What Happened In 2020 | Hacker News Reader

What Happened In 2020

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69 pointspixelmonkey47 comments

>>> wasted on commuting and how much more productive we have all become without it.

Woah there. As a father to young children I have become massively less productive and realise both the uncaptured value of parent provided childcare in the GDP stats plus the role that education plays in releasing workers for the rest of the economy.

Teachers unions - the time to push for raises is now!

I have an 8 month old, my productivity has definitely increased working from home, granted there is the odd moment I am taken away from my work, on the whole though it is a net gain. Not to mention the lack of commuting having a positive effect on my wallet

Perhaps with toddlers things will be more difficult, but my spouse and I have an agreement to treat my work space as an office and only disturb when absolutely necessary.

I do miss the office environment though

Oh you have a live-in nanny and housekeeper already.

But don't worry, after a couple more "start-ups" the live-in Nanny will hit scalability issues, and will need you to concentrate on the Ops side as well, andI warn you that easy solutions like hiring a young underpaid intern may result in industrial action !

I mustn't have explained my situation clearly

I'm a junior/mid Web dev who has an 8 month old, my wife is on maternity leave, when she goes back to work he will go to nursery.

I dont think I signalled my (gentle) sarcasm clearly.

I wish you and your wife all the best.

Blast! No I almost had it, but decided against my intuition.

Thank you.

My productivity increased when my son was that age. This was before COVID-19; I was working from home a lot for other reasons.

With two kids I have to schedule my time a lot more carefully to reach the same level of productivity. Even typing this comment I have to compromise on getting the exact wording I want lest I get interrupted before I finish typing.

We won’t even buy them office supplies. Teachers sometimes buy everything from Kleenex to stationery for use by students in the classroom out of pocket. I don’t think how demanding raises will work unless we somehow convince the public to pay (much) higher property taxes.

The problem is not how much tax we collect. It's how the money is spent.

> The problem is not how much tax we collect. It's how the money is spent.

Thank you. I clearly didn't know enough about the problem space.

For others like me:

> MAY 11, 2020 —The amount spent per pupil for public elementary and secondary education (pre-K through 12th grade) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia increased by 3.4% to $12,612 per pupil during the 2018 fiscal year, compared to $12,201 per pupil in 2017, according to new tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

> The increase in spending was due in part to an overall increase in revenue. In 2018, public elementary and secondary schools received $720.9 billion from all revenue sources, up 3.8% from $694.3 billion in 2017.

> New York ($24,040), the District of Columbia ($22,759), Connecticut ($20,635), New Jersey ($20,021) and Vermont ($19,340) spent the most per pupil in FY 2018.

> Public school systems in Alaska (15.8%), Mississippi (13.8%), South Dakota (13.6%), New Mexico (13.4%) and Arizona (13.2%) received the highest percentage of their revenue from the federal government while public school systems in Massachusetts (3.9%), New Jersey (4.0%), Connecticut (4.2%), New York (4.3%) and Minnesota (5.1%) received the lowest.

> https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/school-s...

I've always been skeptical of New York (City?) policy requiring advanced degrees and certification for public school teachers as well as how involved New York Police Department is with the whole business.

How much of the USD 24,040 figure of New York goes to New York Police Department?

and then there are the football stadiums: how is this legal?

> Eagle Stadium is a football stadium in Allen, Texas. It is owned and operated by the Allen Independent School District and is home of the Allen High School Eagles.

> Construction cost $ 60 million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)

How does this money break down? Would it be better to have a permanent school from home instead? I know I for one would not miss middle school. But yeah, the goal has to be clear: what do we want to achieve? If it is simply a place to park children, we can do that for a lot cheaper. If we actually want to educate, we need to spend better.

LA built the $600M high school[0] (to be fair, it's a collection of smaller schools). we don't lack for money.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Community_Sc...

> How much of the USD 24,040 figure of New York goes to New York Police Department?

Not much, if any. It's a rounding error and only brought up as a political point really. In terms of budgets it's immaterial - ignoring entirely of course the social aspects of the situation.

The football stuff is also highly annoying and problematic, but those do tend (in my limited experience at least) to be built in high performing districts simply due to the tax demographics needed to build such things. Again, in the context of this discussion it's pretty much immaterial.

The massive waste is almost all administrative burden and in my (again, limited) experience almost outright fraud. Just the small amount of interaction I've had with major public school districts show the incompetence of the administrative layers is endemic - massive amounts of wasteful and outright fraudulent spending is done each year that in no way makes it to the students.

Look into how many >$120k/yr admins the NYC public school district has.

Then in the US we also have a major problem of turning schools into defacto social welfare centers. Schools are now expected to provide free meals, social services, etc. where in other countries those are handled by other sectors of public service for the most part. All public schools are also expected to have trained and licensed special ed teachers (for a rapidly growing special ed student population), and in the US inner cities in particular teachers largely act more as behavioral mediators than teachers in many classrooms. Then we get into the insane amount of lawsuits and liability said special ed and social services gets schools into and the incompetent administrators terrified of anyone with a lawyer.

All adds up to just waste billions of dollars on things that are not directly related to teaching students.

The problems are multifaceted and deep, but the easy headline outrages like you pulled out usually are pretty inconsequential - and in my jaded mind are argued about to keep folks too preoccupied to dig into the real issues.

> Then in the US we also have a major problem of turning schools into defacto social welfare centers.

I think we’ve arrived at the heart of the problem. Seems like the problem is a massive scope creep on what a school should do.

How does this happen and what can we do to limit the scope to just education? Or I should back up and ask should we even attempt to limit the scope of schools?

US school spending is already one of the highest in the developed world, and the complaints from the teachers that you quote typically also come from the teachers in highest spending areas too.

If there is anything US school system doesn’t lack, it’s money.

Having worked in a school district, I feel like this is true. The number of administrators, many of whom didn't seem to do anything, was staggering.

The fun thing is that much of the administrative overhead is built into the system. My county has less than 40,000 people (not students, people) and 5 school districts (and private schools).

2 of them do share an administrator, but in general, there's lots of places where a single district has ~8,000 students. There's not any thought of combining them (I guess largely because funding is so local…).

Funding is extremely local.

The other reason districts are so territorial is that a lot of them were founded specifically for their people and to keep the “others” out.

I think this is a common cognitive bias though: just because someone seems to you as if they don't do anything does not actually mean that they don't do anything. It might be that you, yourself, are not affected by their output.

Echo the (young) kids & productivity penalty. I gave up all long-concentration work for short-cycle wins that fit in-between the kid's nervous energy / social interruptions. I have tremendous sympathy for parents that didn't have that flexibility.

Programming & kids do not go together.

Deep thinking and juggling complex structures in mind with past and future states...

"Hey dad, check out my new dress and ring I stole from mum!" <gone>

... 15 mins later.

Where was I... Ah yes, deep thinking and juggling complex structures in mind with past and future states...

"Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad! She took my toys" <gone>

I literally end up jotting pseudocode as fast as possible and then translate it for the simplest things.

So I work when they sleep.

You'd think these constant interruptions would make you super efficient with focus and time, but it's the opposite. Concentration is much harder to obtain and retain because of the constant potential for interruption looming.

Or the suspense of, “wait it’s quiet... too quiet, oh no what’s wrong”

Yes ! Years ago I took a remote job and started in the spare room upstairs.

Hear them shout - wish they would be quiet.

Hear them cry - wish I could comfort them.

Hear them laugh - wish I could join them.

Not hear them at all - OMG they died suddenly!

Yeah I rented an office for the next two years.

I suggest best noise/human cancelation headphones.

It makes tremendous difference.

Unfortunately noise canceling headphones to nothing about a child tugging on your shirt. When children are little, they truly need attention. If there’s no one else around to provide it, then there’s really no way to deep work, because you will have to help them with something at least a few times per hour.

There are some kinds of work that aren’t too disrupted by this, but programming isn’t one of those.

You can't noise canceling your children. They know you're ignoring them and it's just unleashing the kraken.

I worked in an environment like this once, except the interruptions were a little less silly and were from PMs, managers and designers who had no concept of flow. It never was ideal, but I still feel it’s possible to adapt to the situation by adopting a mindset that doesn’t get as bothered by interruptions. This is said with no evidence of course, so take it as you may.

You can always tell the PM or designer to crawl back where they came from and give you some space. it's not an option with children. I still remember Peppa Pig playing on a full blast while I'm trying to bulkify some parts of the code.

I feel the same. Resuming flow state is a skill just like any other. I've seen my own ability to resume flow increase while working from home with two young children.

There's also something to be said for improving one's ability to do serious work in a non-flow state. All other things being equal, people who can improve both of these abilities have an advantage over those who can't.

Your pm doesn't tap you on the leg, scream in your ears like the world ended and start poking things on your desk... I hope.

Yes, the idea of the comment was not to say that PMs are comparable to children.

I always had the feeling (as a child and later as adult) that (pre-)schools were mostly for the benefit of the parents and not the children.

The more I think about it, even with the danger of (religious) indoctrination, I'd say props to all the home schooling parents.

Contrasting my kids' experience with an au pair and daycare, I think the daycare model of a few adults watching a gaggle of kids playing with each other is more "natural" than one kid alone in a nuclear household mostly interacting with adults and arranged "playdates" with other kids.

Bit of slight of hand there tacking Cryptocurrency onto videoconferencing, electric cars, and online shopping.

Cryptocurrency did not prove more useful in 2020 than it did in 2019.

Yes well said - I'm not a Bitcoin hater or skeptic, but it does not seem any closer to being a currency to actually transact in. Happy to be proven wrong here - are there now a significant number of places to spend Bitcoin?

Yeah, I think the hopes of using it as a currency are pretty much dead tbh. This is evidenced by the fact that the most newsworthy stories are about the value of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars.

> There is no question that crypto is in yet another speculative bubble, but like I said, it is speculative bubbles that allow emerging technologies to go mainstream and finance themselves. Odd as it may seem, a lot more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than wanted to buy it at $5000.

Yes, but: if most of that money comes from the pocket of ordinary people, and a bunch of geeks (or the usual Winklevoss twins, Tim Draper [0], etc) will cash out and drive the cost down again, the ones losing a ton of money will be - as usual - the ordinary people.

As much as I like Fred Wilson, sometimes I'm really surprised by comments like this one. It seems he's not realizing the danger of this new crypto "bubble", and who's going to pay for it. But "we all have to eat". [1]

[0]: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/vaurum/

[1]: https://simone.substack.com/p/we-all-have-to-eat

Secondly, how much of the surge in the Bitcoin price is due to manipulation and fraud? Fred states that more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than at $500. Is that true? Or is it that a handful of market manipulators are printing USD coins and using this fraudulent leverage to boost the value that buyers perceive Bitcoin to have?

Less fraud than the US treasury.

The point of his analysis is that you should be taking the other side of the trade. Become a tech person, or a crypto person, or some other recipient of primary capital that's doing something with it. That's how the economy advances: speculative bubbles greatly increase the rewards for doing anything potentially useful related to the new technologies, smart people respond to these incentives by entering the market, the market selects for the best of these "potentially useful" innovations, and then an eventual financial crisis prunes out everything that wasn't useful and reallocates resources to the winners.

Great, largely because it is short, synopsis of last year. Author nailed down what have been my random thoughts on the new economy and ways to do business. I started work at a medical AI company in September that will never reopen its offices again.

I also liked the acknowledgment that so many people are hurting badly financially now, the problem just keeps getting worse.

The thinking in here echoes Carlota Perez, which shouldn't surprise anyone since Fred Wilson has been a known Perez devotee since c. 2012. In the Perez model, this marks the transition from "irruption" to "frenzy" for the general constellation of 21st century technologies ("the sun, the genome, and the Internet", to take the title of a Freeman Dyson book). Perez's book doesn't really touch on the fractal nature of technological revolutions: published in 2002, it described the WWw as having just moved from "frenzy" to "deployment", which was true for the specific case of the WWw but missed the bigger forest of how software in general would eat the world. We're now starting to see many of the technological developments spawned by the Internet (cloud computing, AI, cryptocurrency, drones, etc.) get more mainstream attention.

> Odd as it may seem, a lot more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than wanted to buy it at $5000. That’s just how things are. And it is important to understand that.

This is a classic line.

then by that logic it should go to infinity.

As the first sentence in that paragraph says, it's explicitly discussing a speculative bubble.

"There is no question that crypto is in yet another speculative bubble"

My 2020 Summary:

Powell tricked all the VC's into thinking they were geniuses.

How is online retail more "tech" than physical stores?

How does people not driving hurt gasoline car makers but help electric car makers?

Are people on the ground outside of Silicon Valley seeing this technology boom?

I know that Tesla etc are going to the moon, but from my perspective as a small IT services company and many peers in a similar situation, the market is pretty slow and fundraising sounds pretty hard.

I think some of this commentary is disconnected from reality.

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