rlanday

The withholding is based on Google’s understanding of the law (it’s not like they could just decide to not do it). I can’t ask Google to change their interpretation of the law since I’m not a lawyer.

My concern is that I will file the New Jersey return and pay taxes on the money I earned while working and living there, and file the New York return and ask for my money back since I don’t live or work there, and if New York denies the refund, I’ll be paying taxes in both states.

It’s unclear at this point whether New Jersey will let New York claim all this taxable income or whether New Jersey will try to claim it for itself (it needs the money too). The tax rates are pretty similar in both states but my preference would be for the money to go to the state I actually live in.

It is public information though that the US offices are closed and we don’t have to be back until July (it’s called “voluntary WFH” but they won’t even let us back in to pick up stuff we left on our desks).

> NYC could have issued more supply to reduce the price.

Not really, taxi medallion owners are a powerful special interest group. Just like Bay Area homeowners.

My other favorite YIMBY argument is that the Bay Area would have super cheap housing if only it were more like New York. New York has (had?) some of the most expensive housing in the entire world. Sure, there are zoning laws and regulations that could be changed to build even more housing, but the primary issue is not that New York has less housing than other parts of the country. To the contrary, the cheapest places to live in the US tend to be have the least dense housing.

The issue is that there are not a fixed number of people who want to live in a given area; if there were, every new unit built would allow someone else in the area to either not be homeless or to live with fewer roommates. Really what happens in practice in a high-demand city (conceptually, at least) is the additional supply causes prices to drop by some amount, which attracts new residents attracted by the drop in prices until the housing costs almost as much as it did before. So it’s definitely getting more crowded, with the associated problems, but the effect on housing prices is fairly small in comparison.

The fact that housing prices in the Bay Area create such a concentration of people who work in tech by driving everyone else out contributes to the region’s culture in important ways, some positively and some negatively. My favorite theory (from Date-onomics) is that this causes the local gender ratio to skew predominantly male, which causes the single straight men in the area (while this certainly does not describe the entire labor force, it describes a substantial portion) to work harder (both because they’re trying to stand out to attract a partner and also because they’re less distracted by dating).

The health benefits already have to be set up to account for where the employees actually live rather than where we work on paper. E.g. if an employee lives in New Jersey and commutes into New York, either the health insurance has to cover providers in New Jersey or the employee has to see doctors in New York. It doesn’t solve anything to change an entry in a database and pretend the employee is actually somewhere else.

They could, but they won’t. I think one reason is that management is trying to maximally maintain the pretense that we’re all going to return to the office in July (I don’t see how we can make everyone go back after ~15 months without losing a bunch of employees) to keep their options open. Another is that I think Google doesn’t want to pick a fight with a state government we have thousands of employees in, or get bad press for looking like we’re trying to get out of paying taxes; in both cases, it’s better for the company for employees to take independent action (e.g. asking New York for the money back when we file our returns and making the state government deal with us all individually if it really wants to play this game).

Books and computer chips aren’t really assets (unless they’re collectibles, I guess), they’re commercial products, so I’m not sure my argument really works.

Online music and movies: I think this basically all started with Napster which essentially allowed people to steal music instead of paying for it. That seems like a decrease in demand to me. I think an increase in supply in this context would be e.g. an increase in the amount of music and movies being produced.

Low-end smartphones: Apple’s charging record prices for its new iPhones so I don’t think the availability of low-end smartphones caused any sort of crash in the price of smartphones. Rather, it’s a new market category.

Operating system software: I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. The price of Windows has been relatively stable for decades despite the availability of free alternatives like GNU/Linux. Apple stopped charging separately for its OS and now essentially bundles a subscription into the cost of its hardware. I don’t think it’s ever been popular to charge separately for the operating system on mobile phones.

Sure, the prices of oil and natural gas go down sometimes, or grow more slowly, because of increased supply, but let’s look at the graph of oil prices post-WWII:

https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

The first big crash was at the end of 1985/the beginning of 1986, which Wikipedia says was due to falling demand (e.g. people consuming energy):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut

There was a temporary spike in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait. I guess you could argue that the price went back down because the supply changed.

There was a crash in 1997–1998 that was partially due to increased supply but also due at least in part to the Asian financial crisis. The next big crash was from June 2008 to February 2009, again due to a large financial crisis. There was another crash in June 2015-February 2016 due to a stock market crash in China, and finally we get to the massive crash this year driving futures prices negative, which was of course due to COVID-19 reducing demand for travel.

I’ve seen people do things like compare Seattle and SF housing prices and say, “see, they’re growing more slowly in Seattle because they’re building more!” Even if that’s the case (possible, but there might be other factors at play as well)…that doesn’t solve housing affordability for anyone. It was still getting more expensive, just more slowly.

The issue here is the people no longer work in Massachusetts. They may not even be setting foot in Massachusetts. My situation is that I used to work in Google’s NYC office but live in New Jersey (and have lived here since pre-COVID) and have set foot in New York maybe like six times since March, never for any work-related purpose, yet New York is still withholding income taxes.

If a Google employee ostensibly works in “the NYC office” but hasn’t set foot in the office in over >6 months (will be like 15 months by the time Google’s asking people to be back in July), lives in another state (e.g. New Jersey, maybe the employee took advantage of the remote work conditions to Florida or Texas)…how long should New York be able to tax this person despite the fact that they don’t live or work in New York? Google’s also not headquartered in New York. Google could move everyone in the computer to e.g. the Seattle or the Austin office (but are currently refusing to do so) if we’re all working remotely anyway.

I’ve been trying to explain to YIMBY-type folks for years that while, yes, supply and demand are both important, it’s extremely rare that the price of an asset will crash due to increased supply. It’s almost always due to decreased demand. E.g. the price of taxicab medallions in New York did not fall because the government increased the number of medallions; it was because Uber and Lyft decreased the demand. People sometimes reply, “but that’s the same thing!” I don’t think it is though. Obviously if the number of available medallions went up, we might see a similar effect, but that’s not what actually happened: the political situation restricting the supply never went away.

I think you might be overestimating the level of technical sophistication at play here—if you asked me “how can we verify that these emails are real,” I might’ve been able to come up with this idea, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that jumped into my head reading the article, and I doubt NYPost has anyone on staff who thought to do this either (unless perhaps verifying leaked emails is something they do regularly?).

Mark Zuckerberg is a lifelong Republican political operative?

But this is not a decision they made based on anything their fact-checkers told them. This is a decision they’re making before they get the results of the fact check. Andy Stone did eventually follow up with a clarification:

> This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review.

So apparently this is a standard process, but the process is kind of ironic in that it claims to farm out this decision to a neutral-as-possible third-party, when really they first have to make a preliminary decision internally.

It’s not really possible for Facebook to take itself out of the equation—Facebook sets up its algorithms to encourage the spread of engaging content. So if a story spreads on Facebook, it’s because they designed their algorithms to make engaging content spread. But if Facebook goes and adds a special-case on top, “don’t spread this particular story,” then they’re obviously interfering at that point. So they sort of inherently have to take a position one way or the other. The only other option is to do something like always make the algorithms focus on engagement without any special-casing, possibly with a general rule to limit how fast any new story spreads, but presumably they have reasons for not wanting to do that.

I think Facebook is in kind of a sticky situation since their recommendations algorithms function similarly to a newspaper picking which stories to run. So on the one hand, if this story turns out to be garbage, they don’t have any obligation to be promoting it to their 2 billion users. But also, I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been established yet—someone at Facebook merely thinks it might be garbage, possibly because of their pre-existing views of the people involved. I think their concern is that, if a story is possibly garbage but takes time to fact-check, then there’s no way to avoid promoting garbage stories to people while waiting for the fact-check to be completed (perhaps “fact-check” should be in quotes here, the fact-checkers also have opinions of their own).

The thing that bothers me is this doesn’t seem more obviously garbage or likely to be garbage than a lot of other stories that I don’t think got the same treatment, and they’re choosing a very partisan story to start applying this precedent to.

Also, disturbingly, looking at Andy Stone’s employment history:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-stone-7575b34a

we see employers such as:

- John Kerry for President

- Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

- U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer

- House Majority PAC (at a time when the House was controlled by Democrats); this was his job immediately prior to Facebook

Stone’s listed title at Facebook is “Policy Communications Director” so presumably he’s just communicating the policy rather than actually setting it, but not only does he have political opinions of his own (which is essentially impossible to avoid), he has an extensive history of engaging in partisan political activism for a living.

I don’t understand this argument here:

> Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the government be on the hook, stepping in and paying the college what’s owed.

> This amendment completely overhauled that system, making it so that for the vast majority of student loans, the federal government directly made the loans to students. More specifically, the federal government pays the universities/colleges up front, and the student then owes the government that money.

What’s the difference between the federal government directly making a loan and a private lender making a loan and immediately pawning off all the risk on the federal government? Either way the lender does not care if the borrower will be able to pay it back. It sounds like the problem predates the Student Loan Reform Act of 1993.

30% federal plus 15% state is also higher than 40%, isn‘t it?

Didn’t PG&E also have to shut off a bunch of people’s power last summer to try to avoid burning down any more cities? I recall there was talk about this happening for an entire decade. So really at this point it seems like summer blackouts might be happening every summer in California for the foreseeable future.

The hashtag is not #RestructureSTEM, it’s #ShutdownSTEM, and he’s apparently had it up for 11 days. In a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands, in all likelihood eventually millions, of people. In my view, that says all I need to know about this person. He’s a raging asshole.

This is the same problem, by the way, as the people tweeting #DefundPolice who get upset at people who think they want to abolish the police entirely. The word “defund” means to remove funding for, not to reduce funding for. It’s the height of arrogance to come up with a slogan either intentionally or accidentally using a word to mean something totally different from what it actually means, and then get upset that I am not willing to learn more about a movement that is effectively engaged in trolling.

That’s really cool. Is that a divided highway? How do the trucks back up and turn around there?

On what planet should “shutdown STEM” be a reasonable position to hold in the middle of a global pandemic where hundreds of thousands or millions of people’s lives depend on quality STEM research being done in a timely manner?

The truth of this claim is disputed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/ft63zn/dk64_memory_lea...

The lead artist claims they’d always been planning to make use of it. There’s compelling evidence of a memory leak or similar issue since the released version of the game apparently crashes if you leave it running for some amount of time over 10 hours (which wasn’t usually a problem in practice except for very long speedruns until it was released on Wii U Virtual Console and people started using save states which don’t reset the timer the same way as turning the game off and on does).

Uber has the same problem as Groupon: scaling into new markets requires a team of people for each market. It doesn’t have great scaling properties simply by virtue of being a tech company.

Uber lost $8.5 billion last year. They’re notorious for continuing to operate despite it not being profitable.

How much higher can Uber’s volume get? They will probably never exceed the volume they were seeing a few months ago and they still managed to lose $8.5 billion last year. How in the world do you increase prices by that much without losing most of your customers? Unfortunately in the age of coronavirus, the irrational exuberance is gone now.

“Lose money on every sale but make it up on volume” is not a sustainable business model.

No, this isn’t really true. Look at all the people hoarding toilet paper because the price is below market equilibrium. If the price were higher, there would be less hoarding, and more people could wipe themselves.