peacetreefrog

Note, again, this was their response when this article was written in 2010. "...since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago" is referring to 2004. Just clarifying, because when I first read this I thought, "what was Mark Zuckerburg doing in Harvard still in 2012?"

It'd be interesting to hear what they'd about it today though. Probably nothing.

On the one hand, this is a very shitty thing to do. On the other, he was young and dumb and FB was very different than it is today.

I suppose it could be red flag and indicate larger character flaws that have leaked into how FB operates now, but I'm personally glad I'm not being judged today for everything I did when I was 19.

I think Stack Overflow is great and it's helped me a lot in the past, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be in the future. I've been learning Elm the past few weeks and have noticed a lack of good SO questions and answers on it. It's a smaller community, but I also think many people go to the Elm Slack channel to ask their questions, which they get in realtime.

Not sure if that's just an Elm thing. A language specific Slack is useful in the moment (probably moreso than SO) because you get a real time answer and can ask follow ups etc, but I can't help but think there's a ton of knowledge/people asking similar questions that is just disappearing into the ether. Makes picking things up harder for more people long term.

I suppose and that makes sense, but that's more of a correlation/symptom of failure, whereas 1-3 seem more causal

All of these seem reasonable, self-explanatory except (4), can you expand/expound on why not taking a salary seems harmful? Is it because then the owners tend to just dip into their cash on hand and aren't that disciplined?

Yeah, this is not happening. I don't think a world conqueror + decree would do it, no one would do it and it'd just be the end of the world ruler. I suppose the mostly likely route might be a nuclear war or something. Chernobyl has apparently turned into a nature preserve since the nuclear meltdown 30 years ago (1). But even radiation probably couldn't keep people out if it was half the world we were talking about.

1: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...

I know that itching feeling well, here's what's mostly worked for me: view your phone as tool with a limited set of functionality. For me, that functionality is: calls, texts, Google maps, Spotify, Audible, podcasts, and a camera.

That's it, no email (technically have the ability to send an email if i need to, but no notifications and no constant checking) and no random internet browsing and twitter etc consumption. I have some blocking apps that help with this, but the biggest thing I think is just the mindset. Twitter in line at the grocery store is no longer what my phone is for. Not that reading tabloid headlines is any better, but the main point is stretching out your focus muscles, getting rid of the urge to immediately grab your phone anytime there's a lull or hint of boredom in your life.

Overall, it's nice. Almost like being back in the 90's pre smart phone but also with a super powerful computer that can play any song you want/give you directions to anywhere when you need it to.

I don't think this is true in a world where people can borrow money.

The thing is, most humans are not doing those types of jobs for YEARS like robots. Humans can learn on the job and acquire skills and impress their boss and get raises and maybe become the boss and apply to other jobs or find something like better. That's why it's called "ground floor", because you can move up, and most people eventually do.

The % of people making minimum wage at any given time is a snapshot, and it covers people at all stages of their lives. Are there some people working their ass off and not making it a la an Upton Sinclaire book? Sure. But that's not most people. In fact, most people (1) making minimum wage are between the ages of 16-24 and aren't going to be making that forever. And even among those who aren't, most are well above the poverty line.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/who-earns-the...

Yeah, and part of the reason we have cheaper stuff is because of outsourcing/specialized firms like this.

Take the hotel example, it's probably much more costly to hire (and interview and vet etc) all your own bartenders and cleaning crews and all that piecemeal. Then you also have to train them and figure out a replacement when someone calls in sick or something. I'd imagine a company that's specialized in hiring and training bartenders could do it much more efficiently than a single independent hotel owner.

Those efficiencies (you specialize in bartenders and so are able to train them with less resources than other places) result in lower room rates and more money customers can use on other things.

Here's the takeaway: the frugals/similar bloggers are bad because they, "are telling an older generation of elite Americans — the very people whose policies and financial decisions kneecapped the economy — what they want to hear: that everything is more or less okay, and young people just need to be more thoughtful about their money."

While it's debatable whether everything is "more or less okay", and -- to some degree -- there are definite systemic issues preventing people from being where they want to be financially, I guarantee you that adopting this attitude ("it's not my fault I can't get ahead, the system is messed up") is going to make you worse off financially vs believing/focusing on what you can control and your own agency.

For example, I do think there are some current millennials who sort of got unlucky with the student loan/college bubble and "were told" (or believed) that they could just borrow whatever they wanted to study whatever they wanted, and it'd all turn out OK. But I'm not sure people graduating high school now nec have that excuse. And if you are graduating high school and reading this, for gods sake, please take it upon yourself to think a bit about what you might like to do and take a long, hard look at what exactly borrowing the median 10's of k's of debt might get you before you do it.

Fair enough. Nothing personal against the people of the USPS. I do think those same "external forces we won't realistically be able to get rid that require the USPS to suck" would also make them suck at banking though.

That's the point though. The USPS costs more then it takes in, by a lot. Yeah, it's due to regulators, but they're not going anywhere. That's exactly the argument against having USPS pick up additional responsibilities like banking. The USPS opens a bank branch in every post office, now those same regulators (who can't even agree on increasing the price of a stamp) are pricing loans and opening checking accounts? What reason is there to believe that would end well, especially when it's a whole new line of business for them?

Not complaining, but the fact I'm getting hammered by downvotes on all of these responses is mind boggling to me. I'm surprised how much of the tech world apparently thinks this is a good idea.

But competition is a problem in healthcare too. Why do you think health care is so expensive? A big factor is no one has to pay for anything out of pocket, and no provider has any incentive to compete on price. In fact, no one knows what the price of anything even is.

It's an interesting question. Obviously the money has to come from somewhere. Mail trucks cost money, and no one is going to go out and deliver letters for free. It's easy to say we should just make up the difference with tax reciepts like we are now.

I think it's less a philosophical question -- is mail like roads or police? -- vs a matter of efficiency. It's obviously possible to NOT lose money delivering much more difficult things than paper. FedEx and UPS do it all the time. But they're private businesses who compete with each other (and Amazon and whoever else), so they have to figure it out or they won't be around.

The USPS, meanwhile, doesn't have to compete with anyone (in fact, it's illegal for anyone else to deliver mail) and has no incentive or need to be efficient because they can draw on the US Treasury whenever they need to. It's not that they're bad people, it's just the nature of the incentives and system involved (and also it's run by congress). These same dynamic would be there in banking though, which is why this seems like such a bad idea.

Congress isn't going anywhere though, why would their impact on the ability of the USPS's money to make money banking be any different from mail?

So the postal service loses money because it's mandated by law that it has to serve the entire country. But mandating that it has to provide banking services for the entire country is going to save money? Ok.

The USPS lost $2.7B last year, even though it has a monopoly on mail. Why anyone would want to give it more responsibility is beyond me.

Producer surplus by definition is benefit to the drivers. It's the amount actually make minus the minimum amount they'd be willing to take. This paper purports to show how the minimum drivers are willing to accept (their reservation price) changes by the hour. Flexibility -- fact they can choose to work when their reservation price is the lowest, or only lower than what they'd actually make -- is definitely a benefit.

Obviously a driver's alternatives are a big factor in whether/how much to drive, but flexibility might even MORE valuable to drivers who have other jobs, because they can work around it.

This paper:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23296

Talks about how much of the value to Uber drivers is in that the work is flexible and can be done on their own schedule. More than 2x the producer surplus vs less flexible arraignments. Put another way: if drivers HAD to work at the prevailing wages and didn't have the flexibility, they'd reduce the hours they supply by 2/3.

Looked at the MIT study for a bit and they don't appear to mention this. Obv flexibility is a major component of the economics of driving for Uber and Lyft and the benefits thereto. If they're ignoring this they're missing a big part of the picture.

What do you mean? What's stopping you from giving your coworker $200 to fix her car? Or do you mean you want Bill Gates to give her $200 for her car?

Simultaneously complaining about monopoly, which allows firms to keep prices artificially high, and "price dumping" makes little sense.

I have issues with both. It's obviously not a monopoly. Apart from Uber AND Lyft, you have regular taxi's, public transit, personal cars, bicycles and the ability to walk.

As for price dumping, again -- if rich VC's want to compete with each other to subsidize my rides and my drivers wages -- I'm not going to complain about it. Uber and Lyft are the epitome of options vs what was going on in the NYC taxi scene before them.

As a consumer (driver), if rich VC's want to subsidize my rides (wages) they can be my guest.

Anti-competitive practices are bad in theory, but I think a lot of time the effects are overstated and businesses trot them out as a convenient excuse to get government to regulate their competition. The political and legislative process is pretty messed up. You can't just assume government will be able to wave a magic wand and fix it with no side effects. Keep in mind the original NYC medallion system was put in place via regulation, and it's the root of many of these problems.

There was a lot of similar anti-competitive talk around firms like Walmart and Barnes and Noble. Neither could have been THAT anti-competitive, seeing as how both are now having trouble competing with companies like Amazon. And meanwhile, consumers have enable to enjoy low prices and get more for their money.

Just because we're not sure what the jobs of the future will be like doesn't mean there won't be any. In the 1800's, 90% of people worked in agriculture. Tell anyone back at the time that in the 21st century it'd be < 2% and they'd freak out just like you are now.

The taxi union teamed up with city governments to restrict competition at the expense of consumers. It's not the rules as they were written so much as the rules they wrote. Getting rid of them is great precedent. What's unfortunate is that it'll be much harder to get rid of rules like this in other, not as consumer facing industries.

Also, re: the "speed" at which this happened. Seems like driving for Uber or Lyft (less money but on your own time) would in theory be a great way for drivers to transition to something else.

It sounds like a cliche, but capitalism = freedom. People can choose whether or how they want to get around -- whether it's calling an uber, hailing a taxi, or walking -- and whether the cost of doing so is worth it to them. Similarly, people can decide whether the money they'd make ($69k annually according to this article) driving a taxi is worth it to them, and if not, do something else. There are alternatives.

Capitalism is just the aggregation of all these micro-transactions. Most of the time, intervening in this system means preventing win-win transactions between consenting adults.

Nice in theory, but implementing well functioning safety nets is easier said than done. A lot of the problems you allude to in healthcare, housing, education stem from previous well meaning attempts that ended up making things worse.

It's a sad story and an unfortunate part of capitalism. But the alternative is worse. You don't (or shouldn't) have a right to make people purchase your product or service at whatever price you want.

definitely

I agree with you, as people get richer they spend more on health, for themselves and their pets.

But just because vet costs are increasing at a similar rate (or more) than human costs doesn't mean the third party vs first party thing isn't the issue. Absolute overall human health care costs are still way higher then vet costs for similar services(1), despite the rates of increase the past few years.

Also, anecdotally, some vets are going the other way. There's a vet near my house, for example, that just started weekend + holiday hours with rates the same as to their normal ones. We hadn't even gone their before, but when my dog woke up last Easter with some eye problem, we called around, found them, and got some ointment that helped. The other two options would have been: wait a day, or go into an emergency clinic that's k's of dollars. If we had pet insurance I'm sure we just would have gone in without thinking.

1: http://parkhillvet.com/2012/09/comparing-costs-of-human-vs-p...