baronswindle

Citing Rebekah Jones in your argument is the opposite of convincing. She forged documents related to her firing to make her appear more sympathetic. She has been adjudicated guilty of cyberstalking and misuse of the state’s emergency notification system, and I haven’t seen a credible defense against those accusations. She’s a fraud, and many in the media uncritically boosted her claims because they shared her political aims. That people still cite her is proof of the old adage that a lie can travel across the world before the truth can lace its boots.

In my experience, simplicity can be a bit of a slippery concept. Often, people use the word “simple” to mean “intuitive to me”.

Sounds like your kid deserves a shoutout on dailystfu.com

In case it needs to be said, I'm kidding.

In my experience, grocers always do include unit prices…at least in the USA. I’ve lived in Florida, Indiana, California, and New York, and in 35 years of life, I can’t remember ever not seeing the price per oz, per pound, per fl oz, etc. right next to the total price for food/drink and most home goods.

There may be some exceptions, but I’m struggling to think of any except things where weight/volume aren’t really relevant to the value — e.g., a sponge.

It is...kind of. But we're talking about severely limiting the ability of insurers to distinguish high risk parties from low risk parties and price accordingly. When the insured parties have limited agency over the risk they present — as with, e.g., health insurance for congenital diseases — this kind of regulation can make sense. But when insured parties can control the risk, such regulation usually makes insurance markets much less efficient. Essentially, it takes away the incentive for insured parties to avoid risky behaviors, creating moral hazard. This is a well-understood mechanism for market failures.

The way I read it, it’s actually the opposite of what you wrote. You suggested that the Fed relied on inflation numbers that it knew to be too low — i.e. that inflation was understated due to failure to account for substitution effects and the like. In fact, the Boskin commission concluded the opposite — i.e. that inflation figures were overstated in aggregate due to failure to account for things like quality changes and the substitution effect.

I have nothing to contribute but this video from comedian Rob Paravonian It's probably 20+ years old, but it frequently pops into my mind when I think about the apartments I lived in during my 20s. The materials were shoddy, but the price was right!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8mV8BvVzYA

To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. I was asking a question.

It wasn’t clear to me from the article itself, but for those familiar with research in this area: has anybody attempted to disentangle differences caused by genetics vs. by environment per se?

Went from Vercingetorix to Olivia Rodrigo in four hops.

As I recall, it shows commits from both parents in order of the committed date.

The proposal in the article is to tax wealth at an annual rate of 2%. Not realized gains. Not unrealized gains. Wealth.

Under such a system — unless I've badly misunderstood something — if a billionaire's assets decreased in value over the course of a year, they would still pay 2% on their assets. I can't think of any sense in which a decrease in the value of one's assets would be defined as income.

I have an opinion of the wisdom of a wealth tax, and I could be wrong. Regardless of my opinion, I think it's indisputable that a wealth tax and an income tax are different and that conflating the two makes a debate on the merits much more difficult.

Sure, but I think this is an example of markets working well. Customers don’t want to have to adapt to a new platform every year and are willing to pay for that service. Microsoft recognizes that desire and provides backward compatibility. Microsoft charges a price above what it costs to provide the service but below what their customers are willing to pay. Both parties win. Seems like a good thing.

I’m sorry, but your description of a relationship with an employer doesn’t match mine at all.

I don’t feel anxious. I feel comfortable.

I don’t accept as little as possible. I negotiate with the knowledge that I have options.

I don’t toil in the mines for 80 hours a week to barely afford to feed myself. I spend 40-50 hours a week doing something I rather enjoy, and for that, I’m paid a salary that affords a lifestyle few could have imagined even fifty years ago.

I understand that my employer would pay me less if they could. Then again, if I could find a plumber who could fix my shower for $200 instead of $250, I’d patronize the former, all else equal. Does that make the plumber my “subject”? I don’t think so.

I understand that my boss is not my friend, but to describe oneself as a “subject” is not something I relate to. In fact, I think it’s absurdly dramatic.

Is being on call really a sign of low status? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure most doctors have an on-call schedule. And if you think doctors aren't in a high-status profession, I reckon your standards are wildly different from my own.

Long hours and little respect probably will vary from one employer to the next. However, I've been working as a developer for about ~10 years - most of it with a mid-size insurance company but the last couple with a large bank. I work longer hours than most of my colleagues, but I've rarely put in more than 50 hours in a week, and my average is probably closer to 45. And my non-engineering colleagues have always treated my fellow engineers and me with respect and an appreciation for the difficulty of what we do. If anything, they've usually been a bit too deferential.

YMMV, but I think our profession is probably among the best in the world for workers. If my child were about to enter the working world and had the ability + interest, I'd absolutely recommend this as a career.

> The researchers can't say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness

My immediate thought was that people suffering from depression might eat more “junk food” due to the depression and that their poor diets might lay waste to their gut biomes. Of course, there may be other studies that contradict my hypothesis.

In this particular case, do you think non-US governments could protect the interests of consumers in their jurisdictions in a way that is less unfriendly to the businesses that want to sell to them?

We do have the Associated Press (AP), which seems similar to what you describe. That said, even such sources can be guilty of ideological bias if they choose to report certain facts and not others. In practice, I think AP is pretty even-handed, but I think that is as much a result of their editorial process as it is of their focus on factual reporting over opinion/analysis.

I think that's what the GP means by centralized control becoming worse. That is, information is less centralized now, and the sources that used to be at the center are now complaining about the issue.

I might be an idiot to ask this, but how is this different from the AWS CLI storing IAM keys in ~/.aws/credentials ?

Can you point to empirical studies that demonstrate "the negative consequences on the local economy that these agreements produce"? This is an honest question. I think theoretical analyses point in a bunch of different directions, and I reckon data would help inform our arguments.

Contracts of all sorts increase switching costs, but they also potentially create value. Sure, in some cases, one or more parties could become better off by taking some action that is prohibited by the contract, but that doesn't mean that we would be better off as a society if we outlawed all contracts that have the potential to encumber somebody in the future.

I didn’t learn this information in a vacuum nor on my own time. I worked on systems where I saw abstractions that worked well and others that could be improved. I spoke and tested ideas with users. I attended meetings where people presented findings that were the product of hundreds of hours of work and read countless reports with similar information.

If I left for a competitor, I would be working on a lot of similar problems. Of course, I wouldn’t immediately tell my new employer everything valuable I learned in my old job, but in the normal course of doing my new job, I inevitably would reveal information that my old employer spent time and money to learn.

This is a great point. Non-compete agreements reduce risk of losing otherwise unprotected information to a competitor and probably increase retention of valuable employees. So preventing employers from using these agreements would increase risk and turnover, and employers might (read: probably would) decrease offered compensation in response.

Now, this effect might be dwarfed by the upward pressure on compensation caused by greater availability of alternative jobs for employees, but it’s not obvious to me that would be the case. I’d be interested to see some empirical studies on the subject.

Yes, my signing bonus was contingent on signing a non-compete, non-disclosure, and other agreements. It wasn’t much money, and in retrospect, I don’t think it was worth it. Still, I agreed to the terms, so I should be bound to them.

I am bound by a non-compete agreement, but until a few months ago, I didn’t remember that I had signed it. At that time, I received an offer for much more money and more responsibility from a competitor. However, a close friend and co-worker reminded me about the agreement when I told him I was mulling the offer.

Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to risk asking my manager for a release, and I certainly didn’t want to violate an enforceable non-compete without the blessing of my employer. So I scuttled the move.

I was disappointed, but I hold nothing against my employer or against the laws of NY. They hid nothing from me when I accepted the offer, and the noncompete was very limited in scope (geography, industry, and duration). If I had left for the competitor, I would have brought a lot of knowledge that I gained as a result of my position in the company. Not legally protected IP, mind you, but still valuable technical know-how and information about our customers’ biggest problems and the trade offs of various solutions. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to allow organizations to protect that kind of information.

Edit to add that I don’t believe all non-compete agreements are reasonable. Just that I think it’s misguided to ban them wholesale.

U6 unemployment numbers include workers who are employed part time but would prefer to be full time, and U6 is near all time lows.

This may be extremely naive, but why wouldn't a service like AWS CloudFront or any other CDN that supports TLS solve this problem?