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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • There are two considerations.

    For the American government and corporations, Chinese espionage is an obvious and real threat. NVidia doesn’t want China to steal their chip designs and the Pentagon doesn’t want China to steal military info.

    For American private citizens, it isn’t really a threat. It’s actually preferable in a way, because you know they won’t disclose whatever they learn to the American government. You might even consider buying a fully “designed and made in China” device, which the NSA might not have a backdoor to.

    This only makes it more concerning to the American government, because they lose control over their citizens.










  • The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.

    People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.

    Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.

    We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.

    Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.

    The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.

    The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.



  • Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.

    The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.

    Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.

    Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.

    Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.

    Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.

    And then progressively tax everything above that.



  • The humiliation of losing to a black woman.

    The past months the mood in America has been: not these two old geezers again.

    I am honestly optimistic that it’s going to be a landslide for the Democrats without Biden. Americans are just sick of Trump and they didn’t want Biden to run again.

    So the Democrats are giving the people what they want, while the Republicans are trying to force feed them something they don’t want.

    Let’s see how this plays out.


  • While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.

    From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.

    But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.

    In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.