• 0 Posts
  • 159 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle
  • There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.






  • We’re talking about two different things here.

    Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).

    If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?




  • Putting a huge percentage of a company up for sale on the open market is going to tank the price no matter what the fundamentals are. It’s simple supply and demand: you’re putting a huge glut of supply on the market and not putting similar demand. All those sell orders will begin expiring as the offers drop in price.

    The largest owner of shares putting everything on the market at once is strong signal that the stock is overpriced and so buyers will react accordingly.

    By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.

    I’m neither defending nor attacking capitalism. I’m just pointing out that putting heavy taxes on illiquid assets leads to huge disruptions.

    The increase in value of shares above book is called unrealized gains. They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Taxing makes no sense unless you’re going to reimburse the taxes if the shares drop in price.


  • Shares aren’t always given to you as a reward. If you are the sole founder of a company then you create the shares yourself and decide who to give (or sell) them to. If you choose not to take your company public on the stock market, then what your stake in the company is worth is unclear. Sure, the company may have assets (equipment, properties, resources) but that’s only the book value. The true market value of the company might be much higher.

    Look at a software company. The software they create might never be sold, only used to provide services. The market value of the company could far exceed the book value of all the desks, chairs, computers, and other stuff the company has at the office. But you don’t really know that if the company never goes public. So how do you tax it?


  • if he were able to convert all of his $241.8B to cash

    That’s the assumption everyone makes but it’s a false premise. If he tried to sell all his shares it would cause the stock price to collapse, his wealth would plummet, and his companies would be in jeopardy. Far from being able to give all of them $1.6M, they would all likely lose their jobs.

    That’s also the issue with taxing them. If someone owns a billion dollar company (based on the price of their shares of stock) we call them a billionaire but they might not have very much money in cash (say a few million). Suppose we want to tax them 10% of their wealth: that’s $100 million! They don’t have enough cash to pay for that, so they have to sell shares, which causes the share price to go down, which negatively affects the company and the workers.

    I think the issue is with how we view ownership of a business vs other things, like a yacht. The yacht can be sold to pay taxes and it won’t affect other people. The company cannot. In a lot of ways, the company isn’t just a possession of the owner, it’s a responsibility. These days I feel like we don’t talk enough about responsibility.



  • The main users of Canada Post are businesses anyway: junk mail. I get maybe one actual letter from a non-business per year. I doubt my experience is out of the ordinary. Subsidizing Canada Post out of tax revenue would just be subsidizing those businesses that use it to flood our boxes with fliers and coupons.

    If we’re going to subsidize it then we should probably move to weekly delivery, rather than daily, and stop delivery of junk mail altogether. But that would cost a lot of postal worker jobs, which seems to be the main purpose of keeping Canada Post in existence.








  • Which is a shame. This is an untapped skill in games! I recall sniping in Metal Gear Solid had a steadiness mechanic. It used analog and rumble. You could even pop some diazepam to slow down your muscle twitching, as well as press a button to hold your breath! Very cool mechanics that other games don’t bother with!