mattficke

This is basically the Kaiser model. Kaiser's doctors are salaried, rather than getting paid per procedure. Works pretty well!

(I think the actual answer to the question in the OP is, at least in part, to license more doctors. Then the cartel doesn't have as much pricing power and medical care is less of a luxury good. The rich person should really hire a lobbyist.)

That includes things like index funds. The vast majority of people do not own individual equities.

Effective Python [0] is my favorite book in this category.

[0] https://effectivepython.com/

They wouldn’t be homeless anymore, though. I think that’s a pretty solid improvement, regardless of any other challenges they have in their lives.

This bill doesn’t appear to do so, but I hope the exempt occupations are revisited at some point. Companies like law firms and software consultancies have no trouble billing out many of these exempt jobs at an hourly rate. I don’t think there’s a great argument that the workers shouldn’t get the same labor protections as other employees.

No that's right, unions can't prevent layoffs or office closures, the idea isn't to prevent any sort of changes. To use a programming metaphor, it's more about avoiding undefined behavior. We use contracts to define professional relationships in almost all other contexts; employment relationships are unusual in having terms that are largely unspecified.

A union is just a framework for negotiating a contract. It does two unique, significant things: it allows for negotiating a contract that covers a group of workers (rather than an individual), and it requires the company to negotiate in good faith (they can't just refuse to agree to a contract at all).

The contract itself is the important part, and the details are going to vary based on the situation. A $1M minimum salary wouldn't make sense at a tech company, but is reasonable in the NBA. On relocations, you're probably not going to forbid them, but maybe you have some specified amount of severance for this situation for people who can't move to the new location. Or maybe there's a minimum amount of notice the company needs to provide, so people don't have to pull their kids out of school in the middle of the year or whatever.

I don't see why it would necessarily reduce mobility. I think it would make the company a more appealing place to work, so perhaps people would be more likely to stay at a unionized shop, but I don't think that's really all that different from someone staying at Google because they like the office cafeteria.

Mostly, though, I think a union is not as extreme of a change as it's sometimes portrayed. It can't make money appear out of thin air, or turn around a failing company or industry, but it also doesn't prevent innovation or remove the flexibility to reward high performance. It's just a way for employees to put themselves on more equal footing with the company when setting employment terms.

This sounds like it’s in response to the criticism many tech companies have received for providing on-site meals for employees, instead of spending money at local restaurants.

For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/technology/san-francisco-...

(disclosure: current Mapbox employee, in the proposed bargaining unit)

The primary value is that a union is the only realistic way a worker in the US can get their employment terms specified in a contract. Without a contract, these terms can in many cases be changed arbitrarily and with any amount of notice.

For example, Yahoo made remote employees either relocate to an office or resign in 2013 [0]. With a contract, the process by which this change could be made could be defined in advance.

Severance is another example. In many companies, the amount of severance an employee will receive is not disclosed in advance. A common process is to offer the lowest amount the company thinks the employee will accept and still sign a separation agreement. This penalizes employees without substantial savings. And since there's a short window to exercise potentially expensive stock options after termination, many employees have an urgent need for a large lump sum of cash right away. The employee is in a weaker position without a contract specifying severance.

A contract could also do things like limit non-compete clauses. These are already non-enforceable in California, but are still common in other areas of the country.

Judging by the disclosures in the proxy statements of public tech companies, executives frequently have these types of provisions in their employment contracts. Because of their position, they're able to negotiate these individually; regular workers need to act collectively to get similar benefits.

[0] https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/25/technology/yahoo-work-from-...

He’s saying the quiet part out loud, but this is almost certainly not a rare opinion.

It was long enough ago now that people new to the industry may not know, but Google, Apple, and others were illegally colluding for years to reduce employee compensation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

You had to click through a few menus to use it, but yes (I think it was called “experimental web browser” or something). Worked internationally too, I used it to look up some stuff when I was on vacation in Turkey in 2010.

It would be unenforceable, with the caveat that the protection only applies to non-supervisory roles and only when discussing salary with other employees internally. Companies can still limit your ability to disclose your salary externally, as a trade secret.

>The main idea of the non-compete agreement is that employers want to stop people from walking off the job and taking trade secrets to rival companies.

I don't think this is quite right. The main idea is that hiring and developing employees is hard and expensive, and companies want to have a claim on the future labor of the employee because of the investment they made.

In the tech industry, recruiting fees of 25% of the first year salary are common, which is an enormous amount of money and shows how valuable anything that accelerates the hiring process is.

Banning non-competes is a good idea for essentially the same reason a low unemployment rate is good: companies have to compete against each other to be the best place to work, which improves compensation and conditions for workers. It's easier when your only competition is poverty and unemployment, but that's not a good outcome for society at large.

> You need to take the base rate of criminality into account

So is this the kind of thing you measure with calipers, or…

This is a little more idiosyncratic than the other recommendations, but the “Bite Size Networking” zine by Julia Evans is a really nice overview of networking tools on Linux.

https://wizardzines.com/zines/bite-size-networking/

Your bank is going to start charging you interest as well. They might have a teaser rate that's positive up to a certain balance, but there's limits to the arbitrage here.

This is a systemic problem with tax enforcement in the US in recent years, caused in part by reduced funding for the IRS. Wealthy people can afford expensive legal defenses, which makes it more expensive for the IRS to pursue these cases, so they focus instead on easy to win cases against low income people.

>According to data released by the IRS last week, millionaires in 2018 were about 80% less likely to be audited than they were in 2011.

Audits of the rich continue to plunge while those of the poor hold steady, and the two audit rates are converging. Last year, the top 1% of taxpayers by income were audited at a rate of 1.56%. EITC recipients, who typically have annual income under $20,000, were audited at 1.41%. [1]

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-ameri...

Original discussion of the spec from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272634

There's been a lot of attention to the impact of fatigue on performance in competitive cycling, it's interesting to see this research in other sports as well.

In 2015 Team Sky (the dominant pro team at the time) experimented with using a motorhome for their race leader instead of the provided hotels during a stage race, to help him sleep better at night. The UCI almost immediately banned the practice as an unfair advantage [1].

[1] https://cyclingtips.com/2015/06/team-sky-motorhome-blocked-b...

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18074690

Worth another read in light of the recent TOS changes.

Brian Acton, the co-founder mentioned at the beginning of the blog post, resigned from Facebook in 2017 over early steps toward this and forfeited $850 million as a result [0].

[0]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...

This is a great list, thank you.

Julia Evans has a Pandas cookbook that's a good complement to the official docs: https://github.com/jvns/pandas-cookbook

The claim isn't that the explanation is incorrect or based on a faulty premise, they're saying that there was no explanation at all.

Maybe they're right about FB incorrectly flagging their ads, I'm not in a position to judge. However, they're making a misleading claim by saying this happened without explanation and leading with the image showing no Page Quality violations, since the affiliated Freebies page did apparently have numerous violations.

>Freebies has been plagued by recent ad violations suggesting they are not following policy for dating ads. Freebies has never run a dating site, nor has it advertised for dating sites on Facebook. The CEO of Freebies, Mike Debutte, tried in vain to reach out to Facebook for help in appealing the supposed violations that are causing major disruptions and loss of revenue to our business. It was frustrating and handicapped the business, but it had become the cost of doing business on Facebook, so we just kept doing the best we could to continue to grow the business.

Isn't this the explanation? I get that they disagree with the substance of the violations, but it doesn't sound like this came out of nowhere like the headline claims. They were repeatedly flagged for ad violations, then their pages were shut down when they ignored these as the "cost of doing business".

The primary holding of the Supreme Court case that shut down Aereo[1] in 2014 was that their streams were "public performances", the category of violation that is being strengthened in this act. That decision is more consequential in light of this.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In...

Effective Python is one of my favorite intermediate-level books on the subject https://effectivepython.com/