lsc

eh, right now most people are massively underinsured; minimum coverage in California is like $35k, and most insurance companies won't sell you a plan with more than a half million of liability (at least not without an umbrella policy) - if we stop subsidizing driving through pushing costs on to victims of accidents, the cost of driving will go up. But yeah, it should be about the cost of a good umbrella policy+auto policy is now, modulo any savings if the self-driving car gets in fewer accidents.

eh, my argument is that as long as they are intelligent enough to safely get to the side of the road, I think there's a very large number of people who would be okay with a car that "broke down" every 10K miles if it was otherwise great. (heck, I've been in some sort of breakdown or accident in an uber more often than that, even not counting app failures, so people would probably tolerate a lot more than that if the things were really self-driving.)

Note, you still have the safety problems to solve. You need to know how to get out of the road if the road infrastructure is on the blink. I'm just saying that "I don't know what to do so I will pull over" as long as it doesn't happen too often, is an acceptable answer.

Actually, I think there's a huge opportunity for the incumbent car manufacturers there. Considering how much identification many consumers have with their car brands, this could work out well (maybe even better) if it were only compatible with cars from the same manufacturer.

I mean, you could do a retrofit kit for regular cars, too... but that seems harder to get exactly right (I mean, considering the cost of a fuckup) and would require a bunch of new marketing infrastructure, whereas if Ford, say, just bought peloton and said "hey, make this work across our model lines" - well, that'd be a pretty good argument for buying a ford.

sure, but I think the truck convoy companies are run a little bit more like regular companies than startups? they have a reasonable near-term goal and sales pipeline. Like, I think if you have a couple modern trucks you can go have peloton install their system and you can use it right now.

I dunno. Americans seem to want these giant 4x4s even when they leave the city twice a year; they'd be better off (certainly safer... most trucks are more dangerous for other people and for the occupants) if they had a little car for city driving and rented the off road cargo hauler when they needed it.

A city-only car would be totally useful for people who live in cities; you just rent something when you want to go to the boonies.

Heck, most BEVs are that way now; I've got like 120 miles of range on mine, which is fine almost all the time. the two or three times a year I need something with more range or with more cargo capacity or what have you, I borrow or rent.

I think that the economics of the first level5 cars might be similar to current BEVs, in that you can only go where there is infrastructure. which is where most of us go most of the time.

https://peloton-tech.com - I mean, that's just one company, I think there are a handful working on just the problem you're talking about.

eh, something that only works in cities would be pretty nice for more than half of us. If you need an off road vehicle twice a year, you rent one; we have that technology already.

(I mean, we're still a long ways away from level 5 in the city.. I'm just saying, something that was level 5 only on pavement and only in the city would be damn useful; and good enough for more than half of us.)

Seems like it would mostly be the manufacturers that would have to insure the cars, at least for the expensive part (liability)

For me? I'm a self-driving skeptic, but... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it, (I mean, a reasonable amount of insurance, at least a statistical life worth) I'd ride in the thing. I think that's an honest signal.

>Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need.

Producing enough in the growing season to sustain yourself through the off season is... no small amount of work. You need a reasonably large amount of capital in the form of tools and knowledge to have a reasonable shot at doing so with only your labor. And unless you have a lot of capital in the form of advanced machines, it would be a huge amount of labor.

But that's not the real problem; the real problem is how chancy farming is. Too much rain? no food this year. Not enough rain? no food this year. I mean, there are a lot of things technology can do (like, say, tile drainage and irrigation) that make the growing conditions wider, those things can require significant capital and/or labor, and even then, you can have too much or too little rain. Even if you do everything right, if you are depending on growing your own food, there's a reasonable chance of not getting significant calories for a year or two just 'cause the weather was bad.

Most of our farm subsidies go to crop insurance; the government essentially sees to it that our farmers are made whole if it rains too much or too little, which makes farming a lot more certain, and helps ensure our overproduction of food. (note, I totally support my tax dollars being used for this; If there's anything the world should overproduce, it's food.)

>all I do is copy code from the internal codebase and patch things together until they work.

this is... a big and important thing (and difficult... a lot of people re-implement rather than trying to understand what is there.) when dealing with a giant big corporate codebase. This might be, the primary SWE job at big corporate? I mean, there's a lot there, and to understand what is there well enough to actually do something with it is not nothing.

All that said, 6 years is a long time to spend at your first job. There's nothing wrong with seeing what else is out there. Don't quit until you have the next job in the bag, and keep in mind, when you quit, that you might want to come back.

I dunno, man; I think it is deeply weird how we put so much effort in to airline safety, but let anyone drive essentially anything on the road, without even requiring more than homeopathic liability insurance, and only the most cursory of skill tests. (In California, it's totally legal to drive with $35K in liability insurance; and not all of that needs to cover personal injury!)

I personally think that any additional safety effort ought to be put into making cars safer, and not just safer for the occupants, but safer for the poor SOBs who they run into. I mean, sure, I'm not saying we should decrease airplane regulation (except maybe in the security theatre bits) but I think there's a lot more to be gained, safety wise, by regulating cars more than by regulating airplanes more.

>Fur is a fashion meat is a core pillar in many cultures and changing that will take longer than 10 years.

I think you are probably right... but I want to bring up the counterexample of smoking.

I mean, smoking was never as widespread as eating meat, but I feel like there was a tipping point in the '90s, where it went from something almost every red blooded american would do to something very rude and even forbidden in most indoor spaces.

Smoking became... divorced from manhood.

I remember as a kid I had an IT job; sort of an internship type deal fixing computers for the local county department of public health. I got credit for going to this job instead of taking the last two classes of the day in high school; There was nobody else in the building who wasn't old enough to be my parent. It was so much fun.

I remember when the city passed the 'no smoking in bars' ordinance. The office was super excited. a few people (who I'm pretty sure never went to bars) said they were going to the bar after work. (I was maybe 16, and not invited) I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now that I'm old, I go to bars, too... and you know? I probably wouldn't if they smelled the way they smelled walking past them in the '90s.

the comment I was responding to (from you?) said:

>I've only had issues twice in the last 12 months,

which is often enough, for me at least, to want to carry a backup, just 'cause it's super awkward to eat and not pay, regardless of who is responsible for the equipment failure.

(I've been using the atm-via-cellphone thing and it is pretty neat, though mine only lets me use atms branded with my bank, which diminishes the utility for emergency cash. I think mine (at least Bank of America and Chase) does involve some sort of NFC? I can start the process by waiving my phone over the ATM, which resulted in me looking like an idiot, waving my phone trying to get it to work on other bank's ATMs. Reminded me of how when I first got an electric car (not a Tesla) I pulled into a supercharger and it was... several minutes before I figured out that the supercharger was Tesla-only. )

re reading this, I'm beginning to wonder if I have a stronger than usual aversion to seeming like I don't know what I'm doing? it's not something I've really thought about before. Huh.

>I've only had issues twice in the last 12 months, and in both cases the vendor blamed their equipment for the failure rather than me.

that's... about what I'd expect, and personally, for a twice a year event, I'm carrying a backup. (for that matter, my credit card fails a lot less than that, and I still tend to carry backup cash or another card) it just seems like it would be super awkward to eat a meal and then not be able to pay.

>It would be nice if it had NFC for payments though.

I find this interesting. I mean, sure, when I'm buying online, having a unified wallet is really, really nice and saves me a lot of effort punching in my credit card with each site I buy from, but in person, I don't see how a phone or watch is more convenient than a credit card; I'm carrying backup cash and ID at a minimum already, so adding a credit card to the mix doesn't really lighten my load. (for that matter, the other day I found myself without a wallet but with cash and my cellphone. I ended up in a bar that took credit cards but not mobile payments or cash. It was awkward.)

What use do you find for a nfc payments solution?

>It’s interesting that you specify non-fiction, presumably since part of the point of reading fiction is the process of reading itself rather than simply the plot that unfolds

there's all sorts of "reduced Shakespeare" - most of it more parody than summary, but there is a tradition of summarizing literature and fiction, and the results are not always devoid of literary merit on their own.

>But sexual attraction is an important part of relationships, so going in blind is inherently risky (from a time utilization perspective).

For most of us, there's also a very strong mental component to sexual attraction; I mean, sure, there's also a very strong physical component, but I personally think that the text a person generates is a fairly good indicator of how I will feel about the mental component, while dating site photographs, in my experience, tend to be much less representative of how physically attractive I will find the person once we meet. (note, my experience is old, but my experience is that I'm just as likely to find someone way more physically attractive in person than in a photograph as I am to find them way less physically attractive in person. My suspicion is that some people try to present their very best angle, others try to present their most representative side, while others don't put much effort into choosing a photograph at all.)

The other problem is that people make certain, ah, assumptions about me based on how I look. Assumptions that, well, probably will lead you to an incorrect idea as to my personality and values, I mean, more so than usual.

I mean, this is just my own experience. And mostly pretty old experience; I haven't had an online date in rather a long time, but the best online dates I've had were where we didn't exchange photographs ahead of time, either 'cause we met on a medium that didn't really support them, or because we met on dating sites but without uploading a photo. (and yes, sometimes there was, uh, nothing there, physically, but it was always at least an interesting evening.) - my experience was that on photo-focused sites, often I'd get the sort of 'total miss' - where someone would look at my photo and then make what are really pretty reasonable assumptions from looking at me and, uh, I was not at all what they were expecting.

>Anyway, what sort of graduate work would you like to do and why?

I actually don't have a project in mind at the moment. I have in the past wanted to do a lot more with pushing forward open source diagnostics tools, (and with proving the ESD problems in the way most people handle physical servers) - but I don't know that is what I want to do now; it's been a while since I've been serious about the physical layer, and it's really really unstylish right now; it would be better done once the outsourcing pendulum swings back to insourcing.

I am interested in graduate level work in part because my impression is that my work style would be a better fit; my impression is that if you do something recognized as really pretty great every now and then, they forgive you failures in the meanwhile. Like industry. (I also think I'd be more comfortable going to school with graduate-school age people than with undergrad-aged people. I'm pushing 40 at this point.)

>And I’m surprised your academic performance in high school is still a hinderance. Do you also have not great test scores?

Only okay. I'm held back by pretty terrible math test scores. almost average GRE quantitative reasoning (95th percentile verbal, which is good, but not good enough to make up for an average quantitative) I did pretty okay on the MAT, too, but I don't remember the score, and anyhow, if I want to do something with language or the arts, I really badly need an undergrad. I can mostly read okay and can talk about themes of the classics as well as an arts major, (though, uh, I probably cant speak of the criticism of those works the way they can) - but everything else in the arts I'm pretty terrible at.

(I do have plans to take the LSAT this coming year, with little study. I actively studied for the FE exam last year, but found I have another year of math before I can even try. The LSAT looks doable; I mean, I would be surprised if I do well on it, but I'd give myself better than even odds of doing better than average on it.)

I think bringing up my knowledge of basic maths up through, you know, at least GRE math levels is a moderately high priority, but I haven't quite figured out how.

>If you could get into someplace reasonably prestigious, would you go back to school full-time? Or is being able to go to school while still working important for you?

If I seriously thought that I had a 90+ percent chance of graduating... and I do think that the admissions committees are pretty good at judging that sort of thing, yeah, I would be willing to spend four years on it.

This, though, I think is the crux of it. They won't admit me 'cause I don't have a 90+% chance of graduating. Yes, it seems horribly unfair that they hold my bad behavior of 20 years ago against me, but the fact of the matter is that I still don't have that level of discipline.

I suppose that's another reason I want to go; I see this lack of discipline as a big weakness, and... well, where do I go to learn it? I mean, the good colleges could be said to not teach that sort of thing 'cause they filter out people who don't have it on the front end, so I guess I'm in the right place? but maybe not availing myself to the right bits of it? I mean, there's a very large chance that this will simply be something like handwriting, something that I will be terrible at for the rest of my life, and that I simply work around by not doing the things that require discipline, but... like even with handwriting, I spent a few years at calligraphy as an adult before I gave up on it.

But you asked about motive, and that's different from how I responded. I do need to get better at constrained writing, and to learn even really basic level management type writing, and while this is certainly a goal, a degree is also something I want; I... would like to do some graduate-level work, and that seems difficult without an undergrad.

Also, a degree is an important plan B... I mean, as long as I'm employed where I am, and as long as the industry doesn't change, a degree in and of itself won't help me all that much, though basic management writing might. but if industry changes, there are a lot of cases where having a degree means you are legally middle class. Right now, the pay cut I'd take working anywhere else in the world would mean I should probably just travel on vacation, but if that ever changes? a degree is almost essential to do my job for a non-US company.

It involves a lot of essays... I'm learning a lot about constrained writing, something I'm pretty terrible at as-is. I mean, most of the actual information systems stuff is old hat, but there's a lot to be said for improving my writing to a particular format, and maybe it's best to do that on a subject you already know about? (Interestingly, feedback from my boss has been that I need to improve my constrained writing, that my design documents and things of that nature need to be better, more numerous, and more on topic and to the prescribed format)

It's really interesting 'cause the feedback at the online classes feels... a lot harsher than any I have ever gotten at work; I wonder how much of that is just what is expected in school vs. work? or if it's a class thing, like the school isn't prestigious, whereas most jobs i've had, well, it's usually obvious that I have a lot of other choices... or maybe that I'm really bad at this, and at work, well, there's enough I'm really good at that people treat me somewhat diffidently even in the areas where I'm really bad? I don't know, but it's an interesting experience in a lot of ways.

I mean, it's not bad really, just... really different from how I'm used to people giving me feedback.

But... yeah, I mean, to me it feels like you are paying for essay feedback. Like, they also provide PDFs, videos and reading materials, but I can get all those things on my own; it's the essay feedback, I think, that is the individualized thing.

I read Less as part of my "read all the Pulitzer prize for fiction novels" and I also enjoyed it quite a lot. "the road" might have been my favorite novel on the list of pulitzer prizes in my lifetime.

well, the equation on the "competency based" degrees for me is essentially that they are super way less prestigious than traditional degrees, but they are the only way, as far as I can tell, to get an education without a "you are on time all the time or you fail" condition, as I have a very hard time being on time (and am largely not budget constrained, so the "pay for time" part of most competency based degrees is not as big a deal for me as it would be if I was very slowly earning a degree while working a less remunerative job.) -

'failure' in academia seems, to me, to be way harsher than failure in industry; Nobody brings up even pretty big failures of mine that occured even a few years back in industry, but my high school academic record, more than two decades back, still haunts my admissions efforts, so as far as I can tell, community college is the most prestigious route open to me, and I need to execute almost perfectly to graduate to the next level. I probably won't execute perfectly, especially as my work is a higher priority than school for me, (and my work record isn't perfect either) so I think this is the most realistic route to some sort of undergrad degree, even though I generally work a lot better in person than remote.

There are a lot of 'competency based' programs, and while I think something like that is the best chance I have of getting a degree without permanently marring my record in ways that makes doing academic things harder in the future, I have no idea if I picked the best competency based option. I do personally think that on the low end, you are way better off with a government school than with a private school; that was a big part of my decision. But, for instance, a friend was telling me about western governors university, and... that might have been better? they have an actual CS degree, which would definitely get me further.

So, I think about this a lot. I know a lot of really good sysadmins with no education; like of the people I consider really good sysadmins, close to half might not have degrees, and this is one of the reasons I equate my job to the trades. (I mean, along with the fact that our job is to create and maintain infrastructure so that other people can work) I know a fair number of software engineers with no formal education, though the proportion is a lot less than half. I know very few good electrical engineers who lack formal education. I don't know any good chemical engineers who don't have a formal education.

My own experience (I've tried at school several times. I'm currently enrolled in the computer information systems "competency based" degree at nau.edu, but I've tried a bunch of others) is that school is actually way more difficult than industry. You can't just be brilliant twice a month, as is my experience of industry; you have to show up and perform at 90% every day which seems impossibly brutal to me. I mean, this is probably a quirk of my own personality; I'm actually really good at coming in and dealing with disasters every now and again, but my consistency is... really pretty bad.

I mean, I personally think that a love of and respect for learning is fundamentally more important than education; but I also think that education isn't nothing. There are a lot of people who do a lot better with some formal education, and there are a whole lot of jobs, that as far as I can tell, are almost impossible to do well without a good formal education. I personally don't think I'd let a self-taught doctor hack on me if I had any other choice at all.

My personal opinion is that if there are any young people with the capacity to be good at those things that require an education who are prevented from doing those things because of money, our society has made a huge mistake, one that will cost us much money in the long term, just 'cause having those people perform at peak value is hugely valuable to society. Further, I think that the unwillingness, as a society, to pay for the education of young people evinces a lack of valuation of learning that might be an even bigger problem.

I think That was actually an example of the benefits one can gain by being around people who are smarter and better educated than you are. That book would not have been intelligible without my smarter and better educated co author.

I mean, I do think I am rather a lot smarter than average, but everything is relative, and I believe I have accomplished so much more because I seek out situations where I am surrounded by people I think are better than I am on those scales.

>Some of my kids seem like they enjoy academics, but others do not. I'll be pushing the latter toward trade school. Average IBEW (electrical union) pay is about $20/hr for an apprentice and $33 for a journeyman. $40,000 to $66,000 with ZERO DEBT right out the gate is nothing to ignore (and that pay can easily double -- especially in your younger years -- if you're willing to travel and put in those extra hours). It sure beats minimum wage at a crappy service job.

so, uh, I guess I'm the modern equivalent of those trades. I mean, I don't have a union, but I fix computers and make a whole lot of money doing it, without any education. It is a lot like a trade, 'cause essentially I'm infrastructure for industry. I mean, instead of maintaining electricity at a factory, I'm maintaining servers in a build farm, but it's still infrastructure.

On the individual level you have a point. I mean, as a sysadmin, I do make like 30% less than a SWE, but I still make a whole lot of money, and I started when I was 17.

On a societal level, though? when you don't have a degree, the amount you make is dramatically dependent on how productive the people around you are.

Because I live in silicon valley and manage infrastructure for (mostly highly educated) engineers who are incredibly productive, I make a lot of money. A huge amount for someone who isn't educated or born rich.

If I was in a rural area, I'd be fighting for a job at geeksquad. I mean, I'd handily win that fight, but if I'm maintaining infrastructure for people who aren't very productive, I'm going to make... not very much money.

My point here is that if the US continues this trend of not educating it's children and excluding foreign educated people? Jobs like mine, for uneducated maintainers of infrastructure follow the jobs for the more productive people. If those people start working from china? They're probably gonna go find locals to do my job.

What I'm saying is that it is very much in my interest to do what needs to be done (mostly, I think, pay taxes) to see to it that kids go to college, even if I don't have any children of my own.

nope. Complaining while you are working at a company is generally bad form (though it was something I did a lot) - I'm working deep in the bowels of a faang company and it is so cushy and so remunerative in comparison. I don't even carry a pager anymore! I get vacations! I kinda miss the physical servers, but I own some as a hobbyist.

One of the worst parts, though, was that I felt like getting my first job after working on my own company for a while was... much harder than it has ever been for me to get a job. Like getting a job after being unemployed for a long time, which felt like a huge insult after how hard I worked.

I personally think it's actually a much bigger risk to do this when you are young (I mean, if you otherwise have the opportunity, like I did, to work a corporate job that let you max a 401K) than when you are older, once you have maxed that 401K as a younger person.

>My best advice 3 year post blow up. It ain't worth it. Move on. You will save yourself pain.

My own personal view, if I could go back in time, would be to tell myself to go all in. I think it had a shot, and I needed to take that shot. I still think risking a bankruptcy to get a better chance at that would have been worth it.

I don't regret trying. I needed to try. And I think it was a near-run thing. I could have made it. I feel like there are several points here where if i zigged instead of zagging, I'd have done really well.

I just regret that I spent so long at it, without much success. A spectacular flameout involving business and personal bankruptcy after three or five years would have been far better for my long-term financial health than just slogging along at 1/4 wages for a decade.

Yup. We had a pretty good (20%) discount if you paid for a year up front that customers often used, so it wasn't slow to save up the cash, but it serialized a lot of processes that could have been parallelized. Testing one server well takes a few days. Testing 100 servers well takes a few days.

I mean, there certainly was also a time aspect that was independent of that serialization, but a lot of that was also saving money. I mean, I personally argue that buying servers from parts is less time than negotiating a good deal on an assembled server, but we certainly could have gotten tested servers out faster if we were willing to shovel more money at someone. Maybe even if we still serialized the purchase.

>If you have a growing business making money it should be fairly straightforward to get a loan under your business name.

this is not my experience, not without a personal guarantee or collateral that holds it's value better than servers.

(Leasing servers was also an option that would have made sense then. Most of the leasing deals I was offered that didn't include personal guarantees were two year leases wherein I paid about as much as the servers would cost up front over two years. It would have made sense in that case, but it's super expensive compared to buying servers)

Oh man. I bootstrapped a business on the side, and quit my dajob when it got to the point where it could support me (which is to say, could pay me like 1/4 of my market value in silicon valley) -

One of the clearest mistakes I made that could have made the company opportunity cost profitable had I not screwed it up was that I was conserving capital while I had the opportunity to grow really fast. For a short period of time, because of a blog post someone else wrote, I had a huge waiting list. I was building servers one at a time, using the money from the first to pay for the next one. A lot of that waiting list dried up while they were waiting for me; There is a reasonable chance I would have been 5x bigger at that point had I maxed out my credit and bought servers all at once. And if I was wrong? if I maxed out my credit and went bankrupt? I'd still be better off than I was in reality.

10 years at 1/4 salary is... brutal in a way that bankruptcy isn't. (I think. I've never actually gone bankrupt.)

I guess my real point here is that you need to time box it. At some point, you need to give up. I've never worked with VC, but I would assume that it would act as something of a forcing function here. I think being disciplined about "always take a better job if you are offered one" might also work.