Although some people due want to literally take from the rich and give to the poor, the actual problem with wealth inequality is that game is rigged.
Capitalism not natural order; it has rules and winners and losers. It's actually more like sports. With sport, the goal is to create entertainment by rewarding physical excellence, mental excellence, and successful risk taking. Similarly, the goal of capitalism to create a better society by rewarding physical excellence, mental excellence, and successful risk taking.
What happens to a sport when players cheat or exploit the rules to win? It's no longer entertaining! When the best players can no longer win that's boring. And, in sport, when that happens the rules are changed or enforced better to bring it back in line.
Capitalism is the same. We are reaching the point where we are no longer properly rewarding excellence that is benefiting society. So the rules need to be enforced and rules need to be changed to bring that back in line. Inequality of this magnitude shows that rewards have outstripped the benefits to society and needs to be corrected.
Do they really? The poor have castles and servants and hardly work? No, the real poor work 60 hours a week and live out of their cars. My children, who are not poor, with good jobs still can't afford their own home -- where is their castle, sir?
Let me more specific. I am talking about wealth that is generated by capturing value from existing assets, transactions, and people rather than by producing new goods, services, or productivity gains.
Examples are rent-seeking (making money through ownership, monopoly power, licensing, etc), financial extraction (financial manipulation, speculation, debt, and asset appreciation), housing and land appreciation, middlemen and platform fees, and corporate consolidation.
This is contrast to building factories, software, infrastructure, or goods and services that didn't previously exist. What you might define as "creating".
I don't know how you cannot buy something. You have to have a home, food, transportation, and even entertainment. The extraction economy has come to all of these things. Maybe fewer and fewer things are "worth the money" and that is a bad thing, don't you agree? I feel like you're not approaching this conversation in good faith.
Consider rents. You call that extraction. It is not, as when you rent you exchange money for use of the property. If you've ever been a landlord, you'll find out about how much it costs to make a unit available to rent. There are also high risks associated with it - Mayor Mandami is threatening to confiscate apartment buildings that have a beehive in them. Bad tenants can bankrupt you.
I once tried being a landlord. The tenant cost me more money than he paid. I exited that business. An office tower in Seattle recently was sold for about half what the owner paid for it. Oops. The idea that renting out places is free money and risk free is to not know anything about the business.
Selling people food is not "extracting". It's a fair trade - you farm the food, take it to market, sell it, and the customer eats it. You are not "extracting" from the customer.
When I rent an apartment, I'm obviously receiving something of value in return. The question is where the landlord's increasing profit comes from. If they make more profit from building new housing, maintaining it, improving it, and taking on risk, that's creating value. But if the profit comes primarily from owning a scarce asset that has appreciated because of zoning restrictions, land scarcity, market conditions, or monopoly ownership then no new wealth is created.
A massive number of businesses have failed in my city due to high rents. There are actually a good amount of commercial vacancies and in healthy market you would expect landlords to lower their prices to attract tenants -- but they don't. The actual value of the property is increasing at a rate that they actually don't have to rent out the space. The economics make it better for it sit empty. This is effectively destroying wealth for small business owners.
Selling food isn't extraction. Growing more food, improving yields, creating better products, and serving more customers is wealth creation.
My point is that an increasing amount of economic growth doesn't come from producing more value. It comes from finding ways to extract more revenue from existing value. Smaller packages for the same price, subscription fees, service charges, planned obsolescence, monopolistic pricing, rent increases, financial engineering, and other mechanisms that increase profits without a corresponding increase in output.
In other words, "growth" is being driven by capturing a larger share of the pie rather than making the pie bigger. Just look around, this is what everyone is complaining about!
This isn't an article about creating or even using attributes; it's a fairly low-level deep dive into how they're implemented.
It's definitely nothing I've ever had to think about when using attributes but I can appreciate someone looking into this and making the case that they could be implemented better.
As for attributes themselves, what I've found is that languages without this facility tend to implement them anyway using whatever hacks they can. In C, this is typically done with macros defining constant values. In scripting languages, it's often done with comments.
"Doctors and nurses will make mistakes in performing medicine. Making those doctors and nurses personally liable for honest mistakes is, IMO, excessive."
AFAIK the IRS has historically been more, er, disinterestedly nitpicky as opposed to disproportionately vindictive.
More "you say X we say Y here's your options you are Z days over with a W% rate", rather than "Ah hah! $50 dollars error, time to make an example outta this poor bastard."
Generally, yes. If you make a mistake in your return, the IRS is perfectly happy to accept an amended return, and you pay (or get paid) the difference (perhaps with a penalty fee). They usually only go after you criminally if they think you committed fraud.
I'm using Github copilot and I ran out of requests before the end of the month; this happens from time to time. But last month was the first time I decided to try the cheap models that were still accessible to me just to see what they were capable of. They're dumb as rocks.
I just don't know how many people have an overly negative opinion on AI assisted coding because they've just used the poor versions of these products given out for cheap/free. A similar critique is basing one's opinion on AI based on summary that Google provides for free in their search.
This article comes from a niche of people who read a lot of news articles about LLMs (links scattered throughout) but have also avoided learning about the tools directly.
Like you said, the models available on free trials are usually toys compared to what developers use. Even Opus and GPT-5.5 are available on $20/month plans and you can buy a single month to try it out. The way they write about paying for a tool seeming "absurd and horrific" says it all about the level of actual research that went into their understanding. It's entirely based on news headlines.
So the free trial, designed to convince you that it's worth paying, doesn't well? That isn't the users' fault, that is the companies' fault. If a free trial sucks it's perfectly rational to not pay just in case the paid version doesn't suck.
Certainly if the user gets a bad impression from the free version that's on the provider but if you're writing about it then you shouldn't get to be that ignorant.
Which models did you try? Open weight ones like Qwen and DeepSeek are getting pretty good, you just need the right harness, via OpenCode or Pi. I use Qwen 3.6 27B on my laptop with Unsloth Studio (Unsloth releases a lot of good quantizations and has great support for the latest features, recently released MTP support which can 2x token generation speed with no loss of accuracy).
Capitalism not natural order; it has rules and winners and losers. It's actually more like sports. With sport, the goal is to create entertainment by rewarding physical excellence, mental excellence, and successful risk taking. Similarly, the goal of capitalism to create a better society by rewarding physical excellence, mental excellence, and successful risk taking.
What happens to a sport when players cheat or exploit the rules to win? It's no longer entertaining! When the best players can no longer win that's boring. And, in sport, when that happens the rules are changed or enforced better to bring it back in line.
Capitalism is the same. We are reaching the point where we are no longer properly rewarding excellence that is benefiting society. So the rules need to be enforced and rules need to be changed to bring that back in line. Inequality of this magnitude shows that rewards have outstripped the benefits to society and needs to be corrected.
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