altusbrown

If I caught the staff doing that at a hotel or restaurant, I’d black list them. Fuck that.

If you really want to avoid getting anything in your water - even essential vitamins and minerals - you can always distill your water. It’s worse for you though, much worse. That ‘chalk’ in your carafe is just small amounts of minerals you need anyway that come out of solution.

Bottled water has it too.

If they build up to the point it’s bothering you, a little vinegar will dissolve them right out.

Landfilling is even better.

Or how the network settings pages often don’t even have basic network information on it, so you literally can’t even use the supposed debug page to actually diagnose even the most basic network issues!

It is. My ‘favorite’ is when technical help links in their own settings app links to useless web searches with ads.

Amazon currently employs 798,000 employees. It touches essentially every household, and based on revenue and customer counts is clearly a well used service with utility for a great many people. It is valued by investors at 1660 billion dollars (1.6T market cap), and in 2020 earned revenue of 386 billion dollars. Those employees seem to feel it's a positive deal for them, and the investors certainly seem happy to value it at that amount. Not everyone is happy, but that is true of most things in my experience. They still seem happier than a lot of people at Walmart or the like.

How much would be appropriate for the person who had the vision (back before Amazon existed) to build it, pulled the right folks together, hired and fired who it took to make it work, and structured them and the work they were doing to produce that over a decade - including all the reviews and direction through good times and bad? 1%? 5%? 25%? Even 1% is 16 billion dollars. Most people would argue it should be a lot more than 5% if you stripped out the dollar amounts and the names.

No sharp line, but hardly artificial.

If someone gives you a cake, and I take the whole cake it's clearly confiscation no? You got no cake at the end.

If someone gives you a cake and I take a slice (say 25%), then it is clearly not confiscation, since you got cake correct? Not only that, you got most of it.

Good luck though when the person who learned how to be an assassin/shark and was able to build and maintain the wealth has handed it off to their kids (or grandkids) who probably never had much contact with them (what with all the assassin/sharkiness), and are now trying to judge well managed and safe from what they were exposed to as children. Which was probably massive wealth, and people who aren't always scamming you (because the filtering happened off screen).

Especially since you either have to pick someone (or a small group) from the set to judge, or have to deal with an ever increasing and ever more distant from the original wealthbuilding set of decision makers.

Definitely possible to do, but very, very, very unlikely and rare (based on clear examples around us).

Based on your comment, I'm assuming you would expect them to be led by someone doing the same things - which just highlights the role doesn't?

That attitude does tend to align more with mine, with some important distinctions. It would also be interesting to compare long term societal/general impact and survival with that attitude.

My reasoning is that being exposed to the influence of power and wealth when someone is young is a bit like having them snort cocaine - unlikely to produce a long term successful human).

Is not taking wealth when it is available and not giving it to your progeny a long term survival/genetic benefit or not?

Wouldn't really change anything, but I guess curiosity in the face of a unclear benefit is pretty much the definition of us here. :)

There is an element to that, but it is not only that.

Most (but not all) sizable wealth builders I've met or done research on have been people with a combination of:

- ability to cut through bullshit but play the game (so can generate bullshit when necessary, but aren't fooled or impeded by it) - work hard (yes - bill gates, bezos, etc. all worked their asses off during many important periods). - know the right things to work on (so avoid expending their effort on digging ditches when they can spend the effort negotiating better deals) - get in the right place at the right time (combination of luck, pragmatism, paying attention to wider trends). You can influence this, but never really control it. - ability to work with wildly different people effectively (often nicely, often not nicely depending on the group) to get what they needed done - ability to raise capital, and put it to use. (significant environmental, education, networking effects here) - don't give away the farm/give away too much of their own ownership or assets. - knows how to effectively address a market and deliver a useful product, or find and direct people who do.

This is not a common set of qualities. If you spent all the money in the world on training, you'd be lucky if 1 in 10 people could pick those qualities up. With Genetics and personality traits (ignoring the nurture element), even if they cloned themselves I doubt you'd get better than 50/50 odds.

If being a wealth builder is the result of a large confluence of events coming together just right, say:

- right genetics & right influences in early childhood to produce the right world view and personality - right set of circumstances early on to connect useful people for capital, or circumstances later to connect them to capital - right skillset with understanding and being effective with others of widely different backgrounds - right exposure to the right potential market, and the right luck with with many things (all of which have elements of personally influenceable factors and external non-influencable factors)

It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that what works in the first generation doesn't usually last very long. The circumstances are different, everything is different by the time generation #2 or #3 happen.

With the right training, education, and circumstances you can improve the odds. But maybe a generation or two?

There is a saying I've run across a bunch - first generation builds it, second generation spends it, third generation blows it.

In large part because the environment each generation is in has fundamentally different pressures and environments 'by default', and a lot of our personality and approach to things is set in early childhood.

It's also why you see societies with more stable traditions of wealth/nobility/etc focus so much on traditional ways of doing things, acting, etc. is to attempt to keep reinforcing what was necessary for prior success even when it's not obvious for the new generation. Because they do provide necessary coping skills and the like.

Even still, a great many of them lose it all (statistically).

Taxation is not confiscation, unless the taxation is punitively high. I'd argue it would likely need to be 100% to meet the common usage of it.

The more you tax, the closer you get to banning or stopping activity. If a government sets a tax rate of 100% at say a certain threshold, it would be a poor planner that would be earning anything in that category no?

Do you think Amazon would just exist if Bezos didn't do what he did?

Do you think groups of people spontaneously collect in ways that produce more value than they cost to exist? Even if there is no way to benefit from it individually at scale?

If you do, I can understand where you are coming from - it doesn't line up at all with my experience or extensive datasets I have, but I'd understand it.

If that can't just happen, then how did he not earn it?

Something about the AMD implementation is notably harder to exploit, though last I looked it wasn't clear what that was. It's held up much better, and a lot of people have looked at it.

Still exploits, but almost impossible to do in the field last I checked, where Intel has been demonstrated on live systems handling production load.

FYI - at least one friend-of-a-friend large scale investor reached out after this article to note he'd almost hired this same person.

Don't assume someone coming in through a reference has had the level of due diligence you need. Always do your own due diligence. It catches things that will otherwise slip through because everyone assumes everyone else checked.

That registration with the state puts them in one of the other categories I checked. She was not in those categories.

Those in house council also are a very different category than a independent lawyer.

You're not wrong there is an edge case - it just isn't applicable here (And is called out on the state bar web page as something to check)