> "Batteries included" ecosystems are the only persistent solution
Or write your own stuff. Yes, that's right, I said it. Even HTTP. Even cryptography. Just because somebody else messed it up once doesn't mean nobody should ever do it. Professional quality software _should_ be customized. Professional developers absolutely can and should do this and get it right. When you use a third-party HTTP implementation (for example), you're invariably importing more functionality than you need anyway. If you're just querying a REST service, you don't need MIME encoding, but it's part of the HTTP library anyway because some clients do need it. That library (that imports all of its own libraries) is just unnecessary bloat, and this stuff really isn't that hard to get right.
> When you use a third-party HTTP implementation (for example), you're invariably importing more functionality than you need anyway. If you're just querying a REST service, you don't need MIME encoding, but it's part of the HTTP library anyway because some clients do need it. That library (that imports all of its own libraries) is just unnecessary bloat, and this stuff really isn't that hard to get right.
This post is modded down (I think because of the "roll your own crypto vibe", which I disagree with), but this is actually spot on the money for HTTP.
The surface area for HTTP is quite large, and your little API, which never needed range-requests, basic-auth, multipart form upload, etc suddenly gets owned because of a vulnerability in one of those things you not only never used, you also never knew existed!
"Surface area" is a problem, reducing it is one way to mitigate.
> the "roll your own crypto vibe", which I disagree with
Again, you run into the attack surface area here. Think about the Heartbleed vulnerability. It was a vulnerability in the DTLS implementation of OpenSSL, but it affected every single user, including the 99% that weren't using DTLS.
Experienced developers can, and should, be able to elide things like side-channel attacks and the other gotchas that scare folks off of rolling their own crypto. The right solution here is better-defined, well understood acceptance criteria and test cases, not blindly trusting something you downloaded from the internet.
1. It's really really hard to verify that you have not left a vulnerability in (for a good time, try figuring out all the different "standards" needed in x509), but, more importantly,
2. You already have options for a reduced attack surface; You don't need to use OpenSSL just for TLS, you can use WolfSSL (I'm very happy with it, actually). You don't need WolfSSL just for public/private keys signing+encryption, use libsodium. You don't need libsodium just for bcrypt password hashing, there's already a single function to do that.
With crypto, you have some options to reduce your attack surface. With HTTP you have few to none; all the HTTP libs take great care to implement as much of the specification as possible.
That's actually not really crypto, though - that's writing a parser (for a container that includes a lot of crypto-related data). And again... if you import a 3rd-party x.509 parser and you only need DER but not BER, you've got unnecessary bloat yet again.
When I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when personal computing became a reality, programming exploded - anybody could learn it with a modest investment.
I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.
It's always been this way - the people that rise to the top are the people who never had to deeply understand something, so they can't even comprehend what that would look like or why it should be important. They're trying to automate the "understanding" part, with predictably disastrous consequences that those of us who aren't the "rise to the top" type could see coming. Agentic AI is just another symptom.
IIRC, the US debt is at 39 trillion right now, with no plan to pay it back. Which is logical, because it's unpayable. There's no way in the world that will ever be paid back. I still haven't seen anybody properly analyze how high the debt can go before it actually can't go any higher, but we're going to find out.
The problem is that the constitution doesn't allow for a wealth tax. If you remember, we had to pass an amendment to be able to levy a tax on income, and that amendment is clear in that it only applies to income.
Interestingly, it was also promised to be only 1% or so on the richest households, and it has become, er, different.
But more important to the point, as the government already taxes about 20% of income, that is equivalent to holding about 20% of the wealth, as the wealth is just an income generating device and the value of the wealth is the flow of income it generates, of which 20% is already taxed.
What I'd like to know is why people are obsessed about stocks and flows in completely different ways. For example, not caring about the deficit but worrying about the debt, or vice versa, or focusing on taxing wealth but not really caring about taxing income.
I think the idea of taxing income makes a lot of sense, and don't want the government to try to value assets, particularly illiquid assets. And if it was up to me, I would dramatically simplify the tax code to eliminate all deductions and tax all income at the same rate, regardless of source. No reason to have one tax rate for carried interest, another tax rate for dividend payments, a third tax rate for wage income. Treat all income the same, and apply a progressive rate to the total income. Your tax form should not be more than a page long.
Contemporary interpretation of the Constitution does not allow a wealth tax.
From Section 8: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States...
A future Congress could interpret this to mean paying off the debt is in the general welfare of the country. And if SCOTUS wants to beef, Congress could craft "exceptions" and "regulations" to their appellate power which is power explicitly granted to Congress.
"3 equal branches" is modern propaganda. Congress is the more powerful branch given its explicit power to control Executive function through budgets and strip SCOTUS justices of all but a few ceremonial powers to do with ambassadors and other foreign states. Then we might actually have a Judiciary again instead of Executive, Legislative, and SCOTUS.
But Congress is full of rich people who intentionally avoid flexing the full power against the other two branches.
> What I'd like to know is why people are obsessed about stocks and flows in completely different ways...focusing on taxing wealth but not really caring about taxing income.
Because wealth grows faster than income.
r > g
It's easy, especially for rich people with lots of wealth, to have low taxable income.
I disagree that r > g over long periods, rather there are some periods where it is less and others where it is more and it basically averages out to r = g. If you do not believe that, then you have to think that capital income will be larger than GDP, which is mathematically impossible, as capital income is one component of GDP and the ratio is relatively stable over time.
More importantly, it does not matter at all whether r > g, because both capital income and wage income are taxed. If you don't believe that, try not reporting your capital income and see how that works out.
However, you will say, long term dividend income is taxed at a lower rate, whereas wage income is taxed at a higher rate. Correct! That is why I said that the solution to that is not to impose a wealth tax, but to tax them at the same rate. All market income should be taxed at the same rate, and that solves your r > g non-problem.
Personally I feel that by using an asset as collateral the person is essentially “realizing” the gain (the person is formally and contractually saying the asset is worth at least this much and using it to exchange something of value, even if only in case of default) and should pay capital gain tax for however much the gain was based on assessed collateral value minus the cost basis. And the cost basis steps up to the assessed collateral value.
Yes, let's discuss this. By the way, for the r=g, head on over to measuringworth.com, which has long term GDP and interest rate data, and run the calculations, you'll see how r = g over long periods but swings above and below, it doesn't track it exactly. I used to be fascinated by this stuff and generated lots of charts and even had an econ blog but that was a long time ago. The data is out there.
In terms of borrowing against assets to "escape" paying taxes, I wonder if you have a problem with someone who borrows to pay their taxes. It's the same thing. At the end of the day, they will need to pay interest on the loan, and that rate will be more than the risk free rate.
What is strange is that you never hear the opposite argument:
If you want taxation to be based on spending rather than income, then you want consumption taxes. Now a lot of economists hate income taxes as a group and think only consumption should be taxed, in which case you make a billion but only pay taxes on what you spend.
Overall, do you think billionaires would fare better with consumption only taxes or with income only taxes? How many assets pay no interest ever? It's a weird argument to be making, that billionaires escape consumption taxes when they spend down their savings.
But even here, people are making a mistake, because eventually you need to sell assets to dispose of the loan, and that's when you pay taxes on the realized gains, with interest. And the interest rate charged to the billionare will be more than the risk free rate which the government can use to borrow, so if the government just borrows the expected amount of taxes and rolls over the loan, the government will outlive the billionare and when the estate is settled, all that spending, plus interest, will be realized gains (100% gains, remember) and the tax bill will be paid in full.
This is really no different than borrowing to pay your taxes. Sure, in a sense you "avoid" paying taxes, but not really.
So what you really want is to close the income tax loopholes. Treat inheritance income as income. Ban non-profits. Ban "foundations" that don't pay tax, etc. All you need to do is treat all income equally for tax purposes and you are fine. No one can escape taxes, even if they borrow to pay their taxes.
For rich individuals it could be the risk free rate. Banks can curry favor with rich individuals and gain other business if they do this.
> are making a mistake, because eventually you need to sell assets to dispose of the loan, and that's when you pay taxes on the realized gains, with interest
You seem clued in to this stuff. You really haven't heard of Buy-Borrow-Die?
The deficit/debt exist because US tax rates (even including fed+state+local) are so low compared to every other major advanced economy in the world, even before last year's "One Big Beautiful (Ugly?) Bill". In fact, the US could have raised rates by more than 15% and still been the lowest. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/ap...
If US tax rates were even just the average among other G7 countries, it would be trillions more than the deficit per year.
(The US also has the lowest spending (fed+state+local) among them as well, but even though our spending is the lowest among them, the tax rates are so very low they're still not enough to cover even the lower spending compared to them. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/Ap... )
Without any funny business (meaning no re-valuation of the debt, which I guess there are strategies for) and assuming an interest rate on the debt of between 3-5%, I figured between 10-20 years before the interest payments eat up most essential services.
Monetize it or default are the only options I think. Monetizing affects everyone while default only (directly) affects bond holders. Monetizing is much easier to obfuscate though so that is probably what will happen.
Perhaps, but the monetization would have to be pretty extreme. And that would send interest rates to the moon, making further borrowing difficult.
While these things are impossible to predict, my guess is that in a couple decades the government will do some sort of technical default. Force Treasury bond holders to exchange their current holdings at par for new bonds with longer maturities and artificially low interest rates. Politicians will be able to claim that no one has lost money since the nominal bond values will remain the same even though the market values will be much lower.
The other thing I expect to happen is that the government will force retirement accounts (both defined benefit pension plans and defined contribution 401k plans) to purchase Treasury bonds. Because of course they're so much "safer" for retirees than risky stocks.
I didn't read the article (paywalled), but did the headline is "young graduates face the grimmest job market in years". Did they address how many years? I've seen now compared to 2000 & 2008, which were bad, but that we bounced back from. Is it the grimmest job market in years or the grimmest in centuries?
According to the article's graph of the fresh grad unemployment rate, the present climate is about as bad as in 2003 but less than a third as bad as it was in 2010. Unemployment during the pandemic spiked well above 2010, but only briefly, before returning to pre-pandemic level.
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"
Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
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