crumpets

No, value to the business only sets the ceiling. The floor comes from the labor supply side of the market. (i.e. can the company find qualified people willing to do it at X rate)

how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.

Society doesn't "decide". It's a decided by the labor market. Nobody wants to pay programmers six figures.

It's a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.

Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.

No it's not. Actors are meant to pretend to be different people.

The CEO isn't supposed to be pretending to be a different person.

No, long before AWS, Amazon intentionally re-invested all of the excess revenue that would be reported as profit back into the business instead (expanding capex and opex).

The number of new cars, new iphones, large houses, and other luxury purchases suggests otherwise.

No, because at this point the barrier to entry is substantial.

Not really. Unless the product has a powerful network effect, people can easily enter. If that weren't the case, starbucks would have run every coffee shop out of business by now.

After doing this for a while, you can use these relative effort estimates to project completion dates for new projects.

This doesn't work. The problem is that you get periods where the work is relatively easy overall so 5 points ends up being tasks that take 2 days. Then you pick up new difficult features and estimate everything relative to all of the new hard tasks and you end up with 5 points meaning 5 days.

Sure you can gauge relative difficulty of tasks between each other, but in a regular developer's day-to-day life the range should really be 1-100 or so rather than making stuff fit into 12 points or less.

absolutely destroyed Bush at

Weird. I thought Bush finished out his term.

They also pay 0.005% tax in Europe, sure it's legal, but is it morally ok?

Yes. How would you decide on any other number and justify overpayment to the shareholders?

They certainly benefit from all the European infrastructure and academic research that they are not contributing back to.

Sounds like Europe has tax problems then. Pass some laws.

Not related? Tapping an undersea cable doesn't compromise encrypted traffic.

Unless it looks like the NSA gets Apple and Google to put in back-doors, the products are still significantly safer than Huawei which is just an arm of the government.

It’s not an analogy at all

Then why are you talking about a garbage company? Your whole comment is building an analogy.

Although I’d like to know which step in my story stops qualifying as one.

This is where it stops qualifying:

Instead of taking the land, the government just declares that it’s legal for the garbage company to dump trash on other people’s land, and the owners just have to deal with it. This is quite different in the details from the original subsidy, but the overall effect is essentially the same.

The government saying "it's legal to do X" and all companies in any industry and any individual (what we're talking about is CO2 emissions) are allowed to do it, it's not a subsidy. It's just behavior with an externality that the government doesn't tax.

Could you find one economist that would say that an unpriced externality is not a subsidy?

All of them?

This isn't a tortured analogy, it isn't an unconventional use of the term, these things are economically equivalent.

No they are not. This isn't the equivalent of a tax break that other companies are being taxed for. It's a think for which no taxes exist for anyone. No industries are being taxed for these externalities.

It doesn't fit any of the dictionary definitions: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subsidy

Most people don't know the word "externality," so using a less precise term that they do know is not in any way deceptive.

It's not a less precise term. It's the wrong term. Might as well call it a bailout if you're going for political outrage.

I personally appreciate the headline saying "town" in a colloquial sense

But that's the problem. It's not a "town" in a colloquial sense for anyone who grew up outside of major metro areas. If 170k is not enough, then there are no cities in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, nor South Dakota.

Two things:

- data costs for bandwidth costs hasn't gone down at the same rate

- A big chunk of an ISP is labor costs, which do not go down over time

There is no difference. Regular debt is also discharged in bankruptcy.

Thoughts?

Don't preempt people that might disagree with you by claiming they are in cognitive dissonance.

People use the word NULL and in all caps as well, in particular in bureaucratic processes like those you would encounter at the DMV.

NULL & VOID, etc.

It is entirely reasonable that the system would not accept an empty string for the plate so the process folks worked around that by instructing all employees to write NULL if they couldn't read the plate.

what I wished existed when I was learning said details.

This isn't what 'pedagogical focus' means though. Just writing down the stuff that helped you out very rarely covers what is necessary to help people out in general.

A pedagogically focused approach would also cover the assumptions you had going in and provide clear references to expected prerequisites. It should also cover the "why" for a specific approach if there are multiple approaches, which is very frequently left out of internal documentation wikis.

None of this is how this stuff works.

Huge amounts of cheap debt allow companies to buy lots of stock, driving up prices.

Companies don't use debt to buy stock. Taking on the debt to do that would depress the stock price the same amount that the buying would attempt to appreciate it.

All of this causes massive asset price inflation.

This would be reflected in the CPI.

Stock prices are detached from actual revenue

No they aren't. See UBER/LYFT/AAPL.

so the FED gets to claim "there is no inflation"

The Fed does not claim that. They claim inflation is nominal near their intended target.

Finally, stop saying FED. It's not an acronym.

Kubernetes is still quite exotic for 99% of businesses.

Not really. The difference in the land cost is effectively negligible. At this point (and it has been this way for many years), the limit in solar deployments is cost of panels and storage limitations.

There are vast chunks of empty land in AZ, NV, NM, TX, CA that could easily fit enough solar panels (each) to power all of the US. The issue is cost of panels and no base load supply.

No. A decrease in Google's share price doesn't increase Facebook's share price. These companies are mostly in the same boat of being large tech companies with significant amounts of power. It's in all of the employees' best interest to suppress stories critical of anything that could be generally applicable to that power structure.

Because hottest month on record isn't scientifically interesting? Yes, climate change is happening, no, we didn't forget. The article isn't even about any attempts to do something different to fix it.

but something that's viewed to be scientific fact.

By who? Do you seriously read an HN comment that states something you didn't already know with a citation you don't bother to click and then just go forward assuming it's scientific fact?

I don't even take publications themselves as scientific facts until they have been reliably reproduced or provide ample evidence.

"data" (whatever THAT means)

Holy shit. Observable evidence.

Facts still trump everything in all of those categories. You can certainly talk about how those facts can be explained by people's emotional state, historical context, etc., but that doesn't invalidate facts that might demonstrate something is pretty irrational when you look at actual data.

When someone says they are afraid of flying, you show them facts of how safe commercial flight is compared to driving. You don't just quietly sit by while they try to pass legislation making flying illegal.

No, you're not right. How you render CSS and the page have very little to do with how secure your app is.

SQL escaping, session handling, etc all come easily with standard php libraries. So "I didn't bother with any PHP frameworks" doesn't mean the dev wrote an SQL connector.

Yeah, unless you have workers, the whole "request is the lifecycle of the app" model of PHP makes it pretty damn hard to get a memory leak.

No? Splitting into multiple companies and keeping shareholders paid isn't turning it off.

OP meant total addressable market (TAM).