The potential to commit violence can be reframed as strength. It's useful because it grants you negotiating leverage, regardless of whether you are the aggressor or defender. Can't defend yourself? Vae victis.

Under normal circumstances, a bomb's energy is endogenous. But in the blog's thought-experiment, the energy is assumed to be exogenous. Therefore, your assumption that "the explosion is bounded by the mass of the person" doesn't apply to this scenario. Instead of TNT, imagine a rubberband.

Another way of thinking about this: A wealth tax is like inflation, except assets are also devalued alongside your savings. Which means the wisest strategy is to consume now, save nothing, invest nothing.

Also, quality of living is determined by income, not wealth. Fresh retirees are generally wealthier than other age-groups because they've saved for retirement. But that doesn't mean they consume more. Also, consider the citizens of the Netherlands. They enjoy a comfortable existence while servicing an enormous amount of debt. If wealth were the primary determinant of quality of life, you'd think the Netherlands were as as destitute as Somalia.

Perhaps an analogous situation would be: Suppose a teacher wanted to introduce the notion of limits to a calculus curriculum. "That makes zero sense. The only things a student needs to know are the shortcuts for each parent function, e.g. that (d/dx x^2) reduces to (2x) via handwavey magic." But what if an engineer needs to integrate over an arbitrary curve? Can students solve the problem without being comfortable with Riemann Sums? Maybe 1st-year calc students should rederive the shortcuts from scratch? "Except we're talking about a math course, not an engineering course."

> In particular this bit regarding multiplier/multiplicand makes zero sense to me.

> Isn't 2 rows x 3 chairs the same thing as 3 chairs x 2 rows? It's a bizarre argument.

It's bizarre to simias (and you, I assume) because y'all can't imagine performing the operation without thunking. (Don't get me wrong, I think "repeated addition" is the best method. I'm just attempting to explain the opposite perspective so that it feels less bizarre.)

If all you care about is the total number of chairs, the order of operands is irrelevant. but if you care about the structure, "2 x 3" may encode information that "6" does not.

> Water flows downhill. Scientists want to know why.

"But gravity makes everything flow downhill, right? What makes water especially worthy of investigation." Surely this is a reasonable reaction.

I think the distinction is that the "trigger" relates to a particular instance of failure, whereas the "root cause" relates to a class of failures.

...

> When the lock-down was in full effect it dawned on me: bitcoin is indeed utterly useless when things go haywire. What's the point of wealth if you can't do anything with it, won't do anything with it, or have no one to share it with.

During his journey home, Bilbo gifts a portion of his treasure to the King of the Wood Elves. This generosity is juxtaposed with Thorin, who

  A) Roped his 12 buddies and Bilbo into a speculative venture (with ZERO plan to realistically defeat Smaug), 
  B) obsessed over the Arkenstone to an unhealthy degree, 
  C) refused to share the spoils with Lake Town or the Wood Elves, and
  D) locked himself away in the mountain. 

The Office – How Michael Scott Makes a Sale

(7 min video essay)

TLDR he's a people-person.

The entire object doesn't get collapsed to a single point. Rather, a single point of the object radiates light in all directions. A lens then captures a fraction of that radiation and collapses it back down to a single point. Then we iterate over each point in the scene with a "for each".

Marc Andreesen published an essay "It's Time to Build" [0]. He claims that ostensibly, COVID-19 inflicted acute trauma on the U.S. economy. But it merely excaberated the symptoms of a deeper dysfuntion. The root problem is the cultural decay of "a will to build". The solution is to rekindle this norm.

Several have published their own takes [1]. pg must have figured "What you can Learn from How to Ace a YC Interview" conveniently dovetails into the larger debate. Had he written the essay in a vacuum, I suspect he'd have emphasized "sell users what they want". Rather than the grand narrative "civilization is built by founders" which might increase exposure but possibly dilute the original intent.

[0] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that...