In 2025 it would be anything above 3.6 million. It’s a ton of money but here’s a list of a few people that hit it.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

Now if they added in a progressive tax rate for corporate taxes as well… Say anything over 500 million in net profit is taxed at a 90+% rate. That would solve all sorts of issues. Suddenly investors of all these mega corps would be pushing hard to divide up the companies into smaller entities.

Wealth tax in the modern age could be an inheritance tax. Anything over the median life earnings of individuals could be taxed at 100%. So median earnings in my area is $65K * 45 years (20-65k) = $2.93 million.

Taxes can go either way. It depends on how they were written.

The tax code after the Great Depression allowed for massive expansion of public projects in the U.S. It was 63% for the top earners. During WW2 the top tax bracket was at 94%.

When the boomers were all born the tax bracket was above 70% for the top earners. This high tax bracket is what fueled the creation of a large middle class, public infrastructure, schools, research, space exploration, and the massive military buildup and wars. It also acted as an effective anti-minopoly/oligarchy system because the tax system discouraged it.

Then in the 80’s Reagan slashed the taxes for the top earners down to 28%. its never gotten above 40% since then. Most high earning companies have so many exeptions today that the real tax rate is often 0%.

Because of it the infrastructure built during the 50’s-70’s is degrading and falling apart. Public services are declining and the middle class is shrinking as people become more impoverished.

The last time I had a landline was 16 years ago when my wife briefly had a home office. Her employer required the landline as part of the home office setup (they paid for it).

We got spammed by robocallers every 5-10 minutes all day long and half the night. It was so bad that my wife never knew when a work call was coming in and had to let every call go to voicemail.

We didn’t unplug the phone just turned the answering machine to silent. We still got calls on a supposedly disconnected number.

Everything since 7 has been a downgrade.

I designed my wife’s wedding ring. I drew it up the evening we decided to get married. I still have the drawing. I then found a small independent custom shop and had it made. The diamond is actually small but looks massive because of the design.

Cost me $1,200 for it. Most of it was in the hours of labor to make it back in '00.

I had a idea of how to stop them but my wife wouldn’t let me.

Respond with a picture of a coyote, bobcat, mountain lion, great horned owl or other predator with the caption, “Thank you for dinner, it was delicious.”

The U.S. bulletproof model was proposed for school children. Sadly, Republicans successfully fought against it, because it “Would give the kids an unfair advantage over the school shooters.”

Most smaller cars are designed for 150lbs * 5 people plus a little cargo. So around 800-1000lbs.

Four 300lb people = 1,200lbs. The suspension on that little car was fucked.

The F150 is rated between 1800-2300lbs depending on the model. They can even squeeze in a 5th person into that setup.

I used to spend several thousand every year buying books. Usually from small independent bookstore. I was also always in the library checking out books but the local libraries collection was very small and limited.

Next I got one of the early generation kindles keyboard when I was traveling all the time before I had a smart phone. I of course found all the free books and downloaded several thousand of those. Amazon made almost nothing off of me for that one. I still hit the library regularly for books I could not get for free or stuff for my kids.

Then my local library started offering digital books via Libby and Hoopla. I have pretty much completely stopped using kindle completely in favor of those two apps. I vote every chance I get for the library to get more funding as its back to being my go-to place. I physically have only gone to the library once in the past 5 years however.

Honestly, I would rather see a massive extension of library services than more private bookstores.

People have genetically different ability to detect flavors. Some people lack the receptors to detect the bitter rindlike taste in todays seedless watermelons.

Close but not quite. 3N plants are sterile. This is because the odd number of chormosomes cannot line up during meiosis and form gametes.

They use diploid pollen 2N pollen to trigger fruit formation but the resulting fruit is parthenocarpic. The white pips and even the occasional colored hard seed coat does not contain an viable embryo.

Crossing of plants with different numbered chormosomes can create fertile offspring if the resulting ploidy is even. For example crossing wheat (6N) with cereal rye (2N) creates Triticale (4N). The Triticale is fertile.

The story of seedless watermelons.

Originally developed by a scientist in Japan pre-WWII, the technology was picked up by watermelon breeding programs at universities in the South-East U.S. Over the next 30 years the university programs worked to develop the technology. Progress was very slow as it takes 15 generations to create a new female line.

Unfortunately for everyone the universities decided to use their tasteless, bland, long distance shipping types to create these females. The most famous of which is Charleston grey.

Finally in the mid-70’s the universities released the female inbreds to private companies to create seedless watermelons. The private companies crossed tasty, elongated allsweet and crimsons sweet types as a diplod male with the bland grey females. What resulted was the bland seedless types with large white pips and bland flavor. After all 2/3rd of the genetics came from those terrible females.

For the next 25 years all of the seedless watermelons used the same terrible female lines with slightly improved male lines.

Then a breeder from originally from China decided to create new females. He used small seeded varieties from China and Thailand with deep red color and much thinner rinds.

The resulting seedless watermelons had dark red color, tiny little pips, and a slightly bitter flavor. You see the breeder from China failed to recognize the different flavor profiles in the gene pools. Asian watermelons often have bitter flavors that are completely acceptable in those markets but not in European ones.

And thus we are stuck with bland or bitter shitty seedless watermelons at the store.

There was once a brave lady who attempted to buck the trend. She bred the most flavorful delicious seedless watermelon ever seen on the planet. It was almost honey sweet with strong aromatics and not a hint of bitterness. It was crisp and juicy without a hint of mealyness. It was large elongated and looked just like the good old seeded ones. Alas the market rejected them because “they look like seeded types”. She retired early with a big FU to them all.

I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.

Yes I did on my personal machine. I got a Compaq on sale right after XP came out in 2001. It was a really nice build that just kept running back before HP turn the brand into cheap shit.

Then my first son was born in 2004 and money was very tight for a few years. Vista came out in all its glory so I kept the Win 2K for a few more years. When 7 launched I finally replaced it in 2009. It lasted 8 years.

I currently have a 11 year old Win8 laptop that is dual booting Win10 and Mint right now ( Upgraded to a Sata SSD) My main laptop is on Win11 and is 6 years old.

Used DOS and an IBM Selectric II in highschool. Installed windows 3.1.1 in college. W95 at my first job. Upgraded to them all to W98, ME, 2000, 7, 8, 10, and 11

Installed Linux the first time with Unbuntu Warty Warthog. Had the CD mailed to me.

I still managed to fuck up GRUB today again… because I’m very talented apparently.

I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.

Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.

Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.

City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.

My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.

Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.

A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.

The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.

Fucking hell, I understood that. I have slipped and fallen into the dark side. Learn from my mistakes and turn back before you get to this point. There is no hope for me now.

Its referred to as barriers to entry. These are anything that prevents new startups from occuring. These can be natural or contrived.

As somebody who finally started their own business after 25 years of effort and a lot of luck I know these well.

The largest barrier is usually initial capital. Banks don’t give out loans to startups without assets. So if you have overall negative personal assets like large student loans, renting, car loans, etc you are fucked in getting a bank to fund your startup. I can’t get a line of credit for at least a year, probably 2. At least not one at a reasonable interest rate that doesn’t eatup all of my profit. I ended up taking a draw against expected revenue from a vendor who believes in me.

Health insurance (U.S), literally the reason I didn’t start my business 10 years ago & 5 years ago when I had 2 opportunities.

Business insurance: it took me 5 months to find somebody that would cover me.

Laws and regulations that create barriers to entry. These can be minor annoyance like fees and paperwork or major regulatory hurdles depending on the industry and country.

Infrastructure to conduct the business. I need highly specialized warehousing for 4 months of the year. I ended up renting from a company that is in a similar business as me that runs on a different cycle (they are empty when I need space). Building my own would require a loan… See above.

Available resources: Do competitors limit your available resources by market manipulation and anti-competative behavior. This is a huge one in industries dominated by oligarchies.

There are many more of these that are around.

Most of these can be alleviated by a fair sharing of revenue. 10 years ago I increased the companies net profit from $500K to $10million. They gave me 5% pay raise and $10k bonus out of a “Theoretical” $200K max.