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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • And also the founders. Some of them loved the idea of a militia instead of a standing army. There was even an attempt at a militia navy. Which is insane. “Got my musket and rowboat. Off to defend the homeland!” rows towards French 90-gun ship.

    The whole idea behind a militia was barely practical back then, and isn’t at all with industrialized warfare. If that’s the argument for the 2nd A, then it might as well be tossed on the same pile as the 3rd A of “anachronistic stuff that made sense to somebody at the time”.








  • We tend to forget about it these days, but the Unix permissions model was criticized for decades for being overly simplistic. One user having absolute authority, with limited ways to delegate specific authority to other users, is not a good model for multi-user operating systems. At least not in environments with more than a few users.

    A well-configured sudo or SELinux can overcome this, which is one reason we don’t bring it up much anymore. We also changed the whole model, where most people have individual PCs, and developers are often in their own little VM environment on a larger server.


  • It’s a series where a dragon kidnaps a princess, and a plumber from New York must save her. To do so, he must gather mushrooms by hitting bricks while jumping with his fist, jump on turtles to make them hide in their shell, and dodge fire breathing plants.

    In the most recent 2d incarnation, the fire breathing plants will sing at you.

    The people who made this were on a lot of drugs.



  • I think we can put a specific maximum for a comfortable western lifestyle. You can certainly argue that a comfortable western lifestyle is already far and away better than most of the people on Earth will ever see. This is something of an arbitrary point where past this, most of us are going to agree that it’s excessive.

    It’s USD 10 million.

    Why? Let’s start with the Trinity study:

    https://thepoorswiss.com/updated-trinity-study/

    The original looked at a standard retirement portfolio and asked how much you can withdraw over a thirty year retirement. It took market data from 1925 through 1995 (the updated version linked above goes to 2023) and then checked a thirty year window over that entire period with various withdrawal rates.

    What it found is that if you withdraw 4% of the portfolio the first year, and increasing it by inflation each subsequent year, it’s highly unlikely the portfolio will run out in the 30 year window. The time period covers has market ups and downs, high inflation and low, and this 4% stays.

    The updated study above says a 3.5% withdraw had a high chance of lasting 50 years.

    Lets play it ultra safe and put it at 2.5%. With $10M, we’ll have $250,000/year to play with, and our rules adjust that for inflation.

    (Median household income in Manhattan is $128k)[https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Demographics.html]. We’re pulling almost twice that. I feel comfortable saying a person can live nicely in any city on this income.

    So there you go: $10M. If you want a 100% tax bracket, that’s a good place to put it. Any more money past that is just a game that hurts everyone else.