Endama

Wow, that is insane. I wonder if there is some kind of opportunity here for automation and vertical farming to create economies of scale for the mass production of vanilla?

Great point, felt your argument was very astute.

However, really small nit: I think you meant to use e.g. instead of i.e.

e.g. = For example: i.e. = That is:

I could see i.e. working where you used it but I think you intended it as e.g.

Thanks again for your thoughts!

Ah, thank you for the clarification!

Honest question here, it's my understanding that a bunch of states have laws that state something along the lines of:

Interns can only be interns if they do work that A. Primarily benefit their learning and growth and B. Their labor would not normally be done by a full time employee.

Is this understanding correct? If it is, wouldn't these two interns constitute a breach of said policy?

I suspect the uncomfortable truth behind a lot of the problems regarding public transit isn't the transit itself, but the passengers. If you had the choice of riding a public bus with a large collection of the public or paying a few bucks and selecting a preferred subset of the ridership (e.g. chariot in SF, uber, lyft, etc.) I think most will choose the non-bus option to feel comfortable during their ride.

I'm not saying that this is a morally acceptable thing, I just suspect this is a significant reason why bus ridership has been declining.

VOX just released a video on the "Duck Curve" phenomenon that arises as a result of renewables[1]. Does anyone here have any insight on what the state is trying to do to mitigate negative downstream affects of the duck curve?

[1]https://youtu.be/YYLzss58CLs

My understanding is that the strongest predictors of success that psychologists know about are:

1. Intelligence 2. Conscientiousness [1]

It's also my understanding that these factors usually are correlated under 40% as success predictors. Seems that a lot of it is just plain luck and/or environment. I don't see raw intelligence not being important towards success anytime soon but I don't doubt how as access to information/technology increases, that other factors will begin to dominate as differentiating factors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

Wow, I find this fascinating, the government effectively used a large-scale project to seed a town/city. There was another HN post a few weeks back that was asking about if governments should create more cities. This story provides an interesting case study on the efficacy of the federal government to do so.

Housing a persistent issue that comes up a lot on HN. It seems to me that as tech-workers, we feel the guilt associated with economic pressure adversely affecting the civic-environment we coexist in but strangely feel that it is inappropriate (inconvenient?) to take part in the political machinery that addresses these tragedy-of-the-commons-type problems.

Perhaps there is a collective disillusion with how slow building civic-consensus is (i.e. too much bureaucracy). For those who may feel this way, I strongly encourage your support of political action groups like YIMBY. They provide a low-cost way for you to associate yourself with a group of people focused on trying to fix NIMBY forces within the housing market.

I think a lot of this news went largely unnoticed by those in the west but Choi Soon-Sil was truly Korea's Rasputin. I encourage anyone interested in hearing a crazy story to take a look at the debacle between her and Park Geun-Hye.

I wonder if there are studies that explore what the loss on investment is. That is to say, if we were to repurpose those older industrialized towns to more modern needs, would the cost on renovating the existing infrastructure be more cost effective than say, building new infrastructure in existing smaller but more popular cities? It seems to me that we may be throwing away a lot of good existing infra to be found in these older cities.

I think few people know that a bunch of public transit was actually electric in the early/mid 20th century. Car companies, most notably GM, conspired to convert public transport to gas to make public transit less comfortable compared to private car ownership[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

I'm arguing that the definition of "gender equality" you are advocating for is definitely a western one. You can't argue your definition of equality while trying to feign anti-colonialist attitudes, that's a disingenuous position. I personally don't take issue with you (or anyone for that matter) arguing for their own cultural values over another (at least then we are having an honest discussion). I can't tolerate a position that tries to feign an obviously western-centric position while virtue-signaling as culturally indifferent.

But this is hardly unbiased. You effectively are choosing to feign cultural superiority by co-opting a native-voice that shares your criticism. Rather than sharing a non-biased perspective, your hiding your voice behind a native face. This isn't sincerity in debate, it's cowardice clothed in tolerance.

Since Graphene has been heralded as the next wonder-material, can someone tell me in lay-mans terms how far off we are from seeing a graphene revolution in the personal electronics space when this tech becomes commercial?

I'm sorry, this warmed my heart and terrified me at the same time. A hilariously adorable and obnoxious use of technology.

Yeah I would assume that there is no way that they would be compensated for the lost revenue. I would also imagine calculating the lost revenue for those shops, and subsequently trying to get the government to reimburse them for it, would be prohibitively expensive both politically and financially.

This is a wonderfully thought out and articulated counter-position. I applaud the thoughtfulness of your comment.

I agree with your statement that "cultural heritage is worth preserving, it needs non-market-driven measures to preserve it in some form". However, I think that given situations in which the choice between access to the market and the preservation of culture are fundamentally at odds with one another, access to the market must dominate. I think the downstream effects of the preservation choice are devastating and counterproductive. Let's take an extreme example, if 50% of a given, highly productive, landmass is marked as culture heritage, that would mean that suddenly the available supply to meet housing/commercial demands is now artificially constrained to the remaining half. If the supply does not adequately increase in density to meet this demand, prices shall no doubt increase and people will be priced out of that area. I think this is what is happening across a whole slew of cities across the US and is contributing to homelessness, increase in crime, loss of access to high quality education, etc.

I don't think that this is a zero-sum situation, nor that the example I just gave is the canonical experience. I'm just saying that if I was forced to make a tradeoff, I think the preservation of cultural heritage must be placed as a secondary (albeit very important) value.

I'm not arguing that it isn't uncomfortable, nor that people aren't justified in their unhappiness, I am arguing that the desire to use policy to express that unhappiness and uncomfortability upon the polity is wrong (I would even say it's selfish). Their comfort when "things were better" was built upon the market at the snapshot in time they enjoyed it. To demand that the market revert to that time is, by definition, regressive.

I find this really puzzling, as Americans, we seem to have this strange implicit assumption that the market should protect and reinforce culture. That is to say, that as demand increases for cultural artifacts, that the market should grow without affecting access to such artifacts.

It seems that when this assumption does not seem to play out, our reflex is to say that the markets are obviously failing and that policy should step in in order to preserve the integrity of the culture (i.e. we need to stop ruining our neighborhoods with all this development and letting all these _other_ people in!).

I feel like this is putting the cart before the horse. IMO (and I'd love to hear other people's opinion about this) cultures are emergent properties from markets. When people come together in order to trade goods and services, market forces will reward economies of scale to those who minimize costs associated with things like time to market, access to labor, etc. This increase in density with others leads to community development, which in turn leads to an exchange of collective values, shared cultural artifacts, etc.

From this perspective, the desire to limit market expansion is really an attempt to say which values are acceptable and places incumbents as cultural police for which values are allowed entrance. This seems entirely antithetical to the American ideal of being a nation of immigrants and/or being a culture of acceptance and tolerance.

My problem is that I don't know what exactly constitutes "processed food". Like, isn't cooking a steak on a pan constitute a "process" on a food? If processed foods don't consider my steak example, how much process on a food causes it to fall into the unhealthy category you are describing?

I'm not trying to be nit-picky, this seriously is confusing for me (probably no small-part due to marketing).

As a Korean American, this conflict has always been so strange to me.

My family members fought in this war, my grandfather ran from his village, in the middle of the night, to join the US-led Korean Army so that he wouldn't be conscripted by NK as they moved south. My mom's father joined as an intelligence officer and later continued on to work in the middle east for the US gov. That left his wife (my grandmother) to raise a family of 4 by herself in a war torn country. My entire cultural experience has been defined by this "police action". My grandfather who fled would later be awarded the Korean equivalent of a bronze star and would suffer from PTSD for the rest of his life. He was violent towards his children (including my father) often, but was able to raise a future for my family nonetheless.

Now as a native-born US citizen, the narrative I hear is of doom and gloom, NK is just weeks, if not hours, away from nuking me in SF. China is the only way to get them to stop and they aren't helping.

What I hear from my Native-born Korean friends is a lot of nonchalance. The North Korean threat is all bluster, no action. Nothing is ever going to happen. They are going to threaten, maybe shoot some artillery, but no major offensive ever happens.

All of this makes for an incredibly confusing experience. I feel like we are approaching a historical precipice, but my two cultures respond with either panic or apathy.

This is an excellent exploration of Impostor Syndrome[1]. Thanks for sharing!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

I think the only issue I take with your assumption is that you will end up having more job-seekers. It could just be the case that the abusive employer's business will fail and thus create an opportunity in the market for another company to take over. If you rinse and repeat, you could assume that it would provide a force to push abusive employers out of the marketplace and replace them with more productive employees and employers.

I'll also argue that "improving their standard of living" does not have to be separate from an expansion in the economy. Often the means these irresponsible financial stewards take in "improving their standard of living" is in spending on goods and services, which continues to contribute to liquidity in the market. Not to mention that improving the standard of living for consumers is generally an overall win for society as a whole (lower crime, lower healthcare costs, higher productivity, etc.)

I wonder if UBI actually allows the economy to become more efficient. It could be the case that an abusive employer would be more severely punished by the labor market if the economic cost to the worker is diminished by a UBI (i.e. My boss is a jerk, I'm just going to quit and find an employer that treats me better). I would assume then that satisfied employees, with good employers, would then be more productive than their dissatisfied counterparts.

It also seems reasonable to assume that workers would also be more likely to create new businesses entirely if the personal financial risks associated with doing so were diminished by a UBI.

I didn't realize this, but yes, this is absolutely true. I wonder how many people would actually be willing to pay a premium on having their clothes warm when coming out of a dryer.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't bad teachers or there aren't a LOT of bad teachers. But IMHO a lot of what I have seen at my company is the following:

If a kid brings home a bad report card - Parents often blame the teacher. Obviously, their kid is great, the only reason they are struggling is because of negligent or poor instruction.

If a kid brings home a behavior citation (i.e. teacher/administration called home and said their kid was poorly behaved) - Parents may or may not recognize themselves as a contributor to that poor behavior.

But for the teacher, it doesn't really matter. If there is one poorly behaved kid in the class, it's going to make it harder for that teacher to instruct every single kid.

It often seems that the problem isn't a glut of "bad teachers", it's that the structures placed around the teachers all too often seem to be set up for them to fail. It's no surprise then that 40%-50% of teachers quit the profession entirely within five years http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/16/kappan_ingersol...

A lot of it seems to exacerbated by limited access to quality public transport. As jobs become more consolidated in city centers, the middle and lower class are more likely to get priced out of living near their work places. High insurance and other private vehicle costs (tickets, maintenance, traffic) make car ownership impossible for mid/lower class citizens.

So you end up with a bunch of people, living in poor housing conditions, with poor access to quality transportation, which means the amount of time they are spending in transit, or the jobs that they can reasonably have access to, is constrained.

America should have spent more time trying to shift demand away from private car ownership and more towards effective public transportation. Doing so would make areas outside of major metropolitan areas available for middle/lower class people and allow smaller/mid sized cities benefit from the tax revenue.

I work at an EdTech company right now and we've found huge success simply because we've tried to get out of the way and let teachers do what they do. Teachers today have a hard enough time without tech companies, policy makers, administrators, etc. barging into their classrooms and dictating the best way to instruct their kids.

Like germinalphrase mentioned, I think the best place for tech in education is to "[offer] solutions to the kinds of... problems that teachers face everyday" and to make the existing successes even more impactful (e.g. when a student does well, provide ways for teachers, parents, and students to celebrate together).

Teachers know their kids and their struggles best, the tech just has to help them do what they do.

As someone of East-Asian decent, I totally get this. But I also can understand the counter-point: if you are joining a company of predominantly "anglo-saxon" peoples, does that company not have a valid concern that the people they are hiring are conducive with their current work process (i.e. communication, collaboration, etc.).

I understand your comment isn't advocating for what I am insinuating, but in general, I think the sentiment that companies need to adjust their culture for their candidates is problematic.