MikeLumos

Daily jogging, healthy diet, and meditation make the biggest difference to me.

The biggest change I'd like to make would be to defeat my social media and entertainment addiction - not even entirely, just contain it to a 2-hour window every evening. I keep failing at that, but there were weeks/months when I was successful, and it made an enormous difference, way more than I expected.

Depends on what kind of family and friends you have.

I switched to mac after about 10 years on linux, and I'm not going back.

I'm also very annoyed by most of the things you have listed, but there are two things that are a deciding factor in favor of mac for me:

1. In addition to webdev I sometimes need to do design, graphics, 3D art, and on linux most of the software just doesn't work. There's absolutely zero chance I'd be willing to cope with GIMP and Inkscape instead of using Photoshop and Affinity designer. There's a lot of other software (for screen recording and video editing, for instance), that works on mac and doesn't on linux.

2. On mac, things just work. On linux there's more customization, and open source software, but you pay for it dearly by having to spend hours (sometimes days) tinkering with configs and installing dependencies every time you're trying to get anything to work. I didn't mind that before, but at this point, I'm too old for this sh*t. I just want my laptop to work and help me do my work and make stuff, I don't want to cross my fingers and pray every time I need to install something I need to get anything done.

That's a big part of the problem - a group of people have unilaterally decided that they're the grown up ones, and they know better, and dismiss everyone else as toddlers.

Using that wonderful justification, they proceeded to censor everyone who disagrees with them, including the points of view that later turned out to be correct.

When you decide that you're a smart adult, declare every dissenting viewpoint to be "disinformation", and, therefore, you get to decide for other people what they do or do not get to read or think, and then you get it wrong, people will be justifiably upset. Even if you get it right, people will be upset.

So here's a wild suggestion - why not treat other human beings as adults capable of making up their own minds about things?

The alternative to a billionaire deciding how to spend the money they have earned is a politician deciding to spend the money they didn't earn.

I trust a person who has generated billions of dollars worth of value over a buerocrat who won a popularity contest.

Besides, I don't think it should matter whether or not these people spend their money optimally. They've made this money, it's theirs. Don't take other people's stuff.

> We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power.

Until we leave in a featureless dystopia where all people are perfect clones brought up in an identical environment, there will be power disparity between people. It can be based on inheritance (like in monarchies), or ability to commit violence, or charisma, or political skill, or ability to create value.

Between all these options, I'd much rather live in society where people get to keep the value they have created. It seems to me the most correlated with merit (not perfectly, but better than the alternatives), besides, it is morally right.

You estimate wrong.

Top 1 percent of earners (with incomes over $540,009) pay over 40 percent of all income taxes.