learc83

> sun exposure, particularly among white people in the United States (which is much sunnier than Europe), was rarely avoided or mitigated, particularly among the working class

Sure farmers in the 1930s had more sun exposure than your average office worker does today. But it was certainly not rare to avoid or mitigate sun exposure. Look at the pictures. Notice the bonnets, hats, and long sleeves that the people working outside are wearing.

My great grandmother (working class, born in 1912) always wore long sleeves, long pants, and a hat to do work outside. Even in the middle of July in Georgia. This was normal.

https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...

https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...

https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Roy-Stryker-...

> these are images that the government did not want to show people, of course there's a higher prevalence of unattractive people!

Read some of the comments above by ars. That’s not actually what happened. Almost every picture has another slightly different version that was published.

These weren’t censored, it was just an editor editing.

Exactly. The way I think about it is that anything is interesting if studied in enough detail.

A single square inch of lawn could provide material for multiple PhDs.

Not if the investigation includes a warrant to seize your crypto assets. Which a money laundering investigation certainly could.

In the US at least, the method for seizing crypto is the same as for seizing money in a bank account. The only difference is that the warrant is served on the person who owns the crypto wallet instead of a bank.

That’s what I meant when I said the cost to seize your money goes up if you’re willing to defy a warrant.

However, if using crypto as a currency becomes mainstream, governments will crack down.

Crypto might be decentralized, but governments could easily require registering wallets, and force businesses to only transact with people who are registered.

Your first example was caught up in a government mandated anti money laundering investigation.

If the government is after you, crypto isn’t going to protect you. It might make the cost to go after your money a little higher if you’re willing to violate court orders and live as a fugitive.

That speciality actually sounds extremely interesting. Is this the kind of thing that companies bring in a consultant for, or are these full time positions?

I’d be very interested to hear more. Do you have a blog, or can you point me to any relevantly communities?

In the short term, paying more will pull doctors out of retirement/semi-retirement, and delay retirement for existing doctors.

In the medium term, you'll start attracting doctors from related fields who are willing to retrain.

And in the long term, paying more will attract more candidates graduating from med school who will be performing useful work in 5 years or so.

In software engineering, attracting engineers from other less profitable industries wouldn't take nearly as long.

What are these software engineering skillsets that are paying over $1,000,000? There are people who are technically ICs making that, but at that salary its mostly down to politics not technical skill, and they are ICs in name only.

>That's not a "wage shortage" unless you expect me to believe that software engineers are choosing to grind away on ERP software for $150k instead.

There are a ton of software engineers who are grinding away on ERP software are capable of handling the vast majority of work at most SV companies. Many of them can't pass leetcode style interviews despite being capable of doing the actual work. Some of them could but don't think they could. But that leaves plenty of engineers who just don't think the prep time is worth it. Those are the people who you could convince by increasing wages.z

I've worked with many smart software engineers in specialties outside of backend web development/distributed systems who are capable of retraining in a matter of months and would retrain if the pay differential were high enough.

Of course the other option is for companies to come up with more realistic hiring tests, lower the bar and fire quickly, or train employees and set a realistic retention budget.

Everyone who uses JavaScript reads most of JavaScript left to right.

My wife is an ER physician. It’s a demanding job that requires a ton of focus, so most of her colleagues only work about 30 hours a week.

She’s also worked as a general pediatrician seeing lower acuity patients/well visits. From talking to her, good deal of that job is essentially running on autopilot. That’s why you can do it 8 hours a day.

Don’t try to please everyone. If someone is a FOSS purist, they aren’t going to accept a license with any of the restrictions that prevent companies from offering a hosted service.

That comment paper isn't actually debunking that specific survey. It's just essentially saying that proving that voter ID laws suppress minority votes is hard.

The phone survey of less than a 1,000 people is still a perfectly valid piece of evidence. The methodology wasn't obviously flawed and the delta was so large that the sample size was more than enough.

Here's another survey from 2012 that shows a similar number.

http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...

Sure as your comment paper points out, you can't use nation wide data to prove state level causation, but there's still good evidence that minorities are much less likely to have government ID.

It's not a shocking result either. We know that not having ID correlates with low income, and minority status also correlates with low income (on average, sure there are some minorities that actually have higher income).

You can select people to display in your man on the street interview segment to make it look like the average American doesn’t know who the President is.

Regardless of what some people in Harlem think, data shows that minorities are in fact much less likely to have government ID.

https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...

Enforcement is relatively easy. Many US states regularly pursue enforcement action for misclassification of employees.

Companies already report how much they pay contractors to the IRS and state tax agencies, so spot checking companies paying a large percentage of their total wages to contractors is the easiest way to do it.

If you’re being paid by any American companies, the most likely theoretical enforcement would be the state the company is based in.

Butter or jam/jelly.

They can do those things. But that’s not what most employers want in my experience. And it’s not how most of these relationships operate.

For an example see the response by the OP below.

The remote worker is treated like an employee except for how they are paid.

Few of the distinctions have to do with being in a certain place at a certain time. It’s more about controlling how they work. And in most the examples I’ve seen, remote workers are expected to be available during a certain set of hours, they must do the work in very specific way, they are forbidden from subcontracting, they are provided tools, the work is expected to continue long term, and the level of control generally prohibits them from working for multiple clients at a time.

It’s common for businesses to ignore these guidelines, but the more common it gets for companies to outsource work this way, the more news stories you’ll see and the more likely enforcement will happen.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You are essentially a full time employee in all but name.

Here’s one of the tests. Notice vacation is explicitly called out.

> Are there written contracts or employee type benefits (i.e. pension plan, insurance, vacation). Will the relationship continue and is the work performed a key aspect of the business?

Your employer is clearly treating you like an employee while paying you like a contractor. This kind of thing is common. But the more US jobs get outsourced like this, the more likely it is that people will notice and demand enforcement actions.

The more common this becomes the more likely people in the US (where most people are trying to work) take notice and enforce existing labor laws, and push for more regulation.

I’ve worked with people doing this in the past and they almost certainly are contractors in name only. That is they are essentially full time employees operating as contractors to skirt legal issues.

The problem is that once you segment your customers into paying and non paying. The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers and the paying customers become much more valuable.

So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few” ads. Then the definition of a few gets larger and larger.

Does Tesla’s autopilot normally stop at red lights? My Subaru’s equivalent doesn’t (Unless there’s a car in front of me that also stops at the light).

>Unless you do get a job in your field, with enough income that you're supposed to pay it back, but can't. This probably will be less common with the current rates, but as recently as 2012 the interest rates were at 6.8% .

There's also the fact that now (even for someone who took out loans before 2012) you'll never pay more than 10% of your disposable income, for more than 20 years. Up to a max of about $500 a month (which is the 20 year payoff rate for a $60k loan at 6.8%).

There are ways you could end up paying more. Say if you spent 10 years unemployed running up interest and suddenly got a job paying $100k, but even then you're talking $700 a month for 10 years before it gets cancelled.

Here's what happened. Federal loans have existed for a long time. The Federal government would guarantee loans made by private organizations. However, these were always "Federal loans", the Federal government controlled the interest rate and the maximum amounts available.

The government under the Obama administration changed things so that "Federal" loans instead of being made by private organizations and backed by the government, were directly distributed from the treasury.

However even before this, there were separate Federal and private loans, and the only way to get to $200k (for undergrad) was to get unsubsidized private loans that weren't backed by the government.

>I've done enough work in data collection and stats to know that generalized statistics are almost always associated with false conclusions that avoid context of their data.

There's no context that changes this. Private loans make up less than 8% of all student debt. There are numerous sources available. This isn't in dispute by anyone (except maybe yourself).

Given that fact, the only way your premise, that the vast majority of students take private loans, can be true is if most students take very very small private loans of less than a few thousand dollars.

And even that is demonstrably false. Because we have data that clearly shows that the vast majority of students don't take private loans.

https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trends-student-aid-201...

>...that scholarships are rare...

More than 75% of full time students receive at least 1 scholarship or grant. Most of them aren't enough to cover the full tuition much less room and board, but they aren't rare.

And in many states have large scholarship programs as I've mentioned where tens of thousands of students in the state get that scholarship.

>The evidence I have readily available concludes...

Confirmation bias is something to watch out for. There's no evidence outside of your personal experience to support the conclusion that "the vast majority of students take private loans."

I have many family members in the trades. "The trades" is not a homogenous group of jobs. Some of them got lucky and got good union jobs. Most of them work hard jobs that are hard on their bodies. They have an income that's enough to live on, but money is always tight. I know very few tradesmen in their 50s and 60s who would tell their children to follow their career path, other than the relative few who have managed to work their way up so that they are managing tradesmen, not working as a tradesman.

If you have a very specific career in mind then sure go for it, but just telling people to "go into the trades" is probably harmful.

>Yes, but they are told their whole life "after college, you'll make enough to pay it off easy, no problem!"

If anything, the predominant messaging today is the exact opposite of that. It also doesn't matter because public loans qualify for income based repayment, so it doesn't matter. If you end up stuck working at McDonalds for the rest of your life, you'll never pay back a dime.

>60k, with an extremely high interest is most definitely a problem.

Current undergrad rates are fixed at 3.73%.

>Anecdotally, my group of friends all flip between "school name"/School/Uni in conversation.

Interesting, (as an American myself) I've never heard an American use uni outside of conversation with Europeans.

>The predatory part is the pushing kids who don't understand finances into taking massive loans with high interest rates.

There's literally lectures and a quiz you have to pass before you can take the loans that explains how repayment and interest rates work.

For public loans the actual amount doesn't really matter because payment is income based. And the cap on lending is around $60k for 4 years, so I'd hardly use the word massive.

>"why don't you go to uni?"'

Of course all this only applies assuming you're American, which I'd guess your not since your friends call it uni.

The fact that you are forced to take out private loans isn't evidence that the vast majority of students are.

College tuitions and housing prices vary wildly, many students live with family, many students have merit based scholarships. Many states have copied Georgia and have lottery funded scholarships that covers the majority of in state tuition for students with a B average in high school.

>Or, more likely, the stats are collected poorly as they typically are.

The stats are widely available along with the data collection methodology. If you want to stick with your confirmation bias that's fine I suppose.

Start with something easy like cookies.

When I was in 10th grade, in the late 90s, our history teacher gave us a an assignment to “make a website.”

It turned out that by make a website she meant create a power point presentation that she could upload to the internet.

The point isn’t that depression has no biological cause. The point is that there are probably numerous biological causes. To strain the analogy, there are probably dozens of different depression gremlins. Maybe even a depression goblin, and a depression troll.

Saying that you have “depression” doesn’t give you an understanding of what’s causing it.

We have a baby with colic. What does that mean? It means the baby cries 3 hours per day for 3 days a week for at least 3 weeks with no other explanation. That’s it. It’s not something you can point to and say oh that explains it. That’s the cause. It literally just means there is no explanation.