Maybe they have plenty of guys but not enough spears? 6000 spearheads is a lot of work for 3 days. Ask any blacksmith!

No, it goes on the left so that you don’t need to put down your coffee to shoot the TV!

Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.

Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.

If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.

How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).

Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).

I prefer to think of the creator of the meme as an American and all the awkwardness and sexual undertones are fully intended!

Do you have a source for this?

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).

I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).

I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).

Ideology is one of those words that has become almost useless due to how many different (and contradictory) definitions people have for it. If you have to define a word for someone (and they already knew that word beforehand) then the word isn’t conveying enough meaning!

Yes and the rich have the advantage here: they are few. Cooperation is always easier to achieve with few than with many. Now include the fact that the rich have vastly more resources and the scale of the problem becomes much more apparent:

You’ve got to organize the masses with very few resources. The rich in the mean time leverage their resources to buy traitors, crack coalitions, divide, and conquer the masses.

This is the reason why popular revolutions rarely succeed. If you really want to win you need to divide the rich and get some on your side.

More like Chinese chef knives!

Haskell does both! Most people prefer to use whitespace when writing Haskell but it’s not required. Braces and semicolons are preferred if you’re going to be generating Haskell code.

Pretty funny! But the reason so many people need glasses is because we spend all our time indoors, reading. People in the past were outside working all the time and they didn’t need glasses as a result.