Battle drones might be upvoting this article lol - there are 4 different instances of this article on the homepage currently

Not sure if you're joking, but the only such evidence I could think of would be something like finding some way to influence the hardware of our simulation and seeing a glitch in our world

I think a lot of the difference is due to different groups/lead figures/experts focusing on different concerns, e.g. people like Paul Ehrlich and environmental groups focused on ecological sustainability vs people like Elon Musk and governments focused on economic sustainability

yup. going by sustainability, we already have too many ppl on this planet. everything else is just "who pays my pension".

My first thought was that the article was redacted lol

Libraries spend like $2B / year buying books https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/fy19-pls-re..., which is like 10% of the total book market. So even if no one ever bought a book because they first encountered the book, author, or genre in the library that's already a signficant difference

Yes, and when you do pay it's a lower "real" tax (due to inflation)

If I have X dollars and get taxed such that I have X * T after the taxing, say T = (1 - .20), then I invest and that money grows by a factor, say G = (1 + .50), over the years, then in the mean time inflation hits and reduces my money by a factor, say I = (1 - .10), so that what I end up with in the end is F = X * G * T * I. If instead I invested and grew and inflated and then got taxed, X * G * I * T, it would be exactly the same. Multiplication is commutative.

What you are doing by delaying taxes is hoping you have a lower rate later. Say you make less in retirement or die untaxed and your kids get a step up in basis. But without a change in rate (which might go up even), there’s no difference.

If you take a loan against your larger capital pool, inflation helps you (to the extent it wasn't incorporated in higher lending costs).

But yeah that's a second order effect. There aren't really any scenarios where you have a fixed nominal tax that can be deferred without locking up the money, so I think you're mostly right that it comes back to lower tax rate and step-up.

Good point about inflation. Deferring can make sense. I was thinking what we earn today is more enjoyable to spend today than when we have bad knees and whatnot.

Yes, I came here to say this sounds a lot like Strunk & White

fwiw the substack app did this to me too

Jassy suspects AI will reduce jobs:

> As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.

It's also bad because of the time value of money (deductions in the future are worth less than deductions now).

But I agree that much of the outrage seems due to a confusion that 80% of the deduction is lost completely (vs deferred).