tchaffee

At 75% of the US population obese and a cost to society in the billions, that's no longer "some subset of the population".

It's long past the point of "people with this issue should take responsibility".

If you enjoy weed, and I think that's fine if you do, you should be able to forsee a future where the weed industry in a capitalist system with few regulations ends up in the same position as the food industry: having created highly addictive and unhealthy products to the point of causing massive and lasting damage to society.

It would be better to smartly regulate early on and avoid the disaster and the predictable overreaction as a result. It is hard to smartly regulate. But worth the investment if you want to continue enjoying something.

And smart regulations don't require a nanny state as you implied. You can still choose to smoke cigarettes. But smoking has declined from 20.9% of adults in 2005 to 11.5% in 2021. Thanks in part to smart regulations and higher taxes.

At the very least we should be willing to tax harmful substances at the same rate at which they cost society.

That's not a nanny state. That's just fair. Why should I pay a part of your choice to smoke cigarettes?

Divisive politics to the point of violence or even self destruction. Some pests you try to exterminate.

Soaking the beans and discarding that water before cooking them greatly reduces the phytic acid. Beans are excellent for health. You just have to follow the traditional methods of prepping them.

Or I just understand the realities of having to sort through large piles of CVs while having a time limit. And that in the real world HR will indeed use heuristics, even ones that don't appeal to our sense of fairness or effectiveness.

You've offered no alternatives other than your schoolboy insults.

> If you're letting HR who have no idea what they're doing, go from "a hundred CVs" to "two openings" you are bad at your job.

What I said was different. How many CVs should we eliminate before calling people back for the two openings? What if the pile is 500 CVs? Call all of them? I guess you stop coding for the next two months and that's ok? Or maybe you let HR help you sort the CVs by priority.

> who have no idea what they're doing

I've worked with some very talented HR people. Maybe you haven't been so lucky.

> HR's job, like legal, or many other departments, is to facilitate what you actually do which in this case means work like chasing references and ensuring the candidates have somebody who can answer stupid logistics questions without bothering the interviewer.

HR does more than facilitate. They protect the company from legal threats, just as one example. In the case of needing to trim down a huge stack of applicants to an actually manageable stack, then HR will do things like search the internet for people's reputation. If you think that's not their job, that doesn't change the fact that they are going to do it anyway. HR very often has a say in candidate fit. Especially if HR is responsible for company culture, as is often the case these days.

> Picking software engineers, especially if you actually care whether they're any good, is not the purpose of an HR department.

At most companies the HR department is pretty involved in the hiring process no matter what the position is. At smaller companies maybe less so.

Or they are just busy. A pile of a hundred resumes and two open positions usually means you disqualify quickly.

Sometimes we need to pay rent and deal with obnoxious HR departments.

HR will definitely reject someone because of the title of a blog post. When you have a pile of a hundred CVs and two openings, you disqualify quickly.

I'm basing this on real world experience.

Fair point that you're just making a prediction about future capabilities. I'm not convinced but time will tell.

Can you reassure me then with the data that backs up your claim? Because in my very long career I've seen a lot of people use heuristics when deciding who to follow up with.

"According to a 2018 CareerBuilder survey, 70% of employers check out applicants’ profiles as part of their screening process, and 54% have rejected applicants because of what they found."

Get your resume. HR looks up your name. Throws out the resume. It could be fun if you can get an interview. It might hurt you though.

Ok, so you couldn't give sources for your first claim, so now you're moving the goal posts.

Let's try again. Can you give sources showing that AI effectively models the economic decisions of non-rational actors? Anyone who can predict the economy should be able to quickly become very wealthy.

Waiting a few weeks for a GP appointment is normal everywhere. And it was far better in London before Brexit. The significant factor actually being the defunding of NHS that has happened over the past decade.

My non-emergency care in London is still excellent. It was better ten years ago.

Yes I'd like to get an appointment within a few days but even with my excellent private insurance outside of the UK it's a few weeks wait. GPs aren't sitting around waiting for customers anywhere in the world.

What rational actors? Could you share some sources showing that individual economic choices are mostly driven by a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them? As opposed to being driven by habit, emotion, and social customs?

The rational choice for food would not lead to an obesity and diabetes epidemic in the wealthiest country. Something doesn't add up.

> my point is that the power of the police unions is due to the public support for the police, not simply their collective bargaining power.

I would guess there are other factors. The NHS is hugely popular in the UK, and the workers unions are not as powerful US police unions. Like most things, there are probably a lot of small details that make it complex.

> everyone wants to "support" the police no matter what.

> many leftists, who are generally very supportive of labor unions, still want to "defund the police"

Seems like one of these claims needs adjustment.

Also noted that defunding the police usually means replacing the police with other roles that are more in line with community needs. So there's still a need for labor unions.

"They have argued that cities should instead prioritize the programs that have been defunded over the years that would address root causes of crime and poverty, like education, healthcare and homeless services."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...

Hiring based on a sustainable budget makes sense. That doesn't tell us if we should hire a few people at a high salary or lots of folks at much lower salaries.

I don't have an answer either. It's one of the few economics questions that I've never seen a good answer to. The best I can come up with is to allow some market competition to government services and then to match market salaries. That's still not ideal because labor supply and demand is distorted. I've been asking this question for decades. It's a challenging problem.

We only need to look to nature to find the immortal jellyfish.

Much of medical science is "artificial" extension of life. Natural would be you dying of Smallpox at a young age. Instead you've artificially extended your life with a vaccine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

And who forced you to work for that employer?

What I'm asking is how would people employed in the public sector negotiate a fair wage if the unions didn't exist? What would the mechanism be?

What's your definition of "overly generous"? Based on what criteria?

We are already there. The FDA has approved hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. And there are over 3000 clinical trials under way. We know already that we can effectively treat some blindness.

The reason I mentioned heart disease is because of how widespread it is and how dramatically it might increase average lifespan. For heart disease specifically it is indeed hard to tell how far away we might be from stem cell treatment being a success.

But stem cell treatment as a whole has already delivered.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7367472/

What was the "forcibly" part?

Public sector unions do seem problematic. How do you suggest public employees negotiate the highest possible wages for themselves?

UPS drivers just negotiated $150k TC by the end of five years. That's for unskilled labor.

Think about how much additional profit highly skilled engineers could capture from company owners if we negotiated as team against the organized team that company owners pay for.

Negotiating as an individual against a full time team seems nuts.

Why leave so much profit on the table? For what good reason?

It seems like we are so close to some huge breakthroughs in longevity. With stem cells we can do things like this.

"The extent of change caused by a heart attack is too great for the heart to repair itself or to prevent further damage from occurring. Notably, however, cardiopoietic stem cell therapy reversed, either fully or partially, two-thirds of these disease-induced changes, such that 85% of all cellular functional categories affected by disease responded favorably to treatment," says Andre Terzic, M.D., Ph.D., director of Mayo Clinic's Center for Regenerative Medicine.

https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-re...

Yes, that's an assertion I would dismiss. It's easy enough to say "we don't know", and far more accurate.

> Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits.

That's interesting. What's your data source showing this outcome?

Intel is still around, still innovating, and still profitable. It has a lot more competition than in the past, but they are still a force to be reckoned with.

I haven't seen any evidence in any of your comments. You try to persuade (which is not evidence), but I haven't been persuaded.

> The Great Depression lasted quite a while!

It wasn't caused by a big advance in technology. [1]

"There is no consensus among economists and historians regarding the exact causes of the Great Depression. However, many scholars agree that at least the following four factors played a role."

1. The stock market crash of 1929. 2. Banking panics and monetary contraction. 3. The gold standard. 4. Decreased international lending and tariffs.

Nowhere are technological advances mentioned. You can probably find an article that mentions it, but productivity increases as a cause are considered heterodox theory.

> If the only way an average person can get money and be a consumer is to sell their labor, then they will get less purchasing power over time.

Not if they are as organized and lawyer up like the folks they are negotiating with. And the numbers say you are wrong. Purchasing power has stayed about the same over the past 40 years. [2] The real problem is that workers increasingly negotiate as individuals against an organized management team who has the goal of extracting more profit for the owners, and less profit for the workers. Organized workers have far more negotiating power, but workers fail to join in and use this advantage. Who is to blame for that other than us workers ourselves?

If workers had become more unionized over the past 40 years, they would have captured more of the profits and wealth gaps would be smaller. We can see exactly this with UPS announcing lower earnings for owners in the coming years due to unions winning higher salaries.

> The wealthy can get that way without needing to pay much to human PRODUCERS. That’s the point.

How? Where exactly is the money going to come from if the producers don't have any money to spend? From where does this money magically appear and who is buying the products that the wealthy are selling?

[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/causes-of-the-great-depress...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

I would rather use TC because health plans and pensions vary from company to company. So the number I'd go with is around $150,000.

Right of you to call out the rounding up though. The article was exaggerating with $170k, and to remember that number I had mentally noted almost $200k. I looked for the article later to refresh my memory. You're right that any discussion on this deserves more accuracy than I started with.

The important thing to me is for us workers to recognize how to get a fairer share of the increased productivity. Unions have delivered throughout history.