harryh

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP.

The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

You're welcome!

The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).

It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.

In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!

When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.

Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Brockman is off the board but not fired. Which is weird right? You'd think if he was involved in whatever the really bad thing is then he would be fired.

1) Note that I indicated that the 20% increase was a real increase and not a nominal one. That means that to the extent that household expenses have increased, it's because households are using their newfound wealth to purchase more/better stuff! That's not a hollowing out of the middle class, that's a prospering one.

2) Household debt has declined significantly over the past 15 years:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

Median household income in America is roughly $70,000 per year. That is a roughly 20% real (not nominal!) increase over the past 40 years.

$10/month would represent 0.17% of that income.

Someone should start a company to sell business machines internationally.

Worse demographic ratios though which I think is likely more important.

The WARN act only applies for "mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment."

I'm honestly not sure how this would apply for a remote workforce. Consult your friendly HR or legal team counterpart. :)

Fair point about Canadian law being different than US law. For the < 5% of Stripe employees there, that does appear to be true. Though I would again point to my 2nd bullet point:

- There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they aren't)

This post should be flagged off HN.

Everything in the tweet is factually incorrect.

- Companies aren't required to pay severance when doing layoffs.

- There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they aren't)

- Employees fired for performance are absolutely eligible for state unemployment benefits.

I suspect that whatever climate benefits generated by eliminating commutes will be counteracted by the urban sprawl fostered by your first point.

There is no "someone" who could do anything about this.

I think you're confusing availability zones with regions in this comment.

AWS AZs don't even have consistent naming across AWS accounts.

Yup. Which goes back to the housing problem. Under building of housing country wide (and even more so in major cities) is IMHO one of the root causes of many many many of the problems we see in America today.

You don't need eminent domain.

There are plenty of landowners that want to build. The issue is that NIMBYs have largely captured the city government and zoning restrictions have made new building mostly illegal. We jut need a government that legalizes new construction.

It's mostly illegal to build new housing in Manhattan.

If NYC politics serves property developers first, then it probably wouldn't be illegal for property developers to develop new property in the vast majority of the city.

I think you've misdiagnosed the problem.

When considering this topic, it's worth noting that NYC recently made the construction of all new hotels illegal.

NYC is safer that virtually anywhere else in America when you look at both crime statistics and auto fatalities. Ignoring the 2nd is a major omission.

I don't have stats for Amherst specifically, but here is a comparison between NYC and NH as a whole:

NYC: 5.5 murders per 100k + 1.6 auto fatalities per 100k = 6.1 deaths per 100k

NH: 1.0 murders per 100k + 8.9 auto fatalities per 100k = 9.9 deaths per 100k

This isn't true at all.

The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investment firms don't purchase homes to let them sit there, they purchase homes to rent them out. To whatever degree they're competing against single family homeowners they're just causing a small percentage of housing to shift from owner occupied to rental housing which should actually lower the cost of rentals.

Especially in NYC and SF the cause is very simple: local government has made it illegal to build enough housing to keep pace with demand.

Steve Waldman has a great blog post on this topic that goes beyond big city rents (though I agree that's a huge issue):

https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7263.html

From 2004-17 I lived in NYC and didn't own a car and very rarely rented one. From 2017-20 I lived in Chapel Hill, NC and (along with my wife) owned two cars. From 2021-now I've been back in NYC. We sold the cars and have no plans to ever buy new ones.

I've been roughly the same person the whole time. My change in buying behavior wasn't so much personal preference as much as it was the lifestyle that was enforced by the policy choices of the location I was living in.

So what? Those other people aren't obligated to do things that lead to your enjoyment. Please.

The WNBA players union negotiates a contract with the league that includes provisions like these. In general wage caps are included because the union wants to "spread out" money away from the top stars to raise the salaries of average players.

These sorts of arrangements are common in many industries with a union represented workforce.

It's worth noting that the WNBA Union contract includes a provision for 50% of revenues to go to player salaries. This is the same standard in the men's league. WNBA salaries being substantially lower than NBA salaries are a function of league revenue being far lower.

Very misleading title. Should be changed.

This isn't about making libraries private and charging money to take out books or whatever. It's about municipalities hiring private companies to staff the libraries and manage day to day operations. This is still a topic worth talking about! But it doesn't mean that these libraries aren't remaining free and open to the public.

socioeconomic status

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status

"less than 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES in two massive and representative samples"

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...