I see double click coverage, Amazon coverage, and a tiny amount of Facebook, but missing a lot of large players in the adtech space. I don’t see Microsoft being explicitly called here.
Then from the large scale independent companies I see none of them on here? Shouldn’t you try Trade desk, Magnite, Applovin, Criteo, Xandr as well?
Then you would want to check vs data brokers as well; Experian, Equifax, Axciom, Epsilon, LexisNexus, Liveramp, and CoreLogic at minimum.
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.
Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.
Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.
It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!
Yeahhhh I had to disconnect mine from the internet due to this (I don’t want a display ad on the menu screen when I turn on my TV like WTF, my TV just enshittified itself randomly with an update that added this a year or two ago). Which would be fine but you can’t change the TV menu tile layout if you are disconnected from the internet… Just incredible layers of design stupidity here.
I use pfblockerNG(like pi-hole but for pfsense) to block ads to my roku. And I set up pi-hole at family members houses to block ads and telemetry on theirs.
Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.
However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).
This is a silly take. There is a line of "good enough" for most coding (most CRUD apps and APIs are nothing special), and once we are past that, nobody will care about having the "newest, best" model except extreme outliers. And this base "good enough" model will become an ultra cheap commodity as we already see with GLM, deepseek, etc.
As long as closed models are 6 months ahead I won't be switching from them to prev. 6 month SOTA open source models. Maybe its just a different calculation if you're in a job, but as an indiehacker I'll take any edge I can get
Ofc again, can be convinced to switch if there's however a clear speed difference, like 5x+ for a open source sota even if it was SOTA for 6 months ago
I have 2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill, so it's more like a full acre equivalent of flat ground (except drastically more of a pain). Pulling weeds up several hundred feet of steep hillside that grow back constantly is a punishment worthy of Sisyphus.
It hadn't been done for about 5 years when we moved in, so one of the neighbors spent 200 hours cleaning it up for us. Not joking, 200 hours of labor. Scotch Broom is a literal nightmare.
True. But on a large and very steep hillside - "2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill" - it can be extremely difficult to replace the plants holding onto the soil, without experiencing horrible erosion during the transition.
Yep. Depending on the property layout, and how close that slope is to the house, it might be something to contract out and have hardscaping and drainage done.
My last house didn't have anywhere near as much land, but there was a fairly steep hill on the back of the house. We ended up having part of the slope dug out and a "seat-height" retaining wall installed, with drainage installed as part of the build, and lots of low-maintenance plantings. Reduced the work from weekly mowing on a slope to occasional weeding and trimming. But, it wasn't cheap to do properly.
Weeds are pioneers, helping the soil, when nothing else can grow (or is allowed to). First of all why do you need to get rid of those weeds? Second of all, if you improve the soil and go through successive plantings of larger things, the weeds will be outcompeted.
Yes. And that wealthy individuals are avoiding taxes via things like buy -> borrow -> die, in which high stock valuations that increase but are not sold are not ever taxed, and roll over the taxation potential upon death to their current value. Thus by borrowing against them until death, the inheritor will inherit with a tax basis at the current value upon receipt and thus all taxes are avoided. In which case the tax would go from 0% to 20% (functionally a small amount may be sold to pay interest, so really assume 1% or 2% taxes default). The horror!
Buy borrow die as you describe still ends up with a 40% estate tax. Most uber wealthy want to avoid the estate tax so they utilize trusts, which cant die. Really the people who benefit the most from buy borrow die are those with 10-50 million. Not enough to pay serious estate tax because of the exemption. Above that everyone uses trusts which work differently. Not that the trusts dont have their own loopholes.
Indeed, the ultra-wealthy pay far less than 40% effective estate tax. Seems closer to 15% due to creative accounting, which is further reduced to 6.8% by charitable contributions:
> Specifically, for single decedents, estate taxes paid equal 6.8% of the value of Forbes wealth at death. The value of their gross estate is 39% of the Forbes estimate of their wealth. This large gap, already noted in earlier work (Raub et al., 2010), is likely to reflect the various techniques available to high-net-worth individuals to undervalue assets in the context of the estate tax. Taxable estate is then 45% of gross estate (due to deductions primarily gifts to charities) and on that base the tax rate is 39% (Balkir et al., 2025, Table 4 Panel B).
Hmm, why would a guy who is best known for spectacularly lying to boost his stock price do a spectacular lie? I do wonder… it’s almost like he wants to value the companies like they already achieved these impossible feats, so he can boost his net worth.
But it isn’t like he lied about full self driving for over a decade and then recently admitted none of his cars that people bought for that promise will be able to do that or anything…
Actually crazy that Linus just takes home 1.5M per year for one of the largest contributions to tech of anyone in the world. Obviously nobody needs more than that per year, but this pay is 1/100 or 1/1000th of many tech executives that have contributed very little comparatively.
A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.
There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.
> A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers
Perhaps the "billionaire sympathizers" are people who can manage to see that the bar for what is considered an unacceptable amount of wealth will keep being revised lower and lower until it affects them. Here you are already proposing that a person shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a total of a million dollars in income every year, which caps one's lifetime wealth accumulation at $40-60M[0]. Which would make anyone able to achieve anywhere close to that sum as wealthy as today's wealthiest persons. After which the next person will suggest that such a thing shouldn't be allowed for the betterment of society.
0: assuming you can start earning that much starting at age 20 and you intend on retiring between 60 to 80, so obviously the range can go up or down a bit.
>There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people.
Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true. The vast majority of successful companies and products are developed by people motivated by money, and if you try to prevent them from being rewarded for their hard work then they just go somewhere where their effort is more welcome.
It's always wild to me how people perceive Europe. In left-wing academia there is this term "neoliberal encasement" that discusses in detail how neoliberal capitalism isolates the economy from democracy. The EU is sort of the end stage of this idea, economic policy is detached from democratic comtrol to such a degree that member states submit their draft budgets to unelected technocrats in Brussels for approval before "voting" on it. Imagine if IMF economists were to run the economies of a continent, that's what the EU is. It's staggering how completely the opposite of valuing people's intrinsic incentives this model is, but I get where you are coming from of course everybody thinks that, it's just still wild to me how they managed that narrative so well.
Really? Your rhetoric seems to miss a LOT of new global businesses, as well as older ones that are much bigger than ever before.
Spotify, Wise, Adyen, DeepMind just off the top of my head, but there are loads more.
The fact that you don’t know about them is because many tech bros in the USA are pretty parochial and haven’t been exposed to international businesses or indeed tech.
> Obviously nobody needs more than that per year ...
You are, of course, in a position to know what everybody on Earth needs.
What if someone wants to give $10 million away per year to worthy charities? Will you tell them they can't?
Or... what if someone wants to own something you consider wastefully expensive? Is it your job to tell them they shouldn't? Or is it wiser to adopt the position of humility and say "Well, it's their business, not mine, what they spend their money on"?
It's easy to be motivated by envy, even when we think we aren't. It's much better for your soul, and your peace of mind, to adopt the "let them" mentality, and not decide what other people, whose lives you know nothing about, need.
There is a big difference between 'needs' and 'wants'.
I'll defend the argument no one 'needs' more than 1.5 mill per year.
I agree with you greed is endless and lots of people want more and will rationalize their hoarding while others, often in their own communities, suffer.
No one really "needs" anything. You can live perfectly well on minimum wage. But really, you could survive perfectly well as a slave. Infact, the world is content for you to die and get nothing. All "need" is "want". All you deserve is what you have leverage for.
This comment feels like playing stupid to such an absurd degree that the argument loses any semblance of thought and you sound like you're yelling at clouds.
Obviously being a slave is not the same as being a millionaire. If you make your argument this reductionist then you don't even sound human anymore, let alone well reasoned.
Let's end this conversation right here before it descends any further into ideological battle. And in the interests of peace, I shall hold my tongue about what I think about Marx, or of you for recommending him in a positive light.
Ah, something I can respond to without engaging in ideological battle. Instead, let's look at history.
I think Marx is objectionable because he was, objectively, an awful person. I mean, just to take one single example, look at what he wrote about Ferdinand Lassalle in this letter to Engels:
Interesting vote-to-downvote ratio my comment got. Seems there are a lot more people with anti-libertarian beliefs hanging out at HN at the moment than there are people who lean libertarian.
Since it was not my intention to engage in ideological battle (you'll notice I framed it as "good for your soul and peace of mind" rather than make any kind of political argument for it), I'll leave it there and not reply to any of the answers I got. But it was quite enlightening to see how people reacted to that comment.
I guess to reply to the OG, I’m very conservatively putting a bound on a cozy upper middle class lifestyle locally. Linus lives in Portland, Oregon. There you can comfortably live an upper middle class lifestyle on 200k or 300k. Again, conservatively take the upper bound. 1.5M >> 300k, so it’s more than anyone needs to live a cozy life. Technical needs are much lower, but this is a lazy mathematical proof where I prove the Linus number is bigger than a thing much higher than practical physical and emotional money needs and so don’t need to strictly define them.
In your argument case, those are all “nice to haves” (like much of the stuff in an upper middle class lifestyle), but it would be very difficult to argue they are necessary to live life, even at a relatively wealthy capacity.
I see double click coverage, Amazon coverage, and a tiny amount of Facebook, but missing a lot of large players in the adtech space. I don’t see Microsoft being explicitly called here.
Then from the large scale independent companies I see none of them on here? Shouldn’t you try Trade desk, Magnite, Applovin, Criteo, Xandr as well?
Then you would want to check vs data brokers as well; Experian, Equifax, Axciom, Epsilon, LexisNexus, Liveramp, and CoreLogic at minimum.
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