I get that a lot of people think people's unrealized capital gains should be taxed, so maybe the argument you're making is something like:

"People with very large paper-gains based on appreciation of the market-value of the assets they own pay 0% taxes on those unrealized gains"

In which case, yeah, that's definitely true. But if they sell those assets, they pay taxes. Some of the taxes from those sales can be offset by doing things like donating enormous sums of money to charity. And sometimes people take loans against their equity, which is not a taxable event. Though, in order to pay those loans back, they have to sell something (taxable) or earn money elsewhere (also taxable). So loans are tax deferral...

But eventually the tax man comes for everybody.

On every metric, people in all income brackets are earning more on both a gross and COL-adjusted basis. It is the case that top quintile income has increased more than bottom quintile income, but a faster relative increase does not mean the other group is getting poorer.

The other very interesting thing is that there is statistically not really a "upper ranks" and "lower ranks". The majority of people in the 1% each year are there for the first (and often only) time. And a very, very small percentage of people in the bottom percentiles remain there for their whole life.

Some interesting research:

* 12% of the population will find themselves in the top 1% for at least one year

* Nearly 70% will spend at least one year in the top 20%

* More than half will have at least one year in the top 10%

* While 12% may reach the top 1% at some point, a mere 0.6% stay there for 10 consecutive years

All of that is to say, the idea that there are is some entrenched upper class waging war against some entrenched lower class is just empirically not true. If you dig through the data what you'll find is:

1. People who are just entering the workforce don't make a lot of money

2. As people spend time in the workforce, they make increasingly more money

3. When they retired, they start making less money but tend to have assets to live on

It's far more dynamic than most people's intuition leads them to believe.

Net of transfers, 60% of households receive more from government transfers than they pay in taxes.

The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is just not correct. The entire system is basically rich people subsidizing everybody else through byzantine distributional systems.

But the idea of spinning up a whole VM to use unix IO primitives is way overkill. Makes way more sense to let the agent spit our unix-like tool calls and then use whatever your prod stack uses to do IO.

I think what you're saying is poverty is actually simple, and the solution is to stop the bad actors causing poverty? But at the same time, you are correctly recognizing that attempts to stop bad actors from causing poverty triggers reflexive responses and cascading repercussions. Which sounds mighty like a complex system?

Though I think it's fair to say that the torch was picked up and carried by others with a different set of strategies.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326555

Points: 109

# Comments: 87

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114547

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411480

Points: 19

# Comments: 5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150807

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45015089

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

javascript: (function () {document.querySelectorAll("body *").forEach(function(node){["fixed","sticky"].includes(getComputedStyle(node).position)&&node.parentNode.removeChild(node)});var htmlNode=document.querySelector("html");htmlNode.style.overflow="visible",htmlNode.style["overflow-x"]="visible",htmlNode.style["overflow-y"]="visible";var bodyNode=document.querySelector("body");bodyNode.style.overflow="visible",bodyNode.style["overflow-x"]="visible",bodyNode.style["overflow-y"]="visible";var nodes=document.querySelectorAll('.tp-modal-open');for(i in nodes) {nodes[i].classList.remove('tp-modal-open');}}())

There's a few things I'd consider:

* If you have a bunch of reps, doing the periodic accounting to cut the right checks becomes more of a pain (though it's a pain anyways)

* When you give a choice, the employee might make what, in retrospect, winds up being the wrong choice. This can lead to pissed off sales people and regrettable churn.

OTOH, sales comp plans change every year anyways, so could just be renegotiated

That said, this calculator was built to model/simulate the things that are super common in enterprise SaaS:

1. It takes sellers time to ramp up. Experienced sellers might be willing to jump to your company, but not if they are guaranteed to only get their (relatively) low base salary for 1-2 quarters.

2. If you decide to do a ramp, you have to make a choice about the OTE.

If you can avoid doing these things, that's great. Though whether that will fly largely depends on whether your sales cycle and target talent market supports it!