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More elaboration on what’s involved in “correctly” would probably drive the point home — “this works because” vs “works for me.”

How good is your model at picking good data structures?

There’s several orders of magnitude less available discussion of selecting data structures for problem domains than there is code.

If the underlying information is implicit in high volume of code available then maybe the models are good at it, especially when driven by devs who can/will prompt in that direction. And that assumption seems likely related to how much code was written by devs who focus on data.

It also doesn't have enough "not" contrasts. "Not to remember what we say here, but to remember what was done here."

Then again maybe the quality of Lincoln's literacy defies it.

That's an interesting question. And to the extent that we're shifting discussion from "taxes are terrible mistreatment of the hyperwealthy" to "taxes might make national business/economic development less robust", OK.

Worth noting that GDP per capita of Norway and Iceland are pretty close to the US:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita

Denmark's on the same order and Sweden isn't too far behind (and still has a handful of their own recognized global successes).

Using general stats like that helps avoid sharpshooter fallacies that could be hazards in picking a list of high profile successes.

Still, let's talk about those successes. What are the conditions that gave rise to SpaceX, Amazon, Google, and Walmart? Whatever they are, none of their stories seems path-dependent anyone's personal billions. SpaceX owes as much or more to government decisions to privately source launch capability (not to mention path dependence on public programs supporting a certain related company). Google was famously founded by not particularly wealthy PhD students with initial capital well under a million dollars. Walmart wasn't founded with millions let alone billions. Bezos was probably the wealthiest founder when it comes to your list -- maybe had a six figure net worth, possibly seven, certainly good networks for raising capital -- but the bootstrapping capital that went into it didn't require anyone to be a billionaire.

Whatever the US does right as far as positive business environment goes, it doesn't require personal billions, so it's pretty unlikely to stop with additional taxes on billionaire concentrations of wealth. Taxes which, again, at the level of any proposed rate, would most likely not even un-billionaire anyone.

It's almost like positions are created and managed by law as well as leadership, and even leadership is supposed to follow law.

Fractional direct appointments are the usual case in any large organization. If you're the chief executive, you don't hire individual department workers, you might not even pick individual department management, you probably pick other "C-level" staff and have them manage management personnel most of the time.

It's more like a captain of a ship than "an ant driving an elephant." Every avenue you have to direct the ship depends on a network of knowledge and relationships supporting steering and operational systems. You don't DIY turning the tanker, you team-turn the tanker because you've learned how to work with a team.

Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices.

The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.

I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.

> And 60x the population.

OK, let's assume that oil is the only relevant resource, and population is the other relevant factor, and there's no efficiencies of scale or exceptional American ingenuity that can be discovered. 30x the resources combined with 60 times the population would mean we should be able to provide at least half the floor that Norway does, right?

Does that mean if we discover another resource the US has, or efficiencies of scale, or an exceptionally ingenious solution, we can revise that number up?

What if we'd behaved differently in the past when our oil to population ratio was similar to Norway's (or better)? And when's the 2nd best time to start?

Or is this more of a shrug we're nothing compared to those fortunate Scandinavians and that's why we just can't have nice things that they have no matter how nice it would be to have those things, stiff upper lip chaps, greatest country in the world situation?

> And defends the world with defense expenditures.

This is the "I have to wash my hair that night" of excuses -- plausibly true at some level yet studiedly ignoring such a wide latitude of optionality involved that it's clearly covering a refusal.

> Once that door is open, there will be no end to it.

Slippery slope fallacy. Tax rates move, but not monotonically.

For average US households effective income tax rates are more or less flat for the last generation or three. For high eaners? To say that the trend is downward doesn't cover it, it's a dramatic drop compared to midcentury era rates.

Wealth taxes in the countries that have them don't seem to demand an ever larger share.

If your strongest example is washington state a capital gains tax rate change within the same order of magnitude (that's still well below average effective income tax rates) you don't have much of a case.

Lots of unevisceratedly wealthy people live in states where the highest income tax bracket has rates over 10%. I'm sure the people with over a million a year in income will remain prosperous.

> If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:

Also you'll be dead and as such won't have continued control over any of your previous assets. Hence the earlier comment to the effect that one may as well complain to God about having to loosen ones grasp on them at death as rail against rendering unto caeser.

The natural "tax rate" on assets at death is 100%. Any smaller number than that is an affordance from the cooperation of society.

> said many times that billionaires should not exist

Perhaps he's right and it's hard to draw a solid straight line between that scale of personal profit and input. Perhaps he's wrong.

Still, as discussed, the most extreme concrete policy that Sanders has proposed is a wealth tax of 5%, and we've discussed why the dynamics of that are not existential threats to the wealth of anyone, much less worthy of the term "evisceration."

No one is proposing taking all the money from even the billionares. Most likely outcome of a 5% tax rate is stabilization.

> it won't raise the general standard of living.

And yet other societies have managed to produce better general standards of living (and higher rates of entrepreneurial success) via various policies including some different tax rates.

> You will also never have companies like SpaceX.

Companies exist to broadly source capital to bring to bear on an enterprise. So it stands to reason that companies like Space X will exist whether the capital comes from a wide pool of investors whose upside is limited somewhere below hyperwealth, or a contribution from a narrower set of investors with a higher concentration, at least as long as there's a credible upside.

The "Nordic model" refers to the socioeconomics common in Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), not just to Norway.

It's about how you approach commons and common wealth. Any commons will do. It does not rely on oil resources per se.

Let's say for the sake of argument it does depend on oil wealth, though.

The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does (>200 billion barrels vs ~7 billion). It has already produced at least 200billion barrels since the 1850s. What if the US had treated the wealth from past oil production the way Norway has? What if it treated the next 200 billion that way?

And oil is only one of many commons resources to choose from.

> See Bernie Sanders!

Yes, I addressed Sanders proposal in my earlier comment: "single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy."

A single digit wealth tax is unlikely to fully offset even conventional yearly returns, hence the "might not have impact beyond stabilizing" the wealth of those subject to it.

Even if we assume no yearly returns though -- simply a 5% bite out of net worth -- a wealth tax will not make anyone in that economic strata unwealthy (there's a billions-floor beneath which it wouldn't apply, leaving the worst case still radically prosperous).

There's no reasonable basis to characterize that as "evisceration."

But repeating loaded terms like that as part of an ideological rosary is a common religious and rhetorical strategy.

> Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).

My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.

Having dynastic wealth flows limited over a few million dollars is also not reasonably described as "evisceration" (especially with all the other vehicles for transferring wealth).

May as well complain to God that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.

The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives.

No one is “eviscerated.”

And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public traction in the US. The most extreme proposals require single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy.

No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. Yet. But if we pretend the only options are (a) unencumbered hyperwealth with attendant hyper income inequality and (b) eviscerating the wealthy for long enough, it’s more likely some people will eventually embrace the latter.

And this is particularly relevant for the age of LLMs. None of them approach intelligence with reliance on a huge data commons (and likely even data that isn’t intended for the commons) they’re an enterprise with a natural arrow from the commons to the common wealth, if we can remember a culture that sustains it.

The rent on a literal 1980s apartment (let alone SFH mortgage) in every area that I’ve lived in has scaled up faster than average income. This is the trend for essentials.

Consumer electronics are cheaper; this is the trend for substitutable goods.

Love me the right 20-30 year old car, but the dramatic cost rise around covid times means the savings is only relative to new. A 3x increase in old car prices hasn’t been matched by 3 fold wage increases for most.

And of course we’re discussing this in a larger conversation about automating away 1980s jobs.

There’s no one in the world that creating an alternate “real” identity would be easier for than someone who can influence or even determine military or covert actions. It’s probably even legal for them to do so.

I'd guess this is a bet on which market is more lucrative:

* domain experts paying for tooling that will enhance their productivity

* capital/management class hoping to significantly replace domain experts

Software devs have been a famously tough market to sell tools to for a long time, so the better bet is B. Plus, the story on B is fantastic for fundraising; if there's a 10% chance that it checks out, you want some part of that as your capital portfolio.

Not much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.

I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.

"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"

"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.

Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.

This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.

If anything the culture of the last 30 years has made people dismissive and stupid about copyright — and no one has been more obtuse than an average tech libertarian.

You can spot the worst by really thoughtless ideas like “it’s so easy to make cheap copies now so that means copyright is obsolete!” which is laughably common in tech and tech influenced spaces, but shows a total lack of reflection on the topic - copyright was created as a thoughtful attempt to rebalance incentives in a time when industrialization made copies cheap. Cheap copies made copyright important! Cheaper copies - or fractal remixes - might make it more important.

And it’s copyright proponents who know more than most that it’s not a law of nature but a prosocial bargain that has to be maintained by a prosocial people.

If you’re more “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” if you’re more “eh, thinking through the incentives balance is hard” or “incentives don’t matter now that AI can do all the progress in the arts and sciences we need”, then yeah, copyright may not make sense, but don’t pretend that the problem is that its proponents just can’t conceive of anything else.

This is really interesting. Do you think it’s possible server-deployed software could also get similar efficiencies with adequate testing?

The bigger problem is that our digital gilded age is founded in an entrenched culture organizing and framing support for it. It’s one that has been carefully created with several tracks of effort going back decades (some even a century).

Counterculture is disorganized and shallow, and funding is not as abundant where understanding of this problem exists.

Love this.

There's a sense in which this isn't the most practical choice -- general purpose synths (software or hardware) and libraries available for most runtimes give you all the power you need to create the bleeps and bloops.

But there's also something good about old things and limited things being put to good use, and finding ways for creativity to thrive in constraints.

This... does not seem like separation of concerns.

Not to mention that the data layer seems like the one where you want to keep things most deterministic.

I am so glad to hear there are working PMs who are aware of this (and if you’re hiring it makes me more interested in considering your employer).

You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it.

Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.

And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.

The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.

If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.

The 13th century seems like a late stoic tributary to focus on — some stoicism seems present in the gospels.

It sounds like you’re referring a proof. Where can one find it, and what background prepares one for it?

Don’t forget the practical ability to dissipate waste heat on top of producing energy. That’s an upper limit to all energy use unless we decide boiling ourselves is fine, or find a way to successfully ignore thermodynamics, as you say.

It’s a test.

There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.

At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.

Oh and we barely think about externalities.

We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.

What’s the opposite of bootstrapping? Stakebooting?

I’m acquainted with people who act and speak like they’re flipping a Hitler-Pope coin.

Which more closely fits Solzhnetsin’s observation about the line between good and evil running down the center of every heart.

And people objecting to claims of absolute morality are usually responding to the specific lacks of various moral authoritarianisms rather than embracing total nihilism.

The core issue is that the current US leadership has abandoned its status as a former trustworthy leader that accepted cooperation and responsibility as key operating tenets.

If anyone threatened to take your home by force if you didn’t sell at his favorite price, the sane social discussion would focus on their uncivil threat and pro-social responses, not on victim blaming “the core issue is that I’ve abdicated my ability to defend my house by force.”

You could have a reasonable conversation about sovereign defense budgets and alliance contributions, but not while you’re threatening the sovereignty of an ally.

And all of this will make American citizens less safe, not more. It’s madness. There’s nothing to be gained here for most people by threat of force or hybrid warfare.

Telemetry in the hands of software craftsmen with a supporting business model will probably support improved software.

Telemetry in the hands of stakeholders whose stakes are business/career KPMs will probably serve those, and the software experience will follow.