No real groundbreaking insight, but an interesting overview nonetheless.
My takeaway is that, zooming out from software, society at large is living in a state of ever-increasing complexity. We see this in politics, economics, public infrastructure, climate, and of course technology.
The key pattern is that it's always easier to build upon existing systems and work around practical constraints than it is to fix fundamental problems. Software bloat is just one manifestation of this broader tendency in human civilization to accumulate complexity rather than address root causes.
It's insane how complicated laws and taxes are, with layers of layers of new rules on top of old ones. Which often ends up with different courts not aligning "what is the tax for carrots" because of contradictory rules etc.
1. massively complex
2. issues are fixed by adding more complexity (to fix a security issue, close a loophole).
3. users do not understand how it works (but nonetheless have strong opinions).
4. there is never more than token attempt to clean up bloat (although lots of talk about it)
5. The complexity leads to unintended consequences.
As an example if a business pays an employee in the UK:
1. the business (employer NI) pays a payroll tax on the amount paid
2. they deduct another tax (employee NI) based on he employee's weekly income (but if self employed it depends on annual profits, if both its gets complicated).
3. another tax based on the employee's annual income ("income tax").
The second tax is often thought by people to be hypothecated to fund the NHS (many decades ago it funded, and gave people paying it the right to use, the govt funded healthcare before the NHS) or to be used to pay their pension (its hypothecated to do so, but is mostly used to pay current pensions, but for the last few decades how much you pay is not linked to how much you get, which depends on how may years you either paid it, or just fell short of paying it, or claimed certain benefits). its main real purpose these days is to disguise the fact that you pay more tax on earned income than unearned income.
A consequence of this is that one person businesses that work through company (rather than directly self employed) will pay themselves as employees just short of threshold at which income tax start and then pay themselves dividends because corporation tax + income tax on dividends comes to less than employer's NI, employee NI plus income tax.
So, one loophole and a lot of complexity, but any attempt to change it is strongly opposed by people who gain from the current system, but the real reason it continues is that most people do not understand how it all works. Quite a lot of people do not really understand how even the simplest of those taxes works.
I'm in exactly that situation, and I find it interesting how many web pages there are that present the question "how to most tax-efficiently pay yourself as a director" and then only consider two options - at the primary threshold (when the employee starts paying tax and NI on the income) or at the lower secondary threshold (when the employer starts paying NI on the income).
There's almost no discussion about the overall taxation burden of taking money out of the company via dividends compared to income tax above the primary threshold (which for normal people is the same as the "tax free allowance").
As you've alluded to, if your total income is in the "basic rate 20%" band, then this is actually cheaper overall paid as dividends (21% for company and 8.75% personally) compared to salary (13.8% for company and 28% personally). However, once you're above that and into the "higher rate 40% band, it's less clear cut.
At that point, it's still slightly better to pay yourself in dividends (21% for company and 33.75% personally) compared to salary (13.8% for company and 42% personally), but the decision becomes more nuanced because you might prefer to receive a salary anyway so that your dividend allowance is still free for dividends from other investments. Once you're into the "additional rate 45%" bracket, paying dividends is actually a higher overall tax burden.
Actually, the best way to get money out of a company is via a SIPP as an employer contribution, which is zero rate for tax for both company and employer. Although I can't shake the feeling that actually the deferred tax liability (income tax on 75% of it, many years in the future when it's many times its current value) is actually significantly worse than maxing out an ISA and paying the income tax up-front, so if I wasn't already doing that the decision is less clear.
But like you say, it's all complexity upon complexity, and life would be much easier if all income was treated the same both in personal tax and taking money out of a company.
Under the current monetary system, taxes have to be as complicated as possible, in order to force the government currency to be used in every imaginable transaction. The primary purpose of taxation is this. Actual revenue is second priority.
This is why more efficient or more fair taxation will never be introduced.
> I've seen a lot of programs using 1 or 2 functions from a library, but, nevertheless, linking the whole library.
Exactly. Because it's easier.
Of course it would be much better to split that library up into smaller libraries so you only linked the part you actually needed, but then people on HN will go crazy about "thousands of dependencies".
Why does this even matter? The system will only ever load code into RAM that's actually used by the final binary, because code is fetched as-needed from disk/mass storage.
That other code is still taking up address space and making the symbol table bigger (and therefore slower to use). And someone might want to use your program in a context where they don't have so much disk available. More importantly these giant libraries become hard to upgrade and therefore hard to make changes to.
Address space is abundant enough on 64-bit platforms that we even waste a lot of it on security mitigations. Symbols tables are overhead, but loading multiple libs also involves all sorts of overhead. The disk space argument makes the most sense, but binary code doesn't take up a lot of disk space these days; a vast majority is typically used for data, media, the latest large AI model etc.
Having larger shared libraries also means you no longer have to statically link that included code into multiple separate executables.
Agree, not much insight. Since it was Pike, I started curiously, just to realise that there was not much about what to do about the issue, other than a superficial “choose dependencies wisely”. The doc had already ended :(
"In a traditional portfolio with a mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds, those seven stocks [Mag 7 stocks] each account for, on average, about the same share of overall portfolio risk as a 1-2% allocation to bitcoin"
The path makes you feel good but they convert at discrete event times if they occur. I would suspect they’re highly illiquid and cashing in may be difficult. I’m speculating though. We will find out when they mature.
Edit: The general rule is that products like this are sold, not bought ;-)
For this convertible bond to be in the money requires the price of the stock to hit $800+ by 2029. You can also book trading profits in the meantime (path dependence is useful here) but I suppose liquidity may be a problem down the line. In general I’m skeptical. I have set a reminder to come back here in 2029
Without knowing the details, Microstrategy stock, and especially their bonds, look like an overly complicated way of gambling on bitcoin.
My guess is that a high degree of complicatedness of a bet can make it very compelling to certain types of gamblers because the process of learning how the bet works makes one feel like they have an advantage. But how that results in Microstrategy stock (total market capitalization) selling for around 3x the value of their bitcoin holdings is a mystery to me.
I agree that it is likely an indirect Bitcoin bet. It can be attracting investors prohibited from holding Bitcoin directly by regulations (pension funds, VCs, etc).
I also agree with your assessment of tricking people with an imagined advantage based on knowing the gamble mechanics. It’s a human cognitive fallacy. Knowing != good at.
There's no trick. The real trick is fiat's lack of proof-of-work, which is what Microstrategy's exploiting.
There is an enormous amount of money in the market that is prevented from buying/speculating on bitcoin and MSTR is the pathway for them to do this that has many advantages over an ETF. Once you understand bitcoin enough to know that the risk is very small and the reward enormous, with a finite supply (first liquid asset in the history of mankind with this quality), Gresham's law kicks in.
If you can email hello@lynx.boo with the email address you used it would be helpful for me to determine what happened to the email. I'm hosting my own SMTP server so I don't doubt that:
1) I screwed something up (most likely)
2) Your email rejected it because it's some no name ip with no reputation.
I tried my email address with my own domain, my @protonmail.com email address, and my @[very-good-"reputation"-university].edu email address. None worked. Eventually I tried my @gmail.com address, which worked.
A single hard drive can be part of a larger fault-tolerant storage cluster, not to mention much more easily duplicated and backed up. The digitization process is key.
How odd. This is a rather interesting catch, especially in light of the upcoming tax fight in 2025 with the TCJA and Expanded Child Tax Credit expirations, and the unrealized capitals gains tax proposals.
Given the other comments pointing to the SEO benefits of creating a subreddit just for a single post, it has shades of an effort to seed the information space and shape the narrative in advance of the tax fight by gaming the search results prior to uninformed journalists and legislative aids developing an interest in the topic, many of whom will search Google for background information and context as the tax fight plays out.
Nice catch, and interesting regardless of the motives.
It's mainly just a really bizzare post, super interesting and informative, but why would anyone in that position go into the trouble of typing up that amount of detail and post it in a brand new subreddit?
The practice of using Google to search within Reddit is already known to SEO scammers, and I’ve already started encountering subreddits supposedly geared toward a particular class of product, but upon a closer look, every single post in the subreddit recommends a particular brand of product.
Is this person SEO scamming? I don’t know for sure, but the subject matter is the same that I frequently see frontpaged from /r/FluentInFinance by obvious bots, although the motive seems to be political rather than commercial.
It has become more popular as a result of Google Search algorithm changes in December 2023. Search results now tend to showcase relevant Reddit posts regardless of subreddit size or post popularity, so it’s an efficient way to beat the SEO game. There’s value in owning the subreddit itself, such as to be able to display sidemenu links of your choosing.
My takeaway is that, zooming out from software, society at large is living in a state of ever-increasing complexity. We see this in politics, economics, public infrastructure, climate, and of course technology.
The key pattern is that it's always easier to build upon existing systems and work around practical constraints than it is to fix fundamental problems. Software bloat is just one manifestation of this broader tendency in human civilization to accumulate complexity rather than address root causes.
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