Hacker News Reader

kindatrueon US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

Those are all optional fees.

What they want is a return to the old pre-Obama days where all the taxes and mandatory fees (government and stuff they made up) were only displayed at check out. Kind of like resort fees on hotels.

kindatrueon Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

If you live in the SF Bay Area, it's pretty blatant: most of the economic gains go to property owners - both landlords or people who bought real estate early on (or inherited real estate early on) - due to the self-perpetuated housing shortage.

kindatrueon I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

What's a good number to memorize if you get detained and have the right to ask for a lawyer?

kindatrueon ACARS Drama

Could've been an international (overnight) flight. Maybe alcohol was involved.

kindatrueon When the Dotcom Bubble Burst

Deep cut of "Long Island Iced Tea Corp" -> "Long Blockchain Corp"

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

kindatrueon Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies on YouTube?

The problem might be music rights clearance if they used a lot of contemporary music from actual artists.

kindatrueon Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

Previously Boom's CEO said this:

“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]

Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-hour...

kindatrueon A hot day, a fan provides little benefit when the temperature exceeds 35°C

This link should be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks the general public aren't drooling morons: https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...

tldr: America fast food restaurants don't offer 1/3rd pound burgers because the general public knows that 3 < 4

kindatrueon IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

I've met people who thought that the IRS makes money from collecting taxes - like that employees there get a cut.

kindatrueon IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

Anti-tax people like Grover Norquist and Republicans who have made his pledge have long been concerned that if paying taxes were easy, then the American people might not despise taxes anymore. So making paying taxes painful is part of the plan.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

kindatrueon IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season

"Not very, absolutely everyone hates doing their taxes and the whole shady process behind it all"

That's the Grover Norquist (and Republican) argument for not having IRS Direct File to begin with: if filing taxes becomes easy, people might not hate the IRS and hate taxes.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

kindatrueon Paris cycling numbers double in one year thanks to investment

"I really hope US cities head in this direction"

The US is headed on the path of autonomous vehicles as the solution. It's the perfect combination of things our society loves: 1) No new public investment. 2) Continuous, end-to-end air conditioning

kindatrueon Please don't make me use another QR code restaurant menu

Counterpoint: I don't love getting sticky paper menus full of stains... or for the ones that are in folios, full of crumbs.

kindatrueon Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation

Not surprising at all. It was also taught at B-School that loyal customers are the ones you should hike prices on. They're loyal after all.

kindatrueon Covid's damage lingers in the heart

Huh, so covid is more serious than a cold?

Good thing we're adding more Purell stations everywhere /s

lol jk no one even refills them anymore

kindatrueon Damaging results of mandated return to the office: it’s worse than we thought

"Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated"

No severance payouts. No bumps to your unemployment insurance payments. Everything is working to plan.

kindatrueon ‘No way out’: how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders

I'd only downvote this if you don't have the same opinion for street fentanyl and heroin.

kindatrueon ‘No way out’: how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders

If you're not careful about in app payment settings, your kid can rack big bills with just a few taps. I know parents in Silicon Valley who have had this happen.

kindatrueon Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

This also works in the opposite direction though:

New York has a right to shelter law because of the judicial branch of government. Basically, a pro bono lawsuit and a judge forced NY to have enough shelter space for all people sleeping in the street.

Compare and contrast that to San Francisco (and more broadly California) - where everything can be decided on at the ballot box (like kidney dialysis staffing levels) - which has more people sleeping on the street than all of the UK, and has a wait list of each night of 1000+ for a shelter spot.

Everything has advantages and drawbacks.

kindatrueon JP Morgan fined by SEC for deleting email records

>I asked if they ever tested the backups... no.

THIS.

I briefly worked for a major European bank. There was a system that was backed up on tape. The way they checked the backups was to visually look at the tape spool - before sending the tapes off to a mountain to be preserved.

One day, they needed something from a back up. Sure enough, the tapes were simply blank due a bug in the back up script.

kindatrueon San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

Damn that's rough. I saw a car parked in front a fire hydrant at a fire in Queens once. FDNY simply smashed the windows to open the doors, and then ran a hose through it.

kindatrueon San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

This is going to get even more lolsob when Cruise deploys its self-driving car without a steering wheel[1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/gm-seeks-us-approval-to...

kindatrueon Apple’s agreement with Cupertino

>they could easily afford to buy the empty Vallco site and build housing for their employees, who could then walk to the Spaceship

You do know that the voters of Cupertino elected to their city council the person who posted on NextDoor that allowing Apple employees to live at Vallco would result in more high school prostitution right?

https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816

kindatrueon The fall of SVB and how I tried to save as many straps as I could

I think this was a common problem in Hollywood

kindatrueon How Californians are weaponizing environmental law to eliminate housing

Californians: Let's oppose all new housing

Also Californians: Let's vote in a Property Tax scheme where the amount you pay is based on when you or your ancestors bought the home.

Also, also Californians: Weird why do we have 25% of the nation's homeless population???

kindatrueon California’s population shrinks for third straight year

Not surprising when you look at California's home prices.

The median home sold from Marin County to Santa Clara County is $1M+.

That's the same land mass as from Times Square to the Maryland border.

https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1440035534693232640

California is NIMBYism at its worst: the far left opposes more housing, the far right opposes more housing, and the center is sick of traffic from more housing.

kindatrueon Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

SBF: "I always lie except right now"

People: oh wow so true

kindatrueon Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not for human connection

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, flyers like this appear against anyone that challenges the hegemony of cars:

https://twitter.com/RobMooreLG/status/1562508014464012288

kindatrueon Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

I just think about this letter to the Atherton (median sold home price: $7.6M) Mayor and City Council:

===

Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!

    I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.

Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Andreessen

4 Properties on <street>

===

Everyone economic freedom and deregulation, until it means more people living near them.

(From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...)