The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21hr ago
The ringleaders, though, are doing just fine -- Bernie has several houses and a net worth of about $3M, whereas Warren's net worth is estimated at $12M.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21hr ago
Not now. But that's what your proposal is.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
Designing a working country is engineering, not philosophy.
No, this thread started by talking about how it was a 'great injustice' that a trillionaire existed. That's already out of the realm of engineering; you don't get to switch now and ignore 'philosophical' objections.
If a blue collar worker pays effective tax rate of x percent, then it is ok to make the upper echelons of society pay at least x.
This, too, is outside the realm of engineering. It might be "engineering" to determine what Musk's effective tax rate IS, but in practice it will be entirely dependent on assumptions made which are outside that realm.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
There are probably things they could do to annoy the US enough to attack even without nukes -- keeping up supplying the Houthis with missiles while the Houthis were closing the Bab al-Mandab might have eventually done it, or trying to close Hormuz unprovoked. But yeah, keeping up the proxy shit with Israel wasn't going to do it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
So you borrow money, you're taxed on the money borrowed, and then when you make money to pay it back, that gets taxed too? Maybe banks should be taxed on the value of their deposits too.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
There can't be a 2.5 year Gaza debacle with Iran blockading 13% of global oil.
Iran has been unable to maintain an effective closure of the strait; the US and the Gulf countries have been getting oil through, which along with the diversion to the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman, has kept oil prices from becoming intolerable. In a 2.5 year stalemate, there would be more pipelines outside areas Iran could effectively menace.
As for Israel, unlike South Africa and Rhodesia, it is not just going to give up.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
In fact, curiously, Iran is apparently giving up their greatest leverage by opening the straits. Why would they do that? We have heard that nobody can take the straits back from them, so why are they ceding it?
The strait has been opened sufficiently to prevent most of the oil-related horribles that closing them was supposed to cause -- basically the US has been helping GCC ships run Iran's blockade while maintaining an effective blockade on Iran's ports in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman. This, along with oil going to the Red Sea and directly to the Gulf of Oman, has kept oil prices reasonably tame.
I don't know that it's over, though. Iran may claim they're going to (fully) open the strait, but they've said that before and still fired at ships transiting. It's not clear what the US will do if they do that again. My guess would be resume the blockade, retroactively.
Iran is also claiming they get to toll the strait after 60 days.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
It's not a great impingement on freedom to sell human meat so it's also not a great impingement on human freedom to have the government control the amount of energy to be put into any item sold.
A mechanism of the slippery slope shows itself.
Also demonstrating that there really are just two general political philosophies, exemplified by the memes "You can just do things" and "We live in a society". And the vast majority of people are of the latter belief.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
The pay is likely load-bearing for the engineers just as it is for the founders. Pay a top engineer a normal middle class salary, and you'll get good, solid work out of them. Give them a chance to get rich and you'll likely get a lot more.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
I (a former FAANG engineer) would agree with him that founders are different sorts of people than top technical talent; at least most of them are. (Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades). And that Google, at least, is ridiculously overstaffed. That's different than resenting "code monkeys" making a lot of money; wanting technical talent to be available to startups is valuing them highly, not considering them lower organisms of some sort. It might be better for the engineers to phone it in and collect a paycheck on the latest obviously-doomed FAANG project rather than bust their butt at a startup, but Andressen's desire for them to do the latter is based on greed, not resentment.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
They tried. Didn't work. The French, British, and Germans at home weren't good substitutes, and the ones who came to the US demanded the $300k.
But I would have pegged you (along with BC) as one of most likely to be experiencing that white-hot rage at the wrong people making the big bucks.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Marc Andressen was the first person to come to mind when I wrote my response to the OP. The guy was born to middle-class parents in Iowa and raised in Wisconsin. He was himself a computer programmer. He's not the kind of elitist described. (Also you can't throw him off a cliff because the man is huge.)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
If you're not going to get a promotion unless you murder your boss, you are better off changing companies. Obviously there's no equivalent of that in the analogy... so you're not getting that promotion (or having that next child)
I don't find early-term abortion tantamount to murder, so the analogy really doesn't convince me.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Which people? There's a lot of groups mentioned there. The least valuable are probably "people who see themselves as future founders" (yeah, yeah, ideas are a dime a dozen)... and the people who have that rage. Who I don't think are actually SV founders and VCs; while some are traditional business types, and a few even have multi-generational money, most are noveau-riche just like the "code monkeys" they're paying. They may not like paying them, but that's pretty much for financial reasons. There are definitely those who hate that gauche technical people get paid big, but it's not that group.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
A Down syndrome child is such a massive sink of resources that it DOES (if not absolutely preclude) make it much more difficult to have another child afterwards.
As for the "rich tapestry"... an afternoon being subject to torture is a richer tapestry of experience than taking a nap, but all things considered, I'd take the nap every time.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Not a matter of edginess at all. Land is rivalrous, but it's not a limiting factor for any of your examples. Even if (theoretically) we needed to restart the Superconducting Supercollider project for fusion, land wouldn't be an issue; heck, you could build data centers on top inside the ring. Power is rivalrous but not fixed; both Alphabet and Microsoft have literally had nuclear plants started or restarted for data center power.
Your claim implicitly depends on a fixed set of resources that are already 100% utilized, and neither condition is true.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.
No, production is not zero-sum and in any case money is not the limit of these things. God could come down from Heaven and declare a halt to data center development, and we would not get one step closer to fusion (might actually slow things down), and not one more bridge would be fixed (possibly fewer, in that the data center people might need a bridge fixed).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
As the wokesters and anti-wokesters like to say (in different contexts), God doesn't owe you his presence.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
This is a few thousand dollars worth of OpenAI tokens to create ads with pictures of farms and forests and lakes with text which says "No data center is worth losing a single inch of this" or similar.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Hillary certainly wanted to be the watcher and controller rather than the other way around, but I think she's not at all unique in that -- it's a property of most politicians. Some people prefer the feel of the handle, others the sting of the lash.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Those who read murder mysteries know that one of the advantages of suffocation (from the killer's point of view) is it leaves no external injuries.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Major indices are changing their rules so that these new stocks are included nearly immediately
Dow Jones (for the S&P 500) actually decided against this just this week. Some of the other indexes, like the Nasdaq 100, did change, but it seems unlikely most new AI companies will be able to get in anyway; they're doing it for SpaceX.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
You're talking about actual dating, I'm talking about hiring escorts.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Something was done, in some places; it goes by the name of "gentrification".
It isn't true. The most recent private secular accredited non-profit university is Minerva University, founded by the former CEO of Snapfish. There's also the University of Austin, co-founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, which is not accredited but is a candidate for accreditation; while the people who complain that billionaires don't found universities jeer at that one, jeering doesn't actually make it go away.
And of course there's a lot of schools, programs, buildings, etc at existing universities endowed by tech billionaires.
I suspect it's much more difficult, both because of regulation and because of market saturation, to found a worthwhile new university today than it was when Leland Stanford founded his.
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