Is the contrapositive also true? If Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had been dirt poor in childhood rather than solidly middle class, would they not have had success? I.e. how much weight should we put on the things out of their control vs within their control?
It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have
People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's
not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity
Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel
Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig
And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place
Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.
But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.
IRA contributions are drastically limited to a $7000 cap per year under 50. Whether they should be is another question, and one worth exploring.
Long-term investment is rightly seen as something to be encouraged hence the lower tax rates. You can make the argument that the rate should be more like 0% since the money invested and risked was already taxed most likely...20% is a reasonable value for the market regulating infrastructure provided by gov't entities.
IRA caps are low, but loads of people earning enough that they'd reasonably save more than 7k annually have access to 401ks or similar accounts that raise the annual cap to >30k, vastly more than the typical person is saving.
The middle class isn't taking advantage of low capital gains rates to earn more from their taxable brokerage accounts because they haven't even filled up their tax-advantaged accounts.
There are loopholes to roll all sorts of nonsense into an IRA though. There was a whole news cycle in the 2012 election about Mitt Romney's $4M "IRA" or somesuch. And IRAs are hardly the only shelter from income tax, they're just the most obvious.
The simple truth is that wealth beyond the ~$10M level in the US pays essentially zero "income tax". It just doesn't happen, no one does it. Short term gains are only taxed for small investors who don't know any better.
"Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced on social networks that this year he will pay 11 billion dollars, thus becoming the largest taxpayer in the history of the USA."
That was on a sale of Tesla stock that he'd held for much longer than the long term rate threshold. He paid 20% on it, or plausibly less. I, personally pay a higher rate than that. Big numbers notwithstanding, Elon Musk shouldn't be paying less tax than I do, sorry.
You're dodging, and I know you're smart enough to know how this goes. I don't make money with long term stock, I make salary. I pay >>20% tax on that salary. Billionaries make, statistically, zero salary. All their income is on long term gains. All of it. So billionaires pay 20%, and that only if they're dumb enough not to find other shelters.
You're just saying "Well, that's the way the tax code works". I'm saying "The tax code sucks", and your point is non-responsive.
So how "over time" do I need to wait until I start paying the same tax rate as a billionaire? Seems like your solution to "the rich pay less tax" is "well, everyone should just be rich then"?
"Let them eat cake" makes for extremely poor federal revenue policy.
Assume you think the government is in a better position to spend that billion than the billionaire is to figure out what to buy or invest their money in?
I know he's out of favor with a lot of people, but would Elon have created SpaceX or The Boring Co or Neuralink, or helped start OpenAI if he hadn't had the spare billions to do so?
I'd much rather have multi-billionaires investing in the economy, and in the future, than giving additional money to the government.
Shrimp are mostly tasteless though, aren't they? If you bite into a shrimp and really pay attention to the taste, you'd notice that it's not really a "taste" that you're feeling, but mostly the soft texture giving the illusion of tastiness.
I've seen people claim that they actually do taste very similar if you can isolate the insect's muscle, but usually insects are eaten with their exoskeleton, which changes the flavor.
Is there insects with a similar tail muscle of a shrimp? The muscle is evolved to push water in order to create propulsion. The only thing that I can think f that seems similar would be snakes.
I think this is sort of a myth. There was a relatively brief period of time in the US when lobster was considered poor people's food, but in the rest of the world and the rest of history it has generally been very popular and often associated with the upper class.
I also think it's pretty common for historical "peasant" foods to be popular today, like tacos or potatoes for example. If anything, "poor people love it but rich people won't touch it" is probably evidence that the thing not tasting good is a social construct.
Poor people have an incentive to find ways to make unwanted (aka cheap/available) food taste good, this simple fact is responsible for peasant food all over the world being generally amazing and why even a lot of upper class dishes have some origin as a lower class food.
I’m in Texas and we’re pretty well known for brisket and fajitas which are sourced from fatty/undesirable cuts of beef.
I think lobster tasting good is mostly about the amount of butter used.
Really, though, a lot of it has to do with food preservation technology - lobster only tastes good fresh, and goes bad very quickly (which is why you will often see them alive in tanks at the grocery store, and they are often cooked alive). Before we had the tech to either keep them alive before cooking or refrigerate immediately, they didn't taste very good.
I think the point is that given the right social dynamics, some bugs that already are edible today could probably be considered fancy and tasty in a century or two. I might be the wrong person to ask though because I already find pretty much all seafood nauseating.
I think what the parent comment is saying is that, lobster was likely introduced as an elite/rare dish to people in the current century increasing the appeal
That is exactly the point they are trying to make... that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food.
I think the point is a little overwrought, really... while our expectation is part of what makes it taste good, it doesn't completely change what we think... there are a lot of foods that are considered delicacies that a lot of people don't like.
Sort of like asking a non-deterministic human to help make changes to an existing computer system. Extends the problems of human team management to our technology systems.
Not only extends them, but compounds them because you have a non-deterministic human making changes to a non-deterministic computer system which is making changes to an existing computer system.
And look at how much effort our industry goes through as a whole to work around it! Managing people is harder than wrangling machines, even if the upfront cost to "train" and build the machine is multiples higher. Once a deterministic system works, it will keep going until a variable changes. The "problem" with humans is that our variables change like the weather and it takes a lot more effort and resources to keep everyone on track.
"If you just get out of people's way, then they'll do a good job and the right thing!" - yea, perhaps. But how much of "getting out their way" is more a product of providing meaningful ownership and compensation in the workplace? See the paragraph above. Good employees are expensive and as time marches on, their compensation will need to continue to increase at least with inflation, while the machine will likely become cheaper to operate over time as societal advances bring down the cost and complexity of operation.
Since no one has mentioned it yet, given the author felt like Japanese tea was providing a calming / anti-anxiety effect but with a much lower potential dose of Theanine....I wonder what would happen if he repeated the experiment with a sub-lingual dosing mechanism?
It seems like this would be closer to taking the tea in your mouth and savoring it over multiple sips across a few minutes, and could explain the smaller apparent dose having an effect (some of the Theanine goes straight into the bloodstream and bypasses the digestive tract).
Not mentioned -- Cornell has an $11bn endowment that can be tapped to make up some of the shortfall. Any issues with Federal funding will be hurting smaller schools and schools with smaller endowments way before hurting Cornell.
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