81 karma · joined July 25, 2025
This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.
I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.
If you are from the US, the only nation who doesn't frequently use a national TLD, the onus is on you to judge if a site is commercial, US-specific, global, or something else entirely.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
We have transaction taxes in the UK, on shares (stamp duty) and on property (stamp duty land tax). They are awful. SDLT used to be lower, around 1%, but it crept up as it's an easy tax to raise politically, the top band is now at 12%.
[The government's own modelling of SDLT is incredible](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responsiveness-of...) A 1% change in the effective tax rate results in almost a 12% change in the number of commercial transactions and a 5-7% change in the number of residential transactions. This effect still happens at lower thresholds, it's just less dramatic, but it's still distortionary. If you tax something, you get less of it, and why do you want people to move less?
If you prefer anecdotes, these days it's very common to rent in the UK until you can buy a longer term home, rather than buying a starter home. I know very few people who _haven't_ done exactly that, you don't want to pay SDLT on somewhere you'll only live for a few years.
Stamp duty on shares (0.5%) is also widely panned by experts: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/15/how-to-reform-stamp-duty...
It raises very little, distorts the market hugely, it is a large reason that companies choose to list overseas.
Sales taxes are a (bad) form of consumption tax (VAT is better.) Consumption taxes are broadly good, the problem with transaction taxes are when you are purchasing an asset in a market.
It's awful, rogue landlords who do everything they can to not do repairs or improvements and when they do it often comes after a long time. Often as they have underestimated all the expenses they're liable for and find that the profit is not very much.
Give me a company that owns a whole block every day, they've modelled the risk better, have economies of scale, and you have more recourse against them.
I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit. At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.
All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!
Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.
What's that, people might change their behaviour in response to it, in possibly unintended and negative ways? Nah we can just hand wave that away, who needs liquidity or investment.
Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer people need cars etc.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you...
Co-ordination problems are the hardest problems.
I figured that this is probably something Scott Alexander has written about, and lo and behold: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...
Unless they pre-registered that prediction, isn't this just the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy?
Roles that are more fungible, train drivers, factory workers, I can see the case from the worker's perspective, even if I think there are externalities.
But I can't even see it from a worker's perspective in roles such as software or sales, why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected, compensation is more levelised etc?
I'm assuming this will boil down to some unspoken values differences but still thought I'd ask.
Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.