Happiness only comes from the achievement of values. The greatest bamboozlement of stoicism is teaching people to be indifferent to achieving their values. It lobotomizes upside gains in a world that's full of opportunity to a mind of reason.
> teaching people to be indifferent to achieving their values
That's inaccurate. Stoicism teaches indifference to outcomes you don’t fully control, while demanding total commitment to the values you do control such as your character, choices, and actions.
Which leads to multiple questions - if NVidia can't manufacture elsewhere, will the best in the industry get much more expensive? is the GPU value in CUDA or TSMC?
At best, the two companies are locked into a monopsomy/monopoly market for the next 2 years where TSMC needs NVidia to sell chips and NVidia needs TSMC to make them - in the long term, these arrangements are rarely stable. NVidia wants more manufacturing partners, and TSMC wants more GPU makers.
I find it very interesting the praise Material Design Expressive gets. Perhaps it's just because I've always been on iOS, but every iteration of Material Design seems so much more foreign to me. I'm not really criticizing it, but personally I find it to be extremely confusing to visually process.
It feels a lot like language divergence. iOS and Android started at the same place (same language), then became different accents, different dialects, and (soon/now) different languages.
When you understand the immorality of taxes, there’s nothing immoral about getting your money back from a government that took it while repudiating the taxes.
But I don't think taxes are in and of themselves immoral.
A human being is a social animal, and each gets a lot of value from the people around us.
These are nice to have:
- clean streets
- police
- non-corrupt judges
- a stable legal framework
- living among educated people
- fire department that just shows up
- not getting bombed and invaded by a foreign army
- much more
These are "true expenses" in that if you didn't pay for them... you'd eventually pay the price for them when you're the victim of crime, fire, or exposure to the illiterate.
If you lived in Galt's Gulch or some gated community in an anarchic society, you'd pay a regular fee for these services, like voluntary taxes.
Taxes are infamously as inevitable as death because the expenses it's meant to pay for are also inevitable. We might as well set up a system.
Government waste is held up as an example of immorality, and some/most governments certainly should be leaner, but some waste & inertia would happen in any large organization, public or private. The only other time a government could be straight-up immoral is if it's persecuting innocent citizens or foreigners for no reason. Thinking through the implementation details of Galt's Gulch makes me think taxes aren't so bad after all.
What makes taxes immoral? People want their government to provide certain services. Those need to be paid for. What services should be funded depends on who you ask. It's interesting how the Nordic people are fine with paying more for strong social safety nets. They see it as an investment in society.
He suggested on a podcast that if a woman had no access to resources to perform an abortion she should throw herself down the stairs. Presumably as a way to solve it that doesn't involve getting freebies from the state.
