The answer of course is to do stuff in person, under appropriate surveillance.

Presumably, thinking about difficult math and CS problems goes slower than thinking about random literary topics or whatever.

It could just be a lame excuse. Open sourcing with zero support would be better than not doing it. But I imagine that this seems valuable enough to keep secret, or at least not to pay money to polish up for external use.

You know what sucks more than fixing problems with inheritance? Fixing 20 different copies of the same bug, or just having to copy over dozens of methods in the first place. If you feel like inheritance is wrong, it's probably because you've got too many corner cases and too many responsibilities shoved into a class. Composition can help in such cases, but there's maybe no magic pattern if each object is too different from the rest.

I think you underestimate how chaotic things would get without some basic concepts like patterns laid out. Like so many things in this industry, disproportionate attention is drawn to perceived problems rather than things that quietly work well with the same tech.

Good, then less greedy people will start new businesses.

You don't have to be greedy to not want to be robbed. You do have to be kind of tight with money, aka greedy, to run a competitive business. How often are you paying much more than you absolutely have to for anything? Our greed forces businesses to be run in a greedy way. It's called efficiency.

They outsourced industry, because the logic of industrial production is that all costs should be driven as low as possible and much human labor is fungible.

The claim here is that high taxes on earnings will cause capitalists to leave and take the jerbs with them. A different context, and a scenario that fails to consider the existence of domestic competition, capitalists' desire to sell into the most profitable market, preferences about where to live etc.

Yes it is slightly different but we are talking about people who start and run businesses, typically. Unless living here comes with some tremendous benefits that transcend money, they will leave. They generally have little loyalty to their homeland. I wouldn't either, if my homeland wanted to take me for all I'm worth in taxes. Not only would I consider leaving if I had more money, but I know of people who specialize in helping moderately wealthy leave. They cater to people who have a few million dollars and up.

>They outsourced industry, because the logic of industrial production is that all costs should be driven as low as possible and much human labor is fungible.

It's not just industrial production, it's the top jobs that people on this site need. Jobs in software and other kinds of engineering are increasingly under threat. There is some merit to seeking lower costs, and we benefit from that, but it's also possible to paint yourself into a corner from a national security standpoint. My point remains: the same cost-saving motive that drives wealthy people to preserve money in life and business is likely to push them out of the country if we oppress them.

There are many real-life examples of people fleeing for economic reasons. Why is it so easy to believe that day laborers or doctors would flee for greener pastures, but hard to believe that many wealthy business owners wouldn't?

"Redistribution" at some point becomes blatant theft from productive people to give to unproductive people. I guess taxes need to scale up with wealth to some extent but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't encourage freeloading and doesn't encourage envy.

It's not lol. It's more akin to construction. If you need 100 people to do a job in a given amount of time, you might be able to get it done with 99 people without issue. But that one person might have had an insight that would save you a lot of money overall. And if you kept getting rid of people, at some point the others will not be able to pick up the slack and might even ruin the project unwittingly.

>So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.

I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.

>I adopt rather the opposite virutes. Imprudence, risk, throwing-your-self-at-a-wall-until-you-cant, intemperance (conflict, debate, disagreement, competition) and pragmatism (address what is rather than what should be).

Pragmatism is a form of prudence. A lot of the other stuff you mention could vaguely be called fortitude.

>Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.

This is a recipe for unhappiness. By definition, attaching too much will ultimately (and perhaps immediately) cause you grief. Risking more than what is prudent could lead you to disaster. (Quit your job, for example, and you could end up homeless! That might be a good time to start thinking stoically but a better one would be prior to making such a mistake.) Participating in the world and making the best of it is what stoicism calls for, but it questions what is worth your energy and how you should react to failure.

>Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.

The classical Stoic discussion of death is more of a rhetorical device than a prescription for how to live. Nobody is out here saying you should treat your life as unimportant. But extreme fear of death is a thing that gives people anxiety, and sometimes interferes with them doing things that they ought to do.

I've read many Stoic quotes about making the most of life and not wasting time. That kind of stuff isn't suggestive of laying down to rot. I've never seen a Stoic praise excessive laziness.