The US tax rates are vastly lower than that, and we still have enormous amounts of tax evasion (legal and illegal). Looking at the language from much of the US's rich, and they're basically stating that any tax is too much, so I'm not sure there's a rate you could charge that will be sufficiently low to encourage civic responsibility from those who think they should not pay any taxes for anything.
Facebook's M is powered by Wit.ai (who they acquired a while back), which basically does what you're talking about. They translate natural language into machine readable data structures. Honestly, its interesting tech and being able to feed in facebook level data volume should prove very good for them.
At least in the US, most employees can do the latter two. Turning down customers will probably get you fired though, which is pretty much the same as will happen with Uber.
So these genuinely bad people, you feel the solution is to lock them up for life? Whats the threshold to indicate when they should no longer be allowed to participate in society?
A lot of "bad people" succeed in the outside in politics, banking, venture capital, and frankly every industry. A lot of "bad people" in prison could easily be leading much different lives if they were born into different circumstances. How do you expect these people to become productive members of society and transition from "bad people" to useful citizens if you deny them any help or any tools to do so? If your only choice for survival is to sell drugs, then you're probably going to sell drugs. If there are better options, most people will take them.
By patenting though, you reveal your technique (that's the whole point: you get exclusive rights in exchange for disseminating knowledge). Once you file and receive your patent, you've basically published your results and everyone can benefit (although they'll have to pay you, of course).
I was involved with another company that used to operate in the same space, and they had a big problem with that. Movers would show up, offer the client a slightly lower rate if they paid cash, then both parties would cancel with the company and just work it out directly. Finding reputable contractors who wouldn't just cut the service out turned out to be a very hard problem.
To be fair, most of the things they deleted were also unpalatable to the vast majority of users, not just advertisers, and many were actively detracting from Reddit as a whole. Why shouldn't Reddit be allowed to do what is best for the group? They have no obligation to provide anything to trolls.
So, the only way to improve the world is to wait for rich people to exploit something and try to pick up the scraps? I don't think I can agree with that one.
The database maker's docs have said that their database provides Snapshot Isolation though, which suggests the user should be able to do what Aphyr did without a problem. That's pretty clearly not true, which means it isn't faulty application code. It is the database maker misleading the user.
Why would it be harder for a student from an elite boarding school to get into an Ivy than someone from a rural school? I would say the opposite, in no small part based on the evidence that at least supports a strong correlation.
It sorta spits at the idea of social mobility ("the american dream") though. The biggest rewards are only really available to those who can take risks like starting a business, and if you restrict that to only those who are already well-off, you remove most chances for the poor to ascend to the higher classes.
Except the stockholders never gain a conscience, and the CEO is beholden to them, so there's no incentive to stop behaving like a sociopath and stop exploiting employees. Time and again evidence has shown that rich companies are never satisfied with being rich; they always want more.
A $215 meal at a restaurant is a far cry from a Bugatti. I'm a software dev in the Midwest and I've eaten at Alinea, which is comparable in price and quality. You don't have to be a banker or hedge funder manager to enjoy good food, and I'm not sure what is so socially irresponsible about running a nice restaurant.
That's the theory, but then you have things like wage-fixing scandals as seen recently in Silicon Valley that conspire to prevent workers from capturing their fair share of the value.
This article isn't really arguing what you're arguing though. Productivity (in the US specifically) has continued to grow at a brisk pace, but wages have not. This does not mean that the US has slowed its ascent, and the third world has begun to eat into that productivity; it means that, as wages stagnate, this increased wealth is captured more and more by the top level, the businesses and owners.
If third world countries were eating into this wealth, you would see the entire pie shrinking. As it is, the pie is growing larger, but all that growth is going to the rich owners, and none of it to the workers.
So, you said elsewhere "Generally you can expect a Gigster project to be way cheaper (we've seen 10X in some cases) ", and yet your devs are making 10-20k? That does not add up.
This expectation is often emphasized and reinforced by LEOs themselves. Witness any time an officer refers to "civilians", as though they themselves are some extraordinary power outside normal society.
The thing is, we grow far more food than is required to feed the world on aggregate today. Distribution is a huge problem though, and growing more food without improving distribution strategies really doesn't help anyone.
On beer, craft beer is still far from outselling Bud. According to their own trade group[0], they hit 11% of total US sales last year, their highest ever by far. By comparison, so-called domestics (A-B Inbev, Miller Coors) control a vast majority of the market, with 47% of the total US market just going to A-B Inbev according to wikipedia [1].
Do they have an obligation to ignore the law because it's very difficult for citizens to enforce it? Because that's closer to what the parent is describing.