seibelj

Can you name an example of a monopoly that has developed in the last 50 years that didn’t occur because of crony capitalism?

My company has a large typescript monorepo with many (~100) devs all committing to it daily. We use rush and pnpm (and eslint and some other stuff).

Very solid repository. No complaints. Pleasant to work in

This is because you think too much. Most people just have kids and figure it out, same as it has been since the beginning of time.

Meat is nutritionally superior to plants. Humans do not process cellulose easily. It takes far more plants to equal the nutritional content of meat. I tried Beyond Meat as an experiment but it tastes awful. Real meat is better.

> What is 'red tape' though? No-one ever defines what red tape they would remove.

Where do I begin?

- Stop setting prices by government diktat for medical professionals' salaries and procedures. Stop preventing private enterprise from building competing clinics and hospitals. Enable public health insurance to go towards the cost of private treatments in order to reduce lines.

- Stop requiring licenses for all manner of jobs that don't need them. You shouldn't need a license to cut hair, be an interior decorator, and all manner of work that expensive licensing requirements do nothing to help

- Radically increase the speed to approve new housing and transportation development. Do a single environmental review, get 1 round of feedback, then move forwards

- Reduce import taxes and establish free trade agreements so goods breeze through customs from trading partner countries

- Increase legal immigration to expand the consumer base, expand the labor supply, and allow entrepreneurial foreigners to come in and start new businesses

- Drastically reduce corporate and income taxes to promote productive economic development

Or do the opposite of all this and be surprised when economic activity stagnates and people get poorer year after year

I tried the Beyond Meat ground beef substitute once to see if it would work in tacos. Stunk up my house with a weird smell, tasted off even with all the spices, and made us all feel a bit sick after. No wonder their stock is tanking. Humans are meant to eat real meat, we evolved this way.

Green energy (except nuclear) is inefficient, expensive, irregular, and the money for it goes straight to China and developing nations who mine the rare earth elements. Even Germany finally backed off from de-commissioning their last nuclear plants as the Greens realized it was illogical.

Need to remove red tape, stop controlling prices, de-regulate business, establish free trade agreements, and do all manner of things to increase real productivity and not the government-pretend kind of productivity.

Reality is a tough pill to swallow and it will likely take several years of misery before the obvious solution becomes the only solution.

My company pays SF-payscale salaries no matter where the employee lives. That's how we attract and retain the best talent.

My productivity went at least 10x when the pandemic happened.

- No commute

- No 1 hour lunch (walking, buying, eating, cleaning up)

- Not in an open-desk office where I'm constantly interrupted

- Meetings are much more focused and I can hop between meetings quickly

- Easy to do chores if necessary during the day and then work extra hours at night to make up

- Office politics much reduced, output is easier to measure by necessity and people's output is much more clear

Additionally I was forced to double-down on socialization outside of the office, reinforcing relationships that exist no matter what company I work for, further reducing my aversion to jumping ship.

In summation, WFH forever, I'm never going back

Being a poor immigrant in the USA is far, far superior to being poor in many Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Honduras, and Guatemala. Only an extremely naïve and privileged person would even pretend that isn't the case.

I think the difference is if you do it yourself vs. trust a third party. The third party is charging a risk premium.

I worked in an office next to an Uber clone that was clearly unsuccessful. Yet they had a significant Series A from a Russian oligarch, then got bought a few years later at something like 10x the Series A funding amount by a different Russian oligarch. There was a press release and a news story about how wonderful this was.

This scheme was so clearly a laundering play, but everyone pretended it was some amazing exit. I'm confident the tech industry is full of these shenanigans, but I've never seen anything like this uncovered.

Everyone in YC sells to each other. It's quite encouraged to buy from other YC startups and test out their tech as alpha customers because it increases the valuation of the YC network (including your own company). It's a very interesting model because as a SaaS getting the first enterprises to sign up is extremely hard, yet those add enormous equity value and provide the proof and case studies for growth at scale.

YC can be thought of as a tech startup affinity network. The"shocked-pikachu face" attitude of the author, from being surprised a napkin worked for funding to being amazed that YC-affiliated startups gave him revenue before a product is live, is a testament to the YC model. Either the author is unaware of this obvious inside-network effect or they are pretending it doesn't exist. In the real world no random enterprise cuts you a check for untested, pre-live, alpha software. It is the SaaS cross-selling YC scheme that enables this.

I'm not even saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It's just a very unique model that is a warped inversion of real-world economics, and it decreases the risk for investors provided the whole network can continue selling into each other.

Every single business can be a vector for money laundering. From cash laundromats to high end technology, if the launderer owns the business then it has potential. I would estimate the government catches somewhere in the ballpark of 0.00000001% of all laundering. Businesses also have zero incentive to stop this activity as long as they get their margin.

I want to take the same public dollars that are funneled directly the monopolistic, corrupt, badly run system and instead give the money directly to parents to use as a voucher. If they like their current public school, wonderful, they can give them the voucher. If they want to go someplace else, the money is there for them.

Is any of that actually going to be a massive industry-defining feature? Marketing blogs are already negative value to me, relying on AI to write something as important as my resume is a non-starter, and marketing emails already go straight to the trash.

I'm very impressed with the AI image generation, but again, it replaces... stock art for blog posts?

If I was a creative writer then I think the AI could help me with plot outlines or get over writing blocks. But otherwise I'm not grasping why this is going to automate some huge number of jobs.

Please, put your children in terrible schools out of some sense of social justice or whatever. I myself will do what is actually good for my family. Given the school down the street from me had its Vice Principal of Gang Violence execute a student he recruited to deal drugs for him, our local high school my children would be automatically zoned into is sadly not an option despite my tax dollars paying for it. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/03/05/former-bos...

There is a place in society for schools that will treat you like cattle and babysit you all day. There is also a place for academically challenging schools that provide a strong education. I don’t want to ban the latter in order to improve the former.

Thank goodness in America we have the constitution to prevent such authoritarian activity.

That is another vector on the spectrum of decisions for why quality teachers choose to work at private schools. No one takes a job purely on salary - a decision like that is based on many things.

Isn’t it obvious that good teachers want to teach children with parents that want them to learn? And punish their children when they are disruptive? And the school can kick out bad kids?

The current vogue of reducing everything in education to the lowest common denominator - eliminating gifted programs, enabling disruptive kids to ruin classes, removing suspensions and expulsions - is exactly why private schools are growing. I don’t want education to optimize for the worst kids who won’t go to college and into intellectual pursuits anyway. I want to optimize education for the kids who will actually get value out of it.

You don’t seem to know how to evaluate them, yet everyone agrees Harvard is better than your local community college, and there is literally a private school half a mile from my house that charges $60,000 per year. So clearly some people know how to distinguish a bad school from a good school and allocate their money appropriately.

A lot of Western non-US countries honestly don’t have a lot of attractive private sector businesses. Small nations with strong public education are very unique. For example Norway only has 5 million citizens, extremely low immigration, a mono-culture and mono-ethnicity, and earns a huge amount of money from selling fossil fuels which are then funneled to public use. Yet the left in America pretends the Nordic model can apply here.

America is unique. A lot of our public services are quite expensive and quite low quality. Our system is organized around the private sector and the more we embrace the private sector the better things are.

In my opinion, the voucher system is correct - keep funding public school through tax dollars, but give the parents a voucher for the amount to spend where they wish. If every parent in Boston received a $25,000 voucher to spend at the school they wished, competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers.

Unlike many on the left, who despise monopolies in business and ruthlessly hunt them down, yet worship monopolies the government has (like in public education), I think public dollars should be allocated to the parents to make decisions they feel are best for their children. Saying “just move if you don’t like your public school” betrays the reality of how difficult it is to relocate for the non-tech elite who can’t just work from anywhere.

People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need.

What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just because education is heavily regulated by the government and full of people ideologically predisposed to pretending economic rules don’t apply, doesn’t mean supply and demand is false and the normal rules of gravity are suspended.

I myself have children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. The per-student funding here is $25,000 per year. Yet excluding a few meritocratic public schools that you have to test into (which they are making ever harder for my Asian children to get into as they reduce the seats allocated to tests and give away to “underprivileged” races, aka not Asians or whites) the schools are dog shit and anyone with a few bucks avoids them like the plague. So money is not the problem in Boston, it’s the horrible nature of the public school system.

I’m confused why we are arguing about. I thought you were claiming Ethereum needed ASICS to run and therefore would use more energy. Which is not the case.

It’s like saying the internet needs more energy to run when a new application is developed. No, the internet is the same, it’s the application that now needs energy. So while the total energy the internet uses has increased, it did not increase the total required for the internet to exist itself.

I’m saying there will be no requirement for ASICS in Ethereum. There may be L2s to scale Ethereum that require ASICS but that would be a voluntary decision by users who want to use said L2.

I believe the zk provers will only be for L2s. The base layer will always be the way it is now. The base layer will be settlement for various shards, as it is now for Arbitrum and Optimism.

That doesn’t mean we need more power. It just means the requirements of ZK proofs may need specialized equipment to process them efficiently. Different problem.

There is an Ethereum protocol standard (similar to RFCs in the internet context) that defines a standard for NFT royalties https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981

FYI I am an author of this standard. It is widely supported across the ecosystem https://royaltyregistry.xyz/

My company doesn’t care where our NFTs travel or trade on. We get our royalty regardless.