- high net wealth individuals essentially being indifferent to income tax.

- income tax and short term capital gains are taxed at much higher rates to long term capital gains.

- lower net wealth folks (ie. the general public) receiving most of their income as income.

- high and ultra high net wealth individuals now making most of their money through dynastic trusts and inheritance.

This combination ends up making it so that, as Warren Buffet would put it, he ends up paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.

I effectively don't really care if it's a wealth tax or some other more targeted technical fix, but it's not sustainable to have the very wealthiest individuals taxed at a lower effective tax rate than everyone else and also able to pass on their wealth directly to heirs without significant estate taxes.

I will never trust them with a hardware purchase ever again.

The future is going to dynamically budget and route different parts of the SLDC through different models and subagents running on the cloud. Over time, more and more of that process will be owned by robots and a level of economic thinking will be incorporated into what is thought of today as "software engineering." At some point vibe coding _is_ coding and we're maybe closer to that point than popularly believed.

This could be a lot of money to spend to acquire users that may not be sticky.

Keeping a benchmark test harness secure and fast is non-trivial. You need to keep the grading script and the solution off the box, use network controls, deal with external resource usage, etc. It's a lot of work. I don't think it's realistic to expect benchmark authors to bullet proof their benchmark runners. Most benchmarks are written to be run conveniently on a single machine (ie. in docker), not to run in parallel across tends of thousands of secure, isolated machines.

The US has pushed the burden of retirement onto individuals, hoping that the private sector will offer incentives like 401k matching and generous health care plan subsidies, but this is a fundamental difference in who qualifies, what they receive, and how it's funded. These effects compound wealth and income inequality. If, for whatever reason, you're locked out from a job that would help pay for these programs, there's no coming back. You are dependent on the government at the same time as the government is underfunding the program you rely on. It's not a great situation.