Posted by tosh 4 hours ago
Then there are informal truths: e.g. “the Earth is round”, “the sky is blue”, “Gala apples are red”. You can nitpick them (the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, they sky is only blue during the day in areas without high pollution, Gala apples may be pinkish or have yellow blotches, or exceptional discoloration), endlessly or until they become formal (possibly by becoming self-referential). But in practice, these are also true (like formal truths, even though it’s important to know the difference because…)
The problem is, there’s no line between an informal truth and uncertainty/opinion that isn’t true. Like you know ##FF0000 is red and ##00FF00 is not, but there’s no exact color that separates “red” and “not red” (it depends on person, mood, surroundings…) Consequently, unlike formal truths, informal truths have false implications (“fuzzy logic”). An informal truth can be phrased in a “misleading way”, priming the reader for a false implication (a formal truth can be phrased in a convoluted or unintuitive way, but interpreted formally, never leads to a false implication).
The vast majority of discussion is not formal. Even the smartest people constantly fall for false implications. And this isn’t completely solvable, because we fundamentally can’t formally define everything (too much detail): we tried with GOFAI, it failed and its successor, neural networks, informally defines things like us (by forming a lossy model of the world, then generalizing it).
“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.” — Nietzsche:On the Genealogy of Morals III
It's a target. Objectivity does not appear in nature in a stable form. Nothing is fixed and certain. Some things just appear that way from our point of view.
My own addendum: the atoms are stories, too.
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.
My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else.
I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
on linux i use the default terminal in gnome which is ptyxis now iirc and haven’t felt any need to switch.
Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.
* available on Linux and macOS
* settings easy to transfer, just a file
* comes with Jetbrains Mono Nerd font built-in, no need to install it separately
* supports ligatures
Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.
Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...)
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
I don’t believe donating $400 really feels that satisfying, the impact is fairly negligible in most contexts whereas donating $400k can very visibly improve a lot of lives.
I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
1. Net worth is significantly less than that (taxes + heavy philanthropy)
2. $400K donation is orders (plural) of magnitude off our actual philanthropic giving in total. This is just one donation.
isn't the accrued billion dollars what remains after a much larger amount was taxed at roughly 50%?
(of course could be spread across multiple years, but the essence remains)
How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
Most capital owned by billionaires is not taxed until it is sold, so in the case of Hashimoto and others they most likely have not paid tax on the majority of their wealth.
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
In the same way we calculate income tax, we make it up. Most numbers I see are between 1-3%. We could just start at 1% as that is the most conservative number.
It is possible to tax unrealized assets. We already do. For example, a property owner pays property tax based on the value of their property, even when they are not selling it.
It is possible for billionaires to borrow against their held assets. It is therefore also possible to calculate a tax on them.
How? It'll just go to the gov. budget which will be mostly used to pay for bloated healthcare, military and interest.
So many reasons why it's not a good idea to have a wealth tax. But the biggest reason is that nearly all our tax money is going to fraud. This is why our economy would BOOM if we got rid of a lot of taxes and reduced our fed/state governments a LOT. I just want roads, military and police. There is no reason why we should allow our government to be weaponized or turned into a nanny state when SO much of they money they collect is wasted.
Corporations that provide money for causes is often looked at because it's an investment. The world can learn a lot of free market capitalism, but it keeps pretending that half the people won't just DIE in communism.
It's not an equivalent. It's proportionally the same but it's completely different.
>>I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
If anything it illustrates taxes should be lower for people like Hashimoto. Giving even more money to the government instead of leaving it with people like Hashimoto will result in a huge net loss.
In many(most?) parts of the world, $400 is the equivalent of months of good salary.
I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I'm no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don't play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we're donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don't publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.
(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)
But, more importantly, I don't think playing these "my donation is worth more than yours" games is productive. If you want to think that way thats fine, I won't defend myself or my family any further than this post.
Thank you for your contributions! Although I sincerely request you stop making an exception for "technical things" and stop publicising all of your "giving". There are few things common between the lives that the likes of you live and those enjoyed us lowly "armchair critics". Your boundless sea of magnanimity is incomprehensible by us plebs; it short circuits my inferiour thinking apparatus and all I'll able to wonder is "But what truly is the value of Mitchell's "givings" relative to his net worth?". It's truly an unfair burden bourne by superior beings such as yourself.
Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.
The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.
>>I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
We need some mechanism to select people who makes the choice. Popularity/lying contest (politics) ain't it. People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.
Also, a lot more people (more than 1000x) have $400 to give than $400k so in a sense if people with $400 to give were all being very generous, they could amount to a lot more than what billionnaires could give.
What?
Also, donating appreciated stock avoids taxes. This donation may have come out of a donor-advised fund.
Rich people can make substantial charitable donations rather easily and make a big difference. I suggest we encourage them.
About liquidity, yes most people with a million net worth actually have more than half in their house, so technically it is much harder for them to throw cash than somebody with a billion and a much smaller % of their worth in illiquid assets such as property or unlisted companies. I wish I had made this point too.
~400–800 million people (top 5–10% of global earners) could easily pay $833/month without major struggle, assuming they earn >$100,000/year.
So 90% people couldn’t even afford to pay a whole month of salary to a median earner without major struggle.
~3.6 billion people (45% of the global population) can likely afford to drop a $0.25 coin in a hat for a street artist without financial struggle. But that might not feel exactly the same as giving a whole month of median salary, let alone 40 years of it.
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/two-americas-one-bank...
EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing.
Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison.
There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.
Now you might argue that “vacations” aren’t “life changing”, but I would certainly argue that if you never would have had the experience or seen the place then they absolutely can be. But even if not, I refer you back to the original thesis which is that “life changing” is relative. Because the sums of money we’re talking about would have been “pay my rent for a year”, “buy a reliable (used) car”, “reduce my student loan balance by nearly a third” sort of money. And those I think could all be reasonably said to be life changing sorts of things.
Finally I would suggest that if you are “throwing away” this sort of money on actually changing someone’s life, then you are by definition not “hoarding money” and can hardly be said to be poisoning society with your relative wealth.
I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
If you went to school and believe what you write then you went to terrible schools.
Capitalism has done a lot of good in the world, and it has also done a lot of bad.
The problem isn't that capitalism exists, it is that far too many people treat it as a religion rather than a tool.
I don't think Humans can ever do anything other than capitalism because at the end of the day, a farmer making food and delivering it is just going to STOP working when he finds out a daycare owner has made $15 in 3 years without actually taking care of kids. And everyone just bubble wraps the explanation - and then they disallow anger. The farmer then writes up a proposal for starting a daycare and the food stops flowing. Everyone dies in communism.
There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.
All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.
Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
If you need your car to earn money, and you don't have the money or other resources to repair it if it breaks - that's a huge uncertainty and a huge source of stress and worry. Liquid funds can remove that source of stress. More drastic examples would include rent or food.
That's why liquid funds can remove impediments and distractions from your life, but once all of those are gone, then what?
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
> Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Was it too hard to read beyond the first comma?
Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer?
At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
For example, money can pay for better medical care.
And money does certainly buy health in the US.
More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).
So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.
Define happiness, but there's a baseline for not being miserable (I have enough to eat etc) and then there's actual satisfaction with your life.
If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.
The consistently happiest people I've personally met are Buddhist monks of various sects, who have nearly nothing in terms of money or physical possessions.
I define happiness as whatever the person before me defined it as. GP defined it as good health, love and respect of others. Thus, my reply to GP was focused on how money can be turned into good health, love and respect of others. Your definition of happiness is completely different. So of course my reply to you is going to be completely different. The definition of happiness we're operating on has changed since my last comment, after all.
You are conflating two diametrically different claims. One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about. It's also something nobody in this comment section said. Least of all me.
The other claim is that money can be exchanged for things that indirectly will make some given person happier than without those things. In short - that money can buy happiness. Both "can" and "buy" are extremely important here. "Buy", as in money itself is useless unless it's exchanged for something. It's this something that you exchange money for that's supposed to increase happiness, not money itself. "Can", because everyone has a choice what they do with their money. You can use the same money to buy something that will make you happy, or to buy something that will not. Musk and Trump are extreme cases of people who could buy happiness but chose to buy something else instead, and are therefore deeply unhappy despite their wealth.
What do these "Buddhist monks of various sects" eat? Where do they get food from? Is eating part of what makes them happy, or just something they're forced to do to continue living? If it was somehow possible for them to continue living without eating, do you think they'd stop eating?
What do these Buddhists do when they're not eating? I assume whatever it is, it's what makes them happy. And the more time they dedicate to it, the more happy they become. By not eating, they'd free up time to do even more of the thing that makes them happy.
In real world, these Buddhist could stop growing food by hand and instead ordered catering. They would be exchanging money for more free time, which in turn would increase their happiness. Is that not so?
Trump/Musk without money would be more miserable I surmise.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.
When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.
What a hyper-capitalist statement. You are living a sad life if money and status is all that is driving you.
This person is free to do what they like. Family, friends, hobbies, philanthropy, … But apparently they have been stuck in a hamster wheel, chasing money and status their whole life, without ever stopping to think what they actually want or like, what is important to them.
Use the free time to learn some Zig! And start a life of happily giving back powerful and useful GPL software to put your own 2 cents on the mountain of society building blocks that allowed you to thrive in such a way to begin with.
But spending your life pursuing an unsatisfiable goal (because the goal is “more”) probably isn’t good for your happiness.
Not to mention, there are very satisfying ways to contribute to things you think are important that don’t necessarily involve a lot of money.
I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding.
Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up.
Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.