stopping

Why are you asking? My hope is that you are asking this genuinely from a place of curiosity to better advance this discussion, as there is apparent confusion from people working from different definitions of the same word.

The term you're looking for is "surplus". The consumer sees a surplus of value because the price they paid is below the maximum they're willing to pay, and the producer sees a surplus because the price they charged was more than the cost to produce the good. In this economic system both parties benefit. Economic surplus is the thing that is "created" with every transaction. "Surplus accumulation" as a concept doesn't make any sense, and is isomorphic to what you think people are saying when they use the phrase "wealth accumulation." You should update your definition of "wealth".

Is anyone else having trouble parsing this comment or is it just me?

If the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources to preserve the status quo by preventing desperately-needed housing from being built.

Those with wealth will tend to steer the economic system more towards their own interests in a runaway feedback loop, often in ways which create no overall net welfare for society.

I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line.

I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.

I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.

Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.

Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.

I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.

Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.

It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.

Very few people would agree that red hair is "abnormal". Why do you think that people in general are more likely to describe homosexuality as "abnormal" when the prevalence of homosexuality is roughly on par with that of red hair?

Abnormal isn't a good word to use here since it connotates an undesirable condition, implying a need for correction.

Atypical, non-standard, or unconventional are more neutral in tone, so given your desire for a non-subjective word I'd recommend these instead.

I've done the math on this many times, and it still puzzles me how anybody would choose to buy a house in the Bay Area today versus renting an equivalent one. When mortgages are over 2x rent, the calculation skews tremendously in favor of renting and investing the difference in an index fund. This considers all possible factors and even chooses favorable conditions for homeowners (high appreciation, low stock market returns, high rent increases y/y). The permanent costs of owning a home (property tax, insurance, HOA, maintenance) are typically around 40% of rent, but can be even higher for certain types of property.

My conclusion every time I've done this exercise is that you should only buy a house in the Bay if you have way more money than you know what to do with. The difference in opportunity cost is absolutely massive, on the order of half a million today-dollars or more for a 3-bedroom SFH. That's a huge price to pay for the "privileges" of homeownership.

2nd link contains no such information. Nowhere in the article does it say tech companies were paid to censor anything.

I honestly don't see what the issue is. "Pressuring" in this case just means "asking". Nobody was punished for not fulfilling these requests.

And funding research grants into studying misinformation doesn't really bother me either. Maybe there are better ways to spend the money but you could argue that about almost anything.

Also, none of what you linked points to the Biden administration paying tech companies to remove content.

This is a particular banh mi place in South Bay isn't it? I've been there dozens of times and seen the reviews you're referring to. For similar reasons I completely ignore all review scores because gamification ruins all signal. Same with the chaff driven by SEO. Synthetic information is way easier to produce than organic information, which means it's always going to be a losing battle over the long term.

This is a duplicate of the following reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1hp5r20/comment/m...

There's a difference between a company directly backing a candidate and employees of company backing a candidate. Most of the contributions you're referring to came from employees, which makes sense given that most well-to-do tech employees are socially liberal. It would be a mistake to attribute these donations to "big tech". You wouldn't attribute a donation from a farmer to "big agriculture".

I hate to say it, but that article is inaccurately reported, and I cringe every time I see it linked. It conflates the PAL codes with the presidential launch codes, which are two distinct layers of security. Even if the PAL is hard coded to all zeros, you still need presidential authorization to initiate the launch procedure.

Small correction: The PAL doesn't handle presidential authentication. It's an extra layer of security to prevent a third party from detonating a warhead should they come into physical possession of one, and is (presumably) a static code which is integral to the operation of the weapon itself. Changing it would require complete reassembly of the warhead. The presidential authentication is handled by the missile crew, and the codes rotate daily. The PAL code is fixed and kept safe in the silo, where it is only accessed and input after the presidential order has been authenticated.

Could you elaborate on this a bit more?

2020 vote count: 155 million

2024 vote count so far: 139 million

2024 vote percentage counted so far: 87%

139 million divided by 87% equals 159 million.

Voter turnout this year will be higher than 2020.

Well over ten million votes are still yet to be counted on the West Coast. Is there a reason why you haven't considered this? If you add uncounted votes then the total count is only 5 million less than 2020. Such swings have certainly happened before between adjacent elections, such as from 2000 to 2004.

There are many studies which show that surgical masks are quite good at stopping a majority of expelled particles, even those well within the aerosolized size regime:

Surgical masks reduce outward aerosol-sized particles by at least 74%: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7

Surgical masks reduce outward COVID viral transmission by 73%, and viral RNA by 58%: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00637-20

Outward filtering efficiency above 50% is certainly worth it compared to the cost of a surgeon wearing a mask. It's arguably worth it even at much lower efficiencies.

If you read my comment, you'll notice I'm not disagreeing on the aerosol/droplet size boundary. I'm arguing against the apparent subtext of your comment, which seems to indicate that surgical masks aren't effective at protecting patients.

Your assessment is a non-sequitur to the article.

Surgeons wear masks to protect the patient, because masks are very effective at trapping both droplets and aerosols that are emitted from the wearer. They are not designed to protect the user from lingering aerosols as masks are too loose to form a good seal, so most air breathed in simply enters from around the sides of the mask.

No, individual particles can indeed be redshifted. The particle's wavelength is a fundamental property.

Citation?

It seems telling that as camera and detection equipment has gotten better, presumed "alien" UFO elusiveness has advanced precisely in lockstep: not too much to stop being detected altogether, but not so little as to be definitively identifiable.

I'm going to challenge those numbers: Using a posterior probability density function for a binomial distribution, the lower bound in Falcon 9 reliability is .9934 with 95% confidence (assuming 450/450 successful trials). The reliability of F9 could be much lower than five 9s and still reasonably give you 450/450 successful trials. There's only a 0.44% chance that F9 reliability is at least five 9's given the data.

Indeed. It's not clear to me how closing off visa programs while simultaneously divesting in education will do anything strengthen a country's economic position.

It depends on what market you're deciding to operate in, right? Global market vs domestic market. In an era of globalization, it's a huge loss for an economically well-off country to close itself off from the rest of the world. Remember that businesses don't have any obligation to operate in your country if the local labor market simply becomes too expensive. It also means that a business is far more likely to leave critical positions unfilled because an available person with the required skill set literally doesn't exist (or is extremely difficult to find). The only way to find talent is to poach from other companies, but this is a zero-sum game and offers no overall economic benefit to your country.

In principle a well-implemented visa program picks up people with required skills rather than just simply increasing the size of the available labor pool to suppress costs of labor. If the current program doesn't achieve this, then it certainly requires an overhaul. But abolishment (i.e. closing the labor market to domestic candidates only) doesn't do anything to further the economic health of your country.

The whole point of work visas is to address situations when there aren't enough qualified domestic workers for the open positions that are available. It's economically favorable to fill a position with a qualified foreign national than it is to just leave it open.

It's actually the side mirrors which are the problem. I tend to glance at them frequently to maintain situational awareness, but that good habit is punished when a vehicle with elevated lights simply hovers in the lane next to you. Many times I have to actively adjust the mirror to a useless position just to keep from accidentally blinding myself.

Over the years my opinion on light trucks has shifted from ambivalence to seething resentment. The main reason is that I now live in an area where large vehicles have become increasingly disruptive to normal living:

1) Side streets that prioritize street parking (e.g. streets with multi-family housing) mean that a poorly-parked truck is literally impossible to see around when you're driving a smaller vehicle. Exiting an apartment driveway is frequently a precarious maneuver when you can't clearly see traffic coming in one or both directions. Heaven forbid there's a bicyclist obstructed from view.

2) Headlight elevation blinds other drivers, especially those in shorter vehicles. If you're being blinded from behind at night, you have to slow down to let them pass, or else your mirrors become useless or even actively dangerous to look at.

3) Blind spots in newer light trucks are horrendously large, as indicated in the video. Many drivers are not aware of the blind spot to the front-right side of the cab and are at risk of being PITed by an inattentive driver changing lanes into them.

4) Echoing the point about parking infrastructure. Being unable to park these sorts of vehicles in standard spaces and garages means that many of these end up parked on the street where inconvenience to other drivers is maximized.

The only way a driver can completely mitigate these problems is to simply join in the Bigger Vehicle arms race, to the detriment of all other drivers and pedestrians.