millamox

In New York, less than half of the cost of roads is borne by drivers via the gas tax. In California, drivers pay less than a quarter of the cost.

There are no states in the US where gas taxes cover more than 60% of the cost of roads.

This is another form of racism/classism. White people have no problem paying for white people transport (cars!). They object to "city" transport which often carries poor and other-colored people.

RI receives a substantial sum of taxes (income, property, sales), and the residents also support (and grow) other RI businesses. It's a pretty good deal, when the realistic alternative is that those individuals will neither live nor work in RI.

Most of your physical security comes from two things:

1) the fact that the rest of us lock our doors, so most ne'er-do-wells have accepted the notion that closed doors tend to be locked. It's a form of herd immunity that protects you so long as only a small number of people behave like you.

2) the shift from cash to electronic money, meaning that physical theft is less lucrative than it once was (and meaning that most money is protected by entities that invest meaningfully in security.)

You're a free rider, benefiting from effort made by others, while being a (small) net negative to society. You're welcome for the security we've provided for you.

Why on Earth do you brag about taking such a one size fits all approach to hiring?

Code challenges for non coders? That's just adding entropy。

I strongly disagree. it would have been useful f they'd stuck to problems without well-known solutions.

Sadly, they also mixed in issues which are easily solved, or in a particularly egregious case, where they just complain about a bug. As though MySQL never had a bug. That was silly.

My read of it was: Postgres annoyed us a few times, and we got fed up with its, so now something different will annoy us. Please look forward to our blog post in 4 years about how we're using X instead of MySQL/Schemaless because those were also imperfect.

I paused at that one because I don't like the state's intelligence arm, or it's sub-contractors.

However, I decided it was ethical for the context of this conversation, because to my knowledge they don't lie to grow revenue. They claim they'll charge a huge pile of money to analyze data, and that's precisely what they do.

You made an "edgy" but incorrect generalization based on sparse anecdata. It was good for your comment karma, but it's silly to stand by it.

AirBNB's CAN-SPAM violating email was clearly unethical. A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying. There's an important difference.

Ethical people do not need to leave Silicon Valley. Dishonesty is not prerequisite to success. Your claims are wrong.

> virtually all of them were built on mountains of spam and bad/unethical/illegal behavior,

This simply isn't true. There are a few who did that, but they're the exception, not the rule.

Shady unicorns: Uber (too many to count), AirBNB (spam), DropBox (lied about encryption/security), The Honest Co (lied about product quality)

Not Shady unicorns: Xiaomi, Palantir, Snapchat, SpaceX, Pinterest, Spotify, DJI, Intarcia, Stripe, Vice, CreditKarma, CloudFlare, BloomEnergy, Fanatics, Slack, Blue Apron, GitHub, Domo, SurveyMonkey, BlaBlaCar, Lyft, MongoDB, Buzzfeed, Cloudera, Automatic, EventBrite, Evernote, Warby Parker, Docker...

The narrative that "everybody cheats" is just something that cheaters tell themselves, so they can pretend that their behavior was warranted.

That said, it's worth discussing these things before applying to a company, because dishonesty creates massive risk in the company, so if you hear and answer that sounds like 'downandout's, you need to devalue that company, because their lack of ethics creates risk for that particular company, and it creates reputational risk for you.