No, it will simply be a slow and steady increase of pressure on the working age population: taxes, retirement age delayed further and further, "everyone must work", etc...
I agree that the ultra-rich living on permanent fake debt backed by their stocks / real estate need to contribute more, but I'm tired of seeing people throw "we can tax the rich" as a panacea.
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
Package managers: ecosystem is fragmented, requiring a long list of distro- and package-manager-specific instructions. Many scripts already install through package managers, they simply make the user’s life easier.
Flatpaks: These are clearly designed for desktop applications, with CLIs treated as an afterthought. They may be the best long-term hope, but today they are definitely not as convenient or widely available as a simple script.
If you care about adoption, `curl | sh` is the only real option today, which is why virtually all project show it as the first option.
The "like an adult" is what has and will continue to hold back linux on the desktop. Always gatekeeping less technical users instead of acknowledging adoption and ease of use are critical.
A lot of those scripts are wrappers around package managers. Creating them is extra work for distributors, but they still do it because package-manager installs are not truly one-liners and offer far less control over the installation experience.
Users need to figure out which of the 10+ package managers they should be using, then run several commands. If something fails, the error messages are often cryptic and not easily configurable by the distributor.
And that’s before getting into the many rough edges of package managers. Most of them flat-out refuse to handle configuration and leave that part to the end user. Now you also need to document how to edit YAML and restart a systemd service. With an install script this is also solved.
For power users, this always looks trivial. In practice it raises the barrier to entry and can meaningfully affect adoption if your product is often used by less technical people.
In what world does a user have to choose between 10 package managers? Each distro has exactly one. There are also only about three, maybe four main package managers out there.
A shell script being piped into bash has so many more ways to break than a package. And if yhe theory is that package managers are fickle (they aren't), then how does adding more complexity help?
It is much simpler, much safer, and easier to maintain a package than an install.sh, eapecially for a big project.
Configuration can be handled by a script, yes. Here's a crazy idea: Your package can include scripts for configuring the software. It's almost as if most packages do. The scripts/utilities could even restart a systemd service for you.
Unless you're talking about configuring your build, in which case we're dealing with an experienced developer who will have no trouble just cloning the repo and building from source.
My biggest issue is: if we're dealing with someone who can't use a package manager, we're dealing with someone who doesn't have the capacity to judge how safe a script downloaded off the internet is. This does not drive linux adoption, it drives botnet adoption.
It's crazy to me that even after seeing so many major software distributors choose `curl | sh` as their entry point, people like you will still argue to the ends of the earth that there’s no problem with the package manager ecosystem.
I'll stop there. I'm not interested in continuing this discussion when it's being conducted in bad faith.
Bad faith, or perhaps just ignorance. It reminds me of purist junior engineers - and I have been one - refusing to understand or tradeoff in the world beyond their own.
Rather than argue with those of us who are pointing out messy realities, this commenter might be better served filing a bug against any number of the projects that offer installation this way, asking them to remove it, and see if it lands any better.
Technical purity/superiority isn’t the only factor, or even the most important one, driving projects to offer quick installers like this.
I would appreciate it if you would respond to me directly rather than suggest vaguely that I'm inexperienced and don't understand the realities of software distribution.
I would also appreciate it if you actually talk about something concrete rather than simply claiming to be right. You shouldn't pipe stuff from the internet into your shell.
Are you claiming that's about some highfallutin "technical purity"? Is it technical purity to check inside the bag when you buy a pig in a poke? No, that's common sense. It's common sense to have some degree of knowledge about what programs you execute on your computer. As root, at that.
Sure: I think you're essentially missing a whole set of concerns - ones that are not purely technical - behind why this method is popular; and so your arguments wouldn't convince someone actually responsible for one of these scripts to change or cease the practice.
Nobody would argue that it's categorically safe/good/smart to blindly pipe a script into your shell; and for the record, I agree. I would also readily agree that habituating users to doing this probably creates new, more general risks especially among how less-technical users interact with their CLI.
However, the realities of the "real world" make it popular for a reason, in light of those negatives; tons of scaled projects continue to offer a 1-liner. So we have to ask, why? They'd probably say that's because it (a) improves project adoption, and (b) reduces "install broken" tickets.
You have to address the non-technical merits and goals to get behavior to change here, and sadly, I don't think anyone has done that.
But who cares about me? I'm not currently maintaining one of these (though I did once). My suggestion to bring your argument to an active project was genuine: try it! I'd be delighted to see you bring about the change you want.
[PS: The commenter I replied to originally used the term "bad faith", which they've since edited]
The fact that people do something doesn't make it good.
I am arguing in good faith about the merits of the approaches. I am engaging with the points of argument being brought up from the opposing side of the argument (see above). I am not veering off on side-tracks, unlike you, for example.
There' a simple good faith argument (that I have been making) which you can try responding to: Running arbitrary code from the internet without checking is bad. There is some effort needed to package software, but that is not that much effort in the grand scheme.
Most official repositories have policies that are incompatible with the needs of software vendors (release timing, supported versions, bundled dependencies, etc...).
IMO a lot of the blame falls onto the package manager ecosystem refusing to take into account very valid needs and claiming they aren't real / desirable.
i dunno, nothing about most computing is particularly easy to use or intuitive.
what has worked over time is having computers of various types in schools, where teachers teach students and let them play with it.
nobody teaches about the command line, so nobody knows what to do with it. its also inscrutible without a useable help view, unless you already know how to use the terminal
Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android are definitely much easier to use and more intuitive than Linux today. That’s because their developers are incentivized to put themselves in the shoes of less-skilled users and figure out how to build a good experience for them.
I’m all for higher Linux adoption on desktop, but there’s still a lot of resistance to making less-skilled users the primary target instead of power users.
Teaching can help, but if it takes 50 hours to learn the basics of Linux versus 5 hours for Windows, it’s a losing battle.
Same here. My home computer only runs Windows because I play competitive online games. It would be incredible if Valve built some kind of certified, locked-down kernel, but I doubt that will happen.
The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.
> filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games
FWIW, the easiest way to dispel the fallacies pumped out by these individuals is to ask how much time they've sunk into a reasonably contemporary competitive online game. I almost never meet people who have these delusions about anticheat being ineffective that also has actually invested significant (>500) hours into the games that they're appropriate for.
(people who work with spam and fraud/abuse prevention also usually don't have these delusions, because the underlying economics are similar. turns out that actually having experience with a thing is enough to disillusion most people of stupid ideas about that thing, who know?)
"effective" and "solved" are too easily conflated, here. Consoles have the solution, if you enforce hardware attestation then you reduce the attack surface to people using XIM, Cronus and other detectable exploits. When you allow PCIe/ReBAR, hypervisors, custom bootloaders, custom mobo firmware, third-party hardware drivers, firmware macros, lagswitches, and whitelist process injection, people will always exploit you. Cheating is inherent to the architecture of PC gaming.
Ring 0 anticheat is a mitigation, and just one step down the road of enforcing fairness. The goal of erasing cheaters quickly becomes a Procrustian bed that alienates fair players and funds cheat developers, there's nothing that gamedevs can do client-side to solve this problem without redefining how PC gaming works. Out of all the games I've put 500+hrs into, votekick is the only working anticheat that I've encountered.
The only competitive game I’ve put serious hours into that had votekick was CS, and teams would almost never kick their own cheaters, even when they were obvious, because they wanted that sweet Elo.
Dota isn't a very cheatable game to begin with. Even with the best micro you can't reach a high elo without the appropriate high level planning skills.
If we look at a game like Rust it's impossible for it to exist without a kernel anti-cheat today
...and then you have hypervisor-based cheats, hardware cheats and whatnot. I'd say that AI flagging of suspicious cases + additional targeted scrutiny is the way forward - for competitive platforms, that is. That, and trust factor - I practically never get bad games when I play alone in cs:go/cs2 (~20k mmr eu, lem/smfc prior to that) - both in terms of somebody cheating and in terms of people that are full of themselves in one way or another. I'd say that combining these techniques should be very effective.
The only effective approach is to use as many layers as possible to increase the cost of creating and using cheats. Kernel anti-cheat is an effective layer because it forces cheaters to either buy specialized hardware or gamble that their hypervisor won’t be detected through heuristics.
Competitive games will likely add AI-based flagging into the mix, but it still doesn’t make sense to make cheating as trivial as adding a few uprobes/kprobes on a Linux box.
I don't think it's specific to capitalism. Any system needs workers to produce enough for retirees and children. If you have more retirees and less workers any system is going to struggle.
Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.
There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
> retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
> Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population.
Source? In a growing market, one can spread their investiments to get safe returns that approach the overall economic growth. In a shrinking market, the same logic should lead to small losses, year over years, making investiment much riskier and unactrative. Markets are made of people.
You can't eat assets. Retirees need goods and services, these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free.
No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.
Are farmland, greenhouses, livestock, tractors, silos full of grain, and refrigerated warehouses packed with produce not "assets"?
> Retirees need goods and services
Which are produced by...assets. Factories, labs, intellectual property.
> these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free
Well not exactly "free". Retirees make contributions to the retirement system throughout their career.
> No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.
The solution is tax the workers' output (productivity and asset growth), not their salaries. I don't know what you mean by "wealth redistribution" here.
> Are farmland, greenhouses, livestock, tractors, silos full of grain, and refrigerated warehouses packed with produce not "assets"?
The elderly can't eat that directly unless they're in a good health and can be put to work on a farm.
> Which are produced by...assets. Factories, labs, intellectual property.
In the end nothing is produced by "assets", things are always produced by people with various degrees of automation. This makes the balance between the number of people who are working and the number of people who aren't the key factor.
> Well not exactly "free". Retirees make contributions to the retirement system throughout their career.
Contributions to the economy of the past give them some moral grounds to claim the share of the economy today. But the reality is, an old man today is someone who consumes but doesn't produce. Society feeds them and gets nothing in return. Except for old people who meaningfully help to raise grandchildren or find other ways to be useful.
> The solution is tax the workers' output (productivity and asset growth), not their salaries. I don't know what you mean by "wealth redistribution" here.
There are many ways of how a percentage of GDP can be diverted to the elderly: all kinds of taxes including taxes on salary and assets, stocks and bonds, stashes of cash under the mattress etc.
I'm making a more high-level point: regardless of the mechanism, the more the elderly, the more GDP you need to divert to them. Which means the rest of the population gets less and also less gets invested into the future growth. It's a fundamental problem, which doesn't depend on which exact tax you plan to apply.
> The elderly can't eat that directly unless they're in a good health and can be put to work on a farm.
No but you need fewer farmhands to produce that food than you did 100 years ago. And you'll need even fewer in another 20 years.
> the more the elderly, the more GDP you need to divert to them
In absolute terms, sure. Proportionately, hopefully not because that would mean we aren't meaningfully increasing productivity anymore.
> This makes the balance between the number of people who are working and the number of people who aren't the key factor...Which means the rest of the population gets less and also less gets invested into the future growth. It's a fundamental problem, which doesn't depend on which exact tax you plan to apply.
I guess we have to agree to disagree about this. Worker productivity is 6 times what it was 80 years ago. At a high level 1 worker can support 6 times as many retirees as they could in the past.
80 years ago a worker couldn’t support a retiree. The entire point of social security was that initial contributors back then were gonna get more out of it than they put it. But it was OK because the contributors would always grow faster.
So it doesn’t matter if productivity is up. If it went from 1 worker supporting 1/10th of a retiree to 4/5ths, the math is still broken, significantly.
> That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year?
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
Depends on implementation. For example, a wealth tax that has a "cap" at some ludicrous amount of wealth, like $10M, would effect very few people and therefore be insignificant for the average worker. So 99% of people would continue saving with no change at all to their behavior. The externalities could be nice though, since it'd distribute capital more efficiently. Sort of a general stimulant to the economy.
This line of thinking though assumes it would have no impact on the largest players though. It hinges on a "calling their bluff", that high NW individuals won't change anything despite now being forced to annually liquidate assets to cover taxes. And this doesn't even touch on the immense impracticality of annually valuing assets. Or how to manage assets in illiquid markets, or how to sell 30% of a painting to cover 1% of it's mark-to-market value by year end.
The reason wealth taxes never go anywhere is because when you sit down and learn what wealth is, how it works, and what is practical, it makes the most sense by far to just tax things whenever they go back to cash.
Really the only genuine tax loop-hole is the step-up basis on inheritance. Everything else is just an elaborate deferral to pay taxes later.
> despite now being forced to annually liquidate assets to cover taxes
Allow paying the tax with assets. Put the assets into a black box sovereign wealth fund that's controlled by some mechanical algorithm which sells things at random as needed to fund the government budget. At scale this will be indistinguishable from a whole-economy index fund.
The best part about this is rich people can't beg off by saying "I have to liquidate stuff".
How do you pay with assets for real estate or boats or paintings? An IOU that can be cashed in when the asset is sold. Oh the boat is owned by an LLC so it never changes hands? No problem, the government has a share in the LLC too. (IANAL, IANAA so working out the loopholes is left as an exercise for the reader).
A second benefit is startup shares don't have to get hit with a capital gains tax before the startup goes public. Right now people sometimes pay taxes on shares that are eventually worth zero. Instead if this tax could be paid in startup shares, then there's no unfair tax bill.
As a condition of paying in assets, forbid the government from exercising any control over the assets. No shareholder voting, no board seats, not even choosing the paint color on the boat.
Additionally, this tax can't be on top of income tax. The whole point is to fix the worker-funded tax pyramid scheme. It has to be revenue-neutral with respect to income tax.
The bigger issue is, at least in the US, roughly 2/3 of assets of the wealthy have no meaningful liquidity. There is also no mark-to-market because in many cases these are idiosyncratic goods that may only find a buyer once over decades. Even some real estate markets only clear a single transaction on the scale of decades so any valuation is mostly fiction -- there are no comparables.
You could pay for these using the 30% of the assets that have some practical degree of liquidity but now you are putting massive downward pricing pressure on those because it is essentially a leveraged liquidation. Effectively, the total percentage of assets that are non-liquid would increase.
People tend to underestimate just how non-liquid the assets of the wealthy are. Most of that wealth isn't in stocks and bonds.
Real estate is a bad example because it's already subject to property taxes, which is a form of wealth tax. Maybe it doesn't need another wealth tax.
Private businesses are a better example. They don't trade on markets, sometimes don't have multiple shareholders. There already exist methods for valuing businesses (discounted cashflow, for example). Let the taxpayer pick one and make them stick to it.
> You could pay for these using the 30% of the assets that have some practical degree of liquidity
I already said "no liquidations, pay with assets". For non-liquid assets pay with IOUs on said assets. The government cashes in the IOU when the asset changes hands - whether it's by sale, gift, or inheritance. Yes that's an inheritance tax; who cares? If you want to add a wealth tax to real estate, this is the way to do it.
There are a surprising number of edge cases out there.
Quite a few assets can never clear a market — they have value in some abstract sense but no concrete sense. For example, assets that are legal to own and transfer but illegal to buy or sell.
Some commodity assets have value that it is nonetheless not always transferrable. A common example relevant to wealth taxes is intangible assets where value is bound in who owns it and not the asset per se. Most of the value vanishes the instant you transfer to e.g. the government.
Another common issue is that wealth taxes can directly conflict with existing load-bearing contracts. As a practical matter, these government can’t just void most contracts, including contracts the government is a party to, for the purposes of generating tax revenue.
All of which is why most real-world wealth taxes limit scope to a handful of liquid, legible securities and similar. But as a percentage of wealth, these are pretty small so you don’t collect much revenue.
> A common example relevant to wealth taxes is intangible assets where value is bound in who owns it and not the asset per se. Most of the value vanishes the instant you transfer to e.g. the government.
What's an actual example of this?
> Another common issue is that wealth taxes can directly conflict with existing load-bearing contracts.
we have property taxes, and its taxed every year. and somehow people keep trying to buy yet more property.
plenty of incentive to put money there, ditto for saving.
a saved dollar does not stimulate the economy, either. the whole idea of microloans is that the money gets spent ASAP and goes straight into the economy
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
> A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth
Not really, just a stable ratio of workers/retirees is enough for this system to work. But what we're seeing is a rapid shift in that ratio, with both less workers and more retirees.
A maintainer that is mainly motivated by the 3.8k stars aspect is probably not the person you want. Working on critical OSS software is fun until it's not, especially when you are not paid for that work.
