HN user
I'm not seeing that luxury investment housing, though. The newly built houses are usually +/- cheap junk at premium prices. At the same prices there's a low supply of 30-40 year old homes, but of a way way better quality. And in any case, new construction + available supply is nowhere near enough to meet the demand. What folks without 500k/year are doing I don't know.
What opportunities? Tell me how an average cashier can land an average 150k/year job in a metro area? Don't forget that the said cashier has mediocre intelligence, so-so appearance, zero charisma and little talking skills. He might swap grocery store for an oil change shop, but that's about it. Our society is mostly stratified now, with a little upward mobility left for high-tech workers.
I'm not sure how one would survive on 60k for even 10 years. This isn't an "investable" amount and it's not enough for food, yet along housing expenses.
Your countertops or your landlord's countertops? Because all the rest - all those iphones & vacations - is cheap fluff, really.
From their perspective, it would be rational to cut a deal with JPMC: they bring workforce back to offices, landlords get their money and give a % of that to a few execs at JPMC. And all the health related problems won't be a JPMC's problem. In some sense, JPMC's execs suggest to burn the workforce now, pocket the extra money, and depart to greener pastures (less contaminated with viruses) shortly before the fallout.
As a senior manager, he's a professional liar first.
Professional scientists can't bet their reputation on a novel idea: a 1% chance it'll work out and 99% chance the scientist will be sent to academia's exile. It's better than what would've happened to them in medieval ages, though.
In past, many of the breakthru ideas came from aristocrats: they were rich enough to not give a shit about their reputation in academia.
In some sense, the modern institute of science is somewhat like an orthodox church: a few pre-approved lines of thinking with a swift punishment for heretics.
This is the biggest strength of science: this rigidness of thought is what protects it from clever charlatans. But this is also its biggest weakness because this risk-averse behavior, when scientists can't risk saying unapproved things without torpedoing their own reputation, is why science makes only tiny steps. Right now physics has reached a rather big obstacle on its way and the usual risk-averse-one-tiny-step-at-a-time tactics won't work.
I'm not a vegan of any sort, but one day I realized that I hadn't eaten meat for really long time and I didn't really want to anymore. That must have something to do with fruits: there's definitely some almost material "energy" in them and eating sandwiches with meat feels like chewing paper sometimes. 10 years ago my diet was almost entirely meat.
"to focus fully on the world of ideas" - very interesting choice of words.
It's a gov policy, really: companies get special status, i.e. smaller taxes, if such and such criteria are met.
You know what? I have a clever idea: the Diversity Standard 500 index, or just DS500. We have this SP500 index: a weighted sum of 500 companies into which everyone invests piles of money. The weights are carefully set by the index committee, which gives them outrageous power over the money flow. DS500 shares the same idea: a highly diverse committee would choose a weighted list of desirable traits, and the gov would use these weights to apply the tax code. From time to time the weights would be revisited to reflect the new trends.
As funny as it sounds, we're watching the formation of "progressive fundamentalists" - their "inclusion committee" would give people a low social score if their skin isn't black enough, or their gender is too male or sexual orientation is too straight. And inquisition, of course, would be watching for heretics and send them to "inclusion re-education camps".
There was a precedent: blind auditions in orchestra. Results were rather predictable.
A levitating frog warrants even more skepticism, but it's levitating.
My favorite example of these water experiments is sonoluminescence: a tank of water is driven by a high-frequency acoustic transducer to create a 3d standing wave, which forms a tiny bubble of air or other gas that, when collapsing, produces a burst of light.
That tiny burst of light is still an unsolved mystery. Despite it's trivially reproducible, there's still a range of competing theories that estimate the temperature of that bubble from 2,000K to 20,000K (some researchers add a few zeros there), and attribute the light to anything imaginable, including fusion and the Casimir effect. Quoting Wikipedia: "the rapidly moving interface between water and gas converts virtual photons into real photons."
This is some mediocre people came up with idea that they could easily understand what Calabi-Yau manifold is, if only mathematicians defined it with simple plain words. They don't like the idea that such a full definition would be 1000 pages long, full of complex concepts.
In this example with Google, the higher ups might reject this idea, but only because the measure would have a net negative impact on their own bonuses: pulling the cheap drinks would make 0.3% of employees move and the execs won't get bonuses because retention rate is a metric the company owners look at.
I see execs as a blind force of nature that does everything possible to enrich itself within the constraints set by higher ups. If the company owner hires an exec and gives him a task "give me more liquid assets by end of year no matter what", the exec will liquidate the company, because the constraints were loose. Same with those sleazy VPs running the facilities: SVPs set very loose constraints (likely intentionally), and got the rather expected result.
Well, it does. If we make a random sample of 1 million people that are interested in tech and startups, then another million of those that aren't, measure the average "emotional charge" of both groups, we'll notice a huge statistically significant difference between the two averages.
I agree with every point you've made here except the last one: the MDN docs are very dry, precisely because they are designed for knowledge-first people.
Whenever someone says that something needs to change for the greater good, I want to say something snarky. Copyright law is like the orbit of Jupiter - it is the way it is because it's a balance of all involved forces - and the only way to change it is to change those forces.
Before you comment on technicalities, remember that reddit's management consciously caters to the emotional people, and managing such a platform is very different than HN. I'd even admit the possibility that the plain and dry UI of HN would look unappealing to the reddit folks.
The rule of thumb: if the corporate says something, they lie.
OK, not quite legal, but justifiable. Nobody goes to prison for that, and the saved 10 mil get a nice house for that exec.
It seems a pretty bad deal to spend 2 weeks of your spare time to read about some funky battery, then risk your life fixing it and all that for less than $3,000. Unless you enjoy doing this kind of stuff or really short on money and rich on time.
It's not surprising once we realize that the $2T company is just a bunch of people with different priorities. A major shareholder of Apple can't be bothered to know about this minor issue, but for those lawyers it was a career making event.
Not negligible for the person responsible for that facility. Someone with a VP title is given a budget and freedom to run the shop and optimize expenses. Soon that VP realises that moving the punch clock inside the facility saves 3 millions a year and he gets to pocket half. Unfair, but legal. And if he doesn't pocket the easy money, he will be seen as incompetent by his manager - an SVP.
The HN crowd tends to confuse the human's mind with the human's identity. We think that the final destination of human development is some sort of "super intelligence" - a mind with insane processing power and unlimited ability to memorize and recall things. That's understandable because our life today revolves around knowledge, but one day ability to think will yield to ability to see ideas directly. If we could see a theorem's statement and its proof visibly connected like a tree's roots and its leaves, we wouldn't need to "think".
Remember that scene in "The Accountant" movie where the accountant says "No, the company's truck" meaning that since the truck is kinda used to carry some fluff that the family eventually sells, the truck gets a special tax status. In other words, since you use half of your house as an office, can you deduct half of your mortgage from taxes?
It's fascinating how the subsistence wage is simultaneously too low for workers and too high corporations.