Sure. I mean you can buy a solar panel and put it on your roof and then sell the electricity it produces back to the grid. That’s not work. Is it fair? I don’t know. There are definitely people who think subsidies for solar panels are unfair.

There’s also the question of whether or not you earned the money. I think if you take a risk with your money and you invest it wisely then you’ve earned the profits you made on (minus taxes of course).

Obviously if you inherit millions of dollars from your parents you didn’t earn that. We as a society begrudgingly put up with inheritance because we admit that as humans our urge to provide for our children is a powerful instinct.

There’s also a question of whether or not an investment benefits society. I think the pepper growing and solar panel examples show clear benefits to society. With larger companies the question is a lot more complicated.

For example, I used to think Apple benefited society with all the work they put into their computers and growing the personal computer market. Now I think they’ve moved away from that towards rent-seeking. So to me it wasn’t the money that made the difference, it was the behaviour.

I’m not a teacher but I do volunteer to tutor high school kids whose families are from Somalia. I used to be in the mathematics teaching program in university but I decided not to become a teacher. I love to teach but I’m not equipped to deal with all of the other stuff teachers have to put up with (angry parents, disinterested / defiant students, standardized testing, failing school systems).

Don’t let the people throwing around “bootlicker” bother you. These folks are totally lost in a pit of resentment. They’re basically left wing MAGA types. The two groups are going to tear apart western civilization if they have their way. I’m hoping sanity will one day prevail.

I think you mean private equity, which act as the scavengers of the economy, dismantling companies and selling them off piece by piece. Venture capital is about funding 20 startups and hoping one of them becomes the next Google.

Let me quote GP because it seems like you’ve already forgotten what they said:

you’re just skimming off other people’s work

Now how do you reconcile that with this:

Nobody said it wasn’t fair

Either you’re just flat out lying when you say this, or you think “skimming off other people’s work” is fair. Which is it?

If you don’t think it’s fair then don’t borrow my $10 for pepper seeds! Find something else to do to earn your own money. I’ll buy the pepper seeds myself and keep the profits.

By the way, I’ve grown peppers myself. It’s very easy. The sun and the plants do 99% of the work. Claiming that “you did all the work” by germinating and transplanting a few seeds is quite silly.

Investing your money is not “making money for free” it’s providing your money to someone else so they can use it to make money. Then you make money when they make money. It’s capitalization. You risk losing all of that money if the investment fails. If you work a job you put your time and effort in and get paid for that but if the company fails you lose your job, they don’t take away your house.

It’s no different from a loan. Suppose you lend your friend $10 to buy some pepper seeds and they grow a bunch of peppers, sell some of them for $20, keep the other peppers, and collect seeds from the peppers so that they have even more seeds next year. Is it really fair if they just pay you back $10 next year? No!

They used your $10 to buy the seeds they needed to start with, they earned themselves $20 from pepper sales, plus they got to eat some peppers and even ended up with more seeds than they originally bought. They should pay you back more than $10 for the simple reason that you did not have use of your $10 for an entire year, so you did not have the ability to buy those pepper seeds and make the profit yourself.

That’s the time value of money. It’s why we pay interest on loans. Because to not do so is to saddle the lender with unfair opportunity costs, in addition to the risk of losing their money (maybe the peppers all die and your friend tells you they can’t pay you back the $10 anymore).

The Maillard reaction cannot be achieved through simmering alone. The temperature is too low. Simmering meat over a long period of time is useful for breaking down collagen and making a rich broth but you will not have the same deep, browned flavour as a broth made from roasted meat.

“For some reason”

You seem like a curious person. You should do some more research into cooking and why the Maillard and caramelization reactions produce such delicious food. It isn’t the carcinogenic byproducts that taste good (those tend to be quite bitter), it’s all the other complicated compounds produced from those reactions of proteins and sugars. By the way, these reactions can be achieved without burning the food at all, just not with most traditional cooking techniques.

Even still, you can get cancer from cooking without burning food at all. Heat up a bunch of oil to its smoke point and throw some water in there. In addition to creating a huge oily mess, you’ll fill the air with countless tiny droplets of oil and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are a known carcinogen. However, you can reduce the risks by not reheating used cooking oil, instead using only fresh oil every time.

You can also greatly reduce the risks by not heating the oil to its smoke point. It’s actually not necessary to heat oils to their smoke point in order to achieve the desirable browning flavour reactions.

As for life time of only eating bland boiled food: I would trade away a couple extra years of lifespan for avoiding that. Keep in mind that many of the most delicious soups and stews feature lots of seared, roasted, or fried ingredients anyway. Plus as I said, you can still get cancer even if you never eat or drink anything unhealthy. The air, the soil, and the water are all polluted with carcinogens. Even switching to electric cars will not help: the road, brake, and tire damage creates loads of PM2.5 particles which will destroy your lungs. This damage increases with the 4th power of vehicle mass, which means electric vehicles (that are far heavier) are actually far worse at producing this pollution!

You’re throwing out entire continents worth of cuisine. You’re essentially saying “do not sauté or stir fry anything.”

But here’s the sad reality: you could live your whole life eating nothing but bland, boiled food and still get lung cancer from VOCs and PM2.5 particles in the air due to the pollution of city life.

Not true. No matter what stove you cook with, cooking can produce large amounts of oil fumes (vaporized oil particles), smoke, and other VOCs from your food. All of this stuff is bad for your lungs.

Unless all you cook is boiled pasta, rice, veggies, gently simmered sauces, and sous vide (but not seared) proteins, you’re going to need a good quality range hood that (ideally) vents cooking emissions outside.

I’m reminded by the story I once read about Eritrea, a country with wealthy enclaves for the royal family plus foreign petro-engineers. The enclaves have these walls along the road with vast ghettos on the other side.

It’s a miserable place. The engineers tend not to stay long. Just make a lot of money in a short time period and then leave.

Yes. Capital flight is one of the last resort moves, as I said. Take your money with you and leave the hostile country.

No, it’s theirs. You agree to be bricked when you buy it!

If by issues you mean wealth distribution and the existence of an ultra-rich, powerful class, no. I don’t have a solution to that. The fundamental problem is that wealth brings power and the concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands brings other benefits, namely: coordination.

Smaller groups nearly always have an easier time coordinating their efforts than larger groups, so smaller groups tend to have a disadvantage unless they’re on the battlefield (and even then, wealthy well-supplied small groups of soldiers easily defeat large groups of poorly-equipped, poorly-trained peasants).

The big problem with the high-tax approach is that it’s a class warfare strategy. Apart from the communist revolutions of the 20th century, the history of class warfare has not gone well for the non-rich side. I think that moment in history was a unique one and unlikely to be repeated, barring the unforeseen appearance of some new decentralized warfare technology.

So where does that leave us? We can try non-class-warfare strategies. We want to align the interests of everyone, rich and poor, towards a common goal: peace, prosperity, and sustainability. Why would the rich want this? Because life is better that way! It’s much nicer to live in a safe, walkable, integrated, and prosperous community than it is to live in a walled compound surrounded by ghettos.

You frame it like those are the only two choices. They aren’t. The third choice is capital flight.

People constantly forget that governments don’t have godlike tax enforcement powers. In the real world people avoid taxes via a million different avenues. Absconding with their money for greener pastures is a last resort but it happens constantly.

Take China for example. Taxes are way lower than the US yet capital flight is such a huge problem that the government has enacted Capital controls. Yet capital flight from China continues largely unabated.

So what this means in practice is that if you want to have a 91% top corporate tax rate in the US without a gargantuan capital flight problem you’re going to need a government that is way more powerful and draconian than either the US or China is right now.

Now you might say “what if I just let everyone go and get the money back when they try to sell things to the US?” Well that’s basically what the US under Trump is doing right now, via tariffs. But then you tack on the capital flight beforehand and that means all the big companies, all the great jobs, leave the country before prices skyrocket. This is how you impoverish the US to third world status.

If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.

Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.

Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!

Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.

I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.

I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.

The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.

I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.

I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.

I have been tutoring high school students as a volunteer for nearly a decade. Most of these in early high school (9-10) can’t even write a simple paragraph. How are they going to express critical thinking when they can’t even write very simple things?

I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that! And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.

By analogy, imagine trying to train people to be Olympians. Before they can perform in their sport they need to train their bodies to build muscle and endurance. Yet they insist on bringing a forklift to the gym because they think what it really want them to do is move weights around, not lift them.

How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?