pqtyw

> It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbour also pays, otherwise they can get fucked

You are seeing all of this in a very, very black and white way. It's about how much the average person is willing (or forced to) to contribute in either system especially when you try to scale it up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Libertarianism is an utopian ideology not particularly different to Communism in the sense that both are incompatible with human nature.

I mean there is simply no empirical evidence this approach scales beyond small high trust (usually homogeneous) communities. Tragedy of the commons is a thing.

> your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor

That's extremely reductive... and you are making this way too personal than it should be ; )

If you get this to work once rerunning it weekly seems fairly easy unless you actually need to see the data live and have perfect uptime?

IMHO this would make more sense if provided as part of a larger "platform" like Langfuse/Langsmith/etc. Otherwise you just end with a dozen SaaS products for highly specific use cases which might not scale that well.

Realistically do you also need to have this live with a fancy? i.e. a custom solution maybe even Jupiter notebooks initially might be sufficient. It's not like 100k messages is a very large dataset. It's not trivial to make a generic solution that fits every use cases (besides of basic customer chatbots) to get actual value for more agentic products.

> I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor.

Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)

> decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure

Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.

> have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor

I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.

> taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people

Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).