a single party flip in the quintile from the majority to the minority would make it 50/50 even. Those quintiles cancel each other out when voting on party/caucus lines. It's actually the 2nd and 4th quintiles that have the biggest skews. Democrats take the 2nd quintile while Republicans take the 3rd and 4th.
I've seen it where a project needs to get done but the company can't hire anyone for it due to firm wide hiring freezes. So in come the consultants to bang out a sloppy version 1. In the meantime you wait it out until you can hire a real team and gradually transition them in to rewrite what the consultants did. At least the company will have learned something from the consultants trying to implement the project. When your domain is complicated and has many dependencies there's some value in having anyone trying to figure that stuff out.
Of course, when the project is inevitably a late, half functioning, buggy mess you get to blame the consultants.
I know some large financial institutions that still use it. They were building big systems using the stuff in the 90s and early 00s. It still works and nobody has the appetite to rewrite it as it's a massive undertaking that would be very expensive and high risk. Better to just keep updating it to support the occasional new requirement.
They'll rarely advertise it in a job listing of course. They're looking for people with Java/C#/C++/Python experience, and there's certainly plenty of that, but also thousands of little Perl scripts doing ETL workflows.
Nice case! I actually do the same thing, PC lives on the floor next to my desk. I definitely rejected cases that had didn't have the buttons and front I/O on top for that reason.
Most people probably never upgrade their machines at all. In my case I used the same PC from 2009 until about a month ago. Over its 16 year lifespan it saw 3 GPUs, the memory was doubled from 6GB to 12GB, a Wifi card was added (and then got flakey after about 7 years but was able to switch to Ethernet over coax with MoCa), and an SSD was added for hosting the OS and most apps (original HDD relegated to additional storage).
If you're planning for a 10-12 year lifespan I have this advice. CPUs have surprising longevity these days as most usages don't significantly tax them, go a little above mid range on core count and it should last. GPUs are a throwaway item, plan to replace them every 3-5 years to stay current. Storage can be something that's worth adding if you're planning for a long lifespan and depending on usage. Photos, video, and games use more storage than they used to but personal photos and videos largely live in the cloud now. RAM you might need to upgrade if you go midrange but might not if you aim higher than standard in the initial build. The buses and interfaces become the main limiting factors to longevity. RAM technology will advance, PCIe and USB will have new versions. There may be new standards you can't take advantage of, like I was still on SATA II when the world had since moved on to SATA III and then NVMe.
Sometimes it's more about repairability than upgradability. My stuff lasted but I've had HDDs, PSUs, and fans die in the past. It's nice to be able to replace a dead part and move on.
I will also say that I'm a little surprised that the enthusiast market is still mostly these big ATX mid tower cases. They feel massive and unnecessary today when 5.25" bays are obsolete and storage is not 3.5" HDDs but an m.2 chips that sit flush with the motherboard. The smaller form factors are still the exception. Is it all to support the biggest and baddest high end GPUs that cost more than the rest of the system?
> He pays less next year because Oracle stock is worth less. Just like property taxes on people's houses.
Does he get a refund if he loses money or is it just tax if you win, tax if you lose, tax if it doesn't move?
I'll give a few feelings about property taxes. They are known up front when the purchase is made. There's an expectation that they remain reasonably consistent year over year. In that way they can be consistently planned for, enough that it's seen as more of a maintenance expense for upkeep of local services rather than a wealth tax. If my neighbor sells their comparable property for double what they paid for it a few short years I don't expect my tax bill to have a massive jump. In my experience the city's assessed values tend to lag the true market value pretty significantly. The goal appears to use the assessed value as a means to have some graduated component to the property tax. Being a local tax, any significant jumps are seem to be avoided by design, lest it trigger angry residents showing up at town hall meetings.
With a wealth tax it can be highly variable year to year and out of one's control. If stocks go way up you're on hook for paying those taxes. Especially if you're Larry Ellison with a controlling stake in Oracle, you could find yourself in the situation of having to liquidate assets to pay taxes, thereby reducing your control of your own company.
My main objection to a wealth tax is many of its proponents see it as a means of reducing inequality and "leveling the playing field". I find these positions to come from a place of envy and reject them of those grounds. Many arguing in favor also assume that federal confiscation of wealth inherently benefits the public, as if its some benevolent charity. The reality is more mixed. There is seemingly no limit to politicians' ability squander money on nice sounding projects that give them good headlines while enriching cronies and delivering questionable actual value. It's nice to imagine that all that money is going to roads, bridges, schools, and research, but a whole lot is also going to spying on the populace, subverting foreign governments, and blowing people up.
In its history the US has engaged in military action against western and white majority nations: Great Britain (twice), the Confederate States, Spain, Germany (twice), Italy, and Yugoslavia. Not mention the perpetual rivalry against Russia/Soviets since the end of WW2 which has meant doing things like backing the "brown" mujahedeen against the predominantly "white" Soviets. Today it backs Ukraine against Russia, arguably making that war of "white" nations more deadly than it otherwise would be.
The US may have never fought against lilly white Scandinavian countries but neither has it done so against "brown" India or sub Saharan Africa.