They pay the most taxes, but they also pay the lowest percentage of taxes compared to the money and assets that they have.

What does the percentage has to do with anything? Do they have more percentage in voting? Or in the spending of the money they pay as taxes?

I don't know how people have the guts to pretend equality, but not in taxation. One human, one vote, one dollar.

> Do they have more percentage in voting?

Considering they basically own and operate the uniparty and its media apparatus, they have enormous influence over the entire electoral process and peoples' thoughts to a degree that makes any notions of 'democracy' illusory at best.

It was bad for decades, and then corporation-controlled social media brought the corruption to new heights.

That is just a bad deflection, not an answer to the point.

If the system is shown to be corrupt, the point becomes irrelevant.

oh, they pay the most income taxes which are not in millions or billions.

It's bizarre to think people who can change the tax brackets via dark money are "paying the most".

Sure man, if I pay zero because I'm homeless and you pay a dollar; wow! you're paying the most taxes. Congrats on your logical fallacy.

It's Sunday

I think the main problem is that this will not survive very long once implemented.

Politician A will promise "no VAT on bread" to get elected. The next guy will promise "no VAT on essentials". The next guy will promise "no UBI for the rich". And so on.

And you end up with the next politician dismantling the whole system as unfair.

What will happen will be 'no vat on rice, flour and vegetables', which in my mind is very ok. Maybe if a demographic crisis happens, vat on baby care will be removed.

But VAT is a dumb tax anyway. Anybody with high enough wealth can evade it, you just have to found a company that will pay for your computer, car and probably other stuff. I'm pretty sure I could pay for a 3d printer without paying any VAT. If I was devious, I would start a 'sailing course' company and buy my wings/sails/foil through it, while teaching once a year or so.

If exemmptions need to be made, the tax isn't taxing the essence purely. With the 'no VAT on bread' example, we need to work out why. How can we quantify why bread shouldn't be taxed?

I'm guessing eventually we'll work out that 'fresh food' shouldn't be taxed, and the processed food should be. It's here we can work out that certain chemicals, processes, facilities, etc, are actually what should be taxed at source, and through doing so, we can save the world billions in accountancy bills.

So what you're saying is basically we should stop implementing reasonable measures as a government because there will always be a Ronald Reagan or Maggie Thatcher who will dismantle it out of spite, greed, or both? Surely if we never do anything right or good the baddies will stand no chance of being what they're best at, namely being worse than everybody else. This for sure is a wise plan to stop bad people in their tracks.

Sort of but that's actually ideal, I don't think it will be completely scrapped if implemented, some parts will remain. Those being the ones that make the most sense to the most people.

Cause it's developed. It's been a stable product for a decade. It's like having 10,000 construction workers on a completed building.

10 years ago i wrote a php web chat in 2 hours or so. I pretty much never look at it but the tinestamps suggest it always worked.

I could add more features to it and those will also work.

A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.

It's part of a constantly evolving ecosystem. It's a stable product because reliability engineers make it so and software engineers get the integrations right.

But a messaging program like Signal is fairly similar in scope, but only has like a couple dozen of devs, compared to Messenger's thousands(?).

Signal could definitely use a bunch more devs, if only to fix all the UX bugs I hit on a daily basis.

You haven't used messenger much then, if you're comparing the complexity of the two.

I guess I don't understand which are the features Messenger has that Signal doesn't that requires a billion dollars a year to maintain.

I don't use it. What am I missing?

It still doesn't take a team that large.

When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.

It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.

There is no way messenger features or functionality is changing that much year over year.

It’s almost entirely bloat.

> Cause it's developed

You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "done"

"Official archive" it says.

Seems unofficial. Actually, the domain name is probably a trademark violation.

Some things always happen too. You need to avoid certain terms.

I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not legal for them to read the message inside.

And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them.

It was never designed for this originally.

I wonder if the pace of change in AI will push you back to the "ready to retire" state.

Sure, AI is exciting, and it reignites a passion. But everything you learn today will be obsolete a year from now. And that might tire you out again.

Given that the World Wide Web was invented in 1989... are you saying that the Internet was safer when only FTP and Usenet existed?

I'm saying that those weren't a safe haven either.

The internet has been full of rogue actors and soft targets since shortly after its inception.

It may have had a small enough user base to be considered a safe haven for a brief period, but it was before my time.

Open Source absolutely stops being maintained. And worse.

Yup, source code does not stay maintainable automatically. Just that code is open does not mean anyone can or wants to do any reasonable development.

The only ”safer” bets are the biggest projects providing critical infra for segments of economy like python for example.

At least if you care about it enough then if it dies you can pick it up yourself and maintain it.