chonglibloodsport

This video is very long and entertaining and there’s a lot of evidence of the effort he put into it. The one real criticism I have is that it seems like he didn’t do a lot of research on what foods work well with freeze drying, preferring to do his own experiments and getting gnarly results on basically everything that isn’t already a well-known freeze dried product.

Personally I think one of the most useful things to freeze dry would be fresh, home grown herbs. Another big one is homemade soups and stocks.

As for the usefulness of freeze dried food? The big one he missed is camping and hiking. Frozen foods just aren’t going to cut it when you’re away from electricity for a week or more. You need lightweight non perishable food and for that nothing beats freeze dried. Just need to get some water from a lake or river!

I love everything about this! Such a badass grandma!

Ahhhh, that was a typo. What they meant to say was “the Chinese government has a 95% approval rating among tankies!”

Don’t mistake my argument for a defence of billionaires. I don’t care for them any more than anyone else here. I just want to make sure that any changes we make to the law actually work and accomplish their intended goal. Poorly-thought-out laws are worse than doing nothing: they can backfire.

To give an example, the government of Canada passed a law called the Online News Act. This law targeted Google and Facebook with a special tax, called a link tax, that would force them to pay every time they or one of their users linked to a Canadian news site. The money collected by these link taxes would then go to pay to support Canadian news agencies in general.

The law backfired. Google struck a deal with the largest Canadian newspapers to pay them a flat fee but Facebook went ahead and blocked every single link to a news site for all users in Canada. This left thousands of small, local, Canadian newspapers high and dry (they were getting most of their traffic from Facebook posts linking to them). A law intended to benefit Canadian news publishers ended up putting most of them out of business.

The point of my previous example is to show that if a company is privately held (not traded on the stock market) then how much it is actually worth is not clear or obvious at all. This makes imposition of the $1B maximum wealth limit extremely difficult to properly implement.

I think what we would see in response to that is people hiding their wealth offshore, through private companies, through family members, trust funds, non-profit foundations etc.

So the billionaire has 10 relatives and hires each of them at his company, giving them all stock options as a bonus, which come from his own personal accounts. Then when it comes to tax time he’s managed to limbo his way under the $1B bar.

Take all your wealth and use it to set up a bunch of non-profit organizations for preserving national parks or saving the rainforest or running homeless shelters. Then have those foundations hire your family members to the boards of directors and pay each one millions of dollars in salaries.

There are countless ways to do this. Not just for individuals but for companies. Apple is pretty infamous for its use of Ireland as a tax haven that allows it to avoid paying corporate (profit) taxes on all its sales in the EU.

The other issue I foresee with the maximum wealth limit is how much chaos it could cause for companies. Let’s say you found a furniture company and run it really well and hire tons of employees. Then over time it grows above the billion dollar limit, so in order to pay your taxes you sell off the company to private equity who proceed to liquidate all its assets and fire all the employees. Without the limit in place you may have been happy to keep running the company and maintaining a great workplace for all your employees but the giant tax bill forced your hand. In the end, the company is largely destroyed, everyone has lost their jobs, and you retire with your billion dollars in cash.

I think the above scenarios are problematic no matter what you set the limit to. It also doesn’t address the issue of private companies (not traded on the public stock exchange) which don’t have a nominal market value. Sure, they have a book value for all their hard assets, but that can be far lower than the true value of the company.

Think of something like Snapchat which went from maybe a dozen employees and a bunch of laptops to rejecting a $3 billion buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg just 3 years later. Anyway, also how to deal with that? Let’s say you have a small company making calculator apps for iOS and Android. You earn $10,000 a year in profits from sales. Then some group of investors come together and offer you $10 billion for your company. Is your company now worth $10B just because of the offer? You’re not on the stock market. You barely make enough money to pay rent, yet come tax time you owe $9B.

You could say “well you rejected the offer so you don’t owe the government anything because you actually aren’t worth $10B.” But who decides what you’re worth? Snapchat rejected the $3B offer but most investors would’ve agreed they were worth it. But all they had was a few employees, some laptops and servers, and the app they made. They’re really not much different from the hypothetical calculator app company.

How does that work though? Let’s say the maximum wealth limit is one billion dollars and you own $750M of stock in the company you founded. Your wealth could go above and below that $1B limit multiple times in a day as the stock price goes up and down. What happens then?

No. English got its French words after William the Conqueror of Normandy (France) invaded England and conquered the Anglo Saxons.

A couple of general thoughts:

The Principal-Agent Problem. Dentistry, like auto repair, is one of those fields where the customer is purchasing a service directly from a technical expert delivering the service. The customer is generally at a pretty severe disadvantage when it comes to knowledge of the subject. This makes it really hard for the customer to make an informed decision as to whether or not the service is required.

High- and low-trust societies. We seem to be in a period of rapid decline of trust in our society (Western societies in general). I think we’re much more likely to see small businesses and other service providers try harder to take advantage of customers in a low trust society due to a lack of connectedness and sense of community. When people feel that they are part of a close-knit community they feel a responsibility to preserve those relationships so they tend to not try to take advantage of people.

Yes! Something about her face really attracts boats for some reason!

Theseus is the guy who kidnapped Helen of Troy! Or that’s what the stories tell us. Maybe it was the ship’s fault!

Yeah exactly, but even then there will still be scarcity of land. I’ve been a lifelong Trek fan and I’ve come to see all the holes in that universe. I think even the most diehard post scarcity believers understand that not everyone gets to be Captain Picard. But what about Picard’s family wine estate or even Sisko’s family restaurant? Not everyone gets one of those either.

The best we’ll manage is a tiny living quarters with a replicator and great public transit.

Yes, they’re fueled by resentment and righteous indignation. They see the world as a terrible place and demand that it be fixed for them. They also take for granted all the ways in which the world sucks so much less now than it did for most of history.