264 karma · joined August 24, 2018
My solution would be $30 for tourists, $6 for anyone with a Portland ID and a loyalty card that you get in three seconds. That solves both issues mentioned (one-off, buckelist tickers and loyalty to locals).
This Hustle Porn is just one area where people can be led astray, and they all come back to this same principal of belief that there are people who have everything together.
A more generalised solution is simply to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.
I think the context here is "computer software and the internet doesn't solve humanity".
The worst things that could happen to the environment would actually be whatever happens that results in a surprise cold spell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age was such a period.
If there is a cold snap, that will likely mean MORE coal burnt in Europe, which will put greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and when the cold period ends, even worse greenhouse affects.
There is virtually no situation in which carbon removal will be anything other than a net gain. We need to start removing carbon ASAP, irrespective of whether or not we can, collectively as a world of 7+Billion, reduce emissions.
The carbon removal side of the ledger is the one I think we can make meaningfully changes in fastest and with the least controversy.
Where can the USA look for similarities? Singapore is one city state, as is Hong Kong. Australia's cities are 600 miles apart. The EU has a language issue moving from city to city, despite London to Paris being 1/10th as far than SF is to NYC. The USA is pretty unique here.
The one similar country is China. The GDP per capita by Chinese prefecture makes the US look positively egalitarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prefecture-level_citie...
China solves their issues by essentially banning movement between areas. The US could never solve their issues that way, for a variety of reasons.
So I'm not sure what the solution is to micro level high homelessness, but macro level low homelessness.
I remember an article in the WSJ by a Pakistani man ~2006, saying "the entire history of my country is a footnote in the history of US foreign policy", and it always stuck with me how much some events can have wide reaching and odd effects, disproportionately felt by specific groups.
The reason to track any metric is to know if you should continue, stop, or go all-in. If you are flatlining - or going down - that's a HUGE sign to quit. If you have steady growth, easy as she goes. Explosive growth, you might want to double down.
Fundamentally, I have so many questions, but no one seems able to answer them, and attempts always end up a disaster. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se... is a great example. Here is the summary:
> I don’t envy the backlash this team is going to face for daring to present results that will be seen as heresy. I know that so many people just desperately want to believe that the minimum wage is a free lunch. It’s not. These job losses will only get worse as the minimum wage climbs higher, and this team is working on linking to demographic data to examine who the losers from this policy are. I fully expect that these losses are borne most heavily by low-income and minority households.
But it gets worse. The city knew that the results of the trial were going to be bad, passed them on to what is essentially an advocacy group who ended up publishing before said study: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-obje... All of which is correct in timeline, but the specifics of which are impossible (for me) to disambiguate.
I have no idea what the correct answer is here, BTW, but it really shouldn't be hard to have data for the question "does a higher minimum wage help or hurt people? If so, which ones?"
Here are some questions no resource seems able to answer definitively:
Does a minimum wage hike:
- decrease hours worked per employee?
- Decrease total employees?
- What is the net effect of that? And to whom?
Less general, if the problem is not enough jobs, how will higher wages move the dial? If there are lots of jobs, pay still might not matter (see last point), but if it isn't the issue, how do these laws help?
Why is less minimum wage employees a good thing? If we put that figure at minimum wage +=10%, less employees in that bracket just means you don't create jobs for the poor, doesn't it? The companies named by Bernie at least try to employ uneducated/poor people. Will bills like Bernie's likely encourage more businesses to deal with the poor?
I can't imagine why any company would want to employ people who are, to be as controversial as possible, more likely to be racist, homophobic, uneducated Trump supporters. Not voters, I mean out and out supporters. Why bother, when you can have a company of woke individuals in a city with nice food and like minded liberals, who won't get you bad headlines in newspapers that parents of your kid's friends read?
Why pick on the one FAANG company that actual employs minimum wage Americans at any scale? How many minimum wage employees does Google have? Heck, lets go elsewhere, what about Goldman Sacks? Why didn't Bernie go after Goldman Sacks, and demand they increase their attempts to employ the underserved?
It is really a weird world where employing rich, privileged PhDs is a free pass, but creating any jobs for poor people is a PR disaster, and I'm not sure how it is supposed to help.
Or I could be way off base, and this is the best approach, as many companies can't/won't ever create many minimum wage jobs, so why apply a lever there at all? Could be the best chance is to make life hard for companies that do have a need for cheap labour, and negotiate for the best outcomes for their lowly paid workers, while strengthening welfare to cover the costs for a few that would miss out.
THAT is why this is infuriating - I have no idea what is right, wrong, up or down, and I really wish there was solid data either way that we could optimise for.
Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a speed boost. IMHO that's awesome. So few people have any real interests, so if you have one, indulge it.
Just call it what it is - a hobby - and reframe your thinking. No other hobbies are indulged because we expect to make money directly out of them, e.g. no one playing soccer in a park expects to go pro, they just love playing. Why should hobby coding be different?
Reframing it as a hobby changes the equation from $0.01 an hour, to "OMG, someone, anyone, wanted to give me money to indulge my hobby!" Then what starts as a time and money sink becomes instead what you live for, and a positive in your life.
This is the inverse of survivor bias, in that you are retroactively applying "best practice" at the wrong scale. What gets you from $0 to $7B may hurt you at $7B. Heck, may hurt you way earlier than that.
However, and YMMV on what problem you want to solve, but saving $1.5M, heck lets 10X it and call it $15M, saving $15M when worth $7B isn't the problem I'd personally be concerned with.
I doubt anyone would enjoy that gig, but it would be a very useful person to have in almost any multi-person team.
Semi-related, how weird is this https://twitter.com/amlivemon/status/1002044167793594368
> As a condition of China joining the WTO in 2000, Visa and Mastercard would be allowed into China market. 18 years later, China has lost a WTO case on this subject and Visa/Mastercard are still not allowed into China. That's just for starters. Don't believe China on trade deals.
China and trade is a real quagmire.