

Thanks for your experience! I’m in a similar boat regarding NVIDIA - plus the budget …
At least in Europe the V100 are only available from China and with a huge markup.
Used 5090 for 3,5k, even a 3060 used is still at 250$ plus.
It’s crazy at the moment - I simply can’t afford self hosting LLMs which is a new thing to say :D









What you are describing is neoliberalism in its base form. If you want to dice deeper I to it I suggest Saez instead of some 16th hundred philosopher. (I’m not too familiar with Lockes work, this is more about time than profession or person).
The reason why taxation works different than contract agreements is basically:
Taxes are used as normalization tool, both in the fiscal as well as the social sense.
In general you have three categories of tax: based on purchase, based on possession and based on income.
Most modern countries use all three in a combination. The reason why it’s not purpose linked is simple: you can’t organize it.
To give an example: How much worth does a future tax payer? And who benefits?
Based on the answer to that question you’d either tax consumption (because future tax payers will keep cost low), income (because production facilities for future tax payers is taken from the workforce) or possession (because future tax payers are the foundation of generational transfer).
And on top of that comes the big question of social normalizing effects: even very conservative counties tax higher incomes higher than low incomes to improve the overall Gini coefficient, i.e. achieve a bit of wealth distribution. Now you’re fully in “opinion” country though: How much should society pay for its weakest or unluckiest?
And because it’s not yet complicated enough there’s one very simple element coming on top: “what can we get away with?”. Rules, especially if taxation, are only meaningful if they can be enforced.
German highways for example have a dedicated tax for heavy transports for using those roads exactly the model you’ve described. 50 years ago that would’ve been technologically impossible to realize there.
Now using a sidewalk as an exame and it becomes messy. Because the people directly using them would be the obvious choice. But what about the shops closeby which profit from foot traffic? What about the reduction in micro plastic pollution because those people don’t use cards (which produce about 1/3 of it). What about my body weight? I’m fat and will damage the ground a very tiny bit more than someone who’s half my weight. And what about paramedics using it? The rulebooks and exceptions will be either: broad and easy to abuse, broad and they will exclude many people from using the infrastructure or narrow which brings both at the same time.
To come back to your example: you pay for school because it’s the one institution that makes sure that our economy will work a few years down the road, having new consumers and taxable incomes which are needed for me to continue, well, existing. And you do have a verbal agreement: “I’m choosing to stay in the place I am”. This binds you to its laws, including taxation.
Now if you argue that you’d just want to keep what’s yours then usually just looking one generation back already makes that break apart: where did your parents income and education come from, what social structures did they benefit from, etc.
But: All of this is not intended as “taxes are good as-is”. A) I have no idea what your frame of reference is and B) it’s not in my opinion. But it’s complex. Really really complex because the whole system changes depending on reference timeframe, social norm and the societies past and present goals.