Questions

> modest 2 hours of instruction per day

Isn't this close to what students could/should be spending doing homework, reading or doing some projects together with their parents - effectively one-on-one tutoring for every single one of them?

I suspect that US education spending is so high compared to other developed countries because it has to compensate for lack of social support elsewhere in society. The #1 factor in student success is parental involvement. Instead of buying iPads for low-income schools, what's needed is stable 35-40/hr week jobs that you can live on for low-income parents so that they can spend evenings with their family.

You're flat out wrong in your premise that it's a tax dodge, and it's very easy to demonstrate. Neither of those links support a claim about tax evasion in any regard.

There's no special tax benefit to what they set up. There are only structural benefits, in that the LLC can give to political campaigns and make private investments (neither of which are tax deductible). It also enables Zuckerberg to continue to directly control the Facebook stock while it's held by the LLC.

Any shares sold by the LLC generates a tax event as it would with an individual. You know the best way to avoid taxes like that? To keep the stock to yourself and not sell it at all.

The only tax deductions the LLC can take are identical to what an individual can take, the money must have gone to a 501c charity to generate a tax deduction. Nothing is gained in regards to avoiding taxes.

The first link openly admits it doesn't benefit Zuckerberg to use it as a means of tax avoidance (much less tax evasion, which is a crime that you're claiming is being committed). He'd be just as well off to directly donate the stock to a charity instead, as the ideal example given lists the LLC doing exactly that instead.

Any potential tax deductions accrued are saturated instantly, as they're limited to a fraction of the LLC's income in a given year and the total value of the deductions expire after five years (ie any charitable tax deduction carries forward for a maximum of five years and may only deduct against a maximum of 50% of your income in a year). There's nothing special about this deduction with the LLC, an individual gets the same arrangement. Again, there's no special angle.

Gates for example once gave a very large single year donation to his foundation, back in 2000. He saw very little tax benefit, because it saturated his ability to deduct a hundred times over.

The second link - an angry personal blog post - has the title calling it a fake charity. The first paragraph opens by insulting Zuckerberg's marriage. The second paragraph opens by insulting the Zuckerbergs love of their daughter. You can throw that one out as being biased immediately.

I think it can be hard for people to appreciate the differences because the truly different things are those one takes for granted. To not make this too long I will go directly to what I think has made the difference:

A relatively egalitarian society with a lot of trust between people and towards the government has made progress relatively effortless. When people don't feel the need to guard their own position because they might end up getting screwed there often isn't any good reason to be against development.

A relatively large amount of excess time, security and knowledge that enable people to something else. Startups are ultimately about harnessing excess potential. If all the value are capture by some other industry or the housing market there won't be much left over for startups.

Various cultural factors enabled by those things. Like being able to be independent (with the help of the government). Not being afraid to leave value on the table. An overall sort of generous, or at least non-petty, society.

If you look at factors like these, you can actually draw a lot of parallels to somewhere like SV compared to the rest of the world. SV is to at least some degree a recreation of academic life at its best. Which is the area of US society that would be most similar to Sweden.

> Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?

Doesn't the Facebook editor / autocompleter do that? I guess it's not available to anyone outside Facebook?

> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?

print debugging is extremely versatile and the market has spoken that, apparently, nothing else has the same expressive power to overhead trade-off. I have a few theories: tool usability sucks (looking at you gdb), debugging and writing code are two different disciplines so if you can stay in the same modality (writing code) to do debugging it's one less thing that changes from under you, print debugging is versatile and can apply to everything from embedded to mobile to cloud to HPC. print debugging gets a lot of scorn but (if you want an appeal to authority) if you read "Coders at Work" no "famous" programmers use debuggers, they all use(d) print debugging.

I think the social safety net is definitely a part of it, yes. But after working for a couple years at different startups in Stockholm I can say that another big factor is that most Swedish founders are either rich themselves, or their parents are, or they are very well connected. They don’t see themselves this way of course, they think they are building everything from scratch, but this does tend to be the case from my experience.