It's this moral panic over water and power for datacenters - results in people going too far to prove a point.

No argument there. I'm just fed up with people pretending that the problem is with boring utilities and civilization; rather than with CEOs and their circles.

It's especially irksome when it comes from the areas of 'tech' that are frankly kind of lightweight in a technical sense. Somehow the hardware side manages to go from 800nm to 5nm without sounding off their meds about it; while dudes who manage to pay someone to pay AWS to serve some javascript to a webview on an iphone are babbling about how how disruptive their innovation is.

In early Soviet Union, there was indeed a maximum salary, called a partmaximum.

Wesley Lloyd representing the State of Washington proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have limited annual incomes to $1 million

Another colleague John Snyder introduced another amendment proposal that would have limited personal wealth to $1 million.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of $25,000 Also proposed a 100 percent tax on income over 40,000, yeah, I know those two numbers don't add up quite right, probably after the 25,000 was taxed.

Until it was fixed, people in Sweden occasionally faced a tax of 102 percent. Talk about a positive feedback loop. Astrid Lindgren was an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So there are plenty of people who demand a tax rate of 100 percent on any income over (x), which is exactly a maximum wage.

I think people call it a better distribution of wealth, that doesn't need a level field but when there is too much concentration of wealth there is also too much concentration of power (capitalism by definition?).

Well, I do suspect that if you create a maximum wage, and just give that money to everyone else, and keep doing it until there is a standard salary. That's a level playing field, where everyone makes the same wages. And then the question becomes, If I make the same mopping floors as I would in stressful dangerous jobs, what would be the reason to do those jobs?

What help was that, since you appear to be claiming I am dissembling? My family told me that I was on my own after graduating high school. And what kind of background makes for success. We lived on surplus food (no food stamps at that time) I wore clothing from second hand stores, or hand me downs from relatives. The only "help" I got was marrying a woman with similar values. Which means she didn't overspend by nature.

Sigh. If there is one thing I detest, it is people playing victim. No, I'm no victim. I find people pulling out replies like you just did rather unbecoming. and really, like uno reverse victim claims.

I hear people working very very hard to cast me as the mortal enemy. If you noted, I support the social programs we have her to help the poor people in teh country - but kind sir, I see this all the time. You need an enemy, someone to be everything that you believe is wrong. Your hatred noted, may it serve you and your narrative well.

I know, right? Success for me is having enough money to do the things that make life worthwhile. Money in and of itself is very boring. And many people on both sides of what was once classed as class warfare are consumed with money.

I even enjoy paying it forward. Success is living well, So I take vacations pretty often. I live in a decent but not ostentatious house. Now to paying it forward. When I go out to eat with the wife or friends, I tip 75 to 100 percent. My woodworking "hobby" allows me to donate a lot of rather fine bowls and flatwork to various charities that have auctions and they generate a lot of money for them. I’ve been the CEO of two 501(c)3 charitable organizations, one youth sports oriented, and the most recent one a public education and public service organization. Wife and I contribute to food banks. Do I have money? Sure. But my definition of success isn't just the number of dollars in my checking savings, and investment accounts.

In stark reality, all of the eat the rich people are just practicing their own version of hatred. And your narrative is just an attempt to cast me as that privileged class, who leech off of society, while stomping everyone else.

Regardless, since you have already accused me of lying, you. are likely just going to be saying all the other things I say do that don't align with your narrative are just some rich person lying.

I thought we might have a fruitful conversation. I was completely wrong about that part.

Realistically email hosting is probably a safe-ish business. The required software is already more or less commodified(and the sort of people who pay extra for Proton rather than just using gmail or whatever their ISP points them to are the ones who specifically Do Not want you churning the UI all the time), just not desperately entertaining to administer; and the major challenge(even if you just ignore the amount of admin required to stay on top of security risks when internet facing and hope to get lucky) is achieving the necessary scale and stubbornness to get decent odds of delivery on the various major recipients of email who, at least initially, shoot the spammer and ask questions later or never if novel senders start popping up.

You could already DIY-mailsever in a fairly short span of time well before it became viable to ask a bot to do it; people just prefer not to because babysitting postfix just so that you can get rejected by the various services people you are tryign to reach use is not terribly rewarding.

It's not necessarily a glamorous or high margin sort of business; adequately competent hosted email isn't a wildly differentiated product; but people tend to not enjoy changing email addresses/repointing DNS/migrating mailboxes; so it's not a super cutthroat commodified market where people switch every quarter for the absolute lowest price. If you don't do anything particularly obnoxious or try to push price hikes there's a decent amount of inertia.

However, and this is what makes this guy's ranting seem so unhinged, it's precisely not the sort of business where you'd expect some sort of "AI transformation"; or a bunch of panting about whether the stack has velocity. Proton's config is a bit more fiddly than average, because it is supposed to provide better than 'just trust me bro' privacy assurances; but they do operate the fax machine of the internet age. We call it "email". And their customers are paying them for mailserver stay up; not the agentic everything app.

I'm not sure if this guy is butthurt because he didn't manage to score a nobel during his science time; or because he's not looking at an altman IPO; but the fact that he is screaming like a lunatic about “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity" when he runs something that is, as a feature, supposed to be a deeply boring utility suggests profound temperamental unsuitability.

It seems ironic, and a little telling, for the CEO of a company whose whole purpose is "mailserver stay up; securely" to be screaming at people about " Don't be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age".

Dude, you aren't some kind of randroid superman hero of industry. You run a kind of boring utility company. Which is fine; civilization runs on boring utilities quietly handled by competent people. Problem is that you don't seem to be fine with it.

I do not know that what I have posted qualifies as any "least" situation. What is your solution, tovarisch? A real solution, just not more of the incitement to eat the rich.

Never said it was, you just saw something you didn't like, and stopped taking input. to clarify, I'll repeat - I wrote:

"Well, to clarify, since we're. worried about communism versus capitalism, the US is in no way shape or form capitalism. It is a mixture of corporatism and (cover the kid's ears folks!!) socialism."

We have quite a few socialism based benefits for people of low income. I already pointed that out, but by that time, you were freaking out.

There is a reason why section 8 exists. That reason is the failure of the so called "projects", where apartment buildings were built for low income people. Ironically, one of the reasons they failed was that they would not take working class families, but only the poorest, most needy, and oftentimes most troubled. They were also built in the poorest urban areas. They also had rent control caps, so maintenance often couldn't be made - there was no money for it.

Section 8 is not perfect and has its issues, but it does a couple things the projects did not. Section 8 has mixed income housing, the poor are living in the same places as middle income people not on section 8, and mixed social integration.

People make the decisions. Money indeed does play into it.

That said, with your apparent desire for the poor to make decisions, we do have to deal with some unfortunate truths. Wealth, or the lack of it, does not translate to worth. Some people are born to wealth, some achieve it via hard work, some achieve it through unethical means. It is a mix.

And the poor - it is very similar, some is bad luck - think the handicapped, some of the mentally challenged. Some is drive - not all people have drive. This is also a mix.

We have other things in the mix. Wealthy people who believe all poor are deserving of it, and poor people who believe that worthiness and ethics are inversely proportional to the amount of money a person has. Both are abysmally brain dead ideas, and leave the believer in a highly manipulable state.

I might have a viewpoint based on my personal experience of starting out in poverty, and working my way many rungs up the social and wealth ladder.

Asshats and good people are on each level.

And I do judge. I do it based on character, not the contents of the wallet or amount of melanin in the skin, or country of origin.

Pissed off a comrade, did I?

As long as the inflation of your assets beats the inflation of your expenses, sure. People love to say "$1M isn't so much anymore anyways!" If you have $1M in the S&p500, you have 3.7% of that ($37K) invested in the energy sector. Returns on the energy sector: 61% over the 12 months ending 10/29/2026 - a $22,600 gain. That's a lot of gas money! But yeah, you have to be invested and have equity in the system. Then even the bad things have a silver lining quite often (or in this case, a minor windfall).

That's just not the case

https://thehustle.co/hs-fs/hub... 1/6 of US households now have over $1M in net worth. There are millions of us all over, living comfortably in retirement, balances go up and down but mainly up. Stick with investing and towards retirement it and your annual growtih will likely dwarf what your salary ever did. Buy and hold low cost index funds, it works.

Ultimately your tech gets outmoded, then you have to act. "Searching" is a big waste of time compared to just having your question answered.

I keep getting banned, and I don't even know why. Then log in with an old account and they ban that, for 'attempting to circumvent the first ban.' Do that a couple times and the weeklong ban because a perma-ban for "repeatedly" doing all the above.

It's such a joke, they go hyperbolic running some story that Elon Musk banned somebody from Twitter. Then they ban like crazy at the drop of a hat.

Even if AI didn't "funadamentally" advance at all for the next decade, human/AI interaction will be revolutionized by the end of that time through that use of AI alone. Every phone I get, I hate re-learning the menu structures. That is so over. From now on it should be, "hey google - in 3 seconds take a photo with the flash." Of for cars of course GOOG has Waymo. "Take me to Safeway." done. Not to say that alone would justify the AI-driven valuation of today's stock market, but even that would be a big thing. Much more important than the XeroxX Parc "miracle demos" people have been playing up for the last 50 years.

Disagree, you're incentivizing insiders to leak information. What do you think of the rash of stories along these lines? https://www.jpost.com/israel-n...

Big difference is investing is a net positive. It is possible for everybody to win, and in fact over time, most do. That' plenty of difference to affect public policy.

I know of no one who uttered the word that "capitalism is the root of all problems"

However, is that an actual point making the many posts speaking of end stage capitalism, or is from OP "With capitalism we are rushing off the side of a cliff."

not If you demand specific wording, no - I saw no such exact wording. But unless you are new here, there is a lot of hate heaped on "capitalism" Especially towards one particular country where there is a narrative that said country is run by capitalism. It isn't

Well, let's look at the country in question. Here in the USA we are not living under capitalism. We have a combination of corporatism, with a lot of socialism effects tossed in.

There are many benefits for people of low economic means. Free phones, free laptops, Heating oil assistance, low cost internet, section 8 housing (if you are not an American, Section 8 is a program where a low income person pays a small amount, perhaps a couple hundred dollars a month for their apartment and the Government picks up the rest) WIC- Women, Infants, & Children program giving free food. Medicaid for children and many adults. Medicare, Social Security disabled benefits for adults, and children, even Social Security benefits for children of older parents. We have food Stamp programs, we have free transportation for poor and retired people, including personal pickup and delivery for people living in areas not served by regular public transportation.

This does not sound to me like Capitalism in any shape or form.

These are things that don't get mentioned much. At one point in the past, I provided cites and links to all of this. It varies by state, but even deep red states have these programs.

You tell me. Should there be a maximum allowable salary? How do we make a completely level playing field? Force the driven not to work?

I have to note, I was born in poverty, and worked myself up to around top 10 percent. Zero help. Put myself through college, built a salable skillset. Doing 6 figures in retirement. So I'm probably in the group who need penalized for success.

So how do we deal with the driven vs the non-driven? How do we deal with those who build something? I built my money through frugal living and saving while young and then at around 50, really hit my stride. Waited until interest rates were down, then bought a house that's below what I was approved for, and paid it off in less than 15 years. Kept saving and investing. Don't want to turn this into Ol's financial classes though.

And I'm astute enough to know that not everyone is going to do that. But in the modern parlance, I am the bad person, and they must have the same economic resources as I do. So yes, I've been told I was part of the problem.

Now I might not be the brightest person in the room, but my experience has been that while some are whining about how bad it is that only some people have money, that the proper gestalt is a level playing field, I would propose that it really isn't possible to make that level playing field. Mainly because of different abilities and individual drives.

What do we do with the "obscene" rich, and the poor that are not driven or mentally capable on the other end. I've personally shown that with drive, a very poor person can work their way up that ladder. Takes hard work and financial smarts. No, not everyone has that combo. And here in the land people love to hate we have a way to help the people that might be stuck on the lower end of the economic scale, and don't really care about rising any further. I support such a system.

Now your solution for a level playing field?