Of course there were. There were also lots of successful companies before we had highways or municipal plumbing. So I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.

>Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.

Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in. Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there. They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.

Regarding your quote. Was your intention to imply that I’m a totalitarian because I’m using a slightly different definition of a word than you? That seems a bit severe.

Let’s ask Wikipedia about infrastructure:

> One way to describe different types of infrastructure is to classify them as two distinct kinds: hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure.[4] Hard infrastructure is the physical networks necessary for the functioning of a modern industrial society or industry.[5] This includes roads, bridges, and railways. Soft infrastructure is all the institutions that maintain the economic, health, social, environmental, and cultural standards of a country.[5] This includes educational programs, official statistics, parks and recreational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and emergency services.

I don’t think it’s by any means a stretch to say Medicare or the FDA are institutions that maintain economic/health standards.

Has Tesla ever received a check from Medicare? Probably not. But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.

Has Salesforce ever asked for regulation or assistance from the FDA? Probably not. But because the FDA exists, Saleforce's employees don't have to spend time verifying their medication is authentic and does what it claims to do, so they can spend more focus on their work for Salesforce.

Even beyond government: how much do you think a Ford or Chevy have benefited from the US's culture? They certainly don't sell many large consumer trucks Europe or Asia. That profit exists because of the ideals and beliefs Americans have about how they should live their lives and what type of car they need to do that. Yes someone made the truck, and the truck maker should reap most of the benefits, but some of that profit should feed back into society that supported it.

Sure, we probably spend too much on the military and there exists some cronyism that we should strive to stamp out, but make no mistake that anyone with 100M in investable wealth has earned it with substantial help from the society we have all built together.

People on welfare aren’t getting nearly as much out of the system as people who have amassed massive wealth, so they should put in substantially less.

Stuff like this certainly makes it seem like cops are more interested protecting their own power and their cushy pension packages and their corrupt fringe benefits.

So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing?

I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.

I would imagine goto-definition not working well to be more an issue with Ruby being a dynamically typed language and having metaprogramming features like define_method, not the framework. (FWIW I really dislike Ruby despite really liking Rails)

More software requires more software engineers to maintain it, who then write more software, which then require more engineers to maintain it, on and on and on…