I'd love to see some proof that any of the wild claims made are remotely factual.

  I don't want to donate to charity (I have my own reasons for that, don't ask)

Although they managed to do a pretty plausible portrayal of your average bitcoin libertarian lol

Capitalism is the most efficient economic system.

It's so efficient it consumes everything, even itself and the structure that keeps it in place.

...which does not imply being optimal at every single level of analysis.

The article, your comment and the argument they make, that this effect -- if it exists -- should be highly visible across all strata of society, are taking a ton of assumptions for granted. There are a number of plausible scenarios in which this argument falls apart completely:

a) The act of ruling over criminal proceedings places one in a very unique position of power over complete strangers' lives which only judges routinely experience. What subtle effects on empathy, vindictiveness, leniency do minor fluctuations in mood have that are exacerbated by the unique conditions of this profession?

b) Judges are members of an extremely privileged professional class and universally come from extremely privileged backgrounds. The mechanism of the hedonic treadmill might explain how working class folks cope with regular day-to-day stresses with almost no impact to their mood where being peckish at midday is likely the harshest reality of life that a financially secure judge making $100 an hour has to deal with and may disproportionately sour their temper to a comparable degree that someone making minimum wage worries about paying their rent.

Etc etc. There is no compelling proof of this argument.

Fuck the "bipartisan plan". M4A now.

Imagine if we lived in a society where these stories were about housing startups, not hotel startups. Food production startups instead of food packaging startups. Public infrastructure projects instead of scooter renting apps. Actual creation of wealth and value added to the economy instead of endless insipid rent-seeking, shuffling value around from middleman to middleman until one of them figures out a more efficient way to extract.

Some people look at societal improvements as byproducts of increased wealth generation. In other words, me getting rich is good for the world, presuming I am not cheating/robbing someone else in the process. Although, apparently that's an optional ethical boundary for some.

Wealth generation is not wealth distribution. It is entirely possible for you to become very, very rich thru wealth distribution resulting from processes that retard wealth generation or reduce wealth globally.

Actually generating wealth is hard, it's so much easier to inject yourself into existing transactions and take a cut instead.

Ah, so trickle-down economics then.

I disagree. Just because someone got rich doesn’t mean they created value for society. It’s just means that they were able to capture some meaningful % of the money that flows around and take some for themselves. It also ignores the massive externalities of the destruction of the natural world. Yes, an oil tycoon can get rich, but only at the expense of an externality we all pay for (pollution, climate change) that is not factored into the price of the product they sell.

This is the central fallacy of capitalism and is the “greed is good” methodology. Greed is not good. Good is good. Helping people is good. Valuing people’s lives is good.

I read a great definition of evil: anything that values systems over people.

People and their well-being is the most important value in the world. Not money. Not wealth. Not shareholder value. You can create enormous shareholder value and still ruin people’s lives. That’s called evil.

Cult has only recently (etymologically speaking) become a pejorative in English

1. You generally require a charismatic, authoritarian leader who has strong central command over the group and whose word is law; tenets that actively lead the congregation to act against their best interests; and a dogmatic belief system with strict limits on interpretation of religious teachings (really just the first point again).

2. The classical definition of "cult" has almost no overlap with today's perjorative evolution of the word and just means a system of worship.

I donate much more than 1.2% of my net worth to charity, and every 2 weeks to boot. Somehow I also manage to do it without publicizing it on dozens of media outlets every time or blowing tens of millions on a disgustingly wasteful luxury lifestyle. But where's my army of loser internet sycophants?

So brave of him to donate 1.2% of his vast fortune to a PR project with his name on it! This really makes up for the whole FOXCONN-level human despair harvesting labor practices thing imo. Hell, we don't even need to go through with that legislation any more.