El Struthio › Likes

Louis obviously has been teaching Michael how not to sleep and just keep writing posts. - Rob Diana

Like you, Rob, Mike was born with talent that is hard to teach. This is his natural flow. - Louis Gray

Wait, was that a compliment in there? Sneaky. - Rob Diana

I'm just counting down the moments until the first "Is Mike Fruchter the New Louis Gray" posts start! - Marco(aureliusmaximus)

Nicely done Mike - nice blend of cool ideas in there! thanks!! - Susan Beebe

awesome Mike, ok am gonna hold out on my list for a coupla weeks then. Don't wanna be giving people too many ideas :) - Zee.

Main: Best tech discussion place. - Igor Poltavskiy

#26: Reading about Friendfeed - Eric Rice

Haha +1 for Eric. - Mack D. Male

A lot of great suggestions - Mason Blake

#27: Reading comments about reading about FriendFeed - Tyson Key

This is really helpful....still wrapping my head around FF. - Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)

Great post. I use FriendFeed as a Yahoo! Pipes replacement. Set up a FF account, bring in all your favorite RSS feeds, publish your FF to Twitter, and get updates in Twitter when there are updates to your favorite blogs. Great for industry specific Twitter groups. Wish you could do this in Rooms rather than having to set up a new FF account. Both the FF and Twitter accounts can be private, too. - Dominic Jones from twhirl

IRWebReport, the only thing Pipes still does better is the handling of dupes. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

@ aka Tina, I wouldn't know. I tried using Pipes a long time ago and gave up after 10 minutes. This is one case where FriendFeed *is* simple. :-) - Dominic Jones

meta overload on #26 and #27 =) - Adam Singer

It still hasn't shown up in my Google Account. - Morton Fox

@AJ: If you're not moving forward you're getting left behind. - Daniel J. Pritchett

I don't think there's anything wrong with the new feature. If you don't like it, don't use it. It's that simple. - GeekLad

Not me. :) - Cyndy

Where can I get an invite to Blrugh? - Phil G

Me - Alex Scoble

FF, ftw! - .LAG liked that

He posts on twitter, hilarious. Will he read the responses on FriendFeed? - anna sauce

FRIENDFEED NEVER HEARD OF IT - Akiva Moskovitz

This is the best argument for progressive taxation I have seen. Thanks. - Kårín Dalzĭel

You have to have money to make money. And if you don't have money then the people who have it make money off you (banks love to charge NSF fees on those who have trouble making ends meet which puts them even more in distress, but if you have a nice pad of money you're exempted from NSF fees and extended credit lines to cover them if they happen.) If you're middle class you are basically walking a tight rope and hoping if you fall it's on the rich side instead of the poor. - Fa La La La Lindsay

when it takes money to make money, the wealthy will always have an advantage. when it takes hard work to make money (get ahead), the wealthy have no real advantage. the more we arrange our local economy to allow earnings on wealth (stocks, bonds, property ownership), the less power the poor have to get ahead. tax policy used to work to level this discrepancy. but things like reducing capital gains and other wealth taxes undoes that work and tilts the field in favor of wealth. - MikeAmundsen

I was beating this drum last night as comments on various FF posts including yours about interest. :) The other *very* important piece to consider is that it's not a linear relationship but a geometric one. The more wealth, the greater the ability to make wealth. General pattern of US wealth distribution bears this out. Puts cracks in the notion that we are a meritocracy. - mikepk

Yep, Mike (both of you)...totally agree. - Alex Scoble

The good news is that we all truly do have the abilty to raise in class/financial - even with less advantage. Someone in my family was an immigrant who spoke not one word of english when he came to the country. He did not graduate from college. The company he started in his garage and worked as a side job on weekends is now a multi-million dollar company - and he died a very, very rich man. It may be easier for the rich to get richer, but it's not impossible for anybody to work their way up to anything. - Patricia

The statement "The rich essentially earn more wealth just by having the money" is false. To earn more wealth, you have to *do* something with it. Even if you decide to spend your money on ice cream, then you're providing capital to the dairies, and thence to their employees. - Mistletoe Glen

With our current system, Patricia, it is virtually impossible for someone who's poor and uneducated to work their way up to anything beyond being poor. And Glen, my statement isn't false. Money sitting in a bank earning interest is earning money by doing nothing. The person who owns the money is not WORKING for the increased wealth. The more money you have/make the harder it should be to make more money...not easier. - Alex Scoble

That's false, Glen. If I have money, *I* earn wealth with it by doing nothing with it other than letting it earn interest. Spending that money not only decreases the money I have, it also decreases the interest I can earn in the future since my principle amount is smaller. Buying that ice cream gets me an ice cream now but decreases the number of ice creams I can buy in the future. In a nation that calculates true wealth by how many future ice creams I can buy, I'm poorer if I actually use my money. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

@Alex, I have to disagree. Jeff Skoll was not a rich man before eBay. There are tons of examples. It is very hard, but it isn't impossible. - Patricia

This statement is so true. It is even something that's preached by some millionaires. Greg also makes an excellent point. Many people remain stuck because they are focused on what they lack. It's very hard to imagine a better situation in your mind in order to move toward it when you are surrounded by lack. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

One outlier does not equate to a proof. And I doubt he was uneducated as well. There are millions more examples of my counter argument. That it is very very difficult for poor uneducated people to jump up in status. - Alex Scoble

Sorry, but your money isn't just *sitting there*. The bank is loaning it to businesses and individuals, multiplying the effects of the capital and helping other succeed. In the 1980's, the Democratic congress pushed through a "luxury tax" that taxed such things as luxury yachts. This is progressive, right? And, yet, the net result was that the luxury yacht business moved offshore and 30,000 people lost their jobs. - Mistletoe Glen

Thanks for that very Zen Aikido statement, Gregory. :) - Alex Scoble

@Alex, i agree with you, but still, it is not impossible. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, dropped out of college. They're technically not educated. It is easier if you have certain things, but not impossible. - Patricia

That is a problem in the global economy, Glen. It's becoming increasingly difficult to enforce taxation when the rich can just move to Monaco or wherever to escape taxation. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it in the smartest most efficient ways possible though. The rich will always be able to play by their own set of rules...does this mean we should have no rules that deal with the rich? No. - Alex Scoble

Alex, I respect your opinion. What tends to get my goat in discussions like this is the phrase, "it's a simple fact." It seems condescending to people who don't happen to see the world through your eyeballs; just by looking at the discussion, you can see that it's not so simple. Frankly, I don't think FF is going to solve the taxation issue today. - Mistletoe Glen

They are very technically educated. Saying Bill Gates isn't educated is like saying Joe Montana didn't have much potential to become a great quarterback. Steve Jobs also dropped out of college...heck so did I...Yet the gulf between the examples above and someone who is TRULY uneducated is very stark. - Alex Scoble

Can someone delve into the taxation issue for me? I'm new to this and would love to learn from various opinions. - Patricia

Glen, you have not written anything that shows my initial statement to not be true. - Alex Scoble

The basic premise (that it is easier to do stuff when you have resources to help) is not a problem for me - what is a problem is how this is supposed to lead to the idea that it is thus ethical to confiscate the resources of someone as a result. "It's easier for you, thus we will artificially make it harder to be fair" leads to very weird ethics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Soulhuntre

@Gregory: thanks. cleared me up nicely! - MikeAmundsen

also, didn't bill gates come from a relatively wealthy background anyway? There seems to be so many systems in place to keep the poor in their place. Here in the UK you get taxed extortionately more on the earnings of a second job instead of taxing the income as a whole. Something like 50% of your second job earnings will go in tax. Which penalises the poor far more than the rich. Yet those who are wealthy will get tax break after break and countless methods to avoid tax entirely. - alphaxion

But having money isn't the only way to acquire more wealth -- better education and training is key - Shey, Jamaican of FF

@alphaxion, like i said, i know tons of rich people who had nothing starting out. I guess this doesn't matter so ok - you have to have money and education to be rich. There's no ability to educate yourself despite that I've seen many do it, and no way to climb the ranks. I submit :) - Patricia

soulhuntre: ok, we have a person earning $500,000 a year and a person earning $5,000. A proportionate tax system that takes $100,000 from the rich person will not dent their standard of living. Try taking $1k away from the poor person and watch them die or resort to crime/illegal avenues. Take that $100k and provide free health care or child support to the $5k people and notice their standard of living increase massively. Not a worthy cause? Then again, the gvnmt would use it on war :( - alphaxion

@Shey - absolutely. I think it is a great thing to increase opportunities for education and training, giving people access to the knowledge and skills to meet their potential is the best way to increase social mobility. Obviously I disagree with some about the best tax system to fund the educational system, but the core value of a good education system itself is not (I hope) in dispute. - Soulhuntre

@shey: "better education and training is key"... but are these things FREE? my brother went $64,000 into debt to become an attorney. - .LAG liked that

patricia: of course you will *always* get some that will rise to the top. This isn't about taking away all of their money but asking for a portion of it to help the orders of magnitudes more who don't rise above poverty. I'm still relatively poor, but that's cause I have been the one to dole cash out to people who needed it - I took a loan out to stop my parents going bankrupt, I'm bankrolling my GF through uni, I've stopped a friend from going homeless who then stopped talking to me and won't pay me back. - alphaxion

@LAG, it can be. I taught myself to be a publicist long before I went to college. My friend taught himself to program and rose his way up to making more than $180k/yr. He was born in a farmhouse with zero access to anything. Neither parent went to college, they had nothing. If we think we are limited, then we are. I choose not to think this way. - Patricia

Sorry Alex, if you have more than me, you must give me some or I will not lolz you! LOL - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

oh, and btw I taught myself everything I know about IT. I'm transitioning into writing for a living now too, and I never covered that in school either (I always wrote about contentious subjects that teachers would back down on). I read and learn about science to a level that I can keep up with those who obtained degrees in the subject. I'm still earning about $25k/$27k a year here in britain (where it's worth about $15k) when my job should be paying $40k and upwards. - alphaxion

In recent years we in the U.S. crossed a line... spending more on incarceration than higher education. A disturbing piece of the puzzle. In some ways, "debtor's prison" was more honest. - Richard pancakhaus Walker

Patricia - have you ever been truly poor? I mean really, truly, "I don;t know if we have enough money to eat this week" poor? I don't want to assume anything about you- maybe you have. I have not. There was a time when I was very young when it was almost that bad though. From my narrow observation: It's not the lack of access to something that keeps poor people down. It's the constantly clawing your way up, desperately clinging for air, and then sinking again. - Kårín Dalzĭel

And yes, some people can rise above it. But pointing to a few isolated examples and then saying "see, our system works just fine!" is to ignore the millions of examples where people can't climb out, not through fault of their own. - Kårín Dalzĭel

@karin, yes. I have. - Patricia

@peter on the surface it may seem OK, but the problem is that wealth accumulation is exponential. The effect is that fewer and fewer people will end up concentrating more and more wealth. The current wealth distribution of the US shows this pattern. Radical wealth inequality creates instabilities in society and have, in the past, led to revolutions and violence. - mikepk