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.

Side mirrors almost always leave a large blind spot directly behind and close to the vehicle. There's a reason that when firefighters are reversing their appliances they always have at least one of the crew physically get out and watch the area behind the vehicle.

Even a rear window and rear view mirror almost always leave a significant blind spot low and close behind the vehicle, which is why reversing cameras became a thing. When they're done well, they really are significantly safer, as well as sometimes making it a lot more reliable for most people to park the vehicle in difficult spaces.

One of the modern innovations I really would like to have is full AR on my windscreen. I want unexpected hazards highlighted in real time, particularly those that are more easily detectable by non-visual sensors, like big potholes or animals obscured by vegetation near the side of a country road. I want the actual driving line I need to take to follow my planned route through complex junctions overlaid slightly on my view of the road ahead. I want light amplification for night driving, ideally combined with some other technology that can reduce the glare from oncoming headlights to prevent dazzle.

Although I only want all of this if (a) it's implemented well and (b) any additional data it uses is reliably up-to-date and (c) there's an emergency shut-off that instantly clears everything off the windscreen in case anything goes wrong.

Don't worry. You probably have funky modern door handles that don't work when the power goes out anyway. Not that the power in an EV is likely to go out if it's underwater or on fire or anything.

Oh, don't be silly. Next you'll be making even more absurd claims, like that car theft was already a solved problem 20 years ago thanks to immobilisers, or that having separate physical controls for essential functions that you can find and use without taking your eyes off the road for several seconds to mess around with a touchscreen is safer, or that no-one ever hacked 100,000 cars at once from 1,000 miles away back when they didn't have always-on remote connectivity and allow OTA updates to their essential control systems.

Yes, as long as you're the one in the big, heavy car, it's great. Shame if you're the kid it's reversing over though.

Do you ever use reverse gear? What's behind you is pretty important when you're going backwards...

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.

Yes, Apple's shared RAM model really works for them in the context of running LLMs locally. It's a huge advantage. As you say, not much use for those running other platforms, though.

I'm impressed that anyone can afford a new development PC in 2026. I'd need a second mortgage with the price of the RAM, SSD and GPU these days!