L_Rahman

Genuinely curious what the /u/pulak thinks of this outcome:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/3/17934194/amazon-minimum-w...

Was our skepticism perhaps reasonable?

When the topic in question is how one of the most powerful companies on Earth chooses to use its power we should strive to always be this cynical.

Skepticism of concentrated power is the ur-American political belief. We seem to have forgotten that lately.

I'm seconding scarejumba's position here. Doctor's are enormously powerful and effectively unionized through the AMA. They can influence both the operations of hospitals and the American government itself.

Like any aristocratic guild that provides a necessary societal function however, they as a block choose to profit from it.

This is not every doctor or even every ER doctor. But it's important not to let doctors as a class off the hook.

It's interesting the quite possibly the most important condition didn't get mentioned.

Sweden's social safety net is among the strongest in the world. If the floor on failure is that you still have access to food, housing and healthcare then quitting a full-time job to start a company becomes much more possible.

More people starting companies, more attempts at big targets, more outlier successes.

The GP was most likely referring to motorcyclists riding without helmets.

NY's regulations help a lot in this regard. While Uber's don't have vehicle specific markings, they do have specially marked license plates that I can use to predict their behavior.

The good thing is that the USB-C ecosystem is open and a wide variety of known, vetted OEMs have stepped up to serve it.

USB-C to Lightning cables are still expensive because Apple hasn't opened the connector up for MFi certification yet, but Monoprice will happily sell you a USB-C brick with upto 40W output for $15:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=116&cp_id=10851&cs_id...

It's staggering that this is the top voted comment.

> car loan

most of America doesn't have any way of getting to jobs without one

> eat anything but rice and beans

most people need fundamental nutrients from vegetables just to be able to survive, these vegetables tend to be more expensive than less healthy things

> a >$30 month cell phone bill

internet access gates opportunity in American and for many people their cell phone (which they cannot afford to pay for up front and therefore must lease) and its data plan is there only gateway to the rest of the world

> drink anything but water, have cable tv (or assuming Netflix)

any right to a Gatorade after shooting hoops at your dilapidated public park on a hot day, any right to 30 mins of entertainment after working your mind numbing job that drains of you all life

> You've got obvious improvements you can make to get out of that dilemma.

Why?

Why is the right to a just life gated by the requirement to surrender basic humanity? Who is this we?

A toss off link to a Wikipedia article?

The Census Bureau itself says American household income is the same since 1987 [1] while cost of housing, education and healthcare goes 2x-3x in the last decade alone [2]

How does a world view like this even get formed?

[1] https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...)

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

This place baffles me sometimes.

No we're upset that we can't cut out the trite and petty bs and be free to make ourselves happy while not worrying about predators, scarcity and violence.

I find these arguments in defense of the existing system to to be the actually trite thing because it reveals an inability to truly look at the system at large and ask what outcomes we want and instead mounts a defense of it as is.

I respect your continued push for Anvil. I see your comments on threads from time to time and even though you're promoting your own product it feels topical and appropriate.

I came back to this post after reading the article.

I'm curious, why was this post flagged off the feed? It's a piece from a publication whose posts are routinely shared on Hacker News. Was it the subject matter of the article?

A key reason that these are the two industries we highlight is that they are beset by cost disease. Some charts to explain the point.

1. Cost of healthcare vs life expectancy for first world countries:

http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/cost_countries.png

2. Cost of K-12 education per student versus test scores in the United States over time:

http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/primary_scost.gif

3. Salaries for K-12 teachers over time:

http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/cost_teachersalary.png http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/cost_teachersalary2.pn...

This is good advice.

I would to those following it that this advice is likely most useful if your family members are on Android devices.

iOS does not allow you to change the default SMS application and if your family member is on iOS, the iMessage platform lock in is nearly impossible to break out of.

This didn't even need the shameless plug disclaimer. The bulk of this is just good stuff to help you build a mental model for:

1. What therapy is

2. How therapy fits inside a broader context of other kinds of practice - counseling, psychiatry

3. Some common misconceptions

4. How to go about a search process

Bookmarked to send to friends who are hovering in the general vicinity of finding a therapist in the future.

I share your opposition to quantification for things that are so deeply human, but without a number scale or strict ranking, I suspect that if we asked ourselves whom among our group of friends we seek out for support and uplift there would some that immediately come to mind.

The goal is to know who those people are and spend more time around them. In a way I think this is the opposite of quantification.

This is an improvement over how things worked before, but the end state for this has to be an API definition for service changes so that services like Google Maps and Citymapper can update my routes or estimated travel times.

I don't want to plan a route in Citymapper and then have to check myMTA for service status.

Still holding out hope for the 2016 Macbook Pro keyboard class action and subsequent repair programs.

That this choice happens to reduce the technical and regulatory complexity of your product is I'm sure just a happy co-incidence :)

You suppose there are other problems?

That is the entire problem. The entire problem of building more dense housing - even 3-4 stories in SF is negotiating every single thing besides the literal physical feasibility of construction.

If your startup doesn't think this is the key problem to solve, I'm not sure you have a complete grasp of what you're trying to do here.

In reality, they do credibly advocate this and San Francisco is a key example:

> At the meeting, one woman fretted that the tall building would violate the privacy of a nearby public school.

> When Tillman said he saw his project as necessary so people like his daughter could afford to come back and live in the city, one particularly motivated activist said she wished his daughter was killed in a terrorist attack.

> Parroting many of the Mission activists' concerns, Commissioner Rich Hillis complained that the design was "bulky, and a bit out of character" with the neighborhood, while Commissioner Kathrin Moore said that erecting an 84-foot tall building would be like "plopping a foreign object into this area and not thinking about the consequences." Commissioner Dennis Richards said, "I think a project absolutely belongs here. The question is what kind of project."

https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spe...

How much of this data is archived and searchable?

Most of the descriptions of the service so far indicate a real time or near real time feed. I'm curious if it's possible to go take a phone number and ask "give me location data for this person around xx:xx at yyyy-mm-dd."

I apologize for making my comment so hyperbolic and you are right to call me out for dishing on them unfairly.

I'm familiar with Hodinkee and in general I think favorably of them.

They've brought some necessary web polish to an industry where publicity has a very grubby old school feel to it. Personally, I've used Hodinkee as a jumping off point to do some research into watches I might want to own some day and the site has only made firmer my love for the Nomos house.

That being said, as a journalistic outlet the site is still very much a show run by amateur enthusiasts. This is not inherently a problem, plenty of fields get covered by people early in their career. But there is something specific to luxury watches that makes it unable to feed in or out of the ecosystem of writers and limits the people working there to the kind of people who can be interested in very expensive jewelry.

Compare this profile to one's done by people who specialize in the craft - Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic on Obama, Caity Weaver at GQ, or closer to the tech world Adrian Chen at the New Yorker and Steven Levy at Wired - and you can see the core editorial and writing skills simply aren't there and likely never will be.

I don't appreciate often enough how many of the profiles and interviews I read are composed by people who've spent years honing the very specific craft of talking to a person and trying to put them on paper.

But reading this amateur effort really puts all of that into perspective. Regardless of what you think of the actual views Ives communicates in the piece, the writing is so bad it's hard to keep reading. Apparently all you have to do for an exclusive is be a mawkish fanboy with a lot of money to spend on men's jewelry.

There's also at least one conductor who starts closing the doors during the morning rush our while passengers are still existing at the 1 AV stop.

One of those times the doors smashed into a person walking out on crutches.

The fact that most of us on Manhattan don't own cars unfortunately does not mean that we walk through tree lined streets empty of large, heavy and dangerously driven motor vehicles.

Low effort comment - but I appreciate this breakdown of the story metagame that surrounds any event that receive coverage and that a big function of changing society is changing the structure and tropes of stories we tell.

As one of those immigrant New Yorkers, I too wonder what would have happened if we'd gone down that road.

the problem is that zoning is a bad hack to solve the problem of how a neighborhood feels.

we know that we don't want it get too big or loud - no 50 story office building, or vape shops and bars on every corner - so we write blanket rules restricting certain kinds of construction and grant power to the people already living there for changes to the code itself and approval over all buildings matching the existing code

this puts all the power in two types of people - those entrenched in this process with political and financial power, and existing homeowners. Both of these groups then use their power to preserve what they already have and impose their ideal of a neighborhood over everyone else

and because we live in America not only do the people in power act knowingly in the interest of preserving their wealth and power but also incorporate their biases - especially against members of a class or race - into exclusio

this is so fundamentally broken and yet as a fundamental construct American cities lack any mechanism for questioning the concentration of power in homeowners and it is crazy.

in a transit starved stretch of Brooklyn, homeowners blocked a bus lane from going up just because they wouldn't let go of a hundred parking spots during weekday business hours. entire communities suffer because people who own homes and cars refuse to compromise

This is the opposite of correct. Toys R Us core business is profitable and throws off 200 million in profits a year.

The reason they went bankrupt is that a private equity company bought them in an LBO and the debt load became unserviceable.

It came from the pockets of insurers and individuals who couldn't afford insurance at all when he jacked up the prices of essential drugs.

That wasn't illegal at all though :)

Just that he lied to his investors about the source of the returns.

Saying this is because of unions is like saying America has political problems because it is a democratic nation state. Democracies and unions are modes of people collectively exerting power with inherent.

The actual criticism to be made here is the pathology of all New York institutions and the people entrenched among them - the unions that serve the MTA, the people who own, build and rent the real estate, the politicians who effective rule by plutocracy.

The corruption of New York's unions is simply the end state of a city whose underlying mechanisms have all been captured by a small group of people interested only in enriching themselves. Many of those institutions are unions.