How do they not have email when it's required to sign up for various sites, plus having android phones requires gmail, plus official documents, bank accounts, job applications etc. tend to ask for email; email is used for work as well...?
Notice how in the last several years, a lot of popular sites have allowed signing up with phone numbers, no email address required. Besides making the service more accessible to a generation that doesn’t use email, getting a person’s phone number is great for profiling them for advertising reasons.
In many countries, either WhatsApp or a PSTN number for receiving an SMS is used today for the things that you think are done with email. I have lived in two countries that have highly digitized government services, and they were provided over an official app where email wasn’t part of the signup flow.
Sure, maybe some people use email at work (but WhatsApp has eaten into even that in some regions), but then that address is so associated with work that they don’t use it for social contacts.
I can't speak for others, but this doesn't match my thinking at all.
I want to heavily tax the ultra rich because money is power, and vast inequality in power is undemocratic and just plain dangerous.
I don't really care if somebody buys ten massive yachts. It's annoying and seems wasteful but it's not worth too much of my attention.
But it's another matter if somebody buys politicians, laws, social change. The issue with someone like Elon Musk isn't that he owns a private jet, or even that he owns a rocket company, it's that he bought his way to taking an axe to major parts of our government by pouring unimaginable amounts of money into buying a presidential election.
It's not about grabbing stuff, it's about preventing people from accumulating too much power. The ultra-wealthy should be heavily taxed for the same reason the President shouldn't be given unlimited power to do whatever they want.
You cannot have billionaires and them not be immensely, structurally powerful.
That's the entire point of capitalism, that resources, including labor, be directed by those with capital.
Believing you can have a single human being in control of a non-negligible percentage of all resources of a country, and they wont somehow be actually powerful or influential is moronic.
Taking the power away from billionaires literally IS taking their money.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Power is power. Members of the Communist Party in the USSR were as wealthy as their subjects, their power differential was enormous.
I know, that's why I want to tax them, to remove their power.
Of course, you probably mean to remove their power centers without removing their money. But that doesn't make any sense. Money is power. You can't remove the power from a billionaire and leave them a billionaire.
It's the degree of power they hold, not a binary. A politican in Switzerland has much less power than a politician in China.
When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power. But when it is e.g printing money the calculus is massively different.
A Marxist peddles restructuring of the government to better represent the people. Notable attempts at that replaced existing governments with autocracies that promptly killed the Marxists and Anarchists among them, which is not what you were talking about, I don't think. What kind of revolutionary wants only to tear down their government and not replace it? Anarcho-primitivists, I guess?
That is not illuminating at all. Like, the author just imagines the premise and finds three ways to repeat it. There is no exploration into why people think inequality is unfair; the underlying assumption is that it is perfectly natural and trying to address it is hypocritical and harmful.
The other major assumption is that billionaires are rich because of something they did or are good at doing, better than anyone else could in their position. There is no challenge to this assumption in the text.
This belies a deep disconnect with reality, and an unwillingness to confront the idea that maybe excessive inequality is caused by too much concentrated power changing the rules to further concentrate power. Taxation is just one mechanism to combat this tendency; another way is the guillotine.
this is some of the most insipid dreck i've read in a long time. the only thing illuminated here is the author's complete lack of understanding regarding ability and worth and total inability to think beyond a system imposed upon him by others. i think the kids would say he's "billionaire glazing".
I think your blog post is confused. People on the left are pro-taxation because they (a) think billionaires do not have superpowers, and are benefiting from some combination of systemic injustices and plain old fraud gussied up for the modern era, and (b) think superheroes actually shouldn't be allowed to have 1,000,000 times the influence over the structure of the world and its economy compared to a mundane human, even if they existed.
There isn't a level of competence or ability that shifts the answer to the morality of power. There's not an earning threshold you can cross that entitles you to own a fiefdom or a level of genius that grants you moral right to dictate how others use your inventions. We create democracy and grant everyone an equal vote in matters that impact their lives. The economy gets layered on top to allocate resources efficiently. If the economy is deciding that some people live like kings and some like serfs, then we've failed to construct an economy that lives up to liberal values.
The vibe I get is that he's saying "you poors are just jealous of the billionaires who are smarter and richer than you, so you want to take it away from them"
The comparison to _literal super heroes_ from comic books definitely made me roll my eyes
My problem with billionaires is that their gains are in part from exploitation. I just don't believe that one person can actually produce billions of dollars of value all by themselves. They extract that value from other people and our whole system is structured to promote this.
There are probably millions people who could have been Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever. A million people with the right skills who maybe were born a few years too late or didn't have the right connections or just didn't have rich enough parents. It's a little too "winner take all" for my taste. And then those few winners end up having disproportionate affect on politics and issues that affect us all. It's just not a great system.
> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.
There are certainly sometimes unusual abilities in a positive sense, but the common case likely falls closer to having an unusual degree of sociopathy. It is unclear to me how else one could view the state of perfectly solvable human suffering in the world and continue to prioritize accumulating wealth over all else, moreover and overwhelmingly at the cost of being party to the suffering itself. Indeed, I suspect having such callous disregard for your fellow person is prerequisite to encountering these unfathomable sums.
When people with an intact capacity for empathy come into huge amounts of money I think it's far more common to give a large proportion of it away (say, Jane Street workers have a culture of doing this). And thus you only stay 'comfortably' wealthy, rather than accumulating so much that it distorts society around your singular existence.
> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.
If you count luck, maybe.
> But what if most billionaires had super-powers of the traditional comic book sort, like x-ray vision or an ability to fly, etc.? That is, what if people with physical super-powers earned billions in the labor market by selling the use of these powers? Would folks be just as eager to tax them to reduce unfair inequality?
Yes, I would.
> But if those few very rich folks had real physical super-powers, we would be a lot more afraid of their simple physical retaliation. They might be very effective at physically resisting our attempts to take their stuff.
Yes, and this is why a lot of superhero movies involve fighting the greedy superpowered villain.
Because they're making employees piss in bottles to survive the workday? They're buying up the representatives who are supposed to represent me? They're driving services we rely on into austerity? They get bailouts when they fuck up?
They have had good public education for the past decade or two and rank high in international student rankings. So, I would bet that high 'human capital' would be the cause here.
Polish education has a long tradition of excellence. Indeed, the last decade has seen reforms that have been heavily criticized for working against that.
You mean "MBA for a fee" Collegium Tumanum, or the best elite two universities which globally barely rank somewhere in the fifth hundred? Sorry it's not education. Poles are cheap and subservient, while cutthroat among each other.
IIRC Polish mathematicians were close to being the world's best prior to WWII, people like Banach and Tarski are remembered until today. Also, Enigma didn't get broken by Rejewski being cheap and subservient.
Given how strong Poland used to be in mathematical logic, I can see an alternate history line where WWII does not happen and first computers are developed in Krakow and Lwow.
But computer programming with Polish keywords would indeed be a bit of a hell ;)
> IIRC Polish mathematicians were close to being the world's best prior to WWII
That's right. The Lwów-Warsaw School, the Warsaw Schools, the Kraków School, and so on were big during the interbellum. There was a good deal of activity in the space of mathematics, logic, and philosophy within that scope (art, theater, film, literature, etc. had their respective flowerings).
However, what I had in mind was that education has always been important, with formal education beginning in the Middle Ages with the first cathedral/collegiate schools. And because Poland became increasingly republican in nature, demanding skillful articulation, argument, and diplomacy as a matter of statecraft, Latin culture was of such a high standard that, during the Renaissance and early modern period, foreigners would comment that they felt as though they were visting ancient Rome given the high level of Latin proficiency. I should also mention that the world's first ministry of education was founded in Poland in the 18th century during the reign of Stanislaus II Augustus, creating, among other things, the first comprehensive, state-mandated natural science curricula.
During the subsequent partitions and foreign occupations when germanization and russification campaigns were inflicted on the populace and severe restrictions on the Polish language were put in place, clandestine home schooling, underground education networks, and "floating universities" allowed the culture to survive. So it has a deeply-ingrained and special importance across a range of concerns, from Scholastic libertas to senatorial virtus to cultural survival to so-called "positivist" industry.
> Given how strong Poland used to be in mathematical logic, I can see an alternate history line where WWII does not happen and first computers are developed in Krakow and Lwow.
Indeed. Further evidence of this is that even under the restrictive and crippling policies of the communist state and Soviet influence, you still had a surprising amount of innovation in this space.
> But computer programming with Polish keywords would indeed be a bit of a hell ;)
What would really be delicious is an inflected, synthetic programming language. ;)
Stanislaus II Augustus was a Russian tool, nobody ever felt in Poland like in ancient Rome. The few scientific achievements from the interwar period are gone forever without heritage or even continuity, and they're not even that impressing comparatively to other European countries. Modern Poles put all money into real estate and crypto scams, that's their intellectual sophistication.
This is an ahistorical view lacking nuance. Stanislaus found himself in an impossible situation. He was not the Russian pawn you uncharitably make him out to be. Rather, he often used his position to strengthen the Commonwealth in ways that were at odds with Russian interest. Recall that he inherited the throne of a state that was already on its last legs. Russia held a knife at the Commonwealth's throat. He was walking a very thin tightrope with Russia. His efforts, at the very least, contributed to giving Poles a greater cultural ability to survive the subsequent partition, giving it focus.
> nobody ever felt in Poland like in ancient Rome.
I suspect you (uncharitably) suppose I mean everyone in the streets was walking around speaking Latin. That's obviously not what I meant. I am referring specifically to the educated class - sons of the nobility, magnates, clergy, statesmen, diplomats, senators, scholars, the royal court, even country squires. The szlachta's Sarmatian culture saw itself as a spiritual successor to the Roman Republic, and it showed.
> The few scientific achievements from the interwar period are gone forever without heritage or even continuity [...etc, etc, blah, blah, blah...]
> I am referring specifically to the educated class - sons of the nobility, magnates, clergy, statesmen, diplomats, senators, scholars, the royal court, even country squires. The szlachta's Sarmatian culture saw itself as a spiritual successor to the Roman Republic, and it showed.
The szlachta's "culture" under leadership of a Russian tool led directly to three partitions which quickly ended their sophisticated "culture".
Neither Poland, nor Romania or Iran are know for excellence in education. There is this specific niche in particular age group but that doesn't translate into meaningful industry or into anything really. They are relatively good at solving quizzes, that's it.
Romania is great and it's definitely punching above it's weight, just like Poland, just with the smaller population. Iran is 3 times larger than Poland in term of population so it's not an outlier like Poland and Romania.
And the point is, you should expect best results from China and US just by population alone. South Korea at 3rd place is a testament to their grueling education. But Poland and Romania (and Bulgaria) are something else. Those are not technologically advanced countries. They don't have particular stress on education.
If someone is from one of 75 countries with ban on immigration but also has dual citizenship from a country that is not banned, do they need to go to that second country's US embassy when applying for an immigration visa?
The Gulf countries are dumping their gold reserves and buying dollars, that put a momentary halt on what was a steady declining trajectory for the USD. But since this blip isn't caused by structural reasons (nothing changed in the US economy), it will only last as long as these countries have gold to sell.
I'll also recommend Being You by Seth Anil. It makes a lot of sense of consciousness to me. It certainly doesn't answer the question but it's not just throw your hands up and "we have no idea why qualia", and it's also not just "here's a list of neural correlates of consciousness and we won't even discuss qualia".
It goes through how sensations fit into this highly constrained, highly functional hallucination that models the outside world as a sort of bayesian prediction about the world as they relate to your concerns and capabilities as a human, and then it has a very interesting discussion about emotions as they relate to inner bodily sensations.
How easily can one get E1 treaty trader visa and what volume and quantity of trade are recommended? If I have a company registered in my home country (eligible country) and have payouts from a US provider like an advertising network, affiliate provider or some marketplace etc. and my clients are all US companies, can I apply for that visa? Would a low six figure yearly revenue with monthly payout be sufficient for that?
There's no minimum amount of trade specified in the regulations and the answer depends in part on other factors (such as how active the foreign and U.S. companies are and whether they employees and funding) but the minimum annual trade is generally understood to be at least $100K/$150K.
Can you have just one US client like a marketplace or network that gives you monthly payouts totalling $150k a year? The client is a famous US based company.
Why would public ownership deliver those benefits? Walmart is delivering cheap, quality and reliable service in retail. Soviet stores we not better than American ones.
If you want to get a visitor visa to attend an incubator like YC, is it better to:
1) wait to be admitted into YC and get B1 visa for 3 months. Do you get some kind of invitation letter from YC that increases your chances of approval?
2) get a normal tourist visa now and specify you will go to the US for a week or two like a normal tourist and later use that to go to incubator training.
There's no need to get a new B-1/B-2 visa to attend YC if one already has such a visa. But when to try to get such visa if one doesn't have it already, whether before or after getting accepted into YC, will depend on a variety of factors specific to that person, such as his or her countries of citizenship and residence, current employment/student status, U.S. immigration history, etc.
