ashtonkem

Yes. That’s clearly what happened. But lots of people, myself included, expected prices to go down. The early pandemic was marked by a market meltdown and a shutdown of the timber and housing industry as analysts expected a drastic slowdown in home buying and building. It was perfectly reasonable at the time to assume (or hope!) that house prices were going to fall, and let's not brow beat people over that.

That’s only true if we cutoff immigration, which is how the US has offset the downsides of lower fertility.

Even if we can’t defer those problems forever, we can slow down the transition, making it less painful than the one experienced by Japan.

> The salary is high. Facebook aims to pay top 5% compensation in the market (we’ll get back to that). This makes a lot of other things very comfortable: you can go to a restaurant without worrying too much about the bill, get a nicer car, a nicer house, better stuff.

That's very normal, and I don't want to condemn the author for this, but this is a trap. If you get used to the consumption that a 5% salary offers you, then you will have an extremely hard time finding a job that's not at the 5% or better compensation. And those other jobs might come with other tradeoffs that make them unpalatable in other ways.

Avoiding the hedonic treadmill[0] is a good habit to get into if your compensation goes up. It increases your financial stability, and means that you can take a lower paying job if you decide that it'll make you happier in other ways.

0 - Technical term for how increased spending sets your expectations higher, and quickly stop bringing the rush that they first brought.

Yes, but the Netherlands also has a pretty strong social safety net, which is certainly a factor when they changed the law. Nobody wants to see their material circumstances get worse, of course, but there is a big difference between having no career and no alimony payments in the Netherlands and in the United States.

I am absolutely too cynical to believe that, trust me. But I think we absolutely should be honest with ourselves and admit that any famine is really because our leaders valued profits over lives, rather than pinning the blame on fertilizer prices.

I highly recommend this book called "if you're in my office it's too late" by a divorce attorney. One of the things he recommends is parenting a bit like you're separated, trading off long stretches of time looking after the kid just like a divorced couple might do, but without the separate houses and finances.

The problem with that metaphor is that the Irish largely went hungry because England continued to export food from the island during the famine. The crop failure was because of nature, but the famine was man made.

Participating in a multilateral civil war is much easier than actually invading a unified country, because you have friendly forces to get you in past the frontier and help your supply lines out. Generally speaking invading armies haven’t had a great time in Russia when there wasn’t a civil war on. America on the other hand is an absolute nightmare to consider invading, given geography and the power of our navy.

The Bolsheviks were absolutely correct to be paranoid about the west’s intent towards them. But that doesn’t mean that American tanks rolling east through the Fulda gap was that likely either. Too bloody, and too likely to fail.

The USSR wanted Alaska back in the exact same way that I want to be the CEO of Apple. There was no world in which the USSR tried to take Alaska by force.

Europe, sure. But america only really cared about that because of domino theory and it’s own empire to protect. It’s not like america didn’t do the exact same thing in South America, but on the other side of the political spectrum.

But fears of a Red Dawn scenario were always delusional. And that’s my point.

Its interesting the level of paranoia Americans felt about the USSR. That the idea of a USSR invasion ever entered the public imagination is genuinely laughable, any such invasion would stand no chance and benefit the USSR not one bit. A ground invasion of the USSR was more plausible (but still not plausible) given that the US at least could have used Western Europe as a launching pad. Duking it out in the Fulda gap would be dumb and unlikely, but it’s orders of magnitude more likely than the USSR deciding to take on the pacific fleet in the hopes of landing ground troops on a Californian beach.

With some retrospect I think that on the whole the USSR had more to fear from aggressive US policy more than the US had to fear from aggressive USSR policy. And both were right to fear accidents and miscommunication leading to disaster, which is certainly the most likely cause of conflict between the two.

Not surprising. The entire point of a tipped minimum wage is to make labor cheaper. Given the scope of wage theft in America, I’d actually be shocked if top up payments were regularly honored.

> 4.25 was nearly 25+ years ago at this point.

Nope! The minimum wage in Ohio was $4.25 in 2005, 17 years ago. It has however gone up since then significantly to $9.30 today.

I agree with the rest of your post though. The capriciousness and pettiness is very real, and doesn’t reflect super great on our society imho.

I understand the anger (but not to the point of terrorism or threats), but it's also pretty obvious to me that blaming one guy for the failures is kind of missing the point. The entire unemployment system has been deliberately undermined for ideological reasons, with the goal being making it as hard as possible to get and keep benefits. It's not shocking that one person could fix a decade or two worth of systemic rot when suddenly the system is strained to the max.

I worked at a popular pizza chain for high school and got maybe $10 in tips my entire time there. My pregnant coworker meanwhile averaged an extra $50 or more a night. Given that I was paid minimum wage at the time ($4.25 IIRC), that extra $50 in tips was a significant boost to her income.

Now on one hand I think it's fair that a pregnant woman needs more money than a high school kid who's saving up for extra toys (a DSLR in my case), so I'm not complaining about my pay. But then again literally no customer actually knew that; for all they knew I was supporting my poor family with extra income. The arbitrariness is troubling. If tips are a significant chunk of your pay, then you're dependent on either customers feeling bad for you, or generally liking you in order to make a good wage. And heaven help you if you're in a demographic group that's disliked for whatever reason.

Part of the issue with tipping culture is that there's a grey area between the "obviously tipped" and "obviously not tipped" roles. This grey area creates space for companies to pay tipped wages, but customers to also not tip because they didn't think about it.

> While there have been complaints from employers that workers “don’t want to come back to work” just wanting to “stay on unemployment,” data shows that isn’t true. States that stopped increased unemployment payments early didn’t see much if any change in employment numbers. Child care was hard to get before COVID. The pandemic has increased shortages, building huge barriers to women who may otherwise want to get back into the workforce. The most recent reports show the shortage isn’t from “lazy young people who don’t value work like older generations do (and get off my lawn while you're at it).” It’s from older people who have opted to either retire early or simply aren’t returning to work.

Someone finally said it better than me. All of the discussions of "worker shortages" around Unemployment Benefits have either been incoherent nonsense, or political points cloaked in fake economics.

Personally it took me a second to get past "Death threats drove him from town and to Austin". That is quite the fact to cover in a single sentence.

If the point is to improve public trust “don’t worry, we manipulated the data to make it more anonymous, but we pinky swear that we didn’t manipulate it in a way that changes the results” is not a good approach.

That’s moving the goal posts though. Now we’re balancing the privacy of those on the trial against your interest in seeing the data even though you’re already vaccinated. And you yourself don’t think that it would convince anyone that’s antivaxx. I don’t see the social benefit here, other than you’ll feel better.

Furthermore, it’s not obvious full transparency will help. You’re almost certainly not a medical researcher, so it's not clear if you could do anything useful with the full data set. And our experience with VAERS shows that bad faith actors absolutely can and will lie about it. I see absolutely no upside to releasing the full data set, and a lot of downside for those who volunteered for the trials.

My go to example here is 3D printers. The basic way that 3D printers work (FDM) was patented in 1988. That patent finally expired in 2009, and the explosion in 3D printing is entirely driven by the open source community. Most of the designs and firmware for consumer grade hardware came from the RepRap project, including my Creality printer. Heck, my printer uses an open source firmware designed for the RepRap project straight from the factory.

It's probably a good thing that the inventors of FDM got compensated in some way, but it's also hard to not come to the conclusion that Stratsys owning all the 3D printing patents basically held back 3D printing for a long time.

Some of these are serious, like the CFAA claim, some are genuinely hilarious. Dilution? Really? Unfair competition? Are they accusing TPG of creating an airline?

> You don't need to "compete with Disney";

I'd say that it depends. I think some cultures seem to have their own creative thing going on that resists the homogenizing effect of American movies and TV[0]. Those cultures don't need to compete with Hollywood. Others might, and that's probably not a winning strategy.

> If you think about production that way, then it just becomes a budget measuring game, and everyone in the industry winds up producing largely similar mass-market works.

This is a pretty common complaint about current media in the US though. So maybe that's already happening?

> The best way to compete with Disney is to offer something they aren't (and, ideally, couldn't).

Oh yes, this was entirely my point. Bollywood, Russian literature, and Manga were three examples I picked out at random. It seems like some cultures produce identifiable examples of this, and others do not. But that might also be more a consequence of which ones I've observed, rather than the cultures themselves.

> Thing is, Sweden (or any of the other countries that regularly import most of their culture from America) doesn't need their own Disney. Nor do they need cultural protection laws or a bunch of anglohostile novelists[1]. They just need novelists, in general. Lots of them, and writing works exclusively in Swedish.

Agreed! Although I suspect that anglohostility is probably a helpful trait if your goal is to resist the encroachment of English. Although that's probably not strictly necessary; my understanding is that anglohostility is characteristic of the French literary scene and not say, Manga. But I could be wrong. I don't think cultural purity laws work.

But the question is, does Sweden have a lot of novels writing only in Swedish in order to preserve and foster Swedish culture and language? Or are they getting swamped with external stuff? I genuinely don't know.

> France acts like the Red Sox of the former brutal colonists club sometimes, and I really find it irksome.

That seems to be the near universal assessment of the France, which is entertaining to me.

> Nobody in the Anglosphere cared or even knew about Polish literature or game development until The Witcher.

Much to the Poles annoyance, I'm sure. The relatively low rate of breakthroughs of non-English works into American culture is interesting though. I'm not sure if that speaks more to Polish literature (in this case) or American media culture.

0 - The funny thing is that the Soviets regularly accused America of being a cultural desert compared to the USSR. It's kind of hard to square the argument that capitalism doesn't produce a lot of (or good) culture with the complaint that Hollywood is part of US soft power doctrine.

Which isn't really all that surprising. Humanity hasn't changed in a very long time, there's no particular reason to believe that ancient humans would be any less or more flawed than we are today, and certainly not less complex.

Assuming you take his postulate at face value. Given that he lived centuries before anthropology became a science, I'm not inclined to think that it's literally true, and he might not have either.

Given the context when he wrote Leviathan, a civil war, I think that his views less reflect the reality of no state, and more the reality of what happens when control over the state is contested.

> and it can be hard to argue with them that vaccines are totally safe and effective for them (not talking about the population as a whole).

Right, and do you believe that a full release of the phase 3 trial data would convince them? I sure don't. Anti-vaxx is a fundamentally anti-expert stance, and most people have not logically convinced themselves into that position. Give them the full data set and I bet 9 out of 10 would ignore it, misinterpret it, read lies about it, or just assume that the data set is fake.

I mean, it’s not like anonymous datasets haven’t been de-anonymized before[0]. Successfully anonymizing data sets is a hard and subtle process, and it’s way harder than just removing major identifiers like city and birth date. For example age is obviously super important for vaccine and disease studies, and providing an age narrows down someone’s birthdate significantly.

And no, this isn’t under a “loose” NDA. This would be covered by HIPAA, which tends to be un-subtle about violations.

0 - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/de-anonym...

If I understand correctly, the enforceability of these TOS just added to the bottom of the page is uncertain. After all, I wasn’t forced to read and agree to the TOS on AA’s website like I am for say, Twitter or Facebook.

Also, banks are insured by the government (FDIC) and heavily regulated to reduce the risk of failure. Crypto exchanges are not, which is why they seem to fail about as often as a 19th century bank would.

Even your basic Ponzi schemes often involved generous and public philanthropic gifts even as the scheme was falling apart behind the scenes, just to maintain the public image.