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Slightly off topic, but I am continually perplexed by so many adhering to this archaic idea that memorizing and regurgitating information is "learning."

The issue in this context is that there are very few "right" or "wrong" answers in business (there are some) but the vast majority of the decisions you will make in business are pros/cons and weighing the best option at the time. And what works for one business will not work for another.

I've always found quizzes and tests to be a giant waste of time, largely because they have you spend time trying to guess what the "teacher" or material wants you to say rather than what's actually beneficial or useful to what you're trying to accomplish.

A better alternative is to give "projects." Not busywork, but something specific you can do that can actually help you take steps toward launching or growing a business. (Not worksheets, something you can actually use).

Beyond all of this, the information isn't really valuable anyway unless it's coming from someone who has build numerous successful businesses and can provide insight into which pieces they found valuable and which they didn't.

Insight is always way more valuable than conventional wisdom, especially in the realm of business.


I agree that memorising and regurgitating is not useful here, but I do not think the information should come from someone who has built businesses. This is an attempt to teach business school knowledge. Its called "Core MBA"! The best people to provide this information are the people who teach business.

I am very suspicious on insights from people who have been successful at business. Trying to infer from their success is subject to survivorship bias, they may have advantages they are not entirely honest about (especially after the first success), and their experience is usually quite specific.


I agree that memorising things isn’t learning, but I think it’s generally understood that it is a critically important step in learning.

In technical subjects you need immediate recall of a lot of different things to be able to move onto more advanced topics.

In the humanities like history and written analytical topics like this, I would argue that memorisation of past situations etc is supposed to be the groundwork that you begin to grow your own critical thinking from. It’s not expected that you slavishly apply identical copies of what you’ve learned, they are just examples


I would say that this is literally the idea that I wanted to convey in the project: quite often there are no correct answers.

The goal of the project is to show where mistakes are most often made and try to make them in a simulation, be it a quiz or a market simulation, rather than in real life.


I agree with you on this one, I've never understood the fascination with Chrome. Safari has done a pretty good job of maintaining a clean and simple UI along with being reliable.

If there was a downside I guess it would be in the realm of extensions/plugins where Chrome probably has a leg up. That's where I decided to make the jump to Brave. All the same Chrome extensions without the Google nonsense (and built in ad blocker).

I still really like Safari though and would likely use it daily if it had a built-in ad blocker.


It isn’t free but 1Blocker works well across iOS and macOS devices for ad blocking. I am not affiliated with them; just have had it for the last 3 years.


Yea I've already purchased some of these apps so I was not going to thrilled if they pulled an Adobe and made me pay for an overpriced subscription on top of it >:(

Exactly what I was thinking. I bought Pixelmator Pro 3 days ago… But I am happy, as I have absolutely no need for the others, except for the free ones.

> overpriced

Seriously? This is incredibly reasonable.


It's not outrageous, for sure, specially if you happen to have a use case for all the bundled apps. But things change if you consider that the one time payment for Logic Pro equals about 18 months of the subscription. In my case, I bought Logic Pro in 2013 for 180€. Obviously a subscription seems expensive no matter what the price is.

If a students needs Logic Pro for 3 months for a class then they can get it (with the other apps) for $9 total ($6 if you count the free month). That makes more sense than a one time fee of $200. On the other hand, if you're planning to use the software for over a decade like yourself then $200 is very cheap.

So you bought Logic Pro vX for 180€. Did you receive Logic Pro vX++ for free?

Yes, Logic updates have been free for many years. FCP as well.

Well what I didn't receive for free is the 3 macs that have been running the same licensed product ;)

Indeed, and considering the 14 years of free Logic upgrades I'm surprised they bothered charging the initial $199! (I do remember being a bit miffed that it was $199 regardless of my existing license for the giant $999 box that was Logic Studio.)

The notion that someone keeping what they earn is "theft" while having something forcibly taken from them via taxation isn't, is wild.

I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.


The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.

For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.

Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.

Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.


>>The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.

Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.

However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.

Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.


Historically it was fine because dividends were significant and counted as income.

Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...


This proposed tax is an EXTRA tax on billionaires only. The “all taxation is theft” position is pretty indefensible in modern society, but this explicit “No, fuck you in particular!” tax is ALSO indefensible.

Why? We consistently use progressive tax policies worldwide.

Wealth taxes are extremely uncommon worldwide.

Billionaires have been too and the tax code is one the slowest things to adapt.

In tax code sense I am not even sure the effects of buy, borrow, and die have even been settled.

EDIT: can't respond but "pay no taxes but at least your kids do" isn't exactly a fix


That is a hole we could fix tomorrow by eliminating the step up on death. No need to introduce a new global financial surveillance regime for tracking asset ownership for wealth tax purposes just to fix that.

Fuck billionaires. The fact that individual people possess so much wealth is poisonous to society. It is the easiest thing in the world for a billionaire to become a not-billionaire and they will still be stupendously wealthy.

Your reasoning is ignoring that billionaires disproportionately benefit from public investments (tax money). Therefore, when they avoid paying taxes, they're taking more from the community than they are putting back in: this is theft, and degrades society for everyone (even billionaires, in the long run).

Better neighbor analogy: your neighbor asks for small favors all the time, and you provide. One day you ask him for one and he leaves the neighborhood entirely instead of obliging.


I've never really understood the knee-jerk hatred toward billionaires. The reality is that while I'm sure some fraud/corruption exists, for the most part, they cannot steal money from you. They have to make something so good, a person chooses to part with their money to acquire it.

The government on the other hand, can just tax you (often without cause or justification) and offer nothing in return for what they took by force.

Yet you'll find many people decrying billionaires as the great evil while silent on governments who are in many ways, far far worse.


It's more about the concentrated power that billionaires (shouldn't) have. I didn't care that Elon Musk had $100b+ until he started using it to buy social media platforms and influence national politics.

Of course, you were concerned about how the folks who previously ran Twitter used it to influence national politics, right? You're concerned about such influence by the folks who run each of the four major networks, the folks who run the major newspapers, etc.

What is this concentrated power you speak about? In many areas, they have exactly the same power as everyone else. They get only one vote each election day. They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else.

Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.

It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.


> They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else

Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.

And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.


Actually, you're the one being obtuse. The point isn't that they use Instacart to avoid the lines. The point is that everyone can use Instacart or the USPS mobile app and everyone pretty much pays the same price. The point is that there's no special level of power that's available only to people with a billion dollars.

There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.


I don't know how you can't see it, but people who have gobs of wealth absolutely have more options (and more powerful options) than people who don't. For just one small example, they can purchase equity in non-public companies. If a regular person wanted to invest in OpenAI, they couldn't. But if a billionaire wants to throw down $10b, they can.

Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.


I understand the sentiment (really I do), however, eventually you'll run out of people to tax.

If we don't tax wealth and the wealthy are playing the buy, borrow, and die strategy what is California losing when they leave?

California does already tax the wealthy, this is just more taxes on the wealthy.

Except if you buy, borrow, and die you don't pay taxes.

Elon Musk only paid taxes because he had stock options that were going to expire. Otherwise he just doesn't sell shares thus not triggering a taxable event and not paying taxes.


Massive numbers of jobs as billionaires by definition are building highly successful large companies. Being on the cutting edge of science and technology. Improvements to all of our lives from better goods and services.

If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.


Ignoring OpenAI due to when this article came out of the Fortune 500 one company was less than a decade old.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/06/youngest-com...

Given we now have 2,500 billionaires how can they not manage to come up with new ideas that create companies any faster than that?

The reality is most billion dollar companies are made through mergers to reduce market competition not actually creating new things.


Majority weren’t billionaires when they started their successful companies.

Their successful companies (the employees) and the government, policies, and environment around them are the things that make them successful.

Billionaires mostly hoard assets. Important assets that you need (not want, need) to live.


I don't hate billionaires. They just shouldn't have that much money. NO ONE should have that much money. In fact, back in the 80s, virtually no one did. Remember when Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 1995? And he had $13b of MSFT stock. Now the 10 richest people all have 10-20x that. That's not inflation (which is only 3x since then), that's an incredible increase of wealth concentrated in their hands, that gives them the power to light our industrial society on fire if they want. And some of them do want.

A cumulative total return of the S&P 500 since 1995 is about 2,467% (or roughly 25.7× your original investment).

Right, so a sensible society would tax capital gains more than labor, but since we didn't do that, the lion's share went to the already wealthy. For no reason other than being wealthy.

California should tax its' most valuable asset, its land. It's immovable.

Of course, they did the exact opposite with prop 13 many decades ago, creating a land owning class with disproportionately low tax rates.

In California, if you make or do something valuable, you have to pay increasing proportions of the rewards to the government. But the longer you (and your ancestors) simply own land and do nothing, the lower your tax rate.


There are only 2500 billionaires on the planet. Wealth taxes only apply to a vanishingly small number of people.

Income taxes were originally only levied against the top ~3%.

I'm fairly happy paying my high taxes.

That is the most horrible and accurate comment I've read so far today lol

I tried my dad’s grape nuts once and I never felt the gulf between us wide as I did in that moment. WTF, man.

Lots, and lots, of sugar helps.

it's the only breakfast thing I can get my kids to eat that doesn't have sugar in it, besides scrambled eggs & bacon.

When combined with a good tasting milk, I like them quite alot


Ah yes Flash. I had just started learning how to build static HTML sites and was going down the road of learning flash instead just as I saw Steve Jobs came out in opposition of it.

I decided to turn back to regular HTML/CSS and then PHP.

Turned out to be the right move but I still kinda to miss those old flash sites.


Standards wonks love dancing on Flash's grave, but overlook the massive dent in culture that we lost.

Maybe vibe coding will unlock a similar indie ethos for a future generation, but the frameworkification of the web and centralization of the App Stores has been bad for the last 20y of creativity.


This is slightly off topic, but something I find myself wondering pretty regularly: if ads are pretty much universally hated by every human on earth, why do companies continue running them?

I get the obvious answer: "they work"

But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?

While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything from those companies.


I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.

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