Sure. I mean you can buy a solar panel and put it on your roof and then sell the electricity it produces back to the grid. That’s not work. Is it fair? I don’t know. There are definitely people who think subsidies for solar panels are unfair.

There’s also the question of whether or not you earned the money. I think if you take a risk with your money and you invest it wisely then you’ve earned the profits you made on (minus taxes of course).

Obviously if you inherit millions of dollars from your parents you didn’t earn that. We as a society begrudgingly put up with inheritance because we admit that as humans our urge to provide for our children is a powerful instinct.

There’s also a question of whether or not an investment benefits society. I think the pepper growing and solar panel examples show clear benefits to society. With larger companies the question is a lot more complicated.

For example, I used to think Apple benefited society with all the work they put into their computers and growing the personal computer market. Now I think they’ve moved away from that towards rent-seeking. So to me it wasn’t the money that made the difference, it was the behaviour.

I’m not a teacher but I do volunteer to tutor high school kids whose families are from Somalia. I used to be in the mathematics teaching program in university but I decided not to become a teacher. I love to teach but I’m not equipped to deal with all of the other stuff teachers have to put up with (angry parents, disinterested / defiant students, standardized testing, failing school systems).

Don’t let the people throwing around “bootlicker” bother you. These folks are totally lost in a pit of resentment. They’re basically left wing MAGA types. The two groups are going to tear apart western civilization if they have their way. I’m hoping sanity will one day prevail.

Let me quote GP because it seems like you’ve already forgotten what they said:

you’re just skimming off other people’s work

Now how do you reconcile that with this:

Nobody said it wasn’t fair

Either you’re just flat out lying when you say this, or you think “skimming off other people’s work” is fair. Which is it?

If you don’t think it’s fair then don’t borrow my $10 for pepper seeds! Find something else to do to earn your own money. I’ll buy the pepper seeds myself and keep the profits.

By the way, I’ve grown peppers myself. It’s very easy. The sun and the plants do 99% of the work. Claiming that “you did all the work” by germinating and transplanting a few seeds is quite silly.

Investing your money is not “making money for free” it’s providing your money to someone else so they can use it to make money. Then you make money when they make money. It’s capitalization. You risk losing all of that money if the investment fails. If you work a job you put your time and effort in and get paid for that but if the company fails you lose your job, they don’t take away your house.

It’s no different from a loan. Suppose you lend your friend $10 to buy some pepper seeds and they grow a bunch of peppers, sell some of them for $20, keep the other peppers, and collect seeds from the peppers so that they have even more seeds next year. Is it really fair if they just pay you back $10 next year? No!

They used your $10 to buy the seeds they needed to start with, they earned themselves $20 from pepper sales, plus they got to eat some peppers and even ended up with more seeds than they originally bought. They should pay you back more than $10 for the simple reason that you did not have use of your $10 for an entire year, so you did not have the ability to buy those pepper seeds and make the profit yourself.

That’s the time value of money. It’s why we pay interest on loans. Because to not do so is to saddle the lender with unfair opportunity costs, in addition to the risk of losing their money (maybe the peppers all die and your friend tells you they can’t pay you back the $10 anymore).

I’m reminded by the story I once read about Eritrea, a country with wealthy enclaves for the royal family plus foreign petro-engineers. The enclaves have these walls along the road with vast ghettos on the other side.

It’s a miserable place. The engineers tend not to stay long. Just make a lot of money in a short time period and then leave.

Yes. Capital flight is one of the last resort moves, as I said. Take your money with you and leave the hostile country.

If by issues you mean wealth distribution and the existence of an ultra-rich, powerful class, no. I don’t have a solution to that. The fundamental problem is that wealth brings power and the concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands brings other benefits, namely: coordination.

Smaller groups nearly always have an easier time coordinating their efforts than larger groups, so smaller groups tend to have a disadvantage unless they’re on the battlefield (and even then, wealthy well-supplied small groups of soldiers easily defeat large groups of poorly-equipped, poorly-trained peasants).

The big problem with the high-tax approach is that it’s a class warfare strategy. Apart from the communist revolutions of the 20th century, the history of class warfare has not gone well for the non-rich side. I think that moment in history was a unique one and unlikely to be repeated, barring the unforeseen appearance of some new decentralized warfare technology.

So where does that leave us? We can try non-class-warfare strategies. We want to align the interests of everyone, rich and poor, towards a common goal: peace, prosperity, and sustainability. Why would the rich want this? Because life is better that way! It’s much nicer to live in a safe, walkable, integrated, and prosperous community than it is to live in a walled compound surrounded by ghettos.

You frame it like those are the only two choices. They aren’t. The third choice is capital flight.

People constantly forget that governments don’t have godlike tax enforcement powers. In the real world people avoid taxes via a million different avenues. Absconding with their money for greener pastures is a last resort but it happens constantly.

Take China for example. Taxes are way lower than the US yet capital flight is such a huge problem that the government has enacted Capital controls. Yet capital flight from China continues largely unabated.

So what this means in practice is that if you want to have a 91% top corporate tax rate in the US without a gargantuan capital flight problem you’re going to need a government that is way more powerful and draconian than either the US or China is right now.

Now you might say “what if I just let everyone go and get the money back when they try to sell things to the US?” Well that’s basically what the US under Trump is doing right now, via tariffs. But then you tack on the capital flight beforehand and that means all the big companies, all the great jobs, leave the country before prices skyrocket. This is how you impoverish the US to third world status.

If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.

Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.

Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!

Or if you’re like me and don’t care about the latest big studio games. I play games by development teams with less than 10 people, tending towards just one person. I have no desire to play any of Nintendo’s newest games.

As it is right now? I doubt it. But the actual percentages are unknown to me. It’s not something that’s particularly easy to track.

But then what do we do about it? The wider issue is with social media and its effects on girls and young women. How do we change it? Young girls especially are vulnerable to social comparisons, starting around middle school age. We can try banning social media for young people but the effectiveness of that strategy is not yet known since we’re still early in the process.

For some women maybe. But there are plenty of women who use makeup to express themselves creatively. They study the art either formally through school or informally online, such as through videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram etc.

When explored creatively like this makeup becomes a hobby and potentially a career. It’s a valid form of expression using your face and/or body (hair and nails as well) as the canvas. It can be simple or it can be taken to the level of an art form!

Honestly this every time I read ACX posts on Al risk/trajectories.

Generally nature doesn’t keep doing a useless thing if there’s no longer any need to do it. Energy efficiency is a constant selective pressure in the absence of all other challenges.

My bet is that baobabs are shaped that way for very good reasons. The fact that the trees are spaced far apart even in baobab forests is a clue: the environment is very harsh, especially on saplings.

Since baobabs reproduce via many fruits and since they can be spaced very far apart my hypothesis is that they evolved to be very tall with featureless trunks in order to attract fruit-eating birds to carry their seeds. The tall and featureless trunks would make the trees difficult for ground-dwelling predators to climb, keeping the birds and their nests safe from attack.

I believe leopards are fairly common in these areas and they love to climb trees, although they prefer ones with lower, wider branches they rest on and even eat their prey within. Leopards have been known to carry large prey such as gazelles up into the branches of a tree to protect their kill from being stolen.

It’s extremely efficient given the low calorie density, high fibre diet and extremely limited grazing time (dawn and dusk) of crepuscular rabbits.

Think about ruminants for comparison. They spend all day every day grazing on the same kinds of foods as rabbits. Rabbits have a much more rapid metabolism (faster resting heart rate and ridiculous athletic ability) than, say cattle, yet they manage to extract more energy in less time eating. Rabbits are a marvel of efficiency!

Think about it this way: they’ve evolved a clever behavioural hack that doubles the length of their entire digestive tract without any increase in weight. This is extremely efficient!

They deposit them directly into their mouth. They know when they’re about to produce one and they reach down there with their mouth and consume it directly.

If you think about where wild rabbits spend most of their time (underground in burrows surrounded by dirt) this makes total sense. By not allowing cecotropes to touch the ground, they avoid contamination with soil-borne pathogens.

All spiders are little mechs to me! Their legs are powered by hydraulics!

I love this. I am a big fan of the use of colour, the small details, the little spires in the distance. So evocative! Beautiful!