It's ridiculous.
Numbers are funny, anyway. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's net worth is closer to yours and mine than it is to Elon Musk (Forbes list currently placing them at ~100 bill and ~250 bill respectively). But that's only in absolute terms. In reality, Jensen's got like 8 or 9 orders of magnitude more wealth than I do depending on how far into the month we are, and on the same order of magnitude as Musk.
Either one losing 99% of their wealth would still be above a billion.
Oh I agree that even 2 billion is too much, but my reasoning is that proponents of capitalism often make the claim that capitalism drives innovation (you try to fill some market niche in order to get rich) so if they are right, then 2 billion should be enough that this still works.
I had yachts depreciating to zero in my example because it's estimated that you have to spend about 10% of its' purchase price annually anyway, so anyone keeping a 20 year old yacht around is going to be spending a lot of money on it that will fuel other parts of the economy.
Okay, that's actually a good thing. I've heard unions in the US apparently often restrict individual bargaining, as that would undermine the collective bargaining of the union. So in that case, your coworker who's been working for 20 years, will make twice as much as you do at your 2 years, despite the fact that all he does all day is scratch his balls, while you bust your ass off. And you have no way of earning more than them.
Either way it doesn't affect me because I'm in Estonia and in a field where we generally get paid well enough even without unions. But I also know this won't last forever, because right now there's way too many unemployed software engineers.
Any billionaire can lose 90% of their wealth and have above 100 million left.
Many can lose 99% and have above 100 million left.
Some can lose 99% and still be billionaires.
The 100 millionaire will still have a million or more left after losing 99%, but that's not "live like hogs in the fat house forever" money at least. It's just "I don't have to worry if I lose my job" money.
A hundredbillionaire can lose 99% of their money and not make any perceptible changes in their lifestyle.
I propose the following:
Gap individual wealth at 50000x the national median annual income. Max wealth anyone in the US could have is, at present, under 2 billion. Other countries will vary, but generally it's plenty enough to motivate people to innovate, but nobody gets to be Bezos or Musk wealthy. Yachts should count towards this wealth gap, at a depreciation rate of 5% a year off the build cost. Primary residence doesn't count unless it's also used for generating income. You get to have one car, regardless of price, that doesn't get counted towards it, and the other ones count at market value. So you can have your classic car that appreciates in price, and a daily driver - without having to worry about the classic car's effect on your wealth limit.
Side effect is that now suddenly rich people near the gap will be a lot more interested in paying better wages to the working class. Why? Because then they'd get to keep more of their money. And to raise the median efficiently, you need to be raising wages for the poorest among us first and foremost.
Which one of them is the one that referred to workers as niggers in their codebase?
Google is allowing the app developers to choose (for now?). With Apple, developers never had the option to allow other stores or sideloading.
I'm lucky enough that both of the shareholders of my company are software engineers; one has transitioned to sales and project management, the other is still an engineer, he's also the CTO.
Was discussing office chairs with our team lead/office supplies person (it's a really small company, some people have multiple roles) and when I mentioned that my chair gets really creaky when leaning back but otherwise it works so it really just needs some lubrication, she asked why I would even lean so far back in my chair and the CTO told her "There's two sitting positions for programming. The writing position and the thinking position"
TL;DR: Takes an engineer to know how engineering works. Turns out that you have to spend a lot of time just thinking
I diagram everything out in my brain and it evolves continuously while I'm writing code
Sometimes I feel it's a miracle I get anything done at all but then usually the end result is better than what I'd originally envisioned so it kinda balances out.
since “mobile-friendly” was non-existent.
And now everything is mobile-first.
WIsh we could go back to the time where mobile-friendly was a thing, but using a desktop browser was a valid option too.
Even in 2005, mobile internet was so shit, it might as well not have existed. 2007-2008 was when 3G was starting to get rolled out I believe, but even that was pretty damn slow and expensive. 3.5G in ~2010+ is when things were usable enough that you could perform a Google search without giving up before the your first result loads.
If you read my other comment, basically I've heard from other commenters online that some collective bargaining agreements restrict individual bargaining. That would suck. If the union only sets floors instead of absolutes or ranges, that is another thing entirely and something that I'm very much in favor of.