How much are the 48% who want this fast WiFi actually willing to pay for it though. I suspect that because the answer is something not much more than they pay for the ground-based services, we will not see these services become rapidly available anytime soon.
Also, if satellite internet is the least expensive option for anything that is anything short of the most remote among remote places, I worry more about what is making more traditional infrastructure impossible there more than anything else.
I would gladly accept a pill I need to take for the rest of my life that works every time over the current form of treatment that may or may not cure me, but will leave me feeling as though I might just be half dead.
But even if that comes to pass and these researchers become filthy rich from charging ridiculous prices, that only creates a massive incentive for someone else to find a cheaper solution. Even if no one does, eventually we get generics after the patents expire and there will be plenty of countries that make their own versions of the drug for cheap as they could not care less about the profits of some foreign drug company or keeping the Western governments behind them happy.
Some of what Trump has done is good, but we should not pretend that he is some great proponent of the free market. For example, his penchant for tariffs and trade wars is outright idiotic and will only hurt the American economy in the long run. That Trump looks good on economic policy is more as a result of Maduro being batshit crazy than Trump being intelligent.
Why would the CIA need to spend any resources attempting to destabilize Venezuela when they are doing a far better job themselves? The usual tripe about oil no longer plays since the U.S. has its own vast reserves that we can now exploit and the Venezuelan oil requires special refinement that other sources do not.
The simple truth is that centrally planned economies are not workable and that when you go around nationalizing businesses, no one wants to invest in setting up a company there. Add on currency restrictions (no sane person uses the official exchange rate) and the idiotic financial policies and this is exactly what you can expect.
I am sure that people will still try to line up to defend socialism by talking about the Nordic model (which is not really socialist, but that is a completely different argument) but what Venezuela has done is Soviet era stuff that we know for a fact does not work.
If anything, the U.S. benefits more from leaving Venezuela to their own devices. At least now when socialists start talking about their great utopia we can point to the literal hell that you actually get. I just hope that the amount of misery that most Venezuelans have to endure in order for us to get that point is not so great, but history leads me to believe that this will not be the case.
I doubt that very much. If that were the case, no one would volunteer as it provides no social capital, but we recognize and discuss philanthropic activities all the time. A good chunk of Facebook posts are people trying to convince other people how good they are for caring about some cause. Facebook and social media make it easy to look like you care about community without actually caring about it. Look at the Kony 2012 slacktivism campaign for a good example of this in action.
That and if you look at the parts of the world that disallow capitalism or free market principles, it does not appear to me as though they are acting much different or have somehow come together as a community on a large scale. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to lay this at the feet of capitalism, especial as the youth in the west are becoming more socialistic in political belief (see Bernie Sanders rise to popularity) but are not engaging in community-focused behavior either. If you think that the problem is getting worse and countries like the U.S. are becoming less capitalistic, it suggests that the two things are not strongly connected, at least to the extent that you want to suggest.
I feel as though I am missing part of his argument as well. Python is perfectly good for banging out small programs and frameworks like Django make it much easier to build a functional website once you bother to learn how it works. Contrast this with cobbling something together in PHP as often was the case a decade or so ago and I fail to see what the problem is.
This can all be done without tools as nothing stops a person from writing their code in a simple text editor and testing it by running the program live and troubleshooting and bug fixing as they go along. However, this is not efficient and in the long run it pays to learn to use an IDE, debugger, SCM system, persistence framework, automated build and regression test setup, and all the other tools that make developers much more efficient in the long run.
If a person just needs small programs on an infrequent basis, they probably would not take the time to learn a programming language to start with. Instead they can probably use something like Excel to solve their problem. Hell, there are plenty of things I use spreadsheets for as they are a perfectly good solution and if I need interoperability it is easy to have most programs read or spit out CSV. It seems as though the author thinks that everyone should learn to write their own programs to solve problems that are better solved with existing tools in which they may be more competent. Then he laments that programming is too complicated to use when he has already made things over-complicated by suggesting that programming be used at all.
They are one of the largest device manufacturers on the planet and their devices are frequently among the top selling.
If you think they are only selling to the upper class, perhaps it is an indication of how large the upper class has become. I should think you would not dismiss such as a bad thing.
So either your premise is wrong and Apple is more mass market than you wish to admit, or you are upset that the world as a whole is growing increasingly prosperous and more and more people can afford luxury brands. Or perhaps the most likely explanation is that you just want to rag on Apple or western capitalism.
Also, even if what he is doing is a colossally stupid idea, at least he tried something and failed so that others will be able to learn from this example.
If the problems of society were so easy to fix that the solutions were obvious, we would not have these problems. Even if this fails, it will provide insights into the next set of solutions.
Besides, James is using his own money for this. Would anyone complain if he had instead spent it on a huge yacht?
While this is true, improvements in productivity mean that it has become (and will continue to become) much less expensive to sustain the life of a person with no or little input from them.
I would rather replace the ugly ball of entitlement programs we have now with a UBI. Many are badly designed and incentivize people to avoid getting off welfare, not to mention the administrative overhead. Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually. That would be sufficient to subsist if doing nothing else.
However, just as with any other program, a UBI can be badly designed. If we want to implement one it needs to ensure that bad behaviors are not incentivized. Reducing payments for working is one such example. Letting parents siphon off any income from their children would be another.
I am a proponent of some form of UBI, not because I believe that it is morally right or good for us to redistribute wealth, but because since we have already decided to do that to the current degree, we may as well do it as sanely as possible.
My other reason for supporting it is that I suspect it would also lead to reductions in abject poverty and crime, the externalities of which likely start costing a significant portion of such a program when you factor in the economic activity that must be directed to dealing with the problems caused by such. I cannot verify it, but I recently read that some city was spending some tens of thousands of dollars per person on dealing with the homeless in the city. Think of how much is spent on the criminal justice system as well. If a UBI can lead to reductions in those problems outright it reduces the cost and size of government further.
âoeBut Billy hit me firstâ is not a good argument if you want to be taken seriously. We should not have bailed out those failed financial institutions either, but making a mistake once should not mean that we become more accepting of making that mistake twice.
Of course the politicians love the finger pointing because both sides can continue to get away with bad behavior as the citizens anger will be focused on the other side rather than the newest example of bad behavior.
Either way, I don't understand everyone's surprise. There's always been and always will be a desire to shape or control human behavior. If social media is seeing more use for such manipulation, it's only because social media has become more popular and people have moved away from print, radio, and television.
Use social media appropriately and it's not a problem.
I think that a lot of students are probably using it as a crutch. There are people who legitimately need these substances to function, but there are too many people who are abusing them at the expense of learning some discipline and focus. Yes, it sucks to have to sit down to do a term paper, but really what you should have been doing is spending small amounts of time over the semester working on it instead of putting it all off until the last possible minute.
Whatever you exercise, you will make stronger. Don't assume that self-control and willpower are any different. Of course you can exercise your vices and bad habits just as easily.
which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...
Take a look at the chemical formulas for Adderall and meth sometime.
I think a lot of ADHD problems would go away if we just let kids run around some more. I've known a fair number of people who've been put into that bucket and physical exertion does a lot to mitigate the effects. Extra PE time might also help with the obesity epidemic as well.
The idea isn't anything special or that complicated, but regardless of how you wanted to determine prices, building a platform for a taxi service is hardly simple. At a minimum you'd need a mobile app for both drivers and passengers, a map platform, a back end to track all of the drivers and customers, and you'd need to build a system to handle collecting payments from customers and dispersing them to the drivers, as well as an ability to handle taxes for everything. Some of that could be done using third parties, but that's going to add up in terms of cost.
If anyone wanted to start doing this, the likely path would be to have a small team implement something for a single city (that isn't terribly large) and try to attract a huge amount of venture capital. This is almost something that would work better as a layer that sits on top of Uber, Lyft, or any other taxi service and finds the best matching offer among them. However, even that isn't easy as those individual companies don't have any reason to participate or allow you to interface with their platform.
Make it difficult enough for people to engage in commerce legally and this is what you get. If government law or regulation where sufficient to direct human behavior, there'd be no war on drugs.
Personally I don't mind if Uber wants to have independent contractors, but I think the real sticking point is letting them set their own prices. As much as Uber wants to think they're the good guys in all of this, I think they'd be much better off if they just acted as a way to connect drivers and passengers. The technology that enables Uber to begin with would make it ridiculously easy for both drivers and consumers to negotiate their own rates. This would allow drivers to earn better wages and allow customers to spend more or less as they desire.
I'm not even sure human advisers are particularly good at explaining their rationale. Sure they can give you an explanation, but I'm not sure if it's actually any good. Silicon Valley angel investment has terribly low success rates, even among investors that tend to outperform the average. I suspect it has less to do with picking winners and more to do with having the winner you pick providing massive returns.
If as you point out the only concern is just how good the system is, just consider every case where it disagrees with human advisers and see which is right more often. Maybe it's inline with human predictions to such a high degree that no one really notices the fringe cases.
It's just another fake societal panic that everyone is sure is real for some stupid reason, probably because the news keeps brining it up to sensationalize otherwise mundane stories. I remember when it used to be Dungeons & Dragons being evil and then daycares practicing satanic rituals and abusing children. After that it was rainbow parties (sucks that those weren't actually real) and other idiotic stuff like kids getting high on their own fermented feces and urine.
I don't know why the Saudis banned video games since Blue Whale has nothing to do with video games, but they were part of another big panic in the 90's (remember Jack Thompson) where everyone was sure violent video games would turn little Billy into a killer. Maybe they're still hung up on that one as well.
If you're worried about latency, get a bigger cache. Maybe we could drop latency on RAM, but it would probably be at the expense of other important aspects such as capacity. Most people would probably prefer the added capacity since having to go to disk (even if it's an SSD) is much worse in terms of extra latency than having to go from cache (especially once you get out to L3) to RAM.
Perhaps you could argue that now we have more than enough RAM (64GB ought to be enough for anybody) but for most of history, that wasn't the case. I believe that in general latency has improved, but it's just not going to see the same improvement as other aspects of computing since most of the focus is on increasing capacity.
Then he pays taxes on that. If his space company pans out, it's probably worth it for him to invest some of that in another company. Amazon's value could still increase, but their growth potential is a lot more limited.
His company (Amazon) has historically made little or no money (only in the last quarter did it finally eclipse $1 billion in profit), so there isn't much in the way of profit to tax. Bezos doesn't have $150 billion either. It's what he's theoretically worth based on the present valuation of his company and other assets that he might own. Unless he can find someone (or several someones rather as apparently no one has more money than him) to buy all his shares of stock, he's only theoretically worth $150 billion. In the real world, if he attempted to sell all of his stock, the price would probably decline by a good deal. I don't know what the usual volume is, but I'm guessing Bezos holds more stock than is typically traded so supply will almost assuredly outstrip demand, lowering prices. But until he actually sells any of it, he hasn't made a profit and there's nothing to tax.
That's not to say that $150 billion is completely useless. Bezos can borrow money against it, so he's effectively got as much credit as he could care to have. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, wealthy people don't sit around on piles of money like dragons guarding a hoard. Almost all of it is invested in some fashion, a lot of it in companies like Amazon. The true key to success in America is that wealth breeds wealth. Socking $50 a week away in an IRA starting at 20 and increasing that as you move up instead of spending it frivolously almost guarantees a cushy retirement. For some reason, a lot of people seem to disregard that as nonsense. Someone once said that mankind's greatest follow was its inability to understand exponential growth. They could well be right.
While that is probably more true than some would care to admit, I don't know if work is the place for any of that. I suppose that if you have men and women working together, you're inevitably going to get office romances. Trying to prevent that may be a cure worse than the disease, and I suspect that anyone who can't keep their professional and personal lives sufficiently separate is probably not a great worker anyways. However, people should try to keep things a little more discreet. People can chase down their primal urges on their own time.
I suppose I wouldn't want to outlaw someone running a business that way described in the summary if that's what they want. I'm just not sure that I'd care to work there.
Even with that definition, I think there's a bit of a sticking point on what exactly is meant by "regulated". I'm not sure how much you'd appreciate your grocery shopping choices (i.e., your personal exchange) to be regulated by the rest of your neighbors. Do they get to pick what you're having for supper or what products can be sold at the grocery store?
Otherwise I'm not sure what you mean by "regulated" as unless you're thinking in terms of what is typically meant by government regulations. You can have those kind government or even community (think HOA) regulations without socialism so I don't believe that's a useful description.
Also, you'd need to plot out all of the countries and measure happiness and to what extent their governments are market socialist. Otherwise you can explain Norway, Denmark, etc. being happiest because Scandinavians are just happy people among a large set (for example, lots of good looking blonde women would make most people happy) of other explanations. China and Viet Nam are more classic mixed economies, but I don't know where their blend of market socialism lands them on the happiness axis.
My guess is that if you do a multivariate regression, there are other factors with more explanative power. I'm not even sure if you could do this kind of analysis as there aren't enough examples of what you'd probably classify as your brand of socialism to perform the kind of statistical analysis you'd need. But without doing that, you can't make that claim. Otherwise someone could just as easily point out some other ridiculous correlation and say that their reason must be correct. Let's pick something particular insidious such as lack of black people to illustrate the point. And before anyone jumps all over that, I don't believe (or have any good reason to believe) that would be the cause any more than market socialism.
Regardless, I suspect that if you tried to join the Socialist party in just about any country, the idea "capitalist economy with extensive social programs" would not be the platform of the party or one that they're likely to accept. It's no more than I would expect "drug induced orgies" as a form of worship to be a mainstay position of any Christian church so I probably wouldn't try to tell congregations that I'm Christian and slide that idea by them. The point is that if your point of view is going to be seen as heresy at best by the mainstream of that group, you may just want to characterize yourself as something else. Hence the term "social democrat" that gets used.
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How much are the 48% who want this fast WiFi actually willing to pay for it though. I suspect that because the answer is something not much more than they pay for the ground-based services, we will not see these services become rapidly available anytime soon.
Also, if satellite internet is the least expensive option for anything that is anything short of the most remote among remote places, I worry more about what is making more traditional infrastructure impossible there more than anything else.
I would gladly accept a pill I need to take for the rest of my life that works every time over the current form of treatment that may or may not cure me, but will leave me feeling as though I might just be half dead.
But even if that comes to pass and these researchers become filthy rich from charging ridiculous prices, that only creates a massive incentive for someone else to find a cheaper solution. Even if no one does, eventually we get generics after the patents expire and there will be plenty of countries that make their own versions of the drug for cheap as they could not care less about the profits of some foreign drug company or keeping the Western governments behind them happy.
Some of what Trump has done is good, but we should not pretend that he is some great proponent of the free market. For example, his penchant for tariffs and trade wars is outright idiotic and will only hurt the American economy in the long run. That Trump looks good on economic policy is more as a result of Maduro being batshit crazy than Trump being intelligent.
Why would the CIA need to spend any resources attempting to destabilize Venezuela when they are doing a far better job themselves? The usual tripe about oil no longer plays since the U.S. has its own vast reserves that we can now exploit and the Venezuelan oil requires special refinement that other sources do not.
The simple truth is that centrally planned economies are not workable and that when you go around nationalizing businesses, no one wants to invest in setting up a company there. Add on currency restrictions (no sane person uses the official exchange rate) and the idiotic financial policies and this is exactly what you can expect.
I am sure that people will still try to line up to defend socialism by talking about the Nordic model (which is not really socialist, but that is a completely different argument) but what Venezuela has done is Soviet era stuff that we know for a fact does not work.
If anything, the U.S. benefits more from leaving Venezuela to their own devices. At least now when socialists start talking about their great utopia we can point to the literal hell that you actually get. I just hope that the amount of misery that most Venezuelans have to endure in order for us to get that point is not so great, but history leads me to believe that this will not be the case.
I doubt that very much. If that were the case, no one would volunteer as it provides no social capital, but we recognize and discuss philanthropic activities all the time. A good chunk of Facebook posts are people trying to convince other people how good they are for caring about some cause. Facebook and social media make it easy to look like you care about community without actually caring about it. Look at the Kony 2012 slacktivism campaign for a good example of this in action.
That and if you look at the parts of the world that disallow capitalism or free market principles, it does not appear to me as though they are acting much different or have somehow come together as a community on a large scale. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to lay this at the feet of capitalism, especial as the youth in the west are becoming more socialistic in political belief (see Bernie Sanders rise to popularity) but are not engaging in community-focused behavior either. If you think that the problem is getting worse and countries like the U.S. are becoming less capitalistic, it suggests that the two things are not strongly connected, at least to the extent that you want to suggest.
I feel as though I am missing part of his argument as well. Python is perfectly good for banging out small programs and frameworks like Django make it much easier to build a functional website once you bother to learn how it works. Contrast this with cobbling something together in PHP as often was the case a decade or so ago and I fail to see what the problem is.
This can all be done without tools as nothing stops a person from writing their code in a simple text editor and testing it by running the program live and troubleshooting and bug fixing as they go along. However, this is not efficient and in the long run it pays to learn to use an IDE, debugger, SCM system, persistence framework, automated build and regression test setup, and all the other tools that make developers much more efficient in the long run.
If a person just needs small programs on an infrequent basis, they probably would not take the time to learn a programming language to start with. Instead they can probably use something like Excel to solve their problem. Hell, there are plenty of things I use spreadsheets for as they are a perfectly good solution and if I need interoperability it is easy to have most programs read or spit out CSV. It seems as though the author thinks that everyone should learn to write their own programs to solve problems that are better solved with existing tools in which they may be more competent. Then he laments that programming is too complicated to use when he has already made things over-complicated by suggesting that programming be used at all.
They are one of the largest device manufacturers on the planet and their devices are frequently among the top selling.
If you think they are only selling to the upper class, perhaps it is an indication of how large the upper class has become. I should think you would not dismiss such as a bad thing.
So either your premise is wrong and Apple is more mass market than you wish to admit, or you are upset that the world as a whole is growing increasingly prosperous and more and more people can afford luxury brands. Or perhaps the most likely explanation is that you just want to rag on Apple or western capitalism.
So LeBron James is bad then?
Bernie Sanders is even in the 1% now. How bad is he in your estimation?
Also, even if what he is doing is a colossally stupid idea, at least he tried something and failed so that others will be able to learn from this example.
If the problems of society were so easy to fix that the solutions were obvious, we would not have these problems. Even if this fails, it will provide insights into the next set of solutions.
Besides, James is using his own money for this. Would anyone complain if he had instead spent it on a huge yacht?
While this is true, improvements in productivity mean that it has become (and will continue to become) much less expensive to sustain the life of a person with no or little input from them.
I would rather replace the ugly ball of entitlement programs we have now with a UBI. Many are badly designed and incentivize people to avoid getting off welfare, not to mention the administrative overhead. Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually. That would be sufficient to subsist if doing nothing else.
However, just as with any other program, a UBI can be badly designed. If we want to implement one it needs to ensure that bad behaviors are not incentivized. Reducing payments for working is one such example. Letting parents siphon off any income from their children would be another.
I am a proponent of some form of UBI, not because I believe that it is morally right or good for us to redistribute wealth, but because since we have already decided to do that to the current degree, we may as well do it as sanely as possible.
My other reason for supporting it is that I suspect it would also lead to reductions in abject poverty and crime, the externalities of which likely start costing a significant portion of such a program when you factor in the economic activity that must be directed to dealing with the problems caused by such. I cannot verify it, but I recently read that some city was spending some tens of thousands of dollars per person on dealing with the homeless in the city. Think of how much is spent on the criminal justice system as well. If a UBI can lead to reductions in those problems outright it reduces the cost and size of government further.
âoeBut Billy hit me firstâ is not a good argument if you want to be taken seriously. We should not have bailed out those failed financial institutions either, but making a mistake once should not mean that we become more accepting of making that mistake twice.
Of course the politicians love the finger pointing because both sides can continue to get away with bad behavior as the citizens anger will be focused on the other side rather than the newest example of bad behavior.
Either way, I don't understand everyone's surprise. There's always been and always will be a desire to shape or control human behavior. If social media is seeing more use for such manipulation, it's only because social media has become more popular and people have moved away from print, radio, and television.
Use social media appropriately and it's not a problem.
I think that a lot of students are probably using it as a crutch. There are people who legitimately need these substances to function, but there are too many people who are abusing them at the expense of learning some discipline and focus. Yes, it sucks to have to sit down to do a term paper, but really what you should have been doing is spending small amounts of time over the semester working on it instead of putting it all off until the last possible minute.
Whatever you exercise, you will make stronger. Don't assume that self-control and willpower are any different. Of course you can exercise your vices and bad habits just as easily.
which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...
Take a look at the chemical formulas for Adderall and meth sometime.
I think a lot of ADHD problems would go away if we just let kids run around some more. I've known a fair number of people who've been put into that bucket and physical exertion does a lot to mitigate the effects. Extra PE time might also help with the obesity epidemic as well.
The idea isn't anything special or that complicated, but regardless of how you wanted to determine prices, building a platform for a taxi service is hardly simple. At a minimum you'd need a mobile app for both drivers and passengers, a map platform, a back end to track all of the drivers and customers, and you'd need to build a system to handle collecting payments from customers and dispersing them to the drivers, as well as an ability to handle taxes for everything. Some of that could be done using third parties, but that's going to add up in terms of cost.
If anyone wanted to start doing this, the likely path would be to have a small team implement something for a single city (that isn't terribly large) and try to attract a huge amount of venture capital. This is almost something that would work better as a layer that sits on top of Uber, Lyft, or any other taxi service and finds the best matching offer among them. However, even that isn't easy as those individual companies don't have any reason to participate or allow you to interface with their platform.
Make it difficult enough for people to engage in commerce legally and this is what you get. If government law or regulation where sufficient to direct human behavior, there'd be no war on drugs.
Personally I don't mind if Uber wants to have independent contractors, but I think the real sticking point is letting them set their own prices. As much as Uber wants to think they're the good guys in all of this, I think they'd be much better off if they just acted as a way to connect drivers and passengers. The technology that enables Uber to begin with would make it ridiculously easy for both drivers and consumers to negotiate their own rates. This would allow drivers to earn better wages and allow customers to spend more or less as they desire.
I'm not even sure human advisers are particularly good at explaining their rationale. Sure they can give you an explanation, but I'm not sure if it's actually any good. Silicon Valley angel investment has terribly low success rates, even among investors that tend to outperform the average. I suspect it has less to do with picking winners and more to do with having the winner you pick providing massive returns.
If as you point out the only concern is just how good the system is, just consider every case where it disagrees with human advisers and see which is right more often. Maybe it's inline with human predictions to such a high degree that no one really notices the fringe cases.
Changing the name of a thing doesn't change the underlying reality of the thing.
It's just another fake societal panic that everyone is sure is real for some stupid reason, probably because the news keeps brining it up to sensationalize otherwise mundane stories. I remember when it used to be Dungeons & Dragons being evil and then daycares practicing satanic rituals and abusing children. After that it was rainbow parties (sucks that those weren't actually real) and other idiotic stuff like kids getting high on their own fermented feces and urine.
I don't know why the Saudis banned video games since Blue Whale has nothing to do with video games, but they were part of another big panic in the 90's (remember Jack Thompson) where everyone was sure violent video games would turn little Billy into a killer. Maybe they're still hung up on that one as well.
If you're worried about latency, get a bigger cache. Maybe we could drop latency on RAM, but it would probably be at the expense of other important aspects such as capacity. Most people would probably prefer the added capacity since having to go to disk (even if it's an SSD) is much worse in terms of extra latency than having to go from cache (especially once you get out to L3) to RAM.
Perhaps you could argue that now we have more than enough RAM (64GB ought to be enough for anybody) but for most of history, that wasn't the case. I believe that in general latency has improved, but it's just not going to see the same improvement as other aspects of computing since most of the focus is on increasing capacity.
Yeah, but that robot is going to put a lot of people producing shitty modern art out of work. Maybe they can paint your porch.
Then he pays taxes on that. If his space company pans out, it's probably worth it for him to invest some of that in another company. Amazon's value could still increase, but their growth potential is a lot more limited.
His company (Amazon) has historically made little or no money (only in the last quarter did it finally eclipse $1 billion in profit), so there isn't much in the way of profit to tax. Bezos doesn't have $150 billion either. It's what he's theoretically worth based on the present valuation of his company and other assets that he might own. Unless he can find someone (or several someones rather as apparently no one has more money than him) to buy all his shares of stock, he's only theoretically worth $150 billion. In the real world, if he attempted to sell all of his stock, the price would probably decline by a good deal. I don't know what the usual volume is, but I'm guessing Bezos holds more stock than is typically traded so supply will almost assuredly outstrip demand, lowering prices. But until he actually sells any of it, he hasn't made a profit and there's nothing to tax.
That's not to say that $150 billion is completely useless. Bezos can borrow money against it, so he's effectively got as much credit as he could care to have. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, wealthy people don't sit around on piles of money like dragons guarding a hoard. Almost all of it is invested in some fashion, a lot of it in companies like Amazon. The true key to success in America is that wealth breeds wealth. Socking $50 a week away in an IRA starting at 20 and increasing that as you move up instead of spending it frivolously almost guarantees a cushy retirement. For some reason, a lot of people seem to disregard that as nonsense. Someone once said that mankind's greatest follow was its inability to understand exponential growth. They could well be right.
While that is probably more true than some would care to admit, I don't know if work is the place for any of that. I suppose that if you have men and women working together, you're inevitably going to get office romances. Trying to prevent that may be a cure worse than the disease, and I suspect that anyone who can't keep their professional and personal lives sufficiently separate is probably not a great worker anyways. However, people should try to keep things a little more discreet. People can chase down their primal urges on their own time.
I suppose I wouldn't want to outlaw someone running a business that way described in the summary if that's what they want. I'm just not sure that I'd care to work there.
Even with that definition, I think there's a bit of a sticking point on what exactly is meant by "regulated". I'm not sure how much you'd appreciate your grocery shopping choices (i.e., your personal exchange) to be regulated by the rest of your neighbors. Do they get to pick what you're having for supper or what products can be sold at the grocery store?
Otherwise I'm not sure what you mean by "regulated" as unless you're thinking in terms of what is typically meant by government regulations. You can have those kind government or even community (think HOA) regulations without socialism so I don't believe that's a useful description.
Also, you'd need to plot out all of the countries and measure happiness and to what extent their governments are market socialist. Otherwise you can explain Norway, Denmark, etc. being happiest because Scandinavians are just happy people among a large set (for example, lots of good looking blonde women would make most people happy) of other explanations. China and Viet Nam are more classic mixed economies, but I don't know where their blend of market socialism lands them on the happiness axis.
My guess is that if you do a multivariate regression, there are other factors with more explanative power. I'm not even sure if you could do this kind of analysis as there aren't enough examples of what you'd probably classify as your brand of socialism to perform the kind of statistical analysis you'd need. But without doing that, you can't make that claim. Otherwise someone could just as easily point out some other ridiculous correlation and say that their reason must be correct. Let's pick something particular insidious such as lack of black people to illustrate the point. And before anyone jumps all over that, I don't believe (or have any good reason to believe) that would be the cause any more than market socialism.
Regardless, I suspect that if you tried to join the Socialist party in just about any country, the idea "capitalist economy with extensive social programs" would not be the platform of the party or one that they're likely to accept. It's no more than I would expect "drug induced orgies" as a form of worship to be a mainstay position of any Christian church so I probably wouldn't try to tell congregations that I'm Christian and slide that idea by them. The point is that if your point of view is going to be seen as heresy at best by the mainstream of that group, you may just want to characterize yourself as something else. Hence the term "social democrat" that gets used.