MSM

Our healthcare costs are not high because six people are redundant.

The health insurance business was almost a $900 B market in 2017, that's enough to pay 12,000,000 people $75,000/yr. Adding six, or six thousand, or 600,000 redundant employees affects that market very little.

Matters what you're using the language for more than which language is being used I would imagine.

Scala users make more than .NET users, but that isn't because Scala is more in-demand, it's because that's the language of choice for a lot of Machine Learning / Big Data folks using spark who are highly sought after. I would bet that average Scala and Java compensation is very different, with Scala being much higher, due to the Java average compensations getting watered down by salaries of Java developers that just make CRUD applications but at the top of the scale they're likely similar and they both map back to Spark developers that are Machine Learning / Data Scientist / Big Data engineers.

Same with SQL- in general it isn't highly compensated because "everyone" knows/uses SQL (rarely well, though)- however there are also tons of Data Engineers whose core competency is SQL and they make great money.

Do you see nuclear as a stopgap between coal and renewable, or do you think that 100% renewable is not going to be possible?

I'm with you as being pretty pro nuclear, but if I'm making a plan to spend $16T, why even bother with half measures; just go straight for the future ideal.

I'd say there's a big difference between 41 and 45 and you're also greatly exaggerating the temperatures in Chicago if you include 105 as a typical high.

It's hit 105 a couple of times over the course of a hundred years. The hottest temperature since 2013 is 97. The average daily high in the hottest month is less than the bottom range of 85-105- it's 84.1 in July.

Hitting 45C is a big deal

Very interesting, thank you for sharing! This is has a little twist on what I'd like to see, but I had no idea something like this "graduate market" existed. I'll have to dig into this a little bit more.

I agree, but I also think there is some demand for those fields. The problem is they often become a sort of catch-all for people that don't have a particular focus while they're still in school which doesn't really benefit anyone a lot of times

That's quite a reach.

How is taking a small percentage of your income and being debt free somehow more of a burden than graduating with 100k in debt that cannot be wiped away even in bankruptcy?

I've long thought that the cost of college should be fronted by the colleges themselves should you get accepted. Once you graduate, you owe the college a percentage of your income in perpetuity (say, 2%- nothing crazy, and you graduate debt free).

This flips everything on its head in a good way. Colleges then have no incentive to give people degrees in fields they know there's no future employment opportunities for, it's in their best interests to give you the best education they can, they expand and contract departments based on employment demand, and they would actively seek to find employment opportunities for alumni. I honestly don't know who it would hurt other than loan companies.

You're looking at it strictly from a safety perspective which is a small part of the whole picture. If we looked at transportation from a safety perspective throughout history, we'd still be walking everywhere. What's the risk of crashing and dying while walking? Zero; it's fully optimized for safety. We rode horses and now drive cars to save time. Driving to work is unquestionably a better experience than riding a horse into work every day, but it could be better- we could be sleeping on our way into the office, or starting our work day as we leave our driveway, or eating a good breakfast and finishing our makeup (while not endangering everyone else).

Having commuting time available as what amounts to "free time" is an insane boost to daily life. A quick google says Americans spend 12.2 days per year in their cars. If 300 million people can save 12 days' time per year, you're freeing up ten million years of time every year.

I'm not advocating for throwing everyone in self driving cars untested and who cares how many people die, but if, on the journey to saving many millennia of time every year, a person is killed, why should the company be sued into oblivion? If we're going to sue everyone into oblivion whenever anything doesn't go quite right, why would any company ever try to take on difficult problems?

How is your 401k invested? Contributing the maximum since 2007 would only give you (~187k @ 17k/yr average) and I don't see how you could have almost quadrupled that with anything but the riskiest of investments.

Ideally if they have that information and it's released (either via hacking or sold without consent) the company could be sued. Unfortunately that's not the case today.

You're arguing that anyone knowing anything is a privacy concern which is over the top in my eyes. You could never use a bank, file taxes, get a paycheck, hell you couldn't even ever get a job with it being a "risk" because your employer has a ton of info on you.

The application is specifically meant to track this information, so to me that's cost of doing business. If they sell it to other people without consent, that's an issue.

It would be like if I went into H&R Block to get my taxes done. Should I be worried that they have my SSN and earnings? No, because they need that information to do the task that I'm asking of them. If they sell that to other places yes, that's a huge issue.

> Most jobs are bullshit jobs.

This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes, etc. and here we are still working.

Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a sudden there will be no jobs.

It's not hard arithmetic but they also have no real causation that I could think of.

I can go to McDonald's and buy some combo for $5-8 and get a single meal, or I could go get some chicken thighs, some black beans and some rice and boom, you've got like 5 much healthier meals for $15. People all over the world do this, but in the US we always parrot that eating healthy is "too expensive".

I don't know if people are too strapped for time because of being overworked, having other priorities with the free time they do have to want to cook, or what the root problem is but I can't wrap my head about it being a financial issue.

Second that these diagrams look really nice and clean- does anyone happen to know if there's an alternative that isn't Mac only?

My take: "Physics makes aging inevitable, not biology."

This is one of those facts that sounds scary but it's really hard to interpret. Prostate cancer is extremely common; I've heard that upwards of half of men that die of old age have developed prostate cancer, though not all have gotten to the point where it's been noticed and diagnosed. A quick google says that 1 in 7 men will be diagnosed with it.

So on the surface it sounds like the vitamin will kill you, but in reality what if it's helping enough that you're now living long enough for the prostate cancer to actually become a problem? What if people that take vitamins are more health-aware and more apt to get regular physicals, increasing their "occurrence" of cancer?

There's a lot of variables that the article doesn't discuss and I'm not confident they have been controlled for.

Yep, this is how pretty much every large data warehouse works as well. It's very useful to be able to say "What was the state of everything at time X", even if it's been deleted you want to be able to see the state at certain times.

I also imagine with all the data that FB has, they probably have a legal obligation to keep data as it can be useful in solving crimes or gathering evidence. In fact their TOS explicitly states that they will preserve data: "We may access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal request"

It's really an amazing game.

I think OP just can't get past the pixel graphics because he just picked two of the highest acclaimed titles of the year, highly recommend both of them.

This is a little misleading. Was there a mass exodus? Absolutely, but it's turned / turning around.

You would be hard pressed to find any decent apartment within a mile of downtown for less than 1k/mo. Many nice apartments in downtown go for $2k - $3k. I personally would love to live downtown and many of my peers share the sentiment, there just needs to be a larger supply of apartments on the market.

Do I want to live four miles away from Detroit in a run down neighborhood? Not particularly- if I'm already getting into my car to drive to work, why not go a few more miles away into any one of the nice suburbs that surround Detroit?

>The proper EAV normalised structure would have three tables

But then it's not EAV. In this case he is creating a single table to hold all of the attributes. The pros of this model are that once the business decides they also want to record which browser was used, there are no database changes required. In your case, you'd have to spin up a new table (and then another one once they want to store the time, and another where they want to store whether this is a returning customer, etc.)

I'm not suggesting EAV is the correct solution, but the model has its merits... rarely :).

I didn't understand this comment until I started to check out the FEMA maps myself. Indeed, almost all of Houston is in the "0.2% annual chance of flooding" zone (once every 500 years). To help put that in perspective, you can zoom into almost any area in the US and there will be a 20-30' zone on either side of almost any waterway (I'm talking very small rivers / creeks in my area) that has the same risk of flooding and I'd bet good money no one would criticize someone for not buying flood insurance in these zones.

Really nails home how overly critical we can be.

Replace talking about a rape with any of many reasons the police might be called and it makes just as little sense to have all these videos public.

Super innocent example: A 14 year old kid breaks their leg and the cops show up to them in agony and crying. Would be very easy for a few people that dislike them to plaster them crying all over social media. Yes, the event was public to begin with, but the chances of one of the bullies walking by and snapping their own photos is almost nil.

A lot of people that are interacting with the police are in a very vulnerable state, it would be asinine to expose that to the world. The thought that it will create "good will" with the public is entirely backwards in my opinion, if I'm in trouble and I know if I get the cops that I may end up all over the internet it may keep me from calling them at all.

There are a lot of places around Detroit for people to live if they weren't comfortable in Detroit. There are some extremely nice suburbs that you can commute to/from in 30-45 minutes which is still somehow an acceptable commute time compared to most other large cities in the US. You also have to consider that you can live in a 3k sq/ft house with a nice yard for 200-300k. That's very appealing as a tech worker looking to get out of SV or other "hot" tech areas.

As for importing workers, I think you'd be surprised how many tech companies are in the city already, I've seen a lot of people who suggest that Detroit is a top 10 city in the US in terms of work, one example is here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/03/16/technolog...

I'm very similar- look into the Daily Mixes that are created, this solves that issue for me.

Right now I have six different mixes and each one of them seem to be a grouped into a different genre (or sub genre).

>Don't reinfoce societal pressure with biased probability analysis.

They aren't saying don't sneeze, they're saying cover your sneeze. It doesn't matter why you are sneezing, covering it is the standard.

True, but for most reasonable purchases, time is of some sensitivity.

Even using his previous examples, withdrawing $20 or buying lunch, you can't wait hours or days- you usually want them immediately.

>Trolling is lying

Not at all, I think one of the most famous "troll" things he did was buy the master Wu-Tang album and threaten to destroy it so no one could ever hear the album.

There's no lying or anything meant to "hurt" anyone there, but you can imagine that it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

>I'm probably the type of investor whom people will point to as an example of an ethereum bubble (someone who knows little of the technicals behind ethereum, but is in it 'for a quick buck').

I always see "traditional" investors point to this and say "How could you possibly invest money into something you don't fully understand?"

I'm personally not invested in crypto at the moment but I can understand the draw- my response is this: When you look through your 401k, how many of those companies are even recognizable? If I were to ask extremely basic questions about any of their financials, could that person speak to them? The answer is almost unanimously "No", but it's completely accepted (beyond accepted really, it's pushed on you) to invest into companies that people don't fully understand, yet shamed if someone takes a gamble on crypto.

Not sure this is measuring the same thing.

For example, if I moved to NYC I wouldn't even bother buying a car because the traffic is so bad. I'd spend 0 hours in gridlock per year, but the traffic is still terrible.