Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

I really don't get why it's generally assumed that Zed is an asshole.

I exchanged a few technical emails with him when he was just getting started on Mongrel (v1) and his replies were always friendly (as well as being relevant).

He's put a lot of code out there and the parts that I have used have been great.

Remember when Bear Stearns fell? He was leading some Rails project there at the time (IIRC) and he used his hacker media fame to get his team members new jobs before himself. No idea how that panned out, but that doesn't exactly sound like asshole behavior to me.

Yes I know he puts out rants from time to time. They make for fun and educational reading. As far as I'm concerned a good cathartic rant every now and again speaks for a person, though I wouldn't recommend everybody to go out and put it all online. (It seems to have worked wonders for Zed, though :).

The analogy may not be exactly right, but your explanation also went off on a tangent. It is not the app purchasers who matter here -- it is the people who want to make apps (or finance the making of apps if you will). Just like the movie producers who will pay top-dollar for actors/directors/etc. if they are proven to make a product (the movie) that is successful (like he has been according to what he says).

By claiming that he is charging a ridiculous per-hour rate, he is actually adding to this "stardom" :-).

Slightly O/T, but can someone explain why with JavaScript disabled this blog post is completely invisible?

I can't see any technical reason or understand why one would penalize NoScript users (like me).

This PG essay is a good refutation of the notion that (progressive or, at least, non-regressive) taxes are a "win" for the poor in a zero sum game:

"The Pie Fallacy

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.

What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.

Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. [5]

Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don't have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones-- a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market."

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Taxes on wealth creation discourages it. (It may still, at least in the short term, be good for revenue)*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who hires him?