asoneth

It's been ages since I've driven there, but SFpark[1] was (and maybe still is?) considered the gold standard in demand-based pricing.

One interesting finding from the initial research reports was that it achieved the goal of improving availability while at the same time lowering the average meter price, which is nice because it drives home that the purpose is maximizing efficiency, not revenue.

And despite my using it as an example above, Midtown Manhattan actually does this reasonably well, especially in contrast with trying to park in the Upper East/West Side or Harlem.

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

Others have mentioned the unfairness of asking taxpayers to subsidize drivers. This is particularly egregious in Midtown Manhattan where many taxpayers are not drivers and many drivers are not (local) taxpayers.

But even as a driver I prefer when cities place an efficient price on parking. Otherwise, if parking is too cheap compared to demand it costs time and stress circling the block to find a place to park. Market pricing, where the city sets whatever prices are necessary to maintain an empty spot or two on each block, seems more fair, efficient, and pleasant.

> Plenty of cities, internationally, demonstrate this time again, particularly in much of Europe and East Asia, and even some domestically in the US.

I agree that NYC's transit system is significantly worse than most European and East Asian transit systems. But I'm curious what US cities you had in mind that demonstrate the value of public transit better than NYC?

In my case, I have ridden transit systems in the US that are slightly cleaner (e.g. DC), slightly cheaper (e.g. LA), feel slightly safer (e.g. Boston, Seattle, DC), but I'd consider NYC the overall best transit system in the US by a significant margin.

The implication that companies use H1-B visas primarily to find candidates willing to work for less (e.g. 70%) of a qualified domestic candidate seems like the underlying loophole we should try to close, not just the "fairness" of allocating which companies and fields deserve to exploit this loophole.

But your post raises a good point that money is an imperfect proxy for "value" -- a company with high profit margins can outbid leaner companies (or nonprofits) for a visa, even if the relative value of that visa to the rich company is not as high as it would have been to the other companies.

Three thoughts in response:

First, this "unfairness" doesn't seem unique to a visa auction. Isn't it already "unfair" that mediocre developers at Google earn more than expert mechanical engineers at Boeing?

Second, assuming H1-B visas lower average salaries in the fields where they're used most, then if this program ends up primarily applying to the highest-paid positions (like mid-level engineers at Google) then this might end up reducing some of the "unfairness" above.

Third, I wonder which scheme (lottery or auction) Boeing and their hypothetical H1-B candidate would prefer themselves. Tech companies already game the system and let other companies fight for scraps so having a more predictable (if expensive) pathway may end up being slightly preferable to all parties.

I'm curious what makes you think tech workers would monopolize the top spots? I would expect that companies desperate for experts in medicine, research, engineering, law, business (which, like tech, already pay high salaries) would be similarly willing to pay a premium to be able to hire the best from other countries.

I wonder if switching from a lottery to an auction would help curtail some of the abuse?

That is, for each position a company wants to fill with a non-citizen they also have to bid on the visa fee they're willing to pay. The highest ~7,000 bids that month are accepted and paid to the government in exchange for a visa.

We could debate things like sealed-bid versus open auction and uniform-price versus paying your bid but whatever details we pick I suspect this would allow us to discover which companies are actually desperate for skills and which primarily use it as a cost-savings measure.

(I'm also curious how much H-1B visas would cost if there was a market: thousands of dollars? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? more?)

> It seems strange to call now early on rust given how long it has been around.

The first stable release of Rust was almost ten years ago at this point so I agree that this isn't particularly "early" in technological timeframes, but I suppose it could be considered young compared to C++ (first stable release ~40 years ago) or C (~50 years ago).

> You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence.

I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts.

Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.

> some of those people with "no time" and it has 15+ hours on ticktok this week...

Sometimes this is the result of black-hat products hacking their dopamine cycle, in which case screentime or a friend can help. However, I've found that in some cases staying on top of the zeitgeist like this is actually in someone's 3-5 priorities. In that case saying they have "no time" for X is another way of saying that using TikTok is a higher priority than X for them. (Baffling to me, but a valid choice.) I similarly know people who spend a non-trivial amount of time on other "useless" activities like watching TV shows, playing video games, reading novels, learning esoteric languages, growing plants with no utility, commenting on online forums, etc. Who am I to judge if they find it valuable?

So as technically imprecise as "I don't have time" is, I understand why people use the expression. When someone suggests that I should volunteer for a cause, participate in an activity, go to an event, learn a skill, watch a TV show, read a particular book, learn a language, etc and I tell them that it isn't a high enough priority to displace any of my existing priorities, they sometimes get defensive and/or attempt to litigate my current priorities.

> I'm reasonably sure your boss would happily let you allocate an hour every now and then to improving yourself as an employee

Absolutely, this is a major perk that knowledge workers should take advantage of. I'm spending quite a bit more than "an hour every now and then" to learn about LLMs and accessibility because they are in the intersection of my interests and my job responsibilities. However quantum computing (or game design, solar vehicles, gardening, etc) are not in that intersection and would count against one of my discretionary priorities.

> you telling me you cant find 4 hours a week to read a paper?

For me, four hours a week is sufficient to stay up-to-date on an active research area but making forward progress requires at least twice that.

> You are awake for at least 16 hours of the day, you telling me you cant find 4 hours a week to read a paper? So 4/112 hours or around 3.5% of your week...

Using awake hours as the denominator is misleading because most people have other non-discretionary time commitments besides sleep. For me I'd estimate ~60h/wk sleep, ~50h/wk work/commute, ~30h/wk non-discretionary upkeep of children/relationships/home/body. Assuming 8+h/wk to make progress out of the remaining ~28h/wk of discretionary time means I can handle about three non-discretionary priorities. (Pre-kids I could handle about five.)

Therefore, when someone with a job says "I don't have time" to pick up a hobby, skill, language, outside research area, instrument, volunteer position, etc I don't interpret their statement as meaning it is physically impossible for them to rearrange their schedule to accommodate it. I (and I suspect most people) interpret the statement as them admitting that it's not one of their ~3-5 non-discretionary priorities.

I helped develop software for warfighters and it became clear that the most effective officers and enlisted members were those who understand when to follow doctrine and when to exercise independent judgement.

Think of the last time you interacted with a tech support person who refused to deviate from their script. Now imagine that, but directing operations in a war zone.

> A system that required dishonesty wasn’t honorable and it seems odd to blame the software/system that exposed that.

Personally I would place the majority of the blame on the people who designed and deployed this software.

At best, inflexible software that programmatically enforces standard operating procedure is ignored by the folks on the ground.

At worst, it craters mission readiness until someone with sufficient authority to make "a more flexible, nuanced screening process" takes notice and updates doctrine.

Once upon a time I'd use the same monitor for several generations of desktop. But lately monitors feel like they're advancing more quickly and computers more slowly such that I end up replacing them after about ten years.

I personally appreciate not having to do both at the same time, but at least for me it has reduced that particular criticism against all-in-ones.

> I think you can be wise without being clever (having a high IQ).

I think it depends on how you define "clever". Does knowledge of things like how to sort a list correlate with cleverness?

I know wise people who don't have formal education, but I'd still consider them exceedingly clever.

I built a wood shed many years ago. I looked up the recommended roof slope and used trigonometry to calculate the angles of my cuts. The next time I made one, someone with more wisdom showed me that you could simply assemble a flat roof with joists sticking out both sides, raise one side until it seems right, and then run a circular saw vertically along the side to create a neat edge.

As a metaphor I'd suggest that (Wis = IQ * EQ) might be more accurate -- it is difficult for someone with low emotional awareness to make up the difference with intelligence alone, just as it is difficult for someone of low intelligence to become wise with nothing but high emotional awareness.

> It would be an example of ruinous empathy.

Setting aside empathy, giving some thought about how we can slow the rate of change and/or cushion the fall for those affected is also in our self-interest.

As the number of people who have little left to lose grows, it destabilizes society and sets the stage for populism and revolution. Are cheap goods really so important that we're willing to leave our children to deal with another round of communism vs fascism?

> not everyone can afford to live in cities ... not everyone can afford to live in areas well connected by public transportation

Looking at it from a theoretical standpoint, physically co-locating living space allows for a number of significant cost efficiencies compared to spreading the same number of people over a larger geographic area. For much of history it was the wealthy who could afford to live outside the cities while the poor had no such choice.

My guess is that if suburban and rural residents actually paid the full cost of their roads and other infrastructure (and if zoning didn't prevent organic density from forming) that living in the suburbs (as I do) would become comparatively more expensive.

My guess is that you're thinking of https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

My sense working at an adjacent company and having talked with folks there is that they are more successful with their government projects than their corporate ones.

> Either the lockdown policy before March 2022 was correct or the sudden "back to normal" after March 2022 was correct

It's also possible that both instituting a lockdown and subsequently removing that lockdown were both essentially correct. While I believe the government waited far too long to remove lockdown restrictions I don't think instituting them in the first place was the wrong decision.

> These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.

When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.

My grandfather lived to 104. More impressive was that he still played tennis regularly in his 90s.

It's not his lifespan I aspire to, but his healthspan.

> I would understand if the phenomenon was largely limited to my family, call it genes then

Perhaps there are other shared variables besides genes? For one thing, blindness is associated with higher mortality [1]. And even within a country, life expectancy can vary dramatically by region, city, and even neighborhood. Or perhaps the people you know happen to be more likely to share certain occupations, mindsets, levels of physical activity, or diets?

Or maybe it's just coincidence.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

I wouldn't have thought this kind of thing would be useful, but after trying a few pomodoro timers I ended up with one (TimeTimer Plus) that is so large that it had the unanticipated benefit of notifying others how long I'll be busy.

However, I will say it depends a great deal on your coworkers/family as to whether they care that you're busy when they want to ask you something.

Agreed, guessing only gets you so far and unfortunately the symptoms of iron overload can look similar to those of iron deficiency. Before self-diagnosing and supplementing something like iron (or B12, D, calcium, magnesium, etc) it's worth talking to a doctor and/or getting tested. Most of these tests are inexpensive, especially if you have health coverage, and many doctors will happily prescribe them if you have reasonable concerns.

Once upon a time I was taking a vitamin supplement based on what I assumed I was low in based on my diet, but when I finally got a blood test some years later it turns out I had been supplementing something I didn't need and had an actual deficiency in something I had assumed was fine. Thankfully in my case I was just pissing away money (literally) rather than harming myself, but the fact that I had just guessed at solutions rather than analysing my health using data as I would to diagnose other technically complex system made me feel a little ridiculous.

Oh absolutely, that ship has long since sailed, it's just me lamenting a world that could have been if something closer to simple.css or tufte-css had been the norm.

Though with "reader mode" becoming more popular I wonder if there's a place for a browser with more opinionated defaults.

> The decision to skip CSS by depending on https://simplecss.org/ is smart

I was always a little disappointed with how most web browsers choose to render HTML pages that had no explicit styling information. I'm not necessarily saying web browsers should have defaults as opinionated as simple.css, but the default page margins, padding, text styles, headings, etc that they picked aren't particularly attractive.

Opinionated web developers will override the defaults no matter what they are, but if the convention was to have more attractive defaults I wonder if that would have resulted in a larger share of personal websites and blogs created using plain HTML.

Whether it happens in tens, hundreds, thousands, or more years, every physical product has a finite lifespan.

So it might be simpler to charge a fee when a product is initially manufactured that is based on the current cost of disposing that product. Perhaps this could even replace things like consumer sales tax or VAT.

That would incentivize manufacturers to create products with minimal disposal costs, and it would incentivize consumers to hang on to products longer or buy used.

Is this really a change among modern readers?

As a young reader many years ago, I gravitated towards stories that were the most alien -- not just science fiction, but history, cultures, and experiences that were completely different from my own, populated with characters that thought and interacted with the world in ways I would never have considered. I typically found books about suburban kids "just like me" boring. And I rarely stuck with a series for more than a handful of books because even the most inventive premise and characters often become repetitive after more than a few books.

But many equally voracious friends prefered reading stories set in the countries and cultures with which they already felt comfortable, populated with protagonists who were stand-ins for themselves encountering situations that they themselves had dealt with.

The lovely thing about the world is that we have an effectively infinite supply of good literature of both types and indeed anywhere on that spectrum, so both types of readers will continue to be well supported.

I've been a designer for a long time, and none of my contracts have ever paid based on the number of things I put on the screen. The design effort required to make a grid or list of data dense or sparse is pretty much identical.

(At least in enterprise software the data density typically depends on who makes the purchasing decisions. If novices and/or business folks are the ones making the pick then the software will look sparse. If technical and/or experts pick their own tools then it'll be dense and efficient.)

> It's being actively promoted by companies in order to cut design costs

I'm curious why you think it reduces design costs to put less information on the screen? My experience has been the reverse -- the companies that chase trends (including but not limited to low-information-density screens and using mobile-first designs for desktop applications) also tend to spend more money on UI design compared to other companies.