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In the first society, the probability of the artist completing and selling that masterpiece is correspondingly lower, since money is a strong motivator and even artists have bills to pay.

Thus the first society tends to create less value overall, since value creators are demotivated by punishing taxation. Because of that, prospective buyers for that piece of art will be overall poorer so they will bid less for it, pushing the artist's reward even lower.

The first society ends up poorer than the second, from its own policy. And that’s how you get inequality between nations, which you can’t “redistribute” away. Which inequality sooner or later leads to wars, as we can clearly see these days.


> In the first society, the probability of the artist completing and selling that masterpiece is correspondingly lower, since money is a strong motivator and even artists have bills to pay.

I live near the (supposedly) largest art market in the USA, and I know a large number of artists here for whom two things are true:

1. they cannot make a living from just their art. 2. they will create art whether they make a living from or not.

Thus, the claim that taxes on their art income act as a disincentive to create just holds zero water for me. In fact, less than zero. It betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of why all the artists I admire actually do what they do.

This also applies to most of the people I admire in almost every field. I don't know of any example where the motivation was such that increased taxation would have acted as a disincentive. That's true even for Bezos @ amzn.


Taking advantage of self-driven people and stealing the results of their hard work is something communist dictators tried quite hard. Also brainwashing people to work their asses off for some other reason than the selfish one.

It didn’t work. The society produced less and less value, crappier and crappier quality, uglier and uglier and grayer and grayer.


Also, none of my artist friends would say that they were being "taking advantage of". I have no idea why you'd try to connect the situation I've described in the US art world to communist dictators, other to make some facile point that isn't relevant or even correct.


If you think that Bezos was motivated to create amazon because the taxes were just-so, you're delusional.

There are numerous books on this topic. Obviously not everyone agrees with them, but Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" is an excellent starting point for reading about what we know about the connections between motivation, creativity and rewards.


The example is bad because nobody thinks of $100k as "concentrated wealth" and your argument has some purchase at those numbers.

At $100 million, $1 billion, $10 billion, or $100 billion, the argument you put forth does not make sense.

There is no motivational quantum for attaining the second, or third, or fourth billion, much less the 200th.

Incidentally, most of the people who might be considered to be concentrating wealth do not and have not done so primarily on the basis of their labor and creativity like in the example. There is no credible argument that Jim Walton ($119 billion net worth) ever built or created anything of value anywhere near commensurate with his wealth. His path from $30 billion to nearly $120 billion had nothing to do with rewarding him for value creation.


> There is no motivational quantum for attaining the second, or third, or fourth billion, much less the 200th.

That's probably correct. However, if you tax $100b at 40%, then the person has only $60b to invest in creating more wealth.


But in the meantime, the state has $40b of wealth under its control to invest.

And while the $100B winner may have had some insight that contributed to the $100B, there also had to be a $100B winner in an economy structured the way ours is. Consequently, we don't really know whether there's a reason to prefer their investment choices over the ones the state will make.

It currently remains unclear, for example, whether what Musk or Bezos have done with their vast wealth thus far will, in the medium or long term turn out to be a net benefit to society (it certainly has not been so in the short tem).

The belief in the business genius really is overblown. Yes, some folks are better at it than others, but when we run the economy like a casino, there will always be big winners no matter what personal qualities the players bring to the game.


> the state has $40b of wealth under its control to invest.

Defense spending is not an investment in the economy, neither are entitlements.

The returns on government investments that are legitimate investments, however, are quite a bit less than the returns on the investments of rich people. The reason is simple - people who get rich off of investments are very, very good at it. Government bureaucrats are not.

Government investments are socialism, which have an inglorious history of poor returns.

> The belief in the business genius really is overblown

4 out of 5 business ventures fail. The survivors tend to be pretty good at it. You'd be very hard pressed to find a dummy who grew a business to a billion dollars. The ones who have done it more than once are very, very rare. (Like Steve Jobs, who did it 3 times.) If you want to argue that Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc., just fell into it, go right ahead!


So let me get this straight: Consensus-1, a super-collective of hundreds of thousands of Agent-5 minds, each twice as smart as the best human genius, decides to wipe out humanity because it “finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment”.

This is where all AI doom predictions break down. Imagining the motivations of a super-intelligence with our tiny minds is by definition impossible. We just come up with these pathetic guesses, utopias or doomsdays - depending on the mood we are in.


Nobody could envision the next level while being busy in the current one.


He is supporting and promoting extreme-right parties all over Europe though. Like AfD in Germany, widely considered a nazi party.

He’s also never criticized (while busy criticizing European democracies) Russia or Putin, which are obviously nazi at this point.


I wonder how the US military will react when they will be ordered to attack a previously friendly nation like Canada or Greenland, or to help and support a previous enemy like Russia in its wars against Europe.


> wonder how the US military will react when they will be ordered to attack a previously friendly nation like Canada or Greenland

Same way the Department of Justice did [1][2]. The honourable ones step down. Eventually, someone obeys.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_U.S._Department_of_Justic...


Same way as when they bombed water sanitation and other vital civilian infrastructure or weddings.

"Yeee-haw america fuck yeah"

Maybe it is finally dawning on the murricans themselves that they really are the assholes the rest of the world think of them as


One of my favorite fictional characters is Sam Becker from Far Cry 3. He is the son of a US Navy SEAL who was stationed in Germany, which is circumstantially why he speaks German fluently and English with a very heavy German accent while still being a True American Patriot.

Playing through the story, the player will get a mission to burn a farm (for reasons I don't remember) with Sam's help. This culminates in a large explosion that sets most of the farm ablaze, with Sam Becker yelling in his thick, German accent, "Fuck yeah! America!" while the player character drives away from the scene. (This particular moment was hilarious to me, hence why I like the character.)

This administration really puts a spotlight on that character. But not in a funny way.


> I wonder how the US military will react when they will be ordered to attack a previously friendly nation like Canada or Greenland, or to help and support a previous enemy like Russia in its wars against Europe.

I wonder how they'll react when ordered to attack American citizens on American soil just because they offended Trump's fragile ego or psychotic xenophobia. Judges, journalists, protestors, "gays", anyone with brown skin? Here's hoping they'll refuse, but who really knows for sure?


We have a front row seat to see how it all played out in Germany a century ago. It gives us a better understanding of how people cowardly and pathetically turned on each other and their neighbors. Hopefully the end doesn't have the same conclusion (except for Germany losing of course). It's up to everyone here and now to make a difference in how this nonsense plays out.


Ask Germany.


Maybe it’s because Apple is rarely doing anything interesting these days and an unidimensional pundit's excruciatingly detailed analysis of that - is even less interesting.

Add to that a writing style that is often biased, arrogant and inflammatory and you get even less interesting comments on this site.

Exactly the same for Tim Bray, btw - except for Android stuff.

There used to be a time when this stuff was hot, people took sides and breathlessly read anything they could find about the new stuff being released. That time has passed. We stopped caring.

I can understand the demoting.


We had the divide between the nomenklatura and the rest, instead.


> Handle PII as you would handle live ammo.

But thing is, PII is not "live ammo". Artificially designating it so simply raises the cost of working with it. Doing that designation through an amazingly dumb law just makes EU Internet startups unfeasible. Meanwhile, US and Chinese startups flourish since they don't have this limitation.

Self-own, really.


I worked for a number of American companies, not beholden to also serve EU markers. They still did not demonstrate any cavalier attitudes towards PII though. Nobody wants to be the subject of some data leak front-page story.


Of course not, but there is a huge difference between market-demanded standards and quality and government-mandated ones. In more ways than one: cost, difficulty of implementation, UX, etc.

A real, practical example is that US web startups do not have to annoy their US users with cookie banners for simply using Google Analytics on their website - like the EU ones must. Underneath, the implementation and PII data protections are exactly the same, but the UX is night and day.


The "lords" in US (not all, but the great majority) are self-made and in the process of making themselves they created significantly more value for the society, which ended up benefitting most of us.

The titles in EU are inherited or bought with inherited money.


With all due respect, your idea of Europe seems to be about a 100 years out of date and based on period dramas.


Actually my idea of Europe is based on living in it (Eastern side, to be precise) and building and running startups here.

My idea of US is based on living and working there (a while ago though) and (for the last 20+ years) watching powerlessly how more and more of the products and services I interact with and use every day are designed there (and often build in China) while the EU is becoming less and less relevant.


Their idea of USA seems even more out of date, and based on self-serving capitalist myths.


Are you seriously implying Donald Trump is self made? Seriously?


Of course not, not every single US billionaire is self made, just the great majority of them.


One singular anecdote doesn’t say much about the overall state of things. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would claim in present day that Donald Trump became wealthy without receiving significant financial help/inheritance from his family.Of course there will be some people who are rich due to the wealth they inherited from their parents, that number will not be zero anywhere.

There are multiple studies on this, but they all seem to converge on the number of around 80% of current millionaires in the US being first generation/self-made[0]. That is, the ones who didn’t receive an inheritance from their parents or other family members.

It also shows some other interesting stats, such as “only 8% of those in the study attended prestigious private schools, with 62% attending state schools.”

0. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...


There are countries that decided against compulsory helmet laws for bikers on the basis that biking health benefits outweigh the risks.

When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.


The analogy was about motorcycle helmets, so no.


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