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berberous

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I take no view on whether Elon will be successful on making Twitter more profitable. But as a user -- and someone that typically supports Elon -- I have to say he's made the app subjectively worse IMO. I find the "For You" page and algorithm to boost more "junk" content than before. I used to find it interesting, now it feels like scrolling through Instagram meme pages. I'm at the point where I am thinking of uninstalling it.

Sure, $3,500 is too steep for this to be a mass market hit with v1. But I think it's a fairly reasonable price to get the ball rolling, and they will see a fair number of early adopter consumers (much more than Google Glass or Magic Leap, less than Oculus).

I remember admiring flat screen TVs in the early 2000s when they cost like $10k: https://www.applianceretailer.com.au/eeqycmzusg/

I also used to have this SGI 1600SW monitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW. 1600 x 1024 17", $2,500 (equivalent to $4,490 in 2022)...

If you grew up with $50M+ and lived a luxurious life, but lost it all, would you not have children over worries they may not have the same standard of living that you did?

If you could be born in America in 1925 and live until 2015, would you? Or would you decline because the standard of living dropped right away with a Great Depression followed by a world war?

I agree with you that if I knew, with certainty, that my children’s lives would be filled with nothing but suffering, I would make the same choice. But a fear of a theoretical drop in a standard of living, and which may not even impact an American over the next 100 years all that much, does not seem to me like it should reach that threshold, and I suspect it is starting to for others because of the media playing into their anxieties. There are people living that lived through the holocaust and are still happy to have lived and, over their lifetime, have had fulfilled and happy lives. I suspect your children could likewise carve out a happy life, even if their standard of living is somewhat reduced.

I agree you have no moral duty to have kids, and if you don’t want them, don’t have them. But if you want them, but are not having them because you find that to be cruel to your unborn kids, I question whether that is really a rational choice.

This is a weird take to me. Even if climate change turns out to be significantly bad, I have a hard time imagining it would be worse than most times in human history. Only a few generations ago people lived through two world wars. We could have a third world war at some point, or the AI doomers could be right, but would that stop you from having children? This feels to me like someone who doesn’t leave their house because they are worried a car might hit them…it’s an unhealthy anxiety about one of many potential risks, that shouldn’t prevent you from living life.

Tornado Cash was sanctioned by OFAC, which makes it illegal for U.S. persons to interact with the relevant contract addresses to the same extent as interacting with North Korea.

SushiSwap is not going to be sanctioned. It's not clear what the U.S. could do to shut it down in the same manner, although of course, they could bring enforcement actions like this one and scare off any U.S. person from working on it.

I, and others, would never keep more than $250k in a bank account even before this SVB debacle. There are products made to manage this risk. For example, Mercury gives you up to $1M of insurance by sweeping to four different banks on the back end without you having to lift a finger. You can also sweep excess into money market funds.

I do have sympathy for 20-something founders who were too young and unaware of these risks, and focused on other aspects of their business, but this is not a “hindsight only” kind of thing.

Things are not black and white.

There are certain things that can be more easily audited, verified or enforced on-chain. For example, payments could be automated (potentially based on verifiable data), or secured lending could happen programmatically.

At the end of the day, yes, you still want to have legal enforcement, i.e., if someone defrauds you on chain, that's still a crime and should be enforced, or if someone fails to deliver, you should still have a contract claim against them.

Sure, but that's probably going to unfairly impact the poor. Imagine a family of poor immigrants, where the father worked very hard and saved and left some asset to his non-rich children...you want to punish the children when the father dies suddenly and the children have no idea where to find cost basis information? There are pros and cons to any policy.

I agree with all of that. Hand wringing over tax loss harvesting seems silly to me.

I think there are very good historical reasons for basis step-up, namely, that it is unreasonably hard to expect heirs to figure out basis from a deceased, especially for illiquid assets. But since brokerages have to track basis since 2012, it would seem easy to, at least, disallow basis step-up for securities that have cost basis information held by the brokerage.

You are right that it defers, but does not eliminate, taxes; however:

1. You can use losses to offset $3k of ordinary income per year.

2. Tax deferral is still advantageous. For example, you can defer until retirement when your tax bracket is lower, and also allow that amount to compound in the meantime.

3. If you die, your heirs get a step up in basis, so the tax is in fact ultimately avoided.