soheyl

Not a FB fanboy here, but instagram ads have been the most relevant and interesting ones to me. I actually like seeing them pop up in my feed.

Absolutely. I think (hope) that what PG meant in that essay is that the rich people today get there by displaying more "sportsmanship" than 200 years ago. And I generally agree with that. And I think if you compare Bezos and Musk with whoever would rank similarly to them on Forbes list in 1821, you would agree too. But it absolutely does not mean that anyone can get there.

The fact that Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt have won so many medals without (hopefully) juicing or bribing officials is great, and maybe even a cause for celebration for the human race, but it absolutely does not mean that anyone can do those things.

Agreed. The focus of the original article was the widening gap between the top 1% (or 5, or 10) and the rest of the population. I doubt that it will cause "unhappiness". Unhappiness exists when you compare yourself with people within your percentiles (+- 5%).

A plumber in West Virginia is not unhappy because Bezos is so rich. He is unhappy because his welder brother-in-law just got paid after a better paying contract job (or is heavily in debt) and bought a used Audi.

But is it really "human nature"? Go back a few centuries, and everything belonged to a monarchy, and by everything, I mean even your life and your family. Were people unhappy "because of it"? For the vast majority of humans, I doubt it. They had just learned not to compare themselves with the king.

For something to be human nature, I think it needs more time. And if peasants knew that comparing themselves to the king just does not make sense, maybe we can learn to have the same attitude towards Jeff Bezos.

Fixed rate sales tax is regressive. A loaf of bread, a car, and a yacht should not be taxed at the same rate, and not only because of the demographic of the buyers, but also because of the introduced externalities.

Variable rate sales tax on the other hand is more progressive than any income tax.

I can compare it with VSCode. Goland is much better at working with multiple Go Versions, which is a big thing in my daily work. Other things that it does better than VS Code are auto-generating unit tests, refactoring function signatures, better package management support, easier to set-up different build/debug profiles ...

Interesting post. As I said, I see the use case if you have a blog. Your case for "Capturing information from audio sources" makes a lot of sense too, something that I hadn't thought about.

So your notes on books for example, are they more like a collection of highlights, or like an essay summarizing or reviewing it?