> But I think just focusing on enjoyment in life is a poor human experience. Life has much more to offer that is equally interesting. Enjoyment isn't the only game in town.
I assume this person is employed, so they're probably already doing quite a lot more than just hedonistic enjoyment.
> This isn't the conclusion I was most hoping to reach before moving here; there's a world in which a robust safety net, paid for by such taxes, actually incentivizes entrepreneurship by cushioning the fall - but I just don't see the evidence for us living in that world, at least not here.
> In terms of total returns, residential real estate and equities have shown very similar and high real total gains, on average about 7% per year.
> The data summary in Table 3 and Figure 2 show that residential real estate, not equity, has been the best long-run investment over the course of modern history.
> Although returns on housing and equities are similar, the volatility of housing returns is substantially lower, as Table 3 shows. Returns on the two asset classes are in the same ballpark— around 7%—but the standard deviation of housing returns is substantially smaller than that of equities (10% for housing versus 22% for equities).
> Predictably, with thinner tails, the compounded return (using the geometric average) is vastly better for housing than for equities—6.6% for housing versus 4.6% for equities. This finding appears to contradict one of the basic assumptions of modern valuation models: higher risks should come with higher rewards.
Seems the way the real estate market works has caused a big drain both on economic growth (as investments have gone into real estate rather than more productive products), and on economic equality.
So a Georgist land value tax does seem like a pretty good idea.
> While a noble goal, I don't believe this is a goal shared by the majority of the population.
Then why do most countries have welfare for the poor?
> I think if you ran a poll between "improve the life quality of those born with less potential" and "improve the progress of humanity", the results would favor the later.
What's the point of improving the progress of humanity if not to actually make life better for the majority of humans?
In a few decades the majority of the population might find _themselves_ poor due to not being born with enough potential to compete with automation and robots. Should we keep engineering the economy such as to only improve life quality for the most fortunate?
> He wrote the program specifically for the hardware he was using and independent of an operating system because he wanted to use the functions of his new PC with an 80386 processor.
Even if judging by surface appearance something is a clone, there might still be a lot of creativity involved "under the hood" i.e. in the implementation. In the case of Linux it was originally optimized for 80386 and is a monolithic kernel while Minix is a microkernel design. Fine-tuning it to run fast on 80386 must surely have involved a lot of creativity?
Just a speculation, maybe the temporary slightly elevated blood pressure from coffee is actually beneficial due to hormesis, just like stressing the body with strength or interval training is healthy in the long run as the body adapts and grows stronger.
Bitboys tried, but pivoted to embedded graphics and were bought by ATI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D
Falanx Microsystems tried (not EU but close enough), also pivoted to mobile/embedded graphics and made the #1 shipping family of GPUs in the world: https://developer.arm.com/community/arm-community-blogs/b/mo...