Of course a lease is better than buying.. for the dealer. So the seller was honest, just not entirely transparent.

Leasing is one of the dumbest financial moves ever. Forces you into a perpetual treadmill of payments for life.

Just buy a car, pay it off (cash if you can, or with a loan) and then drive it forever.

This is controversial but very bad advice. No index funds, by their nature, will ever match the return of high-flying company stocks.

If you have very little investment capital available, then yes, allocate it all to index funds because you can't afford to narrow it down yet. But as soon as you have some room to invest in individual stocks, do it.

After about three decades investing, I can say that more than 95% of my returns are from just a small handful of individual stocks. The index funds are in the noise. More than 60% of my net worth is just from two stocks.

Right here, that's how HN RSS feed works.

I only follow HN through the RSS feed. But it only gives the title and links to content and comments.

But for HN use case, that's ok IMO. Based on title I can decide if the comments might be worth it and follow the link.

In the US capitalism, can you find a mobile phone OS that respects owner freedom?

When was that?

It was getting huge in the late 90s and we all know now it was indeed the future.

But it still took a huge dot.com crash because the valuations got ahead of the curve.

If you knew when, it would be easy. But nobody knows the when. It might be tomorrow, next week or in 12 months or maybe two years or five. A drop is guaranteed, eventually, but nobody has any idea how much it will go up before that.

If you are truly convinced on this thesis, one could slowly keep increasing short bond allocations while moving away from tech, but no guarantees. Mainly depends how old you are. If very young, don't worry about it, stay invested. If near retirement, move to safer assets because you can't afford to loose everything now.

Palantir (and every government intelligence agency) has that global database and can query it at will.

Sure you would. Well, I can't assert about you, but most people in that position would.

First, what is usually left out of this kind of discussion is how much work it takes to earn an extra dollar. At minimum wage every extra dollar is a lot of work, so every penny in taxes is a big hit.

When you're making say 1 million a year, every extra dollar takes very little thought or effort, so getting less of each is a non-issue in practice. And when you're making billions, each dollar is asymptotically close to zero effort, so even at a 99% tax rate you'd be getting an extra penny for zero effort, which isn't bad at all when you're getting millions of those pennies.

But, we don't need to keep this theoretical, we can simply look at history.

In 1980 top tax rate was indeed 70%, and that did not stop people from working at making lots of money, buying Ferraris and mansions and yachts. So we know from historical fact that it wouldn't stop the rich from riching. It just makes society a tiny bit more fair.

Isn't the answer obvious? So that you can afford cool things that you want. There needs to be a baseline of minimum services everyone gets (health care, education, food). If you want anything beyond that, like a nice house, nice car, nice toys, travel, etc. then that's the motivation to work harder.

That is only because the system (at least in the US) is designed specifically to enable this. Tax code is mind boggingly complex because there are a million loopholes and special cases, so that if you can afford the top-tier accountants, you won't ever pay any taxes.

But there is nothing inherently necessary about this. We can know the net worth of people and tax them if the government just cared to do so.

I feel using AI (effectively) is not too far from the skillset of programming. It is still a machine following instructions (just, maddenigly non-deterministic, but still close enough), so the same insticts of breaking down work into clearly defined sequences that make a good programmer also make a good AI jockey.

That alone would be a massive win.

No person should be forced to perform actions they don't condone.

But there is no unalienable right to be a doctor. If someone wants to be a doctor and not perform health care procedures, then that's not compatible with being that kind of doctor.

They are entirely free to switch careers to do something else.

Same here, in only a few years!

There might be no long term use for it (but near future use certainly, since all our regular cars are standard, only the truck and EV are not) but having another skillset is always good. And it makes driving so much more engaging.

No downside really.

But as an analogy closer to HN, is there any advantage to knowing about software and operating systems and networking if all you're going to do is watch netflix on a walled-garden phone?

Same answer, no advantage really.

But knowledge is rewarding, understanding systems is fun.

Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.

Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.

So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.

It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.

Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.

But I encourage everyone who likes tech and freedom to host their own email. So many reasons.

Some are pragmatic, for example that way you won't ever get locked out suddenly of your entire digital existence when google/microsoft decide to lock you out for no reason and you will never reach support capable of helping.

Some are more about taking a stand for freedom, but that's also worthwhile. The internet was not meant to be owned by just a few behemots who get to control all content. The internet is about distributed peer to peer protocols. Nothing embodies that better than everyone running their own mail server, if you can.

As many say below, if you're worried about the deliverability you can still run your own email server and have nearly all the benefits even if you use a third party relay for delivery.

That said I also deliver from my email server and it is totally fine, the fears are overhyped. Delivery to microsoft is the worst, but even that one just takes filling a form on occasions (been over a year since had to do it last time).

Seriously?

EVs have many practical advantages. Don't need to list them here, we all know.

But they are so, so, so boring. Zero soul, zero character. Perfect appliance, zero passion.

Sometimes in life, passion matters too.

I like an EV for city commuting because commuting is boring no matter what so it's a good fit.

But for when I want to feel alive and drive (cue up Red Barchetta by Rush), no EV will ever do.