petersellers

It's not inaccurate. While it is true that they didn't pay the rates on paper, their effective rate was still significantly higher than it is today (even with all the loopholes).

That is false, at least for the top tax bracket (which is what I'm referring to).

Even the Tax Foundation, which is a biased source that is anti-tax in general states that the effective rate for the top bracket was 6% higher then than it is today (https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...)

No? We aren't a communist country, so bringing up communist revolutions is irrelevant here.

We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying.

Also, the US government spends more money than it accrues every year, so there isn't any consolidation of money happening in the government (nor will there be if taxes go up).

> It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.

As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.

Regulations are removed all the time in the US (see the repeal of Glass-Steagall act as a recent, prominent example)

> I spent too many years of my life on Java. It was okay until someone wrote a thing in php (!!) in a day that would be have taken at least a month in Java. Maybe two.

Really curious to hear what that was, because I'm having a hard time believing that is true.

> I think the free market is probably a better outcome as long as there is oversight and regulation. The problem is weak regulation.

Public services can be regulated and have oversight, too. What properties do private services have that make them more amenable to being regulated?

Isn't it more likely that you can catch yourself during the planning phase if the amount of work being estimated exceeds your budget? That seems much cheaper and easier to pivot from than if you were to make that realization halfway through your implementation.

I can't speak for the person who posted it. Seems like it could have been an honest mistake to me.

An "appeal to authority" means something more specific (e.g. the logical fallacy "argument from authority") and this is not happening here.

The whole point I'm trying to make is that we should evaluate the writing based on its content. The person I originally responded to was dismissing it solely because of the person who wrote it (which ironically an ad hominem is a fallacy very similar to an appeal to authority but for the opposite reason).

How is that an appeal to authority?

Where is the appeal to authority? I'm not seeing it.

That's not critical thinking though, it's fallacious thinking. Whether or not someone is a "thought leader" has no bearing on the quality of the article.

You are attacking the person's writing capability, implying that the article is not good because they wrote something before that you disagreed with. You're trying to argue semantics here, but it doesn't really matter because either way your argument is fallacious.

In your original post, you dismissed the article because you read previous books of his and thought they were bad. That is literally an ad hominem.

I think it's more likely that if you can't find anything constructive to say about it, that maybe you don't have a valid argument (your original post was an ad hominem attack after all).

I find this kind of empty criticism frustrating. Do you have anything constructive to add about this article specifically?

Let's put aside for a moment your extremely broad characterization of the behavior of "all parents".

Do you not think that society should have an interest in ensuring that children are properly nurtured, educated, cared for, etc.?

Not in the US, you can't.

If the second chart is accurate then the first chart should be showing continual upward progress over time, but what we see is that the first chart is starting to flatten out around 2023.

Either the term "cumulative" is being used incorrectly, or different rules are being used to classify available jobs in each graph.

Maybe the first chart is filtering out duplicates?

Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)

> Twitter is better for users now

This is a totally subjective statement. For me its the opposite: All I seem to see there in replies lately are tweets about culture war bullshit talking points that are 100% noise and 0% intellectual value.

> Because it's not censored to high hell.

Except in Turkey, apparently

> But Twitter is better, leaner, and more popular than ever now, and deservedly so, now that that sinking ship was righted.

Hopefully this is sarcasm, because in reality the opposite is true (except for the leaner part).

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-is-now-worth-a-third-of...

> Again, my point is that I believe this is absolutely intentional. If in these emotional pleas to the community somebody comes out and says, “$1 per user per month is what we’re willing to accept”, you’re going to see the people that were on the app developers side flip out and say $1 a month is too high.

Your belief is strictly faith-based, without evidence.

> My evidence for this is that there’s a reason nobody has put a price they’re willing to pay out.

You don't know that, because you aren't privvy to all of the conversations that developers have been having with Reddit regarding pricing.

> You see it as one where Reddit has killed 3rd party apps.

I don't just "see it", it's already happened:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...

> If nobody is demanding free API access, why has the “movement” not put out a counteroffer for pricing that they’d be happy with?

I don't think this "movement" of third-party client developers is as organized as you think it is, but the Apollo developer did mention discussing pricing with Reddit here[1] and compared Reddit's API pricing to Imgur. Note that he never mentioned any expectation of "free", just that it was about 100x more expensive. I'm really not sure why you can't accept their intentions as being truthful or valid.

>My belief is that it’s because if they announce a number that is not $0, then everyone is going to find out that a lot of people are demanding free API access.

That sounds extremely unrealistic to me, but you don't have any evidence to support this so I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.

> “Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps” is a disingenuous statement.

It's not, because once they are forced to pass on the costs to their customers they will certainly lose a significant percentage of them. It's impossible to say exactly how many, but it's reasonable to assume that it could cost enough to make their app no longer viable. Again, not sure why that is so hard to believe.

> Is any app even planning to charge the new prices? If they don’t, then they’re killing themselves.

I'm not sure I understand this comment. Obviously all third party clients will be forced to pass on these costs to their customers if they go in to effect because they won't have a choice. I mean, it's so obvious that I'm not even sure why you are mentioning it.

>Honestly it’s a great campaign by the app makers to whip users up into a frenzy like this because it means more profit for themselves if Reddit backs down on the API pricing.

I'm completely baffled as to why you are unable to see this from the point of view of the app developer. Just put yourself in their shoes - if a critical dependency of yours started charging X times what they were charging before, it throws off your entire business plan and may make it no longer viable. Are you saying you wouldn't do anything to try and prevent that from happening before you had to change your whole business plan around in an attempt to stave off what will very likely be the death of your company?

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

> “We have no option and no way to exist unless Reddit gives in to our demands.”

That's a strawman. The complaint isn't that Reddit is charging money for API usage, it's that the pricing is extremely expensive.

> But the reality is that Reddit literally gave them an option.

Charging an exorbitant fee that will most likely kill all third-party clients isn't really an option, but ok.

> It’s like the “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” meme.

This is a very inaccurate analogy, and it makes me think you are missing the point of the complaints entirely.

> There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Again, no one is demanding free API access.

Not sure what your point is here?

We're talking about the fact that Reddit's API prices are going to be extremely high going forward. Your response was a dismissive "just charge 9 dollars". Obviously that is going to cause a lot of pain for all third party developers, which is the whole reason why everyone is complaining about this.

Doing that is going to kill a huge percentage of Apollo's user base. It's not a foregone conclusion that the app will die, but the chances of that happening are much much greater now than they were before. If you were the developer of Apollo I think you'd have every reason to be worried about that, and any opposition to this change would be justified.

I wonder if the observed decline in discussion quality has any correlation with the "boost" that is given to comments from accounts with blue check marks.

> Carmack had been pushing for an all-out device but got sidelined by Zuck's push towards cheap and scale

Is that true? From this article[1], it sounds like he had been pushing for cheap headsets, not expensive ones:

> There he talked about his internal efforts to push for the development of a "super cheap, super lightweight" Meta VR headset that could come in at "$250 and 250 grams." Instead, Meta has put its recent VR hardware efforts behind the heavily overdesigned and expensive $1,500 Quest Pro. "We're not building that [cheap, light] headset today, but I keep trying," Carmack said with some exasperation during the keynote.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/12/john-carmack-leaves-m...

What are the software sales people going to sell if there are no software developers to build their product?

In a way you're both right - software developers (usually) don't create/design/sell the entire product end-to-end, but they no doubt are a critical piece of the process. That gives them leverage.