ghein

No controls for any other industry - if you want an H1b, bid.

So anyone who desperately needs someone on a visa can get them. Low-end body shops go away and a bunch of industries that are being cheap don't get their visas. This is called a good thing.

There are many sectors where hiring managers want degrees and other certifications and pay minimum wage or damn close. Then they complain about worker shortages.

This is all solved by higher pay and better conditions, but people want to bring in indentured servants as it's easier. As someone who has run businesses and bootstrapped, that's utter BS.

I'm appalled at the lack of ethics in civil and mechanical engineering!

Automotive engineers willfully destroyed opportunity for stablehands, whip manufacturers, and train conductors out of hundreds of other occupations annihilated.

Civil engineers with their oriented strand board trusses, reinforced concrete, and dimensional lumber stole the livelihoods of masons, carpenters, foresters and so many more.

Engineers have centuries of unethical practice to atone for. They need to stop their work because everything that they do is harmful and unethical!

Sometimes you catch a spy, fire them, and have them arrested.

Sometimes you identify, feed them false information, and watch who they talk to...

Sometimes you screw up.

There can be good reasons for GE/FBI/CIA to let a spy keep their job.

The reward function was horrible!

You need good sightlines for the kids, room for desks, and need to ensure kids aren't isolated in a corner. Plus light (not just to a small courtyard), ability to escape in case of fire or other emergency!!!!!!! and for minimal noise intrusion from other classrooms.

Minimal space and building material are just not the right constraints and speak to absolute ignorance of the actual problem on the part of the designer.

It all comes down to how explicitly preferences are originally understood and then if the reward function can incorporate implicit analysis.

There have been recent studies about AI powered shirt design - the original input uses existing designs in terms of color and shape rather than the basic naive description of requirements that an engineer would give. Then the designs can be assessed by a review board or put up on a site and not produced until some n quantity of purchases.

You wouldn't try to detect cats in images without labelled data why would you try something MUCH harder without labelled data?!?!?!?!?!

The proposal was fine and jail for repeat offences, now it's been kicked to "review".

Like Seattle's job tax once you get serious attention on something, not to mention the teeming hordes of trial lawyers drooling at the opportunity to sue Santa Barbara Council for ADA violations, the idea is going to die a quick death.

They would have gotten away with it without all those people blowing it out of proportion...

Many pensions have ambitious assumptions of 7 or 8% annual returns.

S&P went from 1565 Oct 07 2007 to 735.09 Feb 27 2009.

We're now up to 2818 but if we had delivered 8% since october 07 we'd be at 3649 by this Oct 5. So we're 28% short!

If you use S&P peak in 2000 it's 1552 and to deliver 8% since then we'd need to be at 6209!!!

Catching back up to steady state growth, especially after a 50% loss, is unfathomably hard!

What makes it worse is that the present value of obligations skyrocketed as interest rates went to 0. In 07 the Fed Funds rate was 4.5% and it's currently 2%. This rate was 0.25% until the end of 2015. For a payout of $50k per year for 10 years, ten years in the future, the present value is $481,031 at 0.25%, $368,442 at 2%, and $254,761 at 4.5%.

So the current obligation is 44% higher than it was in 07 and the amount of money is 28% lower than expected. And this is AFTER the S&P has had an incredible run from 735 to 2818!

Well said!

Too many critics focus on pure dollar optimizing rather than value optimizing. We all have different value maximization functions - if you understand that dollars are just one type of value so called irrational behaviour is coldly rational. Dynamic time preferences for money are accepted but dynamic preference functions for other things (status, sense of self, stress level..) are ignored.

The second part of your analogy is off.

It's not billiard physics to general relativity, it's billiard physics to fluid dynamics and predicting the exact route of a stick through a set of rapids.

In economics our biggest complaints are around failure to determine that we're near a singularity and failure to predict behaviour through singularities (in a signal processing sense). It's understandable, as we all strongly care about the path of the stick, yet still unreasonable.

Macro is a decent enough tool most of the time, as are traditional fluid mechanics approaches. What we don't have are ultra precise CFD tools but in our arguments we act like we should/do. Sometimes traders think that they do have a great CFD solution and that's how we get LTCM crashes!

This is exactly why people have been screaming about this problem for a couple of decades.

It is going to be HUGE and do incredible damage. Retirees will be hurt catastrophically, costs of government borrowing will skyrocket, programs will be cut massively, workers will abandon government.

The issue is that the costs of meeting the prior obligations will be completely impossible. States, cities, and school districts will go bankrupt, massive numbers of people will be fired, and taxes will go up while service goes down.

Unfortunately the politics prevent a fix today and prevented a fix 10 or 20 years ago when it would have been much cheaper. The fix will happen in 10 to 20 years and it's going to be horrific.

A major problem is that this is a case of I'll be gone, you'll be gone.

The union leaders and the politicians - typically in their 50 to 70s - who made the promises will be dead by the time the 25 year old new hires try to collect their pensions at 55 or 65. The incentives are all sorts of screwed up and it's very difficult to create a healthy set of constraints for this kind of bargaining.

The guarantees - constitutional in some states - are what will cause the problem to be bigger.

When you can't resolve unsustainable debt without bankruptcy, then you will go bankrupt and credit rating be damned.

Detroit, Chicago, Illinois are just warm ups for the big battles over the next few decades.

There are political choices behind the decline in infrastructure.

It costs NYC $2.1B per mile to build the Second Ave subway while in Europe it costs $200-500M per mile. There's California High Speed Rail, and then there's just the cost to build a condo in San Francisco (see the "historic" laundromat in The Mission).

You have interlocking legislation, many reasons and opportunities to sue, esoteric work rules. Regardless of the validity of each element the structure as a whole is patently absurd and abhorrent.

Then you have government spending. A university does not need much beyond some blackboards and some professors to teach most everything from Philosophy to French to Advanced Data Structures to Topology. Certain PhDs need more equipment but essentially all the expensive equipment should be paid for by research grants or contracts.

Over the past decades more and more classes are taught by adjuncts at Starbucks level wages. Meanwhile the percentage of staff and spending on administrative functions has climbed dramatically. Adjusting for inflation, from 1947 to 1995, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent. Instructional spending, by contrast, increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase.

Obama promised to invest in "shovel ready jobs". There was a backlash because so much money was being spent on construction and thus, due to the current makeup of construction workers, the vast majority of money would go to men. Spending was adjusted to include other projects so that the gender balance of spending would be more palatable.

So to get $1 in new infrastructure spending you need an additional $1 in net new other government services. Or possibly much more than $1, depending on the various worker populations. This in an environment where you're getting only 25% to 10% of your initial money's worth.

So $1 in net new infrastructure costs $20 or more.

In 2005 (pre bankruptcy) each GM car had $1525 worth of health care costs and $675 worth of pension cost built into the price.

So $2200 was being spent on benefits for a population that had 1 worker for every 2.5 retirees.

In California, School Districts are increasing pension contributions from 8 percent of their payroll in 2013 to 19 percent in 2020. This is already creating havoc as teachers unions are threatening to strike unless they get pay increases because districts were saving money to prepare themselves for the 2020 budget math!

https://calmatters.org/articles/california-teacher-pension-d...

When you're designing or building some things you are just GOING to kill people.

The right decision in designing a car (centre of gravity, stopping distance, thickness of gas tank) WILL kill many people.

Incompetence killing people is one thing (bad spec for o-rings, Therac 25 programming leading to massive radiation dose) but in some programming domains you just are going to make decisions that end badly. If you make the right decisions you'll kill fewer people than the alternative but still some are going to die.

It comes down to this question: are they Viaweb or are they Amazon?

If they're Viaweb then they should only do "taxi-like" stuff and should throw away all the automation and other businesses.

If they're Amazon then they are in transportation. Eats acts as a flywheel - more pay for drivers, more demand for drivers, more supply of drivers, more loyal customers, more revenue from customers. They should do automation, be involved in trucking, eats, scooters... add more flywheels.

What's the right strategy? We'll know in 5 years and all proclaim that it was obvious!

We praise "peer review" without understanding/acknowledging that there are few peers and little review.

The aphorism "science advances one funeral at a time" is saddeningly true.

The more rigorous areas are those with little time lag between input and output, and results that are easily verifiable. Do you die within 2 weeks of taking this drug or are you cured - strong results. Take this pill every day for 40 years to reduce your all factor mortality by 15% - not so much. An imploded sphere of plutonium either gives you a lump of metal or an earth shattering kaboom - no need for a second lab to reproduce.

Areas with high time lag and difficult verification/reproduction are more vulnerable to research and policy entrepreneurialism. Whether it's salt hypertension, red meat and heart disease, the Cornell Brand Lab, or much of sociology errors last for decades because of the high costs of verification and the low rewards.

You'll notice that nearly EVERYTHING that you consume comes with the State of California Cancer warning.

Salt to hypertension thesis has been hit with a number of problems recently. As have many other "known" results in dietary and epidemiological studies.

Current research suggests that while salt is bad for people WITH hypertension the causal link between elevated consumption and hypertension isn't what was earlier believed. One study here https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317099.php

It's because the language and approach with respect to Asians (and specifically Chinese, Korean, Japanese backgrounds) echoes the explicitly racist efforts of top universities, especially Harvard, in the early 20th Century against Jews. Holistic applications in the Ivy League were created solely to keep the Jewish population to a manageable level.

This for people who relatively recently experienced severe racist treatment by the government, currently experience racist treatment in pop culture (Lauryn Hill's racist treatment of Koreans in Doo Wop for example, or Spike Lee's movies), and see local governments creating intentionally racist policies (Philadelphia's attempt to ban security glass in liquor stores).

This is a very good and detailed list, includes some of the things that I did in my sales process.

One thing to add is that for each company you should reach out to MANY people. CEO is a key target and the prototypical person to be involved, it's just that depending on the culture, structure, and personal preferences the best person to get involved is different at each firm.

So do research on the Founders, the Board, major investors, CEO and other C-level execs, head of Biz Dev, head of Corp Dev, head of Product Management, and all of the biz dev and corp dev teams. Reach out to them through your network or directly but blanket the organization if you're going in cold or don't here back from a referral to the CEO within a few days.

The Romans were claiming a link to the Trojan war in their origin myths! Prominent Romans would "discover" an ancestral link to a named hero...

While the Japanese Royal Family claimed descent from a God.

I've sold a company in your space. Reach me on gmail

gramerhein at...

There's a reason why most contests state that you have to be 18 to participate.

It's generally overlooked for free fries but for real prizes you need an adult to claim them. Like teenagers that sneak in to a casino - they can win a few hundred bucks but if they win a big prize there will be a demand for ID, they'll be kicked out, and no prize awarded.

Kids can't be encouraged to gamble because they aren't going to make mature decisions.

The people doing the rigging were looking to hit targets and get bigger bonuses. There was pressure up and down, depending on personal and corporate positions. There were also issues in terms of perceived stability of the reporting bank - didn't want to quote too high a number or else you looked injured and could be dead within days or weeks.

While the LIBOR (and similar) rate had a huge impact given how many products referenced it, the direct trading is rather smaller and the direct impact of misquoting was small. Rates were moved hundredths to at most tenths of a percent.

Using the billions figure is hyperbolic and doesn't reflect what the people involved did or were trying to do.

If you want to fix problems in important markets, just like in code, you need a clear, detailed, and nuanced understanding of what happened and the motivations of those involved.

Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe in free choice? Do you think that individuals in a city/state/country should be able to talk to others in a different city/state/country?

Is the Great Firewall of China a good thing or deeply evil?

Anyone is free (outside China and a few other places) can install their favorite version of Linux, use Opera/Firefox/whatever, use protonmail, search on duckduckgo.

Why should the government FORCE people to use a different source of information than the one that they prefer?

Advertisers are leaving local monopolists/oligopolists (local TV stations, newspapers, cable, yellow pages) and choosing a different, cheaper, more effective, and more flexible option to reach customers. Producers and consumers were very badly served by these old incumbents, why should the government step in to protect those old and malevolent businesses?

It's the same thing as Uber vs Taxis. Taxis are racist, expensive, government enforced oligopolies that exploit the drivers, have bad service, don't want to take credit cards (don't even mention Apple/Google/Samsung/AliPay), and aren't available when you really need one. Do you prefer app enabled car service or the old style Taxi, like the ones using terrorism in Barcelona to protect their monopoly?

We have an information commons with infinite choice and network effects. Same as with language. If you're comfortable using criminal law to require individuals to speak a certain language in private, then sure government should control what companies and products people can choose to engage with. The New York Times, Cox, Bertelsmann, and Reed-Elsevier would love that, along with Xi Jinping. Just realize that you are consciously strengthening old corrupt oligopolies and annihilating free speech and freedom of choice.

What people?

Google is a Delaware Corporation with substantial operations in California. Who runs it in your ideal world? The people of Delaware? US federal government?

If you want a different Google for each jurisdiction, how small down do you give the control? A Google for France? A Google for each department? A Google for each Commune?

How does this approach fit with WTO and EU rules, not to mention the US Constitution?

What do you do if Google reacts against your move? Moves its employees/servers/incorporation? Do you run a Great Firewall of X to stop people in your area from using Google?

There's just no way Android's acquisition would or could have been stopped.

Google bought it in July 05, one year after IPO. The smartest phones available were the Blackberry 7750, Motorola Q, and Palm Treo. Google had $3B in revenue in 04 and was on its way to $6B in revenue in 05 when it spent $50MM on Android.

There was no way this acquisition would have been blocked without clairvoyance. Even then "stop this $3B company from buying a startup because it's going to destroy a $35B company in 9 years" is not exactly a compelling argument.

The argument is even more nonsensical than that against Facebook's Instagram acquisition, which is saying something. People argue that DOJ or FTC should have stopped a company that hadn't yet IPOd from buying a company that had raised $7MM (and would raise $50MM a few days before the facebook acquisition).

Sure they're obviously huge in retrospect but they really weren't at the time. Interesting and hot companies die all the time: YikYak and Secret looked like they were going to take over the world at one point.

People here really misunderstand and misapply the concept of economically viable to extract.

As cheaper sources are exhausted, the more expensive ones become viable. So we won't run out on the projected time horizon.

The main reason why US and Australian rare earth production has gone away is because Chinese sources are so much cheaper (aka no pollution or safety regs). No production, no exploration, and no development of rare earth sources.

As cheap production goes away, people again look for, build, and use other sources.

Most benefits are taxable at least in part.

Health is the most tax advantaged, and then retirement. Comes from WWII era rules aimed to prevent wage increases.

The challenge in building Enterprise SaaS is that you don't know what the right price ceiling is or how to differentiate your customers & products. You need to charge enough to have a business and not too much to scare people away.

Since there aren't that many true enterprises that will allow you to test public prices like you can with consumer and SMB products, you have to go private.

The political dynamics you mention apply to developer pull products but you can easily fix that by calling or sending an email. In many Enterprise cases you want to talk to a VP or CXO for a full deployment and the free and medium offers cover the developer pull demand. If you really don't want to talk to sales AND you can spend $500k+ a year, you're a very rare case.