T2_t2

I think the implication is that they achieved the goal they had, to grow a company. Note that goal doesn't mention code at all.

It depends what you think software engineering is - a means to an end, e.g. to grow a company, or as a craft you want to perfect and do for your whole career.

I think there are more craft coders, because most jobs are at companies that have survived and there is more to lose from errors than gain from moving fast. The craft attitude may not be ideal when you want to go from zero to something, and avoid going back to zero very quickly. Or, perhaps more importantly, if you want to go from zero -> something wrong -> something wrong again -> something almost correct -> Product Market fit.

Do you mean does make people happier, or doesn't?

What is your comparison point? Things get better all the time, but it really depends on what apples you compare which oranges to, and which flavour you prefer, how the comparison is viewed.

So, is the comparison point Roman London? During the Blitz? When Pea Soup was a common pollution issue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog)? Or is it a period post war until about 1980 when assets hadn't caught up to a booming economy?

Some parts of life are more expensive in a few world cities that are more than their local population, places like London, SF, NYC, Paris. In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones. On the flipside, supply has not kept up, as most world cities have housing approval procedures that are glacially slow, and held back by NIMBYs.

But even then, the London of 1950 wasn't the place it is now, and lots of things like air quality have improved vastly, as has what is available to do - from eating to drinking and general entertainment.

Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.

No it won't. One case in either direction means anything.

The game is that VCs will adjust, then founders. Then VCs. Then founders ad nauseam forever. This is just one small piece of a giant play being performed by many in different ways every day.

This is just a weird concept. Sure, not growing is risky in the existential, everything is risky sense. Profitability makes that far less scary.

The biggest cost for most SAAS business is salaries. If times get tough, letting people go is always an option, and if a company makes a 30% margin - which $1.5M and 500K profit is almost exactly - that means the non-salary costs likely need to grow by a few thousand percent before there is a profit pinch.

I'd take $500K profit and control over loss making and hope. But that's just my personal risk profile.

Has that continued post reunification? A big problem with interventions like this is that they are so specific to the zeitgeist. By that I mean when everyone struggles, gender differences diminish, and when everyone is doing well, or at least so it seems, gender differences exaggerate.

To be less controversial, the number of artists in ancient Greece was small. Today, depending upon definition, a huge portion of people make a living creatively. Heck, even a job like Food Photographer is an historical outlier in terms of the skill set.

As more types of jobs open up, and society has much, much better individual food security, people make decisions to enter more and more niche professions that don't always make for great statistics.

That's part of the modern, western problem, that when people are free to do what they want, and what we individually want is complicated, they tend to choose paths that lead to an aggregate we didn't expect. I mean, honestly, how many people ever predicted Instagram models in the 1980s? Youtube stars are analogous to TV stars, but Instagram? You take a photo of yourself next to something? That's your job?

Nothing has changed, and ironically, this whole part of the question - is it better to burn people out and rehire - is a capitalist question, and answered with capitalist goals.

How did smaller banks fare during the crisis? I think that's the issue at the heart of whether encouraging them or not.

I think the problem with using money lending as a tool for social justice and equality was laid bare during the crisis. The downsides - lack of mobility for workers, pushing the risk from wealthy people (investors) to poorer people and the fact to function the system needs loans to be paid back at some percentage approaching 100 - all conspire to make this a really poor tool for change.

I think that something like the Australian approach - with enforced retirement savings set at 9% of income (where you earn $50K, and your employer pays $4.5K into super) - is a saner approach to wealth creation for the poorer groups than lumbering them with mortgages.

> could well be

Do you have any evidence of that - the discrimination part? Is there evidence that lending institutions choose to lend based on criteria other than ability to repay? Also, do/did smaller lenders fare as well or better than the big lenders during the financial crisis? Or were their loans more risky? I think that would be the strongest evidence either way.

Your second paragraph is really interesting, and creating an expensive barrier to entry is always a tactic big business implements to stifle competition. I just wonder what the way out of that is?

So the majority of the people trusted with the money went to two of the best schools in the world? And this is surprising how? And news how? And wrong how?

Come on, its HARVARD! HARVARD!!!! Seems like the system os working pretty well to me.

Why is this bad? Your comment seems to assume that, and I really wonder why. I'm assuming there is some concerns with firing, but I'm not sure what the big deal is?

Yes in part, but the mechanism is important, and what is being solved more so.

The USA is like the EU, where the various states vary as much if not more than the countries in the EU. The USA is far more racially varied than individual EU countries. The USA has used two big main policy tools to right wrongs of the past: home ownership and education. This has led to terrible policies, like the crazy mortgage crisis and student loan act, that means you can never get out of the debt through bankruptcy, which is morally extremely questionable.

When you have debt that can never liquidate, things get a little crazy, and a lot of the US college craziness is as a result of too much guaranteed money.

Maybe. It's your life - and you only get one. A lot of this is what you see yourself doing day in, day out.

There are lots of jobs that are coding adjacent. Technical SEO is an example. A mate of mine does installations of software inhouse.

You don't have to code, per se, you can likely find a job where coding knowledge helps but is not specifically what you do.

There is a lot s scope in IT beyond coding, and I'd consider exploring that.

> Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment

Has it? I thought that the worst thing for the environment was subsistence farming.

Name ANYWHERE like Berlin. Surely that's the question? You can't swap Berlin for anywhere, surely? It is majorly disingenuous to choose Berlin, or Rome, or London, Or Paris, or Tokyo and ask for a similar place. There is NOWHERE like these cities. There can't be. That is their unique charm.

Housing size. A 2 bedroom house in The New World is nothing like a 2 bedroom place in Europe. I bet the Berlin housing is a LOT smaller than a US place.

Even in SF, the housing is a lot larger than almost all of Europe. London is a disaster if you expect much if any space.

The US is so varied, it is like saying Europe. I can't imagine anyone not being able to find a part of the US they find appealing.

Like pretension? Portland calling here. Like Theatre? NYC calling. Like the cold? Alaska on the line. Like surfing? Hawaii here. Like the great outdoors? Pick one of a million places.

You just can't do that in any individual countries in Europe, as they are all smaller than most US states, with far less varied environments.

I wonder when people say this sort of thing how much time they spend on tax compliance. I have a company in the UK and one in Australia, and man, it is a MINEFIELD. Very little of what one knows translates very well, as each country has its own quirks.

The USA is like that on STEROIDS. You can have 3 levels of income tax. that's insane! I can't image the costs of being complaint with that - not least of which is the cost of making an accidental mistake. I doubt many small businesses want to be experts in {INSERT STATE HERE}'s tax regulations and laws. Far easier to avoid the headache if at all possible.

And if you don't think that is the case, imagine instead of states it was countries. How much does a US company want to deal with Haitian laws?

Why not centralise it? Imagine a single account# that employees were paid to, where everything was taken care of? Lets say one earns $120K, an employer pays $10K a month to that number, and everything is taken care of, and the employee is responsible for the outcomes, e.g. if you move, you are responsible for changing your state of residence.

It is weird - and I say this as an Australian - that an employer can be on the hook for employee's moving. it would be much easier if this was managed centrally.

America has it rough there. Australia (with a MUCH lower population) has only federal income tax, and a clear delineation of what taxes each level of government can charge.

Got a link to that? Sounds amazing.

What does Seattle currently spend on the homeless? Genuinely curious if you know any of the numbers.

> we need to both move to a carbon-free economy and remove carbon

We need to move to a net negative carbon economy (not carbon free, net negative), or find ways to reduce input heat (reflecting sunlight basically).

That's a terrible article. Just awful.

> or instance, in 2015, research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Social Security Administration revealed that, since 1990, among the bottom quarter of Americans with the least education, life expectancy has either stagnated or decreased. That’s for well over 40 million people.

That doesn't mean they don't get to be seniors, or even state what the numbers change from or too.

Just an awful set of vague ideas loosely linked together.

I think your reply is interesting, as it exactly the sort of thing that Effective Altruism talks about.

The example you gave is endemic of the way we think of charity precisely because it deals with both emotion and things we can individually see. Effective Altruism aims to make charity about things that don't directly affect us, that we can't see, and find areas that where the "bang per buck" is high.

Seattle spent $195 million on the homelessness according to this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/how-much-..., to help a group that this advocacy organisation http://www.homelessinfo.org/what_we_do/one_night_count/ puts at 10,000 people. I wonder how a person can rationally look at that - $195 million at ~$19.5K per person and think they can make a dent. Compare that to https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income and doubling the poorest of the poor's daily income by giving them $1 a day for 12 years. These are people I can't see and don't have to think about, yet for less than $5000 I can provide someone with security and an income for over a decade. If I give $70 a week for 12 years, I can take 10 people out of abject poverty for 12 years. That's fractionally above my coffee budget.

That's the question Effective Altruism wants people to ask themselves. How can I, with the amount of money I have, do the most tangible good in the world, and what is an equation that helps me decide.

Far from being "absolutely morally repugnant" to walk past a homeless person and preference things we can't see, I think it is morally honest to look at the risks humanity faces, and preference things that are under funded, where $1 can go far. That takes several forms, both immediate - like the Give Directly example - versus long term, where risks that could wipe out our species are considered. I think a strong argument can be made that, for minimal expense, it would be possible to have an affect on a potentially species destroying technology like AI, and that the money spent there is more likely to do good than adding that to an already well funded area.

That's catastrophic risk, minimal expense vs human suffering and high cost. How you solve for the equilibrium there.

Absolutely, but in the complete opposite direction, don't give up looking for answers.

The quality of people you see, and their willingness to look for answers, will vary DRAMATICALLY. There is joke, what do you call the person who finished last in medicine? Doctor.

If no one is finding an answer to your problem, dedicated research yourself is liable to be a LOT more effective than ten minutes with a trained professional who is not that interested or willing to do any real research.

In Australia, that is the law. You pay employees and contractors differently, and they have different benefits.

From whose perspective is this written? The employee? The employer? Current employees? Future employees? I'm not really sure.

On all four of those options, there are arguments to be made in either direction, and I think the idea it is a single, one size fits all question is misplaced.

Part of the allure of remote work is reduced cost, and longer runway. On the flip side, remote workers get to offer a discount in return for vastly larger employment options despite some additional problems created by a lack of physical proximity. That even with the discount it is more money than locally available is a double win. A universal change would also change hiring. I doubt many people would hire equally qualified, equally paid workers remotely versus in-house.

I think that proceeding from an unclear perspective makes the conclusions less relevant, and misses some of the nuance of the question, on all sides.

> for most companies most of the time

I know you didn't intend to, but you've nailed the problem: the ambiguity and doubt. Most (<100%) * most (<100%) is a fraction times a fraction, never a good equation if the upside is low.

I doubt the StreetLend dude made much cash out of this project, so why bother? It was likely just a convenient excuse to kill a side project that had little value that sucked a lot of time, but still, the ambiguity no doubt helped push him towards this outcome.

Isn't the answer far simpler? In a global economy, companies that operate at global scale - Amazon, Toyota, Samsung - will see outsized profits when compared to local only businesses. The vast majority of such companies are located/headquartered/listed in/in/on US bases, leading to a two speed growth rate.

Google makes > 50% of its revenue outside the USA. Here is Apples's percentage: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263435/non-us-share-of-a...

Apple employs 123,000 people, 80,000 in the USA (best stats I could find). Google employs 80,000, and AFAIK over 50% are US based.

So what we have are companies with a growth rate far in excess of US GDP as they create wealth from the world, with the majority going to US based employees and shareholders. Doesn't it just make sense that this leads to inequality? Those that work at global scale - and the locales that house such employees (READ: Bay Area) will have outsized results vs US centric businesses and locales.