fbonetti

The problem isn't so much that unions are incentivized to bargain for as much as possible. Every one who participates in the economy is trying to get the best deal for themselves. The problem is that politicians aren't restrained by cost. If a union demands that hole diggers be paid $100 an hour instead of $10 an hour, a politician will gladly give it to them even if it will bankrupt the state.

Edit: I think I should note that I'm specifically referring to unionized government workers.

> Scandinavia says hi.

Idk, maybe I'm spending too much on the internet but it seems like the discussion around inequality has shifted from "let's increase the welfare state" to "let's dismantle capitalism and give socialism a try". There seem to be a lot of people these days that call themselves Marxists or capital-S Socialists, and even some who are apologists for the likes of Stalin and Mao. These people are everywhere on Reddit and HackerNews.

I'm all for the Scandinavian model (which, to be clear, is capitalism with a large welfare state and a sovereign wealth fund, not socialism), but do I want a planned economy or a dictatorship of the proletariat? No, because it doesn't work.

> And those "disastrous" times you're talking about are more the result of dictators, than any economic system used.

Socialists use this argument a lot but I can't think of a scenario in which socialism doesn't eventually devolve into fascism. Even if the means of production are owned by the workers, the workplaces are run democratically, and resources are allocated by direct consensus, you'll still need to use coercion to force people to participate in the economy. If people in village A need more grain and the farmers in village B don't want to produce more grain, do you point a gun to the farmers' heads and make them produce more grain? Disagreements will still happen in Socialist societies. People will still fundamentally be selfish. People will still want to barter with each other and enrich themselves through their labor, intellect, and unique talents. How do you seize peoples' property, prevent them from bartering and hoarding, and force them to participate in a planned economy without a massive and violent state apparatus?

The great thing about capitalism is that it recognizes the inherent self-interestedness of human beings and channels it into something that is (mostly) positive for society. Socialism starts with the premise that human beings would behave in higher-minded way if only they had more economic power, which I think is a flawed assumption and the reason why socialist economies will always fail.

> Even in tech there has been wage/benefit reducing collusion/monopoly behavior. > Why are people so anti-union?

You realize that unions are cartels/monopolies on labor, right? You already recognize that monopolies distort markets, promote corruption and rent-seeking, and produce bad outcomes for society. Why would it be any different with unions?

This doesn't tell the whole story. In states like Illinois, the pension assumptions were unrealistic to begin with. From what I've read, they assumed 7% annual growth and included 3% annual increases to account for inflation. Even if government officials had property invested the funds, we still would've ended up with a massive shortfall compounded over several decades.

Unions are incentivized to bargain for as much compensation as possible and politicians are incentivized to give it to them if union workers make up a significant chunk of votes. Politicians don't have to be concerned with whether or not those obligations are realistic because they'll be out of office by the time the whole thing falls apart.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that the word "socialism" has completely lost it's meaning in the US. I don't think Americans truly comprehend how radical Socialism actually is. To compare increasing the minimum wage with Socialism is beyond absurd. Terms like "welfare state" are also loaded with negative connotations.

I agree. It's definitely not perfect, and I do view the rising inequality and stagnant wages as a serious issue. I just find it alarming that when people criticize capitalism, they usually advocate for some variety of full blown socialism, which has been tried many times before and failed disastrously every single time.

I don't know what the solution is. Every government intervention has the potential to distort the market and create corrupt/perverse incentives. Rent control is a great example of something that sounds nice on paper but ends up increasing housing costs as a result. I'm generally in favor of expanding the welfare state but I think we should be extremely cautious in doing so.

> His idea of human beings as rational, self-interested economic actors that is a ludicrously narrow model of the human being

Sure, but in order to understand human behavior on the scale of millions of people making billions of transactions, you need to start with a simple axiom and move on from there. I think people hear the word "self-interest" and think "greed", and assume that mainstream economics must be predicted on a very cynical view of human beings. That's not the case at all. We all want to survive. We can't possibly understand the individual needs of other people outside of a small circle of people that we love and care about. None of us are omniscient. The beautiful thing about markets is that none of us need to have perfect information in order to participate. By simply buying the things we need and selling things the things we don't, prices emerge in a totally decentralized way.

If you can think of a more accurate way to describe human economic motives, I'd like to hear it.

> has been disastrous for the working and middle classes all over the developed world.

Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. Sure, there's a large gap between the richest and poorest, but the poorest people of the world are also materially better off than at any other point in human history. I don't see how this is a bad thing.

Cutting existing benefits is the only way to avoid bankruptcy in many states and cities. The long term solution is to switch to a defined contribution plan instead of defined benefits.

The reason why many on the right are wary of government programs is because they’ve watched the government horribly mismanage their tax money over and over and over again. It’s not necessarily because politicians and bureaucrats are necessarily stupid or evil, it’s because the government is generally not incentivized to do a good job, since they don’t face competitive pressure like businesses in the private market.

> It's already been established that pensions can be cut in bankruptcy, so, yeah, that's not even a question.

Minor nitpick, but it’s in Illinois’ state constitution that pensions cannot be reduced. Republicans want to change the constitution to remove this rule, but Illinois is an overwhelmingly Democratic state so that’s never going to happen. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

> lack of robust fiscal stimulus

Have you been living under a rock? We've been in continuous quantitative easing for over a decade. The Fed is just now started to raise rates.

Centralized intermediaries are only trustworthy as long as they’re incentivized to be truthful. If another party comes along and offers them a bag of cash, the intermediary might choose to betray its clients’ trust.

Decentralized miners, on the other hand, are highly incentived to tell the truth, because it’s the only way they can collect fees.

You’re right that you have to pay for the truth either way; the difference is that the decentralized approach gives you stronger guarantees.

Normally I find it harmless when people on HN try to reduce non-tech problems into programming terms, but seriously, what value does this comment add?

This isn’t a magic bullet. When you eat carbs, your body produces the hormone insulin in order to convert blood glucose into usable energy. Excessive insulin production triggers the body to store energy as fat. If you drastically reduce your carb intake, your body will enter a state of ketosis where fat will be burned as energy. Barring some rare medical or genetic issue, this WILL cause you to lose weight. It’s a scientific fact. Just take a look at type 1 diabetics prior to diagnosis. They’re skinny and frail due to being unable to produce insulin.

This is a really interesting take, and I think explains why so many young Americans feel disillusioned. It's not the inequality that bothers them per se, it's the fact that they can't afford to buy homes and that their educations have put them in a lifetime of debt. It's the fact that millennials will end up poorer than their parents and won't achieve the standard milestones of adulthood until later in life.

I think engineers would still jump ship just as often even if they were paid more. When you really get down to it, most programming is pretty tedious. What makes it fun, for some engineers, is the opportunity to learn new things, even it means doing so at the detriment of the business.

The term you’re looking for is “type inference”, where the compiler determines the type of a variable automatically at compile time.

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The point is that your mindset going in to the trip needs to be pristine. If you're in a bad place, stressed out, or worried about anything, you WILL think about it during your trip, which can take you to a really dark place. It's hard to explain the horrors of a bad trip if you've never had one.

Also, going back to work on Monday after having your mind blown isn't the same as coming in to work with an alcohol hangover. You may not be able to function as a normal human for a couple days after a heavy trip.

Depends on where you are in life. Do you have a full-time job? Do you have any serious adult responsibilities, like a mortgage, business, spouse, or child? Do you tend to dwell on negative things? Are you worried about anything going on in your life right now?

If you answered yes to any of the above, I would strongly advise against taking psychedelics (especially mushrooms). Mushrooms will completely take you out of your normal reality. It will take you to a place that's "above" your reality. Depending on how much you take, you may even doubt that you exist, or what existence even means. This can be profound in the right mindset or horrifying in the wrong one.

Shrooms can be a very positive experience. It can give you a glimpse into your own consciousness that's impossible to achieve any other way, but the second you start worrying stuff going on in your life in the middle of your trip, you're totally fucked. You'll feel like your brain has been destroyed and it's never coming back. Bad trips are absolutely terrifying, and they're very difficult to get out of.

I had a lot of fun dabbling with various substances in college. Now that I'm married, work full-time, and own real estate, the thought of taking psychedelics has zero appeal to me. In fact, I'm a complete teetotaler at this point.

Elm is extremely opinionated and bottlenecked by one person. It’s great for the specific usecases it was designed for, but it gets tedious once you start interacting with external code and the outside world. The development cycle is slow and communication from the dev team is sparse. Some would argue that the slow deliberate, development pace is a good thing, but I was personally turned off by the fact that compiler bugs (and even documentation spelling mistakes) would stay open for months or years.

I know somebody is going to jump in and tell me I’m wrong, that they’re using Elm in production and it’s the best, etc. This is my personal experience from using Elm on several side projects and also in production at my last job.

I like Typescript a lot, especially compared to plain JS. AWS lambda, on the other hand, requires very special use cases in order to justify the complexity and learning curve, IMO. It’s not great as a general programming environment.

I’m jealous. I left Rails behind a couple years ago because I wanted to learn new things and not get stuck on a single stack. I’m currently working with Typescript/Node on a serverless framework on AWS. It’s got all the buzzwords but dear lord it’s complicated. I would not recommend it.

Agreed. Serverless is not free, or even cheap for that matter. It’s an entirely new skillset that comes with a million new things to learn and worry about. No thanks.

I think we’re saying the same thing. Your original comment made it sound like high real estate prices is just a fact of life.

This is the correct answer.

This isn’t predicted by classical economics. This is the result of the housing supply being artificially constrained by zoning laws. If developers could build a 40-story high rise next to a single family home, housing would be dirt cheap. On top of this, rent control further disincentives developers from constructing new properties.

AirBnB and Uber aren’t “bypassing the market”, they’re bypassing local laws and ordinances. The reason why AirBnB is cheaper than hotels and Uber is cheaper than taxis is because they don’t incur the cost of regulatory compliance. Real estate would also be cheaper if developers didn’t have to comply with zoning regulations.

You can't modify smart contract code once it's been deployed, period. Ether that's locked up in bugged out contracts is permanently lost.

This post describes a strategy for writing contracts that proxies the actual implementation of the contract to another contract. If the contract needs to be modified, a new contract is deployed and the original contract is set to point to the new contract.

Edit: I misread your comment. There has been a discussion over of a possible hard fork in order to recover lost funds, but that's not what the author is referring to in this post.

Ruby has distinct integer and float classes (Fixnum/Bignum and Float, respectively).

I know that was probably the intent, but the senator sounded genuinely confused. It didn't sound like a deposition-style question.

It's a really odd line of questioning from people who don't seem to understand the subject matter. This gem made me laugh out loud:

    Senator: How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?
    Zuckerberg (in a disdainful tone): Senator, we run ads.

https://clips.twitch.tv/FantasticCrowdedDelicataPipeHype

Edit: I directly transcribed the exchange