I think it's fantastic, actually. If the US had such a mechanism in place, we'd get term limits passed in a jiffy! In the absence of such a mechanism, the political class can simply refuse to act on popular measures. And while 10% might seem like a small number, the time, effort, and organization required to get 1/10th of the entire population to sign on for such a measure is actually a huge undertaking.

It's one thing to agree that he should be compensated (I agree), but the figure doesn't make much sense. Per the article:

> During his stay in jail, Larry lost his post-retirement job and missed his anniversary — as well as the birth of his grandchild.

That's all pretty rough, but I fail to see how it entitles him to the lavish sum of $800,000. That's roughly half a lifetime's earnings for the typical worker!

> we need incentives for voters to take this stuff seriously.

I have a sneaking suspicion that setting public money on fire is not the best mechanism to achieve this outcome.

The role of the entrepreneur is to organize labor and capital in pursuit of their goals. The achievement of said goals can obviously be attributed to the entrepreneur.

Try anchoring your arguments in facts--in reality. Make assertions. Form syllogisms. Word games are for children.

Elon is doing amazing things on a regular basis. What would drive someone to pretend otherwise?

From Webster's 1828 Edition:

U'SURY, noun s as z. [Latin usura, from utor, to use.]

1. Formerly, interest; or a premium paid or stipulated to be paid for the use of money.

[Usury formerly denoted any legal interest, but in this sense, the word is no longer in use.]

2. In present usage, illegal interest; a premium or compensation paid or stipulated to be paid for the use of money borrowed or retained, beyond the rate of interest established by law.

3. The practice of taking interest. (obsolete)

This is extremely relatable. I'm pretty confident that this physical sensation is related to my (rather severely) limited working memory, which I have to carefully manage at maximum capacity and which is catastrophically overwhelmed by some interruptions. A token interruption ("hey, do you have a sec"?) Doesn't tend to cause the sensation, but an interruption that contains data ("I called Greg about the plan for Wednesday and he said that Susan said...") is psychologically painful and even enraging in an oddly visceral sort of way.

Welp, that's enough reddit for today.

If you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil's work, I wonder whether this phenomenon might be related. Kurzweil notes that better technology begets better technology in a self-reinforcing and ever-accelerating cycle of technological advancement. His thesis implies rapidly evolving capital requirements. Massive amounts of nimble private capital, secure in the hands of highly competent people with relevant domain expertise, may well be an important precondition for continual acceleration.

There's a great chart out there somewhere (I couldn't find it) which breaks down the impact of private equity on the availability of such opportunities in public markets. It showed a dozen or so companies (like Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, etc) and broke down their market cap gains into two parts, "pre IPO" and "post IPO" gains. Of course, the pre-IPO gains were only available to private equity (or, at best, accredited investors), whereas the post-IPO gains were available to retail traders as well.

"Older" companies like GOOG & AAPL were much more likely to have experienced that vast majority of gains after their IPOs, meaning retail investors could have made big money by betting on them early. Meanwhile newer companies (like Facebook, Uber, Stripe, etc) were much more likely to have yielded the vast majority of their gains before their IPOs, meaning retail investors didn't have the opportunity to benefit from big returns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

> I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here.

It's not about the vote, it's about the human beings who are ruled by a government they don't want.

We can all look at a country like North Korea, where the ruler is oppressing the hell out of his people, and feel for them. We understand implicitly that it is wrong for one man (or a ruling clique) to dominate the other 99% of people who don't want to be dominated by him. We can also look at a country like apartheid South Africa, where a relatively small majority dominated the majority, and say that is wrong. As people who've been raised and indoctrinated as (small-d) democrats, it's easy to look at our systems, where a paltry 49% (or, in Germany, 54%) of the people are being dominated by the other 51% (45%), but this is merely the result of habit. There is no reason that they should be forced to live and work and be taxed by a system they dislike or even abhor. And, of course, the sense that the evolution of the state has somehow "peaked" with democracy is an expression of the most common bias of all, which is our "presentism" bias--that past progress is obvious in retrospect but future progress is impossible, undesirable, or, at best, inscrutible.

> I don't see much of a problem.

Neither did Europe in the 20s, to their great discredit.

> The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream.

Because you say so?

> This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it.

Nine of the ten countries with the highest GDP per capita have a population under ~7 million: Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Singapore, Norway and Denmark. Perhaps you should inform them how "frankly absurd" they've been to forego the benefits of economies of scale?