He has this wealth as a function of having sold the equity in the company he co-founded, so in fact virtually all his wealth has already gone through a tax event at the federal and state levels.

It's possible to do so, but also makes a hostile environment for investment, which is why America hasn't done so yet.

If the idea of taxing unrealised gains and investments excites you, there is the EU... which here on HN is constantly being decried as unable to innovate in the startup space, get good startups going, accomplish anything with AI, and so forth.

> How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.

You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.

I'm no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don't play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we're donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don't publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.

(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)

But, more importantly, I don't think playing these "my donation is worth more than yours" games is productive. If you want to think that way thats fine, I won't defend myself or my family any further than this post.

The problem is that when government spends $1,000,000 on your halfway house, it provides instant relief. It creates beds. The next year the government does it, the number of employees has doubled and it creates 20% more beds instead of the original amount. The third year it creates no beds and we find that 10% of the beds are gone, and the number of employees is now 1000. The government didn't care how well the money was invested.

Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.

The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.

Hashimoto did more valuable work than you and then he is in position to do more impact wherever he pleases.

>>I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.

We need some mechanism to select people who makes the choice. Popularity/lying contest (politics) ain't it. People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.

The point they were trying to make was that if you take appreciation of assets into account, if your billion is appreciating by a relatively modest 5% per year, you are passively earning 50 million/year. Whereas someone with one million passively earns 50 thousand/year. One is enough to live in luxury anywhere in the world for several lifetimes, the other is enough to live comfortably in some parts of the US (or like a king in many parts of the world) but not enough to throw 6 figures at a programming language foundation for fun.

Perhaps he was making a subtle point about liquidity.

I don't know man, maybe read the rest of the comment? Are you serious?

That's only a default limit. You can talk to your bank to allow more, e.g. for buying a house or a car.

No.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe he paid with a Centurion Card! Who knows.

This is more 'multi-factor authentication' than deciding what you can spend your money on

> I have to apply in advance

Banks try to avoid holding excessive amounts of cash in suburban branches because it makes them attractive armed robbery targets. If you have a need for a large amount of cash, you can let them know (my bank says 24-48 hours in advance), go to multiple branches, or to a large city branch. Inconvenient, perhaps, though temporary. If it's for a business or a recurring need your bank is generally happy to make that part of their regular logistics, "Monday's cash delivery needs X because asimovDev regularly wants $50,000 in cash every Wednesday".

> it has to be approved

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I don't think it's "approved" in the sense of the bank deciding if you're allowed to do so. But hmm: multiple ID checks, or a specific seniority of bank employee doing the check. Or if you decide you want to take out $250,000 and you have to do it in cash, they might a) want a day or two to physically acquire the cash, and/or b) have additional security due to their insurance policy. They certainly might try to suggest you look at a cashier's check or wire transfer or other instrument to do so. There's going to be a CAR for any transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash.

But I'd challenge the assertion that the bank tells you you're "not allowed" to withdraw "large amounts of cash" from an otherwise unencumbered bank account.

Also, "the bank likes to make sure elderly people are not being scammed/abused", which is a common problem when someone suddenly wants to take all their cash out. The bank indeed has a duty to advise its clients if a wire transfer, etc. might be a more suitable way to do what they need.

People I know who have $250k in cash or cash like assets generally keep it in a mix of dollars, euros (one paranoid guy I know has a bunch of Canadian dollars - no idea why), junk silver, gold / silver bars (for the former, you're talking about $150k just for a 1kg bar), a collection of watches that appreciate in value, and so on. To quote one guy, "I want to make sure we can wear my family's wealth", which they indeed did (for no good reason, they're just from a cultural background that leads to them being paranoid about banks) when they moved from Scandinavia to Australia - watches, gold bars, etc. on them and their children's persons, valued easily north of $300k in current money.

If we cant grow past money as a species we are pretty much doomed. I'd rather have allegiance or community based incentives over monetary gain, given that most people on earth can't really afford life anymore and rack up debt so rich people can get richer.

> The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...

There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.

All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.

Except this inflation is not a direct fee charged to every holder of money. Inflation primarily affects people purchasing consumer goods.

If anything, inflation is the hoarding.

Rich people indirectly hold money by owning shares in companies that hold the money on their behalf. If the money is paid out via stock buy backs, the money is in the hand of the investor. Said money is reinvested into companies, those companies may temporarily pay out salaries, but eventually the money returns back to the investor leading to a dynamic form of hoarding. They started with less money but ended up with more money. The only way dishoarding can happen is if the money is spent on consumption.

Let me repeat:

If you understand the above, then inflation doesn't impact the rich who don't consume anything. If anything the opposite is true. The government/central bank throws just enough money into the system to prevent the economy from collapsing from the hoarding since money is needed as a tool or utility the same way housing is needed. As far as we know the preferred method of giving out that money to cause inflation has never been helicopter money, it's been quantitative easing which historically benefits the capital markets more or basically made the government take on more public debt.

Then there is the fact that any system where income is proportional to ownership basically negates the impact of inflation for said income. If you earn 3% yield at 3% inflation you might say that this nets out to 0%, but it doesn't. In nominal terms that is still a net inflow of money. You might counter that multi billionaires only turn into trillionaires on paper from inflation but they are still just multi billionaires. The point is that despite this real yield of 0%, the total share of money held by said multi billionaires can still go up and increase inequality even if in real terms their actual wealth did not change simply because consumers pay inflation and the billionaires don't.

If you ever bothered doing even a little bit of research the standard solution to "growing past money" is either something like a demurrage currency or the banking version called oeconomia augustana by dieter suhr (the bank charges a liquidity fee on both positive and negative balances to encourage getting to 0 residual balances, the liquidity fee is automatically determined by competition between banks, it is essentially a private implementation of Keynes' bancor proposal).

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I agree money doesn’t buy happiness, but money can go a long way to helping with those problems.

For example, money can pay for better medical care.

I don’t agree with you. Most of the things you mention are the same level of pain and unhappiness regardless of if you have, or not have money. The one with the peers is misguided because with enough money maybe you don’t need your peers! Freedom of choice.

And money does certainly buy health in the US.

Money won't cure pain and suffering (although it does make trial lawyers happy) but even there it can buy better care. But pretty much everything else in life is better and more enjoyable with more money. You can live in a nicer house, in a better neighborhood, with better schools, with better goods and services, with more things to do, etc. You can travel more, in a more comfortable style. You can support other projects, artists, charity, etc.

More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were.

More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).

So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.

> Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.

Have you done the math of what life consists of for most people?

It's 9-to-5. Your life is DOMINATED - by large order of magnitude - by involuntary wage slavery. Where you literally sell away your time for pennies on a dollar to a highest bidder.

That is the most painful thing in life, bar none, there is nothing worse than this. This is what ruins most of your health, ages you the most, causes most of the stress, which seperates you from spending more time with your family and loved ones and being free and doing what you want.

Unless the wage-slavery happens to be of enjoyable type for you. Which is bit of an outlier, lets be honest.

> From having no respect from your peers?

Most people automatically give respect and admiration to people with money, regardless if it's deserved or not.

> Will money save you from heartache? From being lonely?

Being a 9-to-5 wage-slave is ten times worse than heartache or loneliness. Or most other things.

If you're lonely and aren't able to distract yourself from heartache and you have boatloads money, you have SKILL ISSUES of the most severe kind.

Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life.

> Will money save you from heartache?

Probably yes. If you consider dating to be a numbers game, money moves things into your favor greatly and will give you a chance to move past.

> From the pain of losing a loved one?

Money will help greatly, because for many people getting over loss involves therapy which costs money.

> From being lonely?

Money for many people buys companionship.

> From having no respect from your peers?

Given that people associate respect with money excessively, probably yes as well.

> From losing your health to incurable cancer?

Your chances of surviving cancer greatly scale with money.

Sure, there are limits to it, but absolutely access to money is tremendously pushing things towards happiness. I think it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise, at least in a capitalist society we all live in.

I don't think so. The original comment said reducing unhappiness leads to happiness with diminishing returns. This one said they are two different things.

This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct).

There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.

That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.

No it's not. It might vary by country and culture but in the west that amount has consistently been found to be well over the poverty line and more often over double the median household income.

The whole section about him working for DOGE to "embark on a journey to save our government" tells you everything you need to know about him.

Point and laugh at the man who is honest about what he feels

OTOH, that’s probably how they got rich, and why I’ll never be.

It's surprising how few people do this; mitchellh is the exception that proves the rule.

A lot of the really valuable open source software gets written by people who aren't wealthy and have full time jobs doing something other than writing open source software.

How about let's aim for neither ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So they did improve the lives of the people around them.