rayiner

29 ms·

751.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Yes, and it’s not just what you’d call outright corruption. A lot of the people who work at non-profits are family members of wealthy people. If you’re a Fortune 500 CEO and your kid isn’t qualified to become a “captain of industry,” you ca
752.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Also, we already “properly” tax equity wealth. We tax income at the time it actually exists. We don’t tax notional valuations. It makes no sense to tax shares of e.g. SpaceX when the company is $42 billion in the hole. What’s really happe
753.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Leave money aside—why wouldn’t you want to start a company and build something yourself?
754.
by rayiner 4mo ago
> As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will Lasting change comes down to data-driven programs that work and the money to implement them. As long as you’re not as
755.
by rayiner 4mo ago
It seems odd to give someone credit for something while refusing to engage with whether those actions have a meaningful positive effect.
756.
by rayiner 4mo ago
People don’t build new companies after a successful exit to “make even more money.” You’re projecting.
757.
by rayiner 4mo ago
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar. France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear p
758.
by rayiner 4mo ago
> They don't really exist to "fix" problems, they are mostly a band-aid over the structural issues that lead to social problems. The long-term solutions to most of these problems involve policy changes rather than "sp
759.
by rayiner 4mo ago
> Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word. What makes you think rich people keep working to make more m
760.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Note my caveat: "Not all non-profits obviously." I didn't say anything about a "quality non-profit." I said that a lot of non-profits are jobs programs for people who travel in the same social circles as wealthy peo
761.
by rayiner 4mo ago
A lot of non-profits are just jobs programs for people who run in the same educational/social circles as the wealthy people. Not all non-profits obviously. But a shocking amount when you get close to it.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> MacKenzie Scott What exactly has been achieved with the billions MacKenzie Scott has given away? She seems to do very little vetting of the organizations she donates to. And upon a cursory inspection, they mostly seem like the kinds of
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> Nuclear has never been financially viable We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
764.
by rayiner 4mo ago
We are almost two decades into the age of billionaire philanthropy and what’s results has it produced? Can you point to any area where it’s really changed the world? I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn
765.
by rayiner 4mo ago
We’re still on old Outlook and I’m not sure what we are going to do when Microsoft cancels it. The New Outlook preview release came out 4 years ago. If it was ever going to not be a piece of crap it would’ve happened by now.
766.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Microsoft shows how long you can coast on some good decisions.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Windows NT/2k?
768.
by rayiner 4mo ago
> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it ne
769.
by rayiner 4mo ago
It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our
770.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Please read @foltik's post upthread to understand the context of my statement. @foltik commented that the data on labor versus capital income share could be misleading, because it "ignores realized capital gains and loans against
771.
by rayiner 4mo ago
The new iOS beta buries the “share” button under the line button inside the search lozenge, which was previously for view settings (and downloads). The iOS design team is just coasting on good decisions make a decade ago. The only good thin
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by rayiner 4mo ago
We’re talking about how labor costs impact subway construction costs. Retirees aren’t relevant to that. (And the U.S. has universal healthcare for them anyway.)
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by rayiner 4mo ago
> Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed. Yes, but that’s not the topic. The topic is the labor share of income over time. Your link proves that these loa
774.
by rayiner 4mo ago
Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of th
775.
by rayiner 4mo ago
That article actually proves the opposite of what you’re saying: “For the top 1 %, new borrowing each year is fairly small: 1–2 % of economic income. ‘Buy, borrow, die’ is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich.” OP above said t
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by rayiner 4mo ago
The sibling comments explain the regulatory differences. But another factor is that competent engineers and executives have much lower opportunity costs to work for the government in Spain because private sector opportunities are far less l
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by rayiner 4mo ago
It doesn’t make sense to talk about “economic productivity” as a single number. Productivity growth has been massively different for different jobs. For example, there has been zero productivity growth in food service from 1970 to present.
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by rayiner 4mo ago
Do those factors meaningfully change the picture? For example, total compensation for Fortune 500 CEOs is only $8.5 billion, which is a rounding error compared to total labor income. And CEOs at the bottom of that range make a few million,
779.
by rayiner 5mo ago
> You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s( https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-s
780.
by rayiner 5mo ago
> Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stab

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