Back in the early 2000's (before smartphones and social media) I used to work at a company where we'd go out to lunch almost every day as a group. There were people of both political persuasions (this was in the US) and we'd have real thoughtful discussions about politics face-to-face. Feelings were on display. People were a little exasperated at times. But everyone went back to work and worked together and got shit done, and were respectful to each other.

A few years ago I was back in the US on a job, and a bunch of us were going out to lunch, and I said, "is so-and-so coming?" and they said, "no, he won't come with us. He's a democrat." I guess they didn't consider Canadians democrats because I was still invited. But that's how bad it's gotten, and let's not kid ourselves... it's entirely social media that's changed how people communicate.

I was at dinner with a group of people (in Canada) a year ago. My mother and an acquaintance started arguing over some kind of politics. In my mind it was pretty mild and they did listen to each other. She apologized to me later, and I said, "No, don't apologize! I want people to spend time talking face-to-face! It's way more civil than what gets said online, and you were both listening to each other." It's not like they stopped talking to each other... they still have pleasant conversations now when they see each other.

I suggest getting to know people who disagree with you, and just spend some time together. Ideas only change when people feel listened to.

The idea of catching the rocket means you don't have to include landing legs, which is a significant weight savings. You add the weight on the part that never goes "up". It's a good idea, and the same reason that SpaceX's next generation Starship system uses catch arms to catch the booster and second stage when they return. You do spend a bit more time hovering, which is consuming fuel. I assume the engineers did the math and the fuel you need to hover for a couple seconds is lighter than the weight (and increased drag & complexity) of the landing legs.

The only interesting story you can tell about Superman is bringing up the question... "If you're so powerful, why not just use it for your own purposes? Nobody can stop you. Why help people?" And the answer, which has always been part of the Superman mythos, was that he was raised by two salt-of-the-earth good people out in the middle of nowhere who taught him good old fashioned American values. He does it because it's the right thing to do. Does anyone remember "Truth, Justice (and the American Way)?" I think the recent Superman movie did a reasonable job of leaning into that, in an environment where the audience is jaded about American institutions. It's a tough sell, particularly trying to sell the movie to urban audiences to see everything rural as something to look down on, and rural audiences who see everything urban as selfish and corrupt.

What you just said is super-creepy in a "one of us, one of us" kind of way. Have you ever read Brave New World?

Again, accumulation is a necessary mechanism of the system.

If you were running a centralized economic committee (like in the soviet system) then you need a way to figure out which committee members are making good decisions, and which are making poor ones. So one way is to give all the new ones a small portfolio and get rid of the ones that run it into the ground, and promote the ones that do well by giving them larger portfolios.

Under a free market system that allows personal ownership you're essentially doing the same thing. The people who make sound financial decisions will grow their wealth by making good choices of what to invest it in. The guy who sets up a really efficient trucking company in an area that has a lot of demand for transportation services will accumulate wealth. When his son takes over and stops maintaining the fleet and takes the proceeds of the company and buys a huge yacht, his wealth starts dropping.

When the government takes some percentage of profits and invests it into medical care, education, or roads, then we see general efficiency improvements across society (healthy educated people are more productive).

But if society were to take a chunk of wealth from people who've accumulated it and they handed it out as lump sum cheques to average people, you have to carefully consider what's actually happening. First of all, wealthy people don't have wealth sitting there in a bank account. Almost all of their wealth is in the form of shares of companies. So in order to pay the tax they have to sell a significant number of those shares on a market. That will drop the price of those shares, including the price of the shares sitting in people's retirement funds. So who is going to buy those shares? Who has the cash to actually buy them? It's not even clear to me that there's *this* much cash sitting around ready to buy shares. But what's certain is that the people who are getting the lump sum cheques in the mail are almost certainly not the ones buying those shares. So we're moving shares from people to some other people who have cash sitting around waiting for a good deal, and that cash is then paid to the government and given out to the population. Those people then spend it on, presumably consumables like food, clothes, televisions, electronic devices. Maybe a few of them pay off debts. Very few of them will invest it with the same economic smarts that lead to that wealth being created in the first place. So you forced the top wealth accumulators to sell their shares to some people who were sitting on a pile of cash, for a discount, and then you gave that pile of cash to the people who did nothing more than drive up inflation. I'm not sure this is good for the economy at all.

Paying a share of corporate profits to the government who use it to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure sounds like a better plan to me.

This is just the latest app produced by the "I could code this in a weekend" crowd.

He must have read that BS book that Oprah was promoting years ago called The Secret. "It is based on the belief of the pseudoscientific law of attraction, which claims that thought alone can influence objective circumstances within one's life."

You definitely should pay more marginal tax as you make more money, up to some point. The first $10 or $20k you make should be tax-free, and then the tax rate should become progressively higher after that, but should max out around 30% or so. But that's only 30% of income, not 30% of net assets. Taxing assets is theft. Taxing income is progressive.

However, the accumulation of wealth into the hands of people who make good investments (i.e. making good choices of what to spend it on so that they invest in something profitable) is a valuable feature of the system, and is the reason it's allowed to happen. The government is bad at choosing projects to invest in. The market does it automatically and in an efficient and distributed manner. Picking the right investments is the useful work that entrepreneurs and capitalists are providing to society. If you do something to prevent more capital being given to the people who are making the best investment decisions, then you're actively discouraging the efficient allocation of capital. That would be a good way to run your country into the ground.

The government's job is to regulate the negative aspects of capitalism. That means it has to prevent tax loop-holes for the wealthy (as you said), stop corrupt officials from profiting from their position, punish companies for monopolistic behavior, and reduce the influence of money in the political system. These are the things we should be voting for. Not a 5% government approved theft of assets.

I didn't say 'no parents', I said 'most'. Also, you're posting on slashdot so your 5 parents that you work with are highly likely to be working in the tech world. Sure, people who understand technology are more likely to be skeptical of social media and AI and are going to teach their kids online safety and are going to limit it. But that's certainly a minority of parents. The vast majority of non-computer people will go onto google, type a question in, and 100% believe the entire AI blurb that it spits out at the top. Just like most people will eat too much junk food. You're talking about products that are literally designed to circumvent rational thought and appeal directly to our dopamine receptors. It's not a fair fight.

Realistically most parents aren't monitoring what their kids are doing online. When my kids were in grade 7 and starting to complain that all their friends had devices (and cell phones), I was shocked to learn that many of the kids in their grade had already seen Deadpool. This is an R-rated film, and specifically it has explicit sex scenes and a ton of gore. I'm OK with parents making decisions for their own kids and even watching an R-rated film with them if the parent has OK'd it (I watched the Matrix with my kids when they were 13), but it was clear that these kids just had an iPad with Netflix and Disney+ installed and there was no parental locking, so they could watch whatever they wanted.

Believing that parents will monitor what their kids do online is like believing they'll feed them breakfast every morning. We have breakfast programs in schools for a reason.

I'm not sure that's true. You can cut emissions first by just installing solar panels, which is very cheap and offsets a lot of the energy use at peak times (mostly due to AC). You can also make sure you've developed your hydroelectric sites. Then you need to up the nuclear generation, which is nearly zero emissions and can provide base load power. Then you're only left with your variable load, which is typically provided by natural gas. The only zero-emission substitute for that is battery capacity, which is expensive but certainly feasible. For example, "In Ontario, 87% of electricity is produced carbon-free from hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar. But the remainder comes from natural gas plants, especially during peak hours as they are usually the generating resource responding to short-term changes in demand." (source)

How big are the buyouts, roughly?

Take a note of the countries that were at that conference, and the ones that weren't. The biggest consumers aren't there.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz drops oil supply by about 20% worldwide. That's the amount that has to either be replaced with production elsewhere (likely Russia) or replaced with alternatives (wind, solar, nuclear, etc.). Nobody is suggesting that we're going to replace 100% of fossil fuels with renewables. For a small island nation that already has diesel generators, this means a large up-front capital investment to build a large amount of solar and/or wind and a large battery bank, but the ongoing costs will be lower than purchasing diesel fuel. Unfortunately capital (the thing you use to build stuff) is expensive right now and looks like it will stay high for a long time, so that makes the initial construction a lot more expensive. Which means less spending on other stuff for those nations, like building industrial plant, schools, roads, etc.

Think about the incentives involved in the new AI race.

We've inventing a new type of machine. The machines are big and huge and complicated and consume enormous resources, so they're necessarily centralized. These machines are wondrous marvels. You can ask them a question and 9 times out of 10 they give you a relevant and useful answer.

People are naturally trustworthy of machines because we view computers as infallible. If I store contact information in my contacts list and go back and retrieve it later, the information is still there 100% intact. It augments our brains with perfect memory and recall. After all, that's what computers do.

So almost everyone trusts these new machines intrinsically. Few people question the answers that are given, and even if you were a little skeptical, it's much less work to convince yourself that it's probably right than to track down the supporting material.

The organizations that control these new machines have a perverse incentive. They can make far more money by manipulating the answers that the machine produces in subtle ways for their benefit, or for the benefit of their paying clients. "What is the best dishwasher?" "Are there any pharmacies in my area open until midnight?" "Summarize the political platform of candidates X, Y, and Z." "What medication can treat such-and-such disease?" These are all prompts that can be monetized by the AI provider.

We know they will because companies have been inserting paid advertising and results into our search queries and emails for years.

Imagine the power that you wield if you own a machine that everybody trusts implicitly with their most important questions and most sensitive information.

That's clearly what we're building. We can't say we didn't know and weren't warned.