It’s ridiculous.
Numbers are funny, anyway. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth is closer to yours and mine than it is to Elon Musk (Forbes list currently placing them at ~100 bill and ~250 bill respectively). But that’s only in absolute terms. In reality, Jensen’s got like 8 or 9 orders of magnitude more wealth than I do depending on how far into the month we are, and on the same order of magnitude as Musk.
Either one losing 99% of their wealth would still be above a billion.
Oh I agree that even 2 billion is too much, but my reasoning is that proponents of capitalism often make the claim that capitalism drives innovation (you try to fill some market niche in order to get rich) so if they are right, then 2 billion should be enough that this still works.
I had yachts depreciating to zero in my example because it’s estimated that you have to spend about 10% of its’ purchase price annually anyway, so anyone keeping a 20 year old yacht around is going to be spending a lot of money on it that will fuel other parts of the economy.
Okay, that’s actually a good thing. I’ve heard unions in the US apparently often restrict individual bargaining, as that would undermine the collective bargaining of the union. So in that case, your coworker who’s been working for 20 years, will make twice as much as you do at your 2 years, despite the fact that all he does all day is scratch his balls, while you bust your ass off. And you have no way of earning more than them.
Either way it doesn’t affect me because I’m in Estonia and in a field where we generally get paid well enough even without unions. But I also know this won’t last forever, because right now there’s way too many unemployed software engineers.
Any billionaire can lose 90% of their wealth and have above 100 million left.
Many can lose 99% and have above 100 million left.
Some can lose 99% and still be billionaires.
The 100 millionaire will still have a million or more left after losing 99%, but that’s not “live like hogs in the fat house forever” money at least. It’s just “I don’t have to worry if I lose my job” money.
A hundredbillionaire can lose 99% of their money and not make any perceptible changes in their lifestyle.
I propose the following:
Gap individual wealth at 50000x the national median annual income. Max wealth anyone in the US could have is, at present, under 2 billion. Other countries will vary, but generally it’s plenty enough to motivate people to innovate, but nobody gets to be Bezos or Musk wealthy. Yachts should count towards this wealth gap, at a depreciation rate of 5% a year off the build cost. Primary residence doesn’t count unless it’s also used for generating income. You get to have one car, regardless of price, that doesn’t get counted towards it, and the other ones count at market value. So you can have your classic car that appreciates in price, and a daily driver - without having to worry about the classic car’s effect on your wealth limit.
Side effect is that now suddenly rich people near the gap will be a lot more interested in paying better wages to the working class. Why? Because then they’d get to keep more of their money. And to raise the median efficiently, you need to be raising wages for the poorest among us first and foremost.
There’s a caveat:
Don’t unions really restrict your salary growth in fields where there’s actual potential for it?
I’m in software engineering and I reckon a whole bunch of people would be unhappy if their salary was in a direct relationship with their years of experience.
Though if the gravy train ever ends, I’ll be the first to advocate for an union.
IDEs have had subscriptions for ages. The build server is a cloud service because local machines can be slow to compile and not everyone has an on-site build server.
Which one of them is the one that referred to workers as niggers in their codebase?
Google is allowing the app developers to choose (for now?). With Apple, developers never had the option to allow other stores or sideloading.
I’m lucky enough that both of the shareholders of my company are software engineers; one has transitioned to sales and project management, the other is still an engineer, he’s also the CTO.
Was discussing office chairs with our team lead/office supplies person (it’s a really small company, some people have multiple roles) and when I mentioned that my chair gets really creaky when leaning back but otherwise it works so it really just needs some lubrication, she asked why I would even lean so far back in my chair and the CTO told her “There’s two sitting positions for programming. The writing position and the thinking position”
TL;DR: Takes an engineer to know how engineering works. Turns out that you have to spend a lot of time just thinking
I diagram everything out in my brain and it evolves continuously while I’m writing code
Sometimes I feel it’s a miracle I get anything done at all but then usually the end result is better than what I’d originally envisioned so it kinda balances out.
But think about arguing online! It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm, but usually stay in the 100 wpm range.
Programming? Idk, I spend more time thinking than typing personally. Good code requires you to consider all the corner cases and such.
Facebook 15 years ago wasn’t all that bad tbh. It was nice being able to write to just about anyone you met in real life.
It’d already been getting worse for a while, but to me, the 2016 US election was when things got super obvious. Same with reddit. Can’t believe it’s been 8 years already.
This shit right here is why people buy Apple. You sell your soul to the devil and get convenience in return.
Don’t get me wrong - both my work laptop and my gaming PC run Linux. But my phone is still an iPhone and if I ever have need for a personal laptop again, it’s gonna be a Macbook Air again.
You can’t fit it in Wordle with a hard R
But you CAN fit it without it
I hope it succeeds just enough to take the right wing nutters off YouTube and give YouTube an incentive to improve its service. But that it stays unsuccessful enough that it keeps burning a hole in Elon’s pocket
I’m seriously considering dropping everything and jumping to Rust because of Cargo.
Well if you’re into game dev, ECS and Rust, there’s like a 99% chance you know of it, but just in case you don’t: We have bevy, now with an extra full-time dev (Alice, who’d been working hard at it for years, I think she’s a bigger contributor than the author himself at this point lol)
I’m not a teacher, and I don’t want to become one tbh.
That said, something like Python is standard, and for good reason IMO. For OOP they usually teach Java here, though I’m not a huge fan. I think Kotlin would be better to teach nowadays. There are other OO languages of course, but I’m of the opinion that after messing around with Python, students should probably use something strongly typed, so that’s JavaScript out - I suppose TypeScript could be used, but IMO it’d be best to keep JS/TS in a web dev specific course.
That’s because C++ is such a high performance language, it gets things done faster
There’s a saying in my language that roughly translates to “the morning is wiser than the evening” in English. I believe in English it’s common to say “sleep on it” for tough decisions.
I often wake up and come up with a solution to my toughest problems from the previous day. My REM sleep brain is already keeping me gainfully employed.
No idea why anyone would want to fuck with this. It’s awesome.
If you read my other comment, basically I’ve heard from other commenters online that some collective bargaining agreements restrict individual bargaining. That would suck. If the union only sets floors instead of absolutes or ranges, that is another thing entirely and something that I’m very much in favor of.