A girl broke my heart, I dramatically (I was 22) plugged "Why aren't nerds popular," into Google, found PG's essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html), read the other ones, and decided to become a Lisp Jedi.
1,040 karma · joined December 18, 2013
If you're not familiar with this man's story, you should be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price
"Doing the dishes" is made up of individual actions, guys. If the outcome of your actions is that your sink is "mostly clean, but has a bowl in it," that's...just fine!
That same being endorsed baptism by undergoing it himself.
This may seem contradictory, but becomes much more tractable if you're open to the idea that "redemption" is just an abstraction, with multiple inputs, some provideable by Providence, some provideable by others, and some provideable only by the subject in question.
>just over 50%
k
(I feel like the glib single-character response stands on its own, but more verbosely: yeah, the trend isn't good, but a) there's no reason to assume it's linear, "fair-weather believers" is a thing, and b) I'm not a TIOBE follower, but let's say java use was 70% 20 years ago, and down to just over 50% today. Is "obsolete" the word you'd use?)
None of this means you can't or shouldn't do good work, even somewhere badly managed. Do good work, polish your resume, and disappear without a trace.
Company Type 1, where they don't care where you live
Company Type 2, where they explicitly care, and have some stupid table they look at.
I suspect it will lead to a lot of employees at T2 companies getting shafted. Not everyone is as Online as the HN crowd.
Orthodoxy is not just a numbers game---you also have to factor in reach and institutional support (but I repeat myself).
A state is a three-way bargain between the living, the state, and the unborn. The state imposes all sorts of inconveniences on us---why do we put up with it?
The constitution lists several reasons---common defense, general welfare, and to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"
Imagine, privileging one's own children over someone else's! How aggressively family-ist.
In other words, one of the primary purposes of a state is to act as a vehicle for inheritance.
That's why immigration is not a solution---the point of a state isn't "people," it's our children, specifically. Without that, no one has skin in the game.
Candidly, this feels like grooming.
Have you considered that the causation may be in the reverse?
The article pokes fun at skeptics of women in the workforce in the 60's and 70's. Yet real wages have remained stagnant since then, and given that divorce rates are significantly higher when the woman is the higher earner, it's not insane to suggest that falling (who am I kidding, fallen) family formation rates are due to those couples now having trouble forming in the first place.
Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap is required reading here.
The "lump of labor fallacy" is...not really a fallacy, or at least can act that way longer than a lot of people can remain solvent. Let's look at the article:
>Furthermore, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers. Ultimately, the amount of jobs available depends in large part on the level of demand for goods and services,
This is true if everyone's on a manufacturing line making frozen food and Model-T's for each other, but modern production isn't linear anymore. If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero.
The extra jobs created are instead service jobs, of varying levels of crappiness. More lawyers and psychiatrists---good, I guess. But the lion's share is more demand for waiters and Uber drivers.
>In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill
There's about an inch of separation between this and "we can't find any programmers!" I would hope, on HN of all places, I wouldn't need to debunk this.
>The idea that immigrants will steal jobs from American workers assumes they compete for the same scarce pool of jobs. Studies show this is often not the case.
Sure, because those jobs (and business models that rely on them) exist because of cheap labor. Poor whites in the South presumably weren't lining up to pick cotton unpaid, but without slavery, somehow I think plantation owners would have found a way to get it out of the fields. Yes, the price of cotton in England would have gone up. Life would have gone on.
>And despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976,
Let's posit an explanation for this: engineering in the U.S. is not really respected. Similar to Jews in medieval eras who became bankers because they were disallowed from everything else, foreigners face real barriers to entry to exploitive soft-skills jobs like sales, finance, law, and management. So they're often stuck in an engineering/post-doc ghetto. Does anyone find this hard to believe?
As for the rising-tide effect---there seems to be no mention of negative externalities. Housing pressure is probably the most obvious one to most HN readers (mull over the phrase "lump of housing fallacy" if you want to chuckle), but decreased social capital in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is another.
I'm relatively cosmopolitan. I've lived abroad, I speak multiple foreign languages, about half my coworkers (whom I like and have no animus towards) are immigrants. I'm working on side projects with people in Asia and Europe.
But boy is it hard not to notice that at the same time institutions which are nominally economic complements to labor, but are looking preeeeettty extractive these days---universities and corporations---that it just happens to be now that immigration is a human right. Compare to California in the 90's!
I think if you look for the man behind the curtain, it's---surprise!---Capital, again and again.
If I understand you correctly, it sounds like the media took the bait?
IMO the direction you're describing seems...reactive? I mean, sure, if you don't like racism and hate speech, work to get rid of them, but there's a lot more to social good than that.
Frankly I think Reddit should actively try and fragment itself a bit---give mods more power, let communities become more distinct. Maybe allow mods to add js, or let subreddits host SPA's, etc. Don't encourage subreddit enmity, but tolerate it.
Reddit has a lot of users, but they don't really do much except talk and provide ad impressions. This feels like a waste, considering they're on a compute platform.
Every individual has the power to behave forthrightly, with epistemic hygiene. You can't shove the responsibility to do that onto a nebulous interstitial emergent effect.
Using the above FBI 2018 homicide statistics, blacks committed 3177 homicides in 2018, while whites committed 3011---in other words, blacks account for ~50%, despite only being 13% of the population.
Taking that proportion as a rough "criminality index," and multiply 53.5 by 13/50, and things look very different.
- development becomes a 1st-class "business" activity a la accounting, sales---not that you necessarily do it as aanger, but you're looked down on if you can't
- a culture of "ask about the internals" becomes prevalent, where anyone who bought software without knowing how it worked was looked on as an idiot
- developer coup
Whether that's the particular mechanism or not, I think this bears investigation.
Needless to say, I have little sympathy for those claiming a talent shortage.