It's unclear why anyone should listen to Tegmark. Frankly, its baffling to me why Tegmark even got tenure in the early 2000s at MIT for relatively trivial CMB data analysis techniques.
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
One thing that made Tahoe even worse is that Apple changed what they considered an update or upgrade, so for Tahoe it was suddenly considered as a update and not an upgrade, in all management solutions.
This force-upgraded a lot of Macs at work and we lost days of effective work across many engineers. The machines was practically useless for weeks.
They clearly don't care about power users anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It's so sad.
The frustrating part is that even if you take the position that iOS 26 is just as awful, their incentives are so decoupled from what you’d hope they would be, that ruining your product isn’t really bad for the business! After all, Apple can just point to Windows 11’s embedded ads, three or four layers of different generations of overlapping settings panes, and inferior hardware and dare you to switch. Most of the customer base has only those two realistic options.
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
They’ve achieved sufficient lock-in that they can enshittify everything as much as they want with no consequences. Switching has too high an ecosystem cost, plus in the US it’s a special case that a lot of people think if you don’t use all Apple products you are probably poor.
Federal Receipts as a Percent of GDP measures total government revenue relative to the size of the economy, serving as a standardized way to track the federal tax burden over time.
Although the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s indeed exceeded 90%, federal receipts hovered around 17% of GDP; this was nearly identical to current levels, because loopholes and high income thresholds (roughly equivalent to $2MM for single/$4MM for couples) meant almost no one actually paid that top rate.
The effective tax rate for the top 1% was closer to 42% rather than 90%, demonstrating that extremely high statutory rates on paper do not necessarily generate proportionally higher government revenue.
there is a lot of things that can happen but taxing wealthy ain’t happening ever again in america. you cannot ever again get elected without them at scale and since they control who gets elected this will always ensure they get their way. it’ll be always a great election campaign issue and maybe there will be some marginal tax thing (e.g. nyc mayor’s plan) but nothing will disturb the wealthy :)
What do you do when folks in expensive places can't eat while folks in low-cost areas are able to live better?
$100 had different spending power in different places. I can buy more beer in Prague than in Indianapolis. I'll buy even less in Oslo. You often get variance within a country too: A gallon of milk (and a lot of other food) is generally cheaper in Indiana than Hawaii.
I'm with you in spirit - we should tax wealthy people - but not in a way that can tax folks that already are struggling. We just don't have global cooperation like that nor are things starting on equal ground to do that sort of simple taxation. But another comment has already touched on that.
90% taxes on people with only 200% of the median wealth seems awfully excessive. For someone with $16,000 in assets, this would leave them with $1,600 -- just 20% of median wealth. I strongly suspect no tax system in history has ever worked like this.
Not to mention that taxes are collected and spent at the national level, not at the global level. If you are proposing a global government that administers taxes worldwide, that is an interesting idea, but it's not exactly a place to "start" a new tax policy, given that there is no political infrastructure in place to support it and likely couldn't be for decades even if the world made a concerted effort to make it happen.
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