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I can't speak to the part about wealth coming from the toiling of poor people, but I can say that I find the immense advantages derived from capital over labor to be unfair.

Basically, I can sit at my desk, and in one action, move some numbers from a cash account into an equity security. In doing so, in one day, I can increase my wealth by an amount that it would take a full-time minimum-wage worker a little over 2 weeks to earn. It's one data point, but it definitely challenges the notion of what's fair.

To extend this further, with technology, the inequities of capital over labor will only increase with time because of how technology scales and amplifies an individual laborer's output. The people who will be left behind will be people working in industries that cannot or will not scale.

Is the solution then to make sure that everyone is capable of joining the information/automation economy through education? Do we decide that a universal basic income is the best approach to take? I honestly don't know.

I did find the lowering of barriers that would impede access to education like providing free meals, free transportation, and access to free babysitting to have been really helpful. In a way, it's like lowering the activation energy required to get motivated students into an environment where they can flourish.

I've always enjoyed reading Buffett's remarks in Berkshire's shareholders reports because of those very reasons. There's no BS; he just tells it the way it is, covering both successes and failures. And when he talks about the overall economy, he puts it in terms that people can readily grasp the concept without being swamped by gobbledegook.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/reports.html

I can really identify with the sentiments lined in this post as one of the things I've added to my life is trying to learn the piano, an instrument which seemed all but impossible since I'm not a very coordinated person, especially when playing with both hands.

So far, I'm two weeks into it and progress has been surprising. Sure, I have difficulty getting both hands to work together, but it's coming together rather nicely and my brain is getting a workout as it's trying to coordinate the two hands. Add to that the confidence it gives me in not only approaching a task where I can potentially fail, but transforming those failures into the grit and determination to succeed. I can definitely see this learning process paying back through the confidence it gives me.

Crunchyroll has gone a long way towards providing a legitimate avenue for fans to get access to anime and I hope things can only get better with time.

That's not to say there aren't any problems that need to be ironed out though. Off of the top of my head, my two biggest complaints with CR stem from the consistency of their subtitles, which can range from decent to atrocious, and the lack of availability of titles that I had been looking forward to watching. Obviously, they won't be able to get their hands on every show that's out there since they're competing with the likes of Funimation, but it'd be nice if they could wrap their arms around a greater percentage of titles each season.

It'd also help too if the Japanese studios would try to embrace the internet rather than constantly resisting against it. Sometimes, I get the feeling that they're so stuck in the PPV television rut and aren't confident enough to start releasing episodes online.

Sergei Rachmaninoff should be added to this list since I've yet to encounter any pianist who didn't have a glowing reaction to any of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos. Especially Piano Concerto #2 which ranks up there as being one of my top 10 favorite pieces of music.

How is this different from sinking 6 years of your life into a startup? Are the skills you acquire from running a startup more transferable to other businesses, and therefore makes it okay even if you fail and learn that you're not that good at running your own gig?

Is this service for the 85-90% of people who have simple returns consisting of a W-2, a few 1099s, and a 1098? My question is how it'll handle issues like multi-state tax returns, oodles of K-1s, and tracking the basis for those, and figuring out stuff like foreign tax credits? Would the designated Preparer know to ask such questions and wholly handle everything on their end?

(I'm guessing that for those complex issues, you'd still stick to a live accountant, and this service isn't geared towards that particular segment of the population.)

Thanks!

I've actually been doing manual updates to my personal twitter account after each post with a blurb about the latest article. Each tweet is customized rather than a generic auto-update message. I'm just not sure whether this is the best way of going about it or if I should take your suggestion and completely automate it. Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?

Does a blog reviewing music count?

Though I started in 2008, I didn't really make any attempts at monetizing until late 2009 and started with Adsense, then linked all the albums reviewed to two online stores that sell the CDs in question. All told, it took me maybe 3 months to make my first dollar and even longer for affiliate commissions to come in. I didn't make my first sale until maybe February 2010.

Obviously this isn't a product-based project, so it's not representative of the webapp stuff that others are producing.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. I've always been rather fond of pg's quote which says something to the effect that "if I had to choose between bad high schools and good universities, like the US, and good high schools and bad universities, like most other industrialized countries, I'd take the US system. Better to make everyone feel like a late bloomer than a failed child prodigy."

The reported number does sound pretty low since a not insignificant part of 4chan is dedicated to anime and there's got to be quite a few people who grab fansubs and read manga scanlations, both of which are clearly illegal.

I'm also wondering what the Drug User questions looks for. People who are taking illegal substances or people who are taking prescribed medication. It sure is interesting to compare that percentage to the criminal question.

Obviously a great read for kids and adults alike. The only thing to add is that I love its message of cultivating that sort of mental playfulness, which allows you to explore the fantastic, unknown territory where great ideas can be found.

Also, aren't women the population bottlenecks? A population's growth is constrained by the number of fertile women, and so, it's prudent that, for the continuation of a species, that women be more risk averse to prevent the species from dying off altogether.

Well, I'd say Buffett's letters' strong points are the way it breaks down tough concepts into a language that most people can understand. While I wouldn't say that he dispenses much in the way of investment advice, they make good reading if you're looking for a broad stroke of the US economy (especially the financial sector) as well as the factors that affect his business.

It also helps that his letters tend to be free of the BS that permeates some of the annual reports I've had to read through. When a business he owns isn't doing well, he admits to it without needing to couch behind platitudes.

It is, but my primary strategy has been to commit a huge list of words to memory, especially the two-letter words to join new words together for point efficiency.

Pretty much been my experience playing. It's more about memorizing lists of words without really bothering to know what they mean and figuring out which words to use when and how to place them to maximize your point total on each play.