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Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

mitchellh.com

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Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#141

Post by KerrAvon »

Xirdus wrote: post #77
sph wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either. Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer? At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more…

More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were. More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a roman…

None of that makes you happier.

Define happiness, but there's a baseline for not being miserable (I have enough to eat etc) and then there's actual satisfaction with your life.

If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.

The consistently happiest people I've personally met are Buddhist monks of various sects, who have nearly nothing in terms of money or physical possessions.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#142

Post by throwitaway222 »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #125
sph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.

If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars. I don’t believe donating $400 really feels that satisfying, the impact is fairly negligible in most contexts whereas donating $400k can very visibly improve a lot of lives. I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth ta…

People with that much wealth should keep their money and use it where they see fit. A "wealth tax" forces some people to sell stock since not everyone has liquid assets. The CA "wealth" tax was written in a way that they could instantly turn $1B -> $1M or $100K overnight without a vote.

So many reasons why it's not a good idea to have a wealth tax. But the biggest reason is that nearly all our tax money is going to fraud. This is why our economy would BOOM if we got rid of a lot of taxes and reduced our fed/state governments a LOT. I just want roads, military and police. There is no reason why we should allow our government to be weaponized or turned into a nanny state when SO much of they money they collect is wasted.

Corporations that provide money for causes is often looked at because it's an investment. The world can learn a lot of free market capitalism, but it keeps pretending that half the people won't just DIE in communism.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#143

Post by kyrra »

johnwheeler wrote: post #119
Lerc wrote: post #34

It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has repr…

I use Ghost TTY coming from iTerm for no other reason than I saw everybody else using and praising it. Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.

input latency. the time from pressing a key to showing on-screen is much lower with ghostty (I can't find exact number, but it seems to handle input 2-4x quicker. So around 15ms instead of 60ms).

Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#145

Post by throwitaway222 »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #136
grim_io wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very privileged out of touch comment to make, no offense. In many(most?) parts of the world, $400 is the equivalent of months of good salary.

How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire. I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.

The problem is that when government spends $1,000,000 on your halfway house, it provides instant relief. It creates beds. The next year the government does it, the number of employees has doubled and it creates 20% more beds instead of the original amount. The third year it creates no beds and we find that 10% of the beds are gone, and the number of employees is now 1000. The government didn't care how well the money was invested.

Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.

The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#146

Post by vga1 »

ar_lan wrote: post #137
bionsystem wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few things to note. 1 billion isn't a thousand times a million. If you make a conservative 5% let's say out of your net worth, you still need to work with a million, whereas you don't with a billion. So, technically, $400 with a million is some amount of work hours, whereas $400k with a billion is just pocket change taken out of more than most people lifetime's of earnings that is just 1 year of your interest. Also…

> 1 billion isn't a thousand times a million. What?

Perhaps he was making a subtle point about liquidity.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#147

Post by Capricorn2481 »

gr8painz wrote: post #104
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.

[dead]

I don't think so. The original comment said reducing unhappiness leads to happiness with diminishing returns. This one said they are two different things.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#148

Post by georgemcbay »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #105
sevenzero wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.

Hoarding money is not economically prudent in a system designed with mild inflation. Money loses value sitting still, to grow wealth there has to be some action with a positive return. The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours... I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual…

> The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...

There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.

All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#149

Post by csomar »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #125
sph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.

If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars. I don’t believe donating $400 really feels that satisfying, the impact is fairly negligible in most contexts whereas donating $400k can very visibly improve a lot of lives. I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth ta…

> why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society

How? It'll just go to the gov. budget which will be mostly used to pay for bloated healthcare, military and interest.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#150

Post by tpmoney »

sevenzero wrote: post #60
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: comment was under incorrect parent. my error. moved it to correct location. EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing. Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison. There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.

In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.

“Life changing” money is relative. We take some family friends and their kids on a vacation every two years. Sometimes the bill is split, sometimes we cover most or all of the cost. We’re not rich, we just have extra money they don’t because of different life circumstances. But as a result we can help give them and their kids experiences they never would have had. Likewise some friends who are better off than we are were able to take us on a trip we could not have afforded on our own. Again they’re not rich, just a different set of life circumstances.

Now you might argue that “vacations” aren’t “life changing”, but I would certainly argue that if you never would have had the experience or seen the place then they absolutely can be. But even if not, I refer you back to the original thesis which is that “life changing” is relative. Because the sums of money we’re talking about would have been “pay my rent for a year”, “buy a reliable (used) car”, “reduce my student loan balance by nearly a third” sort of money. And those I think could all be reasonably said to be life changing sorts of things.

Finally I would suggest that if you are “throwing away” this sort of money on actually changing someone’s life, then you are by definition not “hoarding money” and can hardly be said to be poisoning society with your relative wealth.

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