Limit's higher for families. You still have to file, though.
233 karma · joined March 1, 2021
It's been tricky. I get why there's not some kind of policy or program in place, since that's a pretty niche circumstance, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a good thing for whichever country I'd end up in. I don't make SV-bucks but I make more than I'd easily be able to in, say, Canada, and I'd be spending that money and paying taxes in the new country (I'm not at a level of income where I'd get double-taxed by the US, though I'd have to file there). At the same time, having to job-hunt and probably take a pay cut to find a job before we even move would suck, since I already have a job I like, that's fully remote.
Anyone got any helpful info on that situation, that I may not have come across elsewhere?
The fact that practically all rural public schools are bad is what keeps us from living the remote-work dream of moving out to a quaint little town or cheap country house. If you're not rich enough for (good) private schools (bad private schools are more common than one might expect, though), and not daring enough to hope to luck into a good urban charter school, then you're basically stuck living in the 'burbs, even if you'd prefer either the city or the country/small-town to that.
Unfortunately, that's completely wrong. The worst-of-the-worst schools, especially in cities (maybe also out in the sticks, I have less visibility into that) get tons of extra money (state, feds, non-profit grants, et c.), such that they're not-uncommonly spending more per student than their "rich" counterparts, paying their teachers more, and so on.
The reason that's so unfortunate is because if funding failing schools equally to "good" schools, or even somewhat better than them, made meaningful progress to solving the problem, that'd be a relatively easy thing to do.
It turns out, instead, that any actually-helpful approach to fixing US schools amounts to "solve poverty". That's a much bigger problem, is much more expensive, is much more complex, and is far harder to sell, politically. One finds oneself immediately in the weeds of trying to fix US labor relations, wealth inequality, and our social safety net. But that's what has to be done to really fix the problems with our schools. Everything short of that is just a show put on so it looks like "we're doing something about it".
[EDIT] instead of down-votes I'd love a pointer to a more tractable solution than "solve poverty", but everything I've seen so far indicates that's the only thing that's gonna work and that the wonderfully simple solution of "fund schools equally" has little or no effect. AFAIK the only thing we've tried that even kinda worked was so-called "bussing", but that was so wildly unpopular (and not just among the people you'd expect to have hated it) that I can't imagine anyone having the guts to propose it again.
One of the most important things to understand how America works, I think, is to appreciate that blame-avoidance is the #1 priority of basically all actors who matter—which itself isn't that unusual—and also that we also have a bizarre cultural blindness to same, such that we'll give people a pass when they plainly are responsible just because they set something up in advance to shift the blame (to e.g. a system of rules or a committee).
The flip side of this is that we crucify people who can have mistakes pinned on them, or admit to a mistake.
"No-one got fired for buying IBM" is practically a national motto for us.
We'll tolerate a chronically-broken and ineffective system far, far longer than we will an individual making one bad choice for every ten good ones they make.
Keeping this in mind makes a lot of how our institutions and "decision-makers" operate much clearer.
(HN is mostly Prole-and-proud and, especially, Middle-who-erroneously-think-they're-Upper-Middle-because-they-can-afford-expensive-hiking-clothes, with some actual Upper-Middle but not that many—most of the Upper Middles in tech are in more people-person roles, if not ownership or management, than pure technical ones, even if they have some kind of tech background, or sometimes are in the more academic wing of tech)
[EDIT] That is, I wouldn't take it as a straightforward academic effort or something like that, but I wouldn't dismiss it because it happens to be entertaining. Not one thing I had first-hand knowledge of in it make me go "oh come on, that's not quite right". I'd guess if it contains such, it's a very small portion of the book.
Judging from how many apparently-jokey parts where I was in a position to judge their accuracy were entirely accurate, I'm inclined to believe he's rarely joking in the book. What he writes may be funny, even intentionally so, but I think only a very little of it, if any, is misleading or substantially exaggerated.
Graeber builds on this in Bullshit Jobs by taking a stab at why this is, which is in part because most of these jobs pay like crap and take a ton of time to get into, but are nonetheless desirable, so they're preferentially held by people who have enough family support to earn little or nothing for years and years and still not have to worry much (plus family contacts are a big deal in some of them). Graeber's analysis of the class-dynamics of desirable, seen-as-basically-contributing-to-humanity jobs is one of the more interesting parts of that book, IMO (the military is the equivalent for people who can't afford a PhD plus five years of unpaid internships in a high COL city, travel, etc.)
Book's a ton of fun. Recognizing the elements of one's own class roots, reflected in Fussell's mirror, if you will, is entertaining. Fascinating tool for analyzing (sorry to bring him up, but, it's really interesting) Trump & family's, uh, fashion and decorating preferences.
[EDIT] And on actually reading TFA, Scott notices and covers all of this, because of course he does. There's a reason I like his stuff.
Can the team decide they don't need dedicated standups, and stop doing them until they decide they want them again?
If not—if management mandates them, if some single in-charge person (who may or may not also do some programming on the team) would, all on their own, be able to veto that change even if every single other person didn't want them, and even if offered alternatives to suit whatever needs they actually have, or if you'd feel uncomfortable even bringing it up even after you're pretty familiar with everyone there, or if you're not even sure when such a discussion might occur ("pretty much any time" is the best answer, but "during a retro, and only then" is... OK) then very probably the agile you're in is bad.
If that's something that could, plausibly, happen, then there's a decent chance it's the good kind.
One way to get a sense of this if you're new (even during an interview) at a place that actually claims to "do agile" and has done it for any length of time, would be to ask what they've changed about their process since starting. "Nothing", especially if accompanied by seeming baffled by the question, is such a bad sign I'm tempted to name it as sufficient evidence per se for a "run far away, very fast" reaction. Citing deliberate abandonment of or modification to any major agile "ritual", arrived at only after initially trying it the normal way and not just because some manager said to change it, but because the team wanted to, is a very good sign, though just because they haven't done that isn't necessarily bad. The point is: is agile a straight-jacket for the team, or just another tool to use as they like.
There are lots of other bad signs one might see (multiple teams in a standup, standups becoming perform-for-the-manager prove-you-did-work describe-every-little-detail-of-your-"struggles" garbage-micro-management-meetings ruining every single work-day, et c.) but that's an easy one that can be checked for even in the absence of other obvious problems.
Example from the n4j Cypher docs, for the curious:
MATCH (user:User { name: 'Adam' })-[r1:FRIEND]-()-[r2:FRIEND]-(friend_of_a_friend)
RETURN friend_of_a_friend.name AS fofName
On the contrary, continuing to conceptualize fractional multiplication exactly as your "1/2 X 1/2" as addition example served me well. My wife—with a higher measured IQ than mine, FWIW—evidently can't see it that way. She basically stopped learning math when multiplication of fractions was introduced (it's interesting that one can continue to earn decent math grades, regardless) as all the results felt arbitrary and magical to her, and still do in middle-age. This is actually a very common point for students to stop following WTF is going on in their math classes and never really get back on track (yes, all the way down in, what, 2nd or 3rd grade) from what I've seen; factoring is another, later on.
"1/2, added 1/2 times" is precisely how I think of it. If I can't just pattern-match or rule-follow my way to a solution (because I've forgotten the rules, say) that's still my line of reasoning to figure out what to do to get the solution.
I do exactly the same sort of thing to come back to my senses if I get lost or forget exactly what is happening in fractional division. "How many times does 1/2 fit in 1/4? 1/2. How many times does 1/4 fit in 1/2? 2." Even if I have to manipulate some things to figure out the result with uglier fractions, that's absolutely how I think about what I'm doing as I do it, and it keeps me focused on the ultimate purpose of the calculation. I imagine that's also wrong, according to the author.
In short I can vouch that yes, that exact thing was very helpful to this particular person, including for multiplication of fractions. I truly don't know how else I might have understood those problems, to avoid joining the ranks of the mathematically-lost as early as lower elementary school.
It's not just that the output is well-formed and sensible JS, it's that it's structured so similarly to the TS. With a recent EcmaScript version as your output, it's practically just the TypeScript with the type-related keywords & blocks stripped out.
As much as it could provide more and better features by breaking that guarantee, I think it's a brilliant decision & guideline, at least until WebAssembly is far more mature and the space starts to open up.
[0] Medicare is our insurance program for old people, and I think also kicks in for those who are disabled at younger ages. Medicaid is the name for our HC program for the very poor. People get these mixed up because the names are so similar. Then of course there's our coverage for the active military and their families (Tricare) and VA healthcare coverage for retired military. And programs for other government employees, and their families. By the time you add it all up, a huge percentage of the US population is already covered by government healthcare schemes, actually, which is reflected in our spending enough on publicly-funded healthcare that we should be able to cover everyone with just that money, if our costs were similar to the rest of the OECD. Instead we still have the costs of private insurance and bills to individuals even when covered by healthcare (these can run into the five figures per year, easily, on top of insurance costs) and, for some of the above, huge expenses in addition to the costs of the government portion of the HC program.
[EDIT] Medicare gap coverage tends to run low-hundreds of dollars per person per month, in case that wasn't clear.