Most billionaires nowadays are not the type that have the bulk of their wealth in assets. The lot of them got wealthy because the company they founded or initially employed with became very successful and the stock they accumulated became more valuable over time.

In a way, it’s wealth up there in the ether. It’s the investors who give it value. Somebody says “hey $100 for a share of company x sounds like a good deal” founder has 10M shares of company x, and voila, they’re a billionaire.

In a way, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

A strange thing is happening nowadays with the market though. Markets are supposed to go down from time to time, but due to low barriers to entry so many people are in the market now, investing in ETFs, setting up automated monthly purchases, DRIPs, etc, that markets consistently go up. Even after a major economic shock like the tariffs, the market continues to go up.

And so those billionaires keep getting wealthier.

At some point this carousel will end. Healthy markets do have to go down, it’s one of the mechanisms of how capital gets redistributed from the slovenly to the savvy. There has to be some kind of adjustment or we end up where we are, a new Gilded Age.

China is on the edge of one such adjustment in real estate, but the state is pulling out all of the stops right now to prevent its collapse. What happens there likely is to be a harbinger of what’s to come.

In the US, I’m not so sure. If we keep letting our average population age slip towards middle age and beyond, then we’ll likely see the correction when we have no one left to keep the economic engine running. If we don’t mitigate that we probably have 15 to 20 years left. Unchecked political unrest may be the catalyst for its arrival sooner.

Back to billionaires. The best way to put this back in check in my mind is to tax unrealized gains. Think of it like real estate tax. Every year, you pay a nominal bit of your home’s value to fund the fire department, city planners, etc. if you don’t pay, then they can put a lien on your house. Same should apply with stock. The noninvesting public helped build the infrastructure that made the company thrive, thus, the public should be entitled to a bit of its success. The tax has the nifty little gimmick of distributing a bit of the power too - precisely why the billionaire class hates it.

Nah Nah Nah

There’s three ways to get rid of cancer:

• Poison it. Diminish its numbers to the point where it never comes back.
• Excise it. Cut it away from the rest of the host.
• Do nothing. It’ll die once it consumes the host.

Eating granola and berries or sitting there with hopes and praying for change is option 3. I’m on team option 1. Time to get active.

Well yea, when you train the entire 2nd generation of coders on a book that is “For dummies” what did you expect?

Being a US citizen permanently living in a foreign country, paying taxes to that country and not paying US taxes.

I’ve been interviewing folks for an internship position lately. These have been remote interviews. Six things that have made candidates stand out to me.

• Get your camera angle straight. Don’t slouch in the corner. I need professionals so I need you to look like one.
• Hide the weird shit in your backgrounds, unless it’s something you want to talk about
• Have presence / wow factor. I’m interviewing for a position that will sometimes talk to customers. I’m your customer at the moment and I really do want to buy what you’re selling, and will absolutely do so if you wow me.
• Read the job description, I put a lot of effort into that thing (I know, not every company does). Get to know the JD and company website. I had a marketing guy apply and he got through the resume review because he had an lot experience in my industry. Turns out he didn’t and I read right through it. Don’t waste my and your time, neither of us have enough of it on this planet as is.
• Have hobbies, extracurriculars. I get tired of asking the same boring questions to everyone so I may ask you about them. I’m in no way religious but surprisingly, I’ve now had two candidates talk to me about how they’re a leader in their church and that they’re leading groups or projects there. It got them both to the next round. I want to hire a colleague not a robot.
• Have writing and presentation samples prepared. I want to see how you document things I want to see the work you’re proud of. I need dynamism and a diverse team, not all of us need to be customer facing rockstars. A beautiful presentation absolutely can and has won me over on candidates that did not have the interview presence.

Some don’ts

• Don’t act aloof. I’m giving you my attention and I need the same from you.
• Don’t be cocky. I want confidence but not cockiness, as cockiness would likely have my clients calling me telling me to get you off their projects.
• Don’t ask me to rate how well you did at the end of the interview. That’s what practice interviews are for.

Get on my bike and see how far it could take me. And when I was done with that I would go build bike trails for my community.

This guy, I bet he even reclines in his airplane seat.

Mr Burns got shot.

• hey, my name is _____, what’s yours?
• are you looking for new friends?
• great I do _____ on ______ days, would you like to join?

You see a baby on the second floor in a burning building. It’s crying. Its screams trigger your fight or flight response. Though you know going into that burning building will harm you, your will to act compels you to go save that baby and end its suffering.

You go in, the flames all around you, but you can barely feel them because you are so concentrated on reaching that baby.

You get to the baby. Your flight response now kicks in. You jump out the window. You break your ankle, but you can’t feel it, because your sense of duty and accomplishment of saving that child and the cheers from the community overwhelm your own internal nervous system.

That’s empathy. When your feelings for others override your feelings for yourself. When the extrinsic reward from the community can override your intrinsic experience.

Granted, an extreme example.

Gregorian chant can be very relaxing in the right moment.

Blathering Blatherskites!
Great Scott! Great Googly Moogly Narf! Blech Hot Dog! Hot diggity! Salad! Biscuits! Corn Nuggets! Nerfherder Awoooguhhhh! Ballyhoo Farfegnugen To the mattresses! What in tarnation? Shoo whee

• Get some catfish and some cornflour and an egg. Cut the catfish into nuggets. Dip in the egg wash. Roll lightly in the cornflour and salt/pepper mixture. Fill a pan with oil. Deep fry. Yum!
• Get some mahi mahi. Place on some tin foil. Add a pat of butter on top of each. Grill it up until flaky but not dried out. Salt to taste. mahi is so mild, like no fish flavor. Delish!
• Get a tuna steak. Soak it in a bit of ponzu sauce. Get an iron skillet nice and hot with a little splash of oil. Toast some sesame seeds on it. Put those to the side. Then get your tuna and sear it on all sides. Add a dash of salt (if you want, the ponzu may be salty enough) and the seeds. Enjoy.
• if you like spicy, get a good blackened seasoning, it can help mask the fish flavor
• also, try sushi, but like from a good place. Rolls will hide the taste much better than sashimi, which is meant to showcase the fish. Fresh sushi (yellowtail, salmon, tuna, mackerel) has almost no fish taste. Eel has a steak like taste, but can be a bit fishy. Do not go for urchin, it’s like a straight up fish umami bomb.

• welcome to nightvale - if you like kooky off the wall sci-fi stories
• We’re alive - Long form zombie survival podcast. I recommend starting from the beginning before moving to the newest stuff
• Alice isn’t Dead - mystery sci-fi trucker podcast
• Fictional - classical novels read with a bit of snark - new season coming soon
• That time that Planet Money read all of The Great Gatsby
• 99% Invisible’s book club synopsis of The Power Broker by Robert Caro
• The Truth
• What’s Ray Saying

Throw some blues in there and baby, you got a stew going.

Same as it ever was.

• Until AI can do it, they need warm bodies to do their bidding.
• Until AI can do it, they need warm bodies to fight their wars.
• The dumber and more obedient, the better.

They want to rule, not participate. Same as it ever was.

It also has a chance of being a million dollars.

How does this not curdle?

Do you want nationalism? Because that seems like a good way to get it.