simplecomplex

It’s cold and uninviting, not a warm and relaxing environment for reading and pondering. You’d think it was a museum not a library.

What’s with the recent trend of libraries and coffee shops that look like modern art museums (cold, bright, lack of wood, metal, sharp acoustics..)? I can’t be the only one who notices this.

Proper diet, exercise, and avoiding smoking also prevents more than a third of heart problems. It’s safer than blood-pressure or cholesterol medications.

> There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value".

If there is, then how would I calculate the intrinsic value of a piece of real estate, to levy a tax on it?

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

Margin of error? I don’t think you understand me.

There can’t be a margin of error because there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything). Margin of error compared to what?

People attribute different values to the same property, which is not reflected in any sort of assessed value.

I’ll explain with a question: If I say a property is worth $30k and you say it’s worth $100k what should the assessed value be?

Pretty much. An assessor can write down any assessment they want. All assessed value taxes have this problem. The value I attribute to something can only be objectively defined by a market transaction. And more importantly, people attribute different values to the same thing.

This is simple to illustrate by example: Three people are willing to buy the same property at different maximum prices. Person A is willing to buy at $35k, person B at $30k, and person C at $25k. Any value an assessor writes down will necessarily be different than one of the three people. There is no dollar value intrinsic to the property itself.

Sounds nice but the devil is in the details. Land value tax would be determined arbitrarily not by the market. It’s sounds great if you ignore the problem of actually assessing unimproved land value.

Of course we know “value” is just the amount of money someone traded for something, so Georgism can’t be implemented practically.

When you stop thinking about how awesome LVT is and think about how to calculate it, the whole theory falls apart.

Advertisers don't follow us around and take photos of us, so that's not something we need to worry about. But CCTVs do have photos of us being taken every 10 seconds in public in major cities. It's not an issue. Nobody is publishing CCTV photos of me. Similarly, advertisers aren't telling your spouse what websites you visited. They just want to show you ads that are relevant to your interests.

My point is that the expectation of privacy is unreasonable in every situation. For example, it's unreasonable in public or when doing business with others.

So? What’s the problem?

If I go in public someone might photograph me or see me. If I visit a website, it might log information about my visit (to show me ads).

Sounds fine to me. I like reading free news articles, paid for with ads. If I don’t like it I can stop reading them.

Great. Professional adults don’t talk about heated issues at work when it is not necessary. For obvious reasons.

What forces a homosexual black man into talking about politics at work? Could you give an example ?

Yes, life can be hard. And it’s unfair.

It wasn’t easy or fair in preindustrial times. People worked a few hours less on average, but they received less wealth in exchange and had no opportunity to educate themselves and grow wealth. Serfs were not given a choice of job or even the ability to leave or marry without their lord’s permission. Peasants were stuck for life, unlike someone who works low paid 2-3 jobs today.

Here are numbers in question:

13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours

14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours

Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hour

1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours

1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours

1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours

1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours

1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours

Someone else is working for you instead (unless you saved this money).

Whoever pays your bills is your boss. If the pay is contingent on attending graduate school then it’s actually a job.

Never before has education been so cheap or widely available. The whole world’s information is available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Haskell!

If you aren't proficient in a functional language like Haskell then you haven't completed your programming education. Go, Rust, D, etc. are all just C with fancy features. Change your whole programming paradigm.

Here's a great deep-dive into Haskell web server performance: https://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/warp.html

And if you're building an API you don't need to code! Just throw postgREST in front of a postgreSQL database and get a haskell-powered API for free. No need to write a web server.

Yeah, its so terrible being able to search the whole Internet for free, carry a computer in your pocket, and order anything delivered to your door.

Elizabeth Warren is an idiot, and her ignorance is destructive and a threat to a productive and free society. Arbitrarily destroying businesses doesn't make anyone richer.

A Ponzi scheme lies about the source of returns. WeWork is not lying about any financials. WeWork is not a Ponzi scheme and you know it.

What did they omit that constitutes a lie in your opinion?

How is it fraud? Investors make idiotic investments. Nobody is being forced to buy shares of WeWork, and all the financials are there. It’s not like WeWork is lying about financials.

Write a spec... What sage startup advice by YC lol. Who would have thought.

Seriously though check out Shape Up: basecamp.com/shapeup

It’s a whole book on how 37signals makes the sausage. Goes over how they spec out a feature, decide on what should be built, etc. They’re a team so not everything applies to individuals but there’s a lot of useful ideas. They give concrete examples and case studies. Including specific examples of specs.

How is that possible if you're comparing the same data loaded on the client vs the server? Server has a faster Internet connection and connects to the DB directly (not over HTTP).

Sure, clients load "faster" if you mean they don't actually load everything. Apples to oranges.

If a page needs to make 5 DB queries to present a bunch of data, those 5 DB queries will be faster on the server than from the browser. So will parsing the response and transforming it into HTML.

Super happy customer of Fastmail of 7 years now.

It’s a joy to use. Fast, responsive, and reliable. No pointless redesigns or 10 second loading screens like gmail.

By definition welfare is a net loss. Otherwise it wouldn’t be needed.

How can it be bad for immigrants to get more than they put in, but not citizens?

The “immigrants will get more out of welfare than they put in” is exactly how welfare is supposed to work!

No, they are terrible experiences. The most frustrating part is that I’m not in control of what I read.

I use feedbin to aggregate RSS feeds. I control what I read. If someone I follow publishes something, it’s in my feed, in fucking chronological order.

There are no ads, no algorithms, no NLP, no comments, and no pop-ups demanding my email to continue reading.

There is no gender or financial requirement to be a CEO. Everyone can be a CEO.

Here’s some job ads for CEO: https://www.indeed.com/m/jobs?q=CEO

You’ll notice there’s nothing about gender in any of them, or being born to wealthy parents.

Consider that maybe the limiting factor to becoming a CEO is yourself, and not society, men, rich people, discrimination, etc.

Which study would that be? This one [1] concludes “both the “ideological sorting” and “vote-buying” hypotheses are able to explain the positive correlations observed between PAC contributions and voting behavior.”

In other words, vote buying is not necessarily why votes correlate with contributions along policy lines.

Fact: You can be a CEO.

Fact: You can be elected to vote on laws.

Fact: There is no financial or divine right requirement to run for office or be a CEO.

[1] https://www.ifs.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Bronars-1997-...

Nope. Not really. CEOs don’t rule anyone. We elect representatives who vote and make laws.

But you know all this, so the feudal comparison is pretty melodramatic and ridiculous.

You can be a CEO if you want. Give it a try!

Nobody deserves anything. CEOs get paid because they negotiated the pay and people are willing to pay them that. That’s a fact not an economic theory.

VCs get management fees typically 2% of fund size. VC incentives are misaligned with LPs. Very similar to hedge funds. As long as they keep raising the money keeps flowing and they can delay showing a return. Whether the fund fails is irrelevant. There’s an endless supply of rich LPs like there’s an endless supply of kids with a “startup”.