chaqke

i do almost everything on cgpgrey's list, but i don't think i'm unhappy. life is pretty good!

i also do about half of the list in the article. perhaps there are just different preferences...

Not clear what happens if two people bid different amounts at the same time, or if 1000 people bid $5+ at the same time (does it just completely fill up the chat?)

whoa - I've recently had that problem start happening. I'm going to go build some more anec-data.

ugh, oh god

Well, they DID take $1500 of cash to join the explorer program. At least they could make it easier for someone to use the hardware if they were going to abandon it.

I've heard several mentions of this over the years as one of the better use cases for devices. Sometimes it takes having a problem really close to your life to drive that devotion - I'm glad someone spent the time and effort to solving this.

indeed, per capita GDP is increasing, and the proceeds have not flowed proportionately to the workers...so it is a fallacy that we don't have enough goods to distribute, but it's a truth that those goods are relatively scarce/expensive to the workers......sucks.

For an average four-person family, a minimum 350kg of cabbages and 200kg of radishes are required during kimjang. A winter’s supply of the fermented cabbage dish also requires 3kg of garlic and 18kg of salt.

350kg/4people = 87.5kg/person 87.5kg/person / (0.25*365days in a season) = 0.96kg/person per day

That's actually quite a lot (granted I'm assuming the "season" is 1/4 of a year, and at that latitude it could be longer).

For the hell of it, that 200kg of radishes is another 0.55kg/person per day. ~3 pounds of low-caloric food per day might be plenty.

..the Kim dynasty controls the weapons...

I've claimed a similar phenomenom before. Going back further, when there was much less content, even chain letters seemed awesome and hilarious (and worth keeping around). Now, in a post-buzzfeed world, I don't want any more junk food.

Hilariously, you can see older people (like your parents, if they aren't already savvy,) start to use the internet more, and enter the chain letter phase....then send them to you because omg they're amazing. Meanwhile, your hipster internet-consumer self tries to politely decline the second helping of cheap candy.

Filtration is the key - I mainly want healthy information, with the occasional disgusting treat :-)

There's a saying that goes something like: "Any idiot can build a bridge. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that is just strong enough to stand given the weight it's meant to bear".

A lot of older structural "engineering" was figuring out how much material was required, then multiplying it by 80 just in case.

Intuit (owner of TurboTax) lobbied against the "government doing your taxes" for you.

This is definitely a valid problem for anything strongly driven by a network effect. If you buy your widget and pay for it, it's not a problem, but if the product is only cool when many people produce content on it, then it get many people by being free-at-first.

That would cause usernames with spaces to overwrite passwords ;-)

That sounds upper-middle if not upper class to me ;-)

Disposable income going into high-risk investments after securing an excellent education for 2 kids - if the rest of the middle class were so lucky, our entire next generation would be pretty well-positioned.

This definition is a bit leaky. For example, the executive who lives month to month live in a luxury penthouse "has" to work to pay his mortgage...but has the option to not pay that mortgage, save for a year (or two), stop working, and live off wealth. I wouldn't call someone with that option "working class".

This is true, but the developer in Palo Alto has the option to scale back her lifestyle and bank a lot of cash, whereas the developer in Arlington Heights will bank much less cash if he scales back his lifestyle.

Not arguing, just adding more "shape to that curve" :-)

Living in an area can be more than an emotional decision - for example, nearby family members might provide free childcare. Moving elsewhere would cause childcare to be a (large) financial burden.

A family on the edge doesn't always have the luxury to move.

The struggles of the poor ("poor" as defined by the original post) are not the same as the struggles of a fresh college grad.

Households on minimum wage are often paycheck to paycheck, and thus have no buffer with which to even find a roof in a new city, much less hunt for a job in a less-reliable industry.

Also, familial connections are not just purely for joy - they may provide some amount of free childcare that would become a financial burden after moving away.

Agree - and in addition, they may not have a 2-week buffer to find a new job even if it were available. They certainly aren't being flown in for interviews.

Financial sense depends on how you price the benefits of living in this area vs other areas. For example, being near family is a a benefit...so is being near people who care about technology, if that matters to you. Consider being a programmer in several startups over 5 years vs being a programmer in a large bank.

There are many houses on the market that fail or pass "rent vs buy" calculators - savings can go into diverse sources instead of a property if you so choose.

I'm of the opinion that the overall package is "worth it" here, but each person should consider their own evaluation metrics - and yes, move if you don't think it's worth it.

Note: this is certainly off-topic from the troubles of extremely poor people in this area.

The collection of this data mainly benefits employers.

I agree, the inner (premature) optimizer in us leads us to do all or nothing. It's a bug in our brains.

After years of working as a programmer, I also find something extremely satisfying about doing physical labor.

When someone asks me how close my project is to done, I often say "about half", or "it'll take a few more days". Is it 52% done? 59% done? 43% done? Will I run into some complication tomorrow and realize I'm 23% done?

When I have 25 rebar to pound into the ground, and 10 are already there, I know it's 40% done. I know that in about double that amount of time, it will be near 100% done. There's no question of if I am about to run into a complication that will set me back 20%.

More complicated construction can certainly lead to the same situations as programming, but sometimes simple tasks are really satisfying to a mind always dealing with new things. Variety is the spice of life.

A New Way for Google to accept your money in an auction for placement slots (that displace actual search positions).

Obviously a winning move for google, but not really a win for anybody else (besides people trying to arbitrage ads for these new, search-result-displacing slots).

..perhaps he isn't at $100/hour?

Some people have scarce resources and are not "designed" to fight a bureaucratic machine that was designed to not process their potentially-valid complaints.

I've certainly gotten erroneous tickets in the past.

Secondarily, I'd support ending the practice of generating revenue by statistically extracting a large amount from a few people - people whose demographic doesn't overlap much with those who can pay for permanent garages or parking lots....This makes me happy.

"Although the major effects of the increasing minimum wage won't be felt for a while, we've chosen to close now instead of waiting for two reasons. First, the minimum wage has already increased from $10.74 per hour to $11.05 (as of January 1st) and it will increase again on May 1st to $12.25. Continuing to pay the higher wage without any corresponding increase in income will expend the store's cash assets. In essence, the store will have less money (or inventory) six months from now, so closing sooner rather than later makes better business sense. But more importantly, keeping up our morale and continuing to serve our customers while knowing that we are going to close has been very painful for all of us over the past three months. Continuing to do so for even longer would be horrible. Far better to close at a time of our choosing, keep everyone's sorrow to a minimum, and then get on with our lives."

Source: the article.

Note: The raise to $11.05 is a 2.9% increase, and from $10.74 to $12.25 is a 14.1% increase. The 3% won't kill them right away, but the 14% would hurt quite a bit more.

Some easy numbers: 1k/month is ~12k/year, which is ~15-18k of pre-tax salary.

To re-emphasize, 1k/month in lower rent is worth 15-18k of salary.

I have friends paying more than $2k/month more than me, which is around a negative 40k raise (I live in San Francisco, but share).

It's very easy for humans to misinterpret recurring costs.

easily pressed to spend more than $17/day on food if you go out, but many tech jobs provide at least a meal (so you can work more)