Because wealth rapidly becomes illiquid as it increases in value. The capital of the ultra wealthy is intimately tied to physical assets in the real world that makes it difficult for capital flight to occur. They are wealthy because they own the supermarkets, the hospitals, and physical infrastructure.

An example of this is when the UK froze/seized Russian billionaire Abramovich’s assets as part of sanctions, which included the Chelsea Football club. Abramovich (and the media) made a big stink about it, but was ultimately forced to sell.

The case for keeping the ultra wealthy around for their entrepeneurial innovation is inconsistent with broader economic evidence. Bell et al 2019 (QJE) show that although it is true that the young of the top 1% (again, not the ultra wealthy) are 10x more likely to become inventors, the actual causal mechanism is exposure effects, i.e. having strong peer networks.

This is something that is explicitly worsened by abolishing wealth taxes, which are well documented to increase wealth concentration and social mobility.

Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation* | The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Oxford Academic - https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/2/647/5218522

I suggest you read Zucman’s common wealth tax objections, which addresses most common rebuttals.

https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/saez-zucman-wealthtaxobjections.pdf

I applaud the high quality references, but the wealth taxes studied by Econ are often not the wealth taxes that are in popular discourse.

In particular, the general public, and the few inequality economists like Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, advocate for a billionaires wealth tax. Due to the lack of any sort of data on this, the broader economics profession generally only studies the effects of wealth taxes in the top bracket, which targets the wealthy, but not the ultra wealthy.

The NBER paper you cited is particularly egregious. The claim that a one percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate leads to capital flight is arguably misleading because Sweden and Denmark have infamously flat taxes (contrary to popular belief). Their top wealth tax applied to singles/couples with a wealth exceeding 1500K/3000K, or about 150K/300K USD.

That is… not very wealthy, and if anything only middle/upper middle class. Not at all what a billionaires tax would target.

The broader evidence is that Sweden has exhibited a serious backsliding in its inequality measures, and the collapse of its welfare state after abolishing wealth taxes.

‘We got lazy and complacent’: Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country - https://theconversation.com/we-got-lazy-and-complacent-swedish-pensioners-explain-how-abolishing-the-wealth-tax-changed-their-country-272041

Ditto. I don’t see how this is different/better from existing harnesses such as Opencode, Pi, and even “commercial” open source offerings such as the CLIs for Codex, Copilot, and Gemini, especially once tricked out with plugins and extensions.

Docker’s main advantage is just being more well known and hence more supported as a default option.

Even then, I feel that this availability of docker compose files is an illusion, due to their verbosity and limitations inherent to docker. Less granular control of permissions, clunkiness in updating images, and multi container stacks feeling like an afterthought.

In pretty much all other ways podman feels superior. Cockpit provides a basic web gui, but quadlets are the main draw. Way easier to configure, explicitly designed for multi containers, and updating all images is a single command.

Roughly, the different ecosystems from least to most complex are:

Docker/Portainer -> Podman/Cockpit/Quadlets -> Kubernetes

Actually, what he meant was a seas-fire, hence the bombing of a coastal city /s

Israeli (derogatory)

Yes, Most Jews are in fact Zionists - by Tariq Acknickulous - https://tariqacknickulous.substack.com/p/yes-most-jews-are-in-fact-zionists

As someone completely unfamiliar with the JavaScript mess, are these security issues specific to npm the actual repository or npm the package manager?

If it’s the latter, does using something else like yarn or bun instead help?

Lisdexafetamine is somewhat unique because the slow release mechanism is more or less inherent to the actual drug itself. That is, the fact that lisdexamfetamine is a prodrug that needs to be processed into dextroamphetamine (the actual stimulant) is the slow release mechanism itself.

Methylphenidate is different because the chemical itself is the stimulant, so pharmaceutical companies need to come up with ways to physically release it slowly, e.g. via mini capsules that dissolve slowly.

Unfortunately every brand and formulation kind of does their own thing in order to differentiate themselves from generics.

IIRC Concerta was the most “advanced” in the sense that they formulated a special double release system where each dose also dissolved slowly. Ritalin LA is much jankier because it basically just released a second or third dose all once later on.

You can search “name of drug” + pharmacokinetics to get more graphs, which in combination with keeping a mood diary can help in nailing down hat works for you.

pandoc. Converts markdown to html, latex, pdf, and Word.

It serves as the backend behind basically every program that support some kind of rendering of markdown, e.g. quarto, ipython notebooks.

Pandoc - Pandoc User’s Guide - https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html

AI: Actually Indians

Home Depot is charging an insane markup on them. You can get them direct from suppliers on Alibaba for $1- $5.

The Gen Z stare is simply the rational response in dealing with customer facing situations where either 1. the customer is problematic, or 2. if the worker genuinely doesn’t know what what to do.

Responding or engaging to problematic customers (racist, homophobic, misogynistic) can only lead to conflict, reprimand, or lawsuits.

Responding with inaccurate information or simply saying leads to conflict, reprimand, or poor reviews.

Both have worsened as people have become more polarised, and management cuts funding and hours for training.

I hate this food gatekeeping.

This is REAL food, enjoyed by REAL food enjoyers:

Maths feels like a first class citizen in latex. The syntax is ugly, but there is some logic through the legacy jank.

Typst makes fundamental design decisions that render it unsuitable beyond extremely simply equations. In LaTeX, curly braces are nearly always reserved for enclosing arguments, to avoid confusion with actual brackets.

Typst uses normal brackets for both its scripting and actual maths.

For example, \frac{n(n+1)}{2} in latex turns into (n(n + 1)) / 2 in typst. The typst code is incredibly unclear - the first set of brackets with the slash together actually form the fraction operator, so neither end up visible.

You can see how this would start to struggle even with high school level maths, with bracketed terms and possibly fractional terms in exponents, integrals, etc.

For example, it is very difficult for me to work out the difference between the following three in typst. That is specifically not what you want from a typesetting language.

1/2(x + y)
1/x(x + y)
1/2^x(x + y)

LaTeX ignores whitespace, so you can just use a formatter to space out your code and ensure the curly braces. This is not even an option in typst, which uses the space as an escape character.

Huh? Both hover to focus and click button in background work in macOS, though hover to focus usually requires an external application. There used to be a focus follows mouse that you could enable via a terminal command, but Apple removed it.

The top menu bar kind of seems to be more of a result of historical happenstance, and maybe some different philosophies regarding Fitts law.

Bill Atkinson, who designed the UX for the Apple Lisa recounts that part of the decision was to avoid the problem of menu items being possibly obscured. If the window of some application is near the bottom or partially off the desktop, the menu bar of individual windows can become obscured and inaccessible.

Historically the menu bar would’ve been easier for normal people to learn due to consistency, and also helped with limited screen estate.

Memories of Lisa - CHM - https://computerhistory.org/blog/memories-of-lisa/

It’s janky AF mess.

Internally the copilot key is hard coded to be meta + shift + f23. If you don’t recognise what the f23 key is, that’s because it was last featured over four decades ago on the IBM model M.

The fact that Microsoft has decreed that the Copilot key must send this exact shortcut of three different keys makes it very difficult to remap consistently.

Most keyboard remapping software (SharpKeys) work best at remapping single keys, not shortcuts. Windows users can use PowerToys to remap this three key shortcut, if you try to use it normally as a right ctrl, e.g. rctrl lshift p it doesn’t work consistently.

I suspect it might be because you’re essentially trying to send a whopping five keycodes for a shortcut, when most programs already struggle to handle 4.

Linux users were similarly out of luck until early last year, when most desktop environments fixed up the key codes.

Copilot key is based on a button you probably haven’t seen since IBM’s Model M - Ars Technica - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/shoehorned-windows-copilot-key-is-just-a-reprogrammable-macro-journalist-shows/

Microsoft Copilot Key : r/olkb - https://www.reddit.com/r/olkb/comments/193b5id/comment/kxqj1ve/

Linux 6.14 Adds Support For The Microsoft Copilot Key Found On New Laptops - Phoronix - https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-Input

under the false impression that being at war means he can stay in office no matter what (despite his entire life being filled with counterexamples)

Tbf it’s working for Netanyahu

Anthropic making a lot of noise of being the victim of large scale distillation attacks (ie other AI firms, usually Chinese copying/scraping their model), but people have pointed out the hypocrisy that Anthropic themselves seems to have copied DeepSeek.

If you bypass the system prompt and ask Claude what model it is (e.g. via Open router), it’ll reply that it’s DeepSeek.

(Also I know, eww Reddit and X)

Claude sonnet 4.6 says it’s DeepSeek when system prompt is empty : r/DeepSeek - https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1rd5jw7/claude_sonnet_46_says_its_deepseek_when_system/

Claude Sonnet 4.6 distilled DeepSeek? : r/DeepSeek - https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1r9se7p/claude_sonnet_46_distilled_deepseek/

https://x.com/i/status/2026130112685416881

Yep, US citizenship is one of the most expensive in the world, due to their uniquely harsh taxation of expats.

Actually, with the exception of the crown, none of the jewellery had much gold