qsymmachus

WeWork's business model makes more sense when you realize it's probably just a scheme for transferring VC money directly into Adam Neumann's pocket. He owns a number of the buildings that WeWork is leasing: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/01/16/wework-c...

Markets != capitalism, markets predate capitalism, and the end of capitalism does not necessarily mean the end of markets.

Because capitalism is an optimization function for making money. It doesn't care about anything else.

Sure we could ban child labor, but then millions of children would be out of a job.

I'm only half joking – the problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify almost any injustice or inefficiency if there is a cost to fixing it.

You are right to flag the issue, and most serious proposals to introduce single payer healthcare in the United States also lay out a transition plan for health care workers to move from the private to public sector.

The alternative is universal single payer health care, paid for by taxation.

I think you're making this sound harder to implement than this really is.

> There is no consensus about which of 5 workdays to drop to get there

As a company (or better yet as a society), just redefine the weekend as Friday – Sunday, or Saturday – Monday. I don't think anyone is proposing a free-for-all approach where people get to pick and choose which day they take off.

> Enforcing shorter days means that the gap between the hard workers and those who are just showing up for the hours

I have a hard time understanding this mentality. The law and your labor contract only requires you to work 40 hours. Some people may choose to work more than that, but to what end? So you get to feel superior to your coworkers? If the law reduced the work week to 30 hours, would you seriously hold it against people to spend more time at home with their families?

It would not be hard to run a B2B business for 4 days if most businesses had a 4 day work week. That's what the author is arguing for, right?

Phasing out CFCs was much easier to do because CFCs do not make up the backbone of the global economy the way fossil fuels do.

There were some hacks in the aerosol and chemical industries who tried to deny that it was a problem (the chairman of the board of Dupont declared that ozone depletion theory was "a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense"), but they were small fry in relative terms.

The bottom line is that too many powerful peoples' wallets are lined with money earned by burning fossil fuels. That's why there is no Montreal Protocol for carbon dioxide.

So long as economic growth remains the primary goal of most societies, and so long as that economic growth is tied to the use of fossil fuels, then climate change will not be stopped.

Maybe, on the other hand, an appeal to "civility" is often used to squelch criticism of bad behavior. There are plenty of business and political figures who, for one reason or another, deserve little more than a "fuck you" and getting booed off the stage.

We can debate whether Zuckerberg falls in that category!

"Dry fast" means you consume neither food nor water, correct?

How can a human possibly go "8 to 10 consecutive days" with no water?

There's a book about it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

As the comments on this post make clear, there are a lot of HN readers who go to great lengths to reduce or even eliminate screen time for their kids. Just this week, the NY Times wrote a piece about how parents who work in tech are most wary of the impact screen time has on their children[1].

Even more broadly, the same gap was found between high-income families and low-income families. Poorer children spend ~2.5 more hours in front of a screen per day than rich children[2].

I am seriously concerned about this emerging "digital divide", which is ironically an inversion of what everyone expected. What does it say about the kind of things we are building, when the people who work closest with tech are most afraid of it, and take the greatest lengths to keep it away from their kids?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-sil... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-scre...

This is the thousandth time I've clicked on a "crypto" article expecting it to be about cryptography, and instead it's about blockchain/cryptocurrencies.

Is this a losing battle?

You make it sound like poorer Americans are blowing their paychecks on designer handbags, but the article makes it clear that that's not what's happening. "Luxury goods" as economists define them are not what you'd expect. To quote the article:

> It’s worth noting that by the specialized nomenclature of the dismal science, even eating at McDonald’s is a luxury — that is, we do it more as our incomes rise — while smoking and lottery-ticket buying are categorized as necessities.

Mhmm, sure thing pal.

I studied Latin for five years before I read the Golden Ass. It's not a straightforward text.

Glad this is back on the front page, because an earlier post with the story was flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569

Someone care to explain why this was flagged?

Certainly, and it's probably difficult for smaller tech companies just barely making a profit to cover the high cost of hiring a software engineer.

But typically the companies who complain the loudest about "not finding qualified engineers" are not small consulting shops, but big firms that are already very profitable. They _could_ afford additional engineers, but they'd rather make another $1 on their dividends. It's often just a question of priorities.

It's very lightly regulated compared to most other industrialized countries.

> FANG

An acronym invented by Jim Cramer: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google

> Maybe they can't find anyone who will work cheaply enough to justify hiring them based on how much they will generate the company

While we're on the topic of FANG, these companies post profits in the billions of dollars. They could afford to pay their engineers 5x what they get now, if they were so inclined.

As you said, economics (read: the profit motive) means they will actually pay them what the market demands (and no more). As rational actors (again thinking with our economics hat on), big tech companies would love it if the market for SWEs were a little less hot, and they could get away with paying less. Why make 1 billion in profit when you could make 2 billion, amirite??

So it's not a conspiracy theory to suppose that a big part of what motivates the "we need more STEM grads!" narrative is a desire to saturate the job market and thereby depress engineer salaries.

The Tech Worker's Coalition organized a protest outside Lanetix's office this morning; it had good turnout.

Edit: Check out https://techworkerscoalition.org/ if you're interested in joining future actions.

As an epistemology science is extremely rigorous – if something can't be measured (and thereby tested), science can't claim to "know" anything about it.

This is an excellent standard for particle physics, but can be extremely limiting in other contexts. You probably claim to "know" a great number of things, despite the fact that you have never "measured" any of these things (or could ever hope to measure them). Whether or not we can consider this knowledge is an old debate[1].

When taken to extremes, the scientific world view just devolves into "scientism", which denies the possibility that we can know _anything_ outside the strictures of the scientific method.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

Does anyone have experience with both gRPC and Thrift? I'd be curious to know how they compare.

> I don't understand why she would be entitled to half given that she did not contribute half

Under California law, all assets acquired after marriage are considered "community property". This means that regardless of who "actually" earned the assets, they are owned by each spouse equally (50/50).

Not all states have this regime, and there are good arguments both for and against the concept. I believe that the strongest argument in favor is that community property prevents power imbalances from developing within a marriage. It is sadly common for a spouse to be trapped in an abusive or unhappy marriage, but who cannot practically escape the relationship because they do not have independent means of support. Community property provides a guarantee of financial support should a marriage dissolve.

People who learned block letters first, and who rarely encounter cursive, undoubtedly find block letters easier to read. But you might imagine that if had learned cursive first and used it regularly, you would have no problem reading it.

The point I'm trying to make is that the preference for block letters is an accident of how most of us were taught, and not intrinsic to the writing style itself.

Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never even taught how to write block letters.

The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective?

Edit: anecdotally, I write cursive cyrillic faster than I write block letter English, and Russian isn't even my native language.

This is not a pure supply-side problem. In general, demand for college instructors remains high and job growth in the sector outpaces the average[1]. This is not surprising given that the number of students enrolled in post-secondary education continues to rise[2]. There is plenty of teaching to be done, the problem is that the bulk of this teaching is no longer done by full-time professors.

In the last decade, universities have shifted teaching responsibilities from full-time, tenure track positions to part-time adjunct positions. Today, half of all teaching positions are part-time and include no benefits. Adjuncts are paid an average of $2,987 per semester-long course[3]. That's less than $1000 a month. If you've ever taught a college class before and realize how much preparation it actually takes, an ostensibly "part-time" position easily demands 40-60 hours of work a week.

In some fields, over-supply is helping drive this trend[4]. We produce more History PhDs than there are jobs to fill. This weakens the bargaining power that academics have on the market. But this does not absolve universities from their role in the immiseration of academics – after all, they continue to accept more PhD candidates with full knowledge that most of them will never find gainful employment in their field. This is not surprising given the fact that departments now rely on _graduate students_ to teach one-fifth of their course loads[5].

The "casualization" of post-secondary teaching is also a disservice to students, many of whom don't realize that the bulk of their instruction is now done by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who don't have the time or incentive to do their best work.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/posts... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.20.a... [3] http://www.chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/... [4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/11/grad [5] https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts

A creepily common idea among certain libertarians.

"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."

– the inimitable Peter Thiel

You carry two laptops, two smart phones, and two cameras on your person?