Economics: billionaire's tax (2023 Update)

John Larkin certainly doesn't.

It's not a ponzi scheme - the money that comes in gets spent in the way that was promised.

It's not a "fully funded" scheme. The money being put in now is spent on paying off obligations to other people, rather than being invested - only the Dutch have fully funded social service schemes, probably because they've been doing that kind of stuff a lot longer than anybody else.

A ponzi scheme has crooks in charge, siphoning off most of the money that gets paid in. The administrators that run the scheme do get paid, but a 10% overhead isn't criminal - registered charities seldom do better.

I'm not 70, gosh. Do you know any 70 year olds familiar with the ouvre of Biggie Smalls?

I don't much like doing "on" with members of AARP. Anyway compound interest isn't magic, who knows what can happen over 30 years. Earth may be ruled by a sentient cloud AI in 30 years what is my IRA going to be worth at that point. Whatever the sentient cloud AI says it is, I expect.

On a sunny day (Thu, 28 Oct 2021 16:54:36 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I also have a Logitech mouse, but mine is wireless :-)

No more than the interest is now , compounding less than 1 % is almost nothing in 30 years. If you make less than 1 % and the inflation is 2% or more you are going in the hole. The only game I know of now to make money over time is the stock market.

I don't think natural selection as Darwin understood it could be the main driving force behind any modern evolutionary changes in humans, but I don't think Darwin understood that evolutionary changes could occur by other mechanisms than natural selection he didn't even know what a "gene" was.

And I don't expect social Darwinists like Jan know much more than Darwin did and if it's happening I doubt it's happening by the mechanisms they hope or believe it does e.g. the smart (and hopefully Aryan) survive and the stupid, poor or otherwise unfortunate stock dies off.

In years past the smart and healthy would survive while the dumb/weaker ones would die off.

With modern medicine and society keeping the dumb ones alive it is going to be the smart ones that die off.

Related:

I have some money in the market and the little bullshit calculator tells me "if these trends continue" it's probably going to be worth like X million dollars by the time I'm 65 which seems sufficient enough. But look the calculator is bullshit who knows what might happen.

But I'm still working and the best "game" I know for myself right now to "make money over time" is to just make money, y'know

One never knows what the stock market will do, but the main thing is not to bail out of it too late. That is when the market starts down, get out before it goes down 10 % . Don't wait to the market has lost 20 or

30 or more percent. Like Buffet said when people are buying, sell and when people are selling, buy.

If you are working and making money and just leaving the money in a place that it is not making money for you , you are loosing in the long run.

You do have to be in for the long run and not worry if it drops close to half the value.

Thankfully the working time-horizon of people who design electronics seems to be pretty long. I might be able to retire at 65 or earlier but why would I if I didn't have to? If there's work that needs doing when I'm 65 and someone who's willing to pay for it I see no reason I wouldn't accept, what else would I do with my time go on Caribbean cruises? I don't golf, either.

Being retired sounds pretty boring.

IOW if "they" want to take my iron away from me they can come get it.

I retired at 62, about 9 years ago. I can find plenty to stay busy if I want to. Work a little in a garden, do some with my hobbies, just lay in bed for a few extra hours if I want to. Take the time mowing the grass instead of running the mower at top speed.

Learn new things. You mentioned electronics. I Have learned to do some things with the Arduino processor. I do have a decent electronics workshop and being a ham radio operator play around with the equipment. Restoring some old radio gear.

I'm self-employed I can already do most of that stuff. The trade-off is I don't make as much as I would if I were grinding 80 hours a week in some code sweatshop, but you're only "young" once as I figure it.

Oh that's very good, I got my technician license last year I admit I haven't done much with it yet though, but it seemed like something good to have in case the need and/or desire arises.

I'll probably upgrade to general class as the technician license is fairly limited on HF, which seems to be where most of the action is. Could have probably done that one too the first time but there were enough mask-free patriots hanging about the rather cramped test location at that time when there were no vaccines going on yet, I didn't much feel like sticking around too long.

He certainly didn't know what a gene was. The word was invented in 1909, and Darwin died in 1882. He talked about descent with variation, and the concept that what you inherited was in any way quantised wasn't part of the intellectual atmosphere at the time. Gregor Mendel thought up the idea in 1865, but it didn't register. Hugo DeVries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak independently rediscovered Mendel's work in 1900 when they started writing up their own, similar work , a generation after Mendel published his papers.

The whole point of Darwin's work was to point out that - given descent with variation - natural selection could explain what had happened. Natural selection is the mechanism by which Darwinian evolution works - where the variation comes from is irrelevant.

There's nothing in Darwinian selection that favours smartness over any other advantage that lets you have more fertile offspring that survive to reproduce. Darwin though that social Darwinism was nonsense, and didn't like Herbert Spencer's ideas. Of course the phrase "social Darwinism" in it's modern sense comes from the American historian Richard Hofstadter popularized the term in the United States in 1944, mainly as a device to be rude about right-wing lunatics.

Bitrex is satirising Nazi thinking, which is something of a waste of effort. Nazi thinking about human evolution was the kind of nonsense that makes a satirist's life difficult. When the organisations that you want to satirise are pushing out obvious nonsense - John Doe does come to mind - it is difficult to invent something bonkers enough to be obviously intentionally ridiculous.

People who think the leaders of industry don't create wealth have no understanding either of wealth or what leaders of industry do. I'm no Musk fan, but he clearly has been a huge factor in changing our views of EVs and in the process in essence created the EV segment of the auto market. I sold my Tesla stock far too soon and left something like a million dollars on the table.

Bill Gates may not be popular, but he was the driver that created the Windows "empire" providing the world with a computer OS that is the basis of virtually all business and home computers. In the process he created huge amounts of wealth.

Some people are just petty and jealous of the hugely significant accomplishments of others.

What is the significance of that number?

Did you actually read this article? In the beginning they say 43.6 percent of households in 2019, then later they show a graph which puts the number around 33% of Tax Filers. The source for the first number is "Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center Microsimulation Model". The source for the second is "IRS Data and Tax Policy Center projections". I'm not sure of the validity of any of this information but more importantly I don't understand why the numbers are so different.

Does anyone else report these numbers? I didn't find it.

left something like a million dollars on the table.

It is often not the invertors that get rich, but the ones that know what to do with the inventions. Gates did not invent the personal computer or even the operating system. He just had the vision of what the computers could do and how to market the operating system. At the time there was another operating system that may have been even better than the Microsoft one. Gates sold his for $ 50 while the other was $ 150, so people being what they are went for the cheaper one.

Gates did creat a company that hires probably thousands of people , maybe hundreds of thousands that make very good money. From that the internet got started and many have made millions.

Paintings are not worth much,but get people to think they are and you can sell them for millions. Even Hunter Biden was reported selling his for about half a million. Diamomds were not worth much before the DeBeers convinced the women that they needed them. What are they really worth to just look at and put in a ring or neckless ? Lots of people are involved in selling them in stores. By weight the most expensive thing on earth is totally worthless. It is an old canceled stamp. Only one of its kind but can not be used for anything other than just to say you have the only one.

I believe that is your curse. No point in projecting it onto others.