"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's tedious and invariably reflects the bias of the perceiver.

Hear hear. I don’t begrudge clever hardworking people having the opportunity to make money as an incentive, in the implementation of some sort of Adam Smith-like idea of a genuinely free and sensibly regulated market …especially when it comes to non-essential goods and services… (proportionate to their wealth/jobs creation perhaps, as they never tire of reminding us…) …even better if this was awarded somehow based on their capacity to genuinely innovate and bring to market (as opposed to rip off and monopolise I suppose), but when you live in a country/world where people, kids even, are not eating properly, people are dying prematurely because the infrastructure/services are crumbling etc etc …as a priority before we even start to think about other ways to alleviate inequality of opportunity… and yet a tiny proportion are spending what to others would be a lifetime’s fortune every year on wealth fiddlers/obfuscation services to enable ‘tax avoidance’, even spending vast sums to finance lobbyists and entire media organisations because it is cheaper than actually paying another 1% of tax/whatever… (if I ‘evade’ something thrown at me is it really all that different from ‘avoiding’ it? …and yes, I understand that in financial terms one word denotes a crime and the other is supposed to merely be admired as ‘creative’ accountancy…). Warren Buffett himself suggests he should be taxed higher (…his famous anecdote about his secetary…). Idiosyncratic philanthropy is a poor substitute, no matter the inefficiencies of the state (…Anand Giridharadas writes well about this: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take... …Even the 0.1%/whatever might find the world a brighter place to live in with the improvement of public services and a reasonably educated, healthy populace flourishing on a non-dying planet, at least before the robot overlord takeover/orbital/interplanetary escape plan is completed ! :) For me it comes down to a question of what we value as a society. Is a nurse/carer for example, who literally preserves someone’s life, day in day out, worth less or working less hard than a hedge fund CEO/tech. entrepreneur? Both are doubtless very important and valuable to society, but is one a thousand/whatever times more valuable as a human being or possessing of a thousandfold more rarefied qualities of thought/action? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/24/the-trouble-wit...