candybar

In the US, your W-2 employer has to withhold your taxes on behalf of the state so they have to have your legal residence. I suppose you could file a tax return where you later claim that you weren't really a NY resident but a CT resident, but then you're going to have to file taxes with CT and pay out of pocket with penalties (since you were supposed to have them withheld from your paycheck) and NY will probably dispute your return, as they have documented proof of you being a NY resident. Especially if your income is high, which will be the case for many Google employees, it's a bad idea to have your residency in that dispute state where multiple states can claim you as a resident.

> A little-noticed marketing report released last month by U.S. Trust contained the disturbing statistic that while almost a third of Baby Boomers worth more than $3 million claimed to have grown up in lower-middle-class homes, the number fell precipitously for younger cohorts, with 18 percent of Gen Xers and a mere 6 percent of such Millennials saying they came from working-class stock.

This is the 2013 report being referenced here:

http://doingmorethatmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2...

Age Cohort Definition:

Millennials: age 18–32 Generation X: age 33–48 Baby Boomers: age 49–67

Socio-economic status growing up among the wealthy:

Age 18-32: 0% Poor, 6% Lower Middle Class Age 33-48: 4% Poor, 18% Lower Middle Class Age 49-67: 5% Poor, 31% Lower Middle Class Age 68+: 7% Poor, 24% Lower Middle Class

This is almost entirely due to the fact being wealthy (to the tune of 3M+ net worth) is a far more exceptional outcome for younger people than it is for older people, especially given how much asset prices have gone up over the past few decades. Also these rely on self-assessments and my personal experience is that there's been a class inflation of how people describe themselves and their own upbringing. I suspect older people are more likely to describe their own upbringing as "Lower Middle Class" than younger people.

In the US, employment is generally at-will, which means either side can unilaterally terminate the agreement but either way, these are the people whose employment conditions presently include having to physically show up to work. So, there's no "existing employment contract" here either legally or morally - if want to change one side of the contract (from working in the office to working from home), then it's reasonable for the other side of the contract (compensation) to have to be renegotiated.

Paying people simply what they are used to being paid is even less fair than what they are doing. Given that they already have location adjustments, if they simply let people keep their comp regardless of their move, employees that moved to Boston from SV and now work remotely from Boston would be paid more than employees who were always in Boston and still work in their Boston office. Remediating this would require increasing everyone's pay outside of their top market (Is it just SV and NY? Not sure) and that would cost significantly more.

> Stage 4 of the CDA outline can be critiqued on several grounds. The first is that if we have all the numbers in [0,1] in our table a priori, then using the diagonal process to create a number that is not in the original set does precisely that: It creates a number that is not in [0,1]. So why does the constructed anti-diagonal number seem to have a form that puts it within [0,1]? Could it be that ignoring the zero ahead of the decimal point is a bit sneaky?

You wrote all this and you don't seem to understand how proof by contradiction works?

> If, instead, we construct the anti-diagonal number by counting down the table by positions before each digit selection we find that any anti-diagonal number constructed (from the rectangle) is now within the set we have counted through, and therefore not outside the counted set. This Stretched Diagonal counterargument remains true as d→ ∞, irrespective of any ordering of number representations in the table.

This is not how anything works. You can't take a proof where they create an example that leads to contradictions and say, well, if you choose a different example, it doesn't lead to contradictions, so the proof doesn't work.

Your "proof" in Appendix B is also just gibberish from a mathematical perspective. The infinity and cardinalities aren't numbers - this isn't a mathematically rigorous statement: lim(n -> inf) log(n) = inf = aleph_0 - it's nonsense. What you're saying here is that as n increases without bound, 2^n also increases without bound. That doesn't prove anything about the cardinality of infinite sets.

Also, since you seem to accept that |R| is equivalent 2^|N|, it's also not hard to prove that 2^|S| > |S| for any S. 2^|S| < |S| is trivially untrue and if |S| = 2^|S], there must be at least one bijection F such that F: S => P(S) and inverse F^-1: P(S) => S

Now define S' to be a subset of S such that s is in S if & only if it's in S, but not in F(s). Now, consider F^-1(S') - it must be in S, due to how it's defined. Let's consider whether it's also in S':

1. If F^-1(S') is not in S' (= F(F^-1(S')), by definition, it must be in S'

2. If F^-1(S') is in S', by definition it must not be in S'

Since both these lead to contradictions, the assumption that there must be a bijection between P(S) and S mut be false.

On the whole, you seem to be generally confused - R is not a real thing - it's a mathematical abstraction.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to include the effects of medical interventions for the purposes of determining which group, athletically speaking, trans-women should belong to. My understanding is that trans-women are women, not because they received medical treatments that affirm their gender, but because they identify as women. Thus, gender identity, except to the extent that it correlates with biological sex, has very little direct effect on athletic performance. Yes, some choose to receive treatments that reduce their athletic performance, but that's true of many other athletes - sometimes you have to choose between your own health and competition and making the best choices for health often means forgoing a chance to be a top athlete.

If anything, going by biology is more inclusive because it allows both trans-women and trans-men to compete fairly against others that share their biological sex, as long as they postpone treatments until their athletic career is over. If we go by this evolving combination of gender identity and hormone level checks, pre-treatment trans-women aren't allowed in any category, post-treatment trans-women have a massive advantage over biologically female bodies, pre-treatment trans-men cannot compete at all and post-treatment trans-men are still at an extreme disadvantage.

You're not comparing apples to apples. Senior designers and data scientists also typically make 250K+ (and often 300K+) at these companies.

It's worse than that - the hiring managers were accurately identifying things that matter. The article isn't saying that the hiring managers were unfairly biased, but that they were somehow able to pick up on traits (their level of education, their level of professional success) that they'd otherwise care about.

It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found.

To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.

The article seems to be saying that the study shows that hiring managers are able to identify with not a lot of interaction candidates that are well-educated, gainfully employed and earn a high salary and unsurprisingly favors such candidates. This is not class bias - you can't just define class as that which employers care about and then accuse hiring managers of having a class bias when they understandably look for these traits.

> Housing can't be simultaneously an investment and affordable.

I see this cliche often but it's simply wrong. Housing prices don't need to increase over time for housing to be a good investment, as long as the rental yield is sufficiently high relative to cost of capital.

This isn't measuring the same thing though - a college degree vs a high-school degree is a very different question than a college degree from an elite school vs a college degree from a slightly less elite, but still very good school.

This also appears to lack any kind of control, whereas the other study tried to control for the student's abilities.

There are a lot of great comments here about what to do but wanted to add something a little different. Most of the advice here about what you should be doing is reasonable, but one critical thing that's missing is that most people that do the right, pro-social things, don't do it just to get what they want. When it comes to highly important decisions, sure, people strategize and ensure that the consequences are personally beneficial but for the most part, people act properly in social situations because they are socialized to instinctively care about other people's needs. People are programmed (through some combination of nature and nurture of course) to take into account the needs of others that they spend time with, whether bosses, coworkers, friends or family.

It appears to me that you're missing or perhaps blocked out some of this conditioning. The reason why people are throwing out terms like "sociopath" or "autism" here is that you do not seem to have any instinctive regard for others or even your future self in any of your stories - either you don't know how your actions would affect others or you don't care. I know a lot of people think being relieved of having to care about others makes it easy to become successful because they think they can then take advantage of others without any qualms, but this ignores motivational aspects. For most people, naked self-interest isn't motivating enough to get people to do the right things even for themselves. People that aren't motivated by something that's bigger than themselves - whatever the causes may be - usually find it difficult to put off instant self-gratification and control their emotions enough to do what it takes to become successful. To be motivated enough to overcome your habits, you may have to learn to care about other beings beyond your immediate self. This will also make it easier to instinctively do the right thing - you don't have to pretend to care, when you actually do.

The minimum wage hasn't kept up with other things (it feels to me that it should be $15-$25) and the overall trend of inequality is undeniable (the very top, both in terms of wealth and income, have done much better than the median person, who in turn has done much better than those near the bottom) but comparing minimum wage to bonus is highly misleading, as Wall Street comp has moved increasingly to a bonus-heavy structure, which means bonuses have grown much faster than salaries. And this is just an incredibly misleading way to frame this:

> But those paydays have been skyrocketing for decades. Since 1985, Wall Street traders' bonuses have grown 1,217% - and that's just part of their overall pay, which was more than $406,000 on average in 2019, according to data from DiNapoli's office.

There's insinuation here that bonuses have grown 1,217% and since that's just part of the pay, Wall Street employees did even better than what's implied by the growth rate But that's just bad math - the salary had to also grow by the same rate in order for the overall pay to have the same growth rate. I don't have this data but they probably do and it's unlikely that they would've cherry-picked the bonus data if the salaries show the same trend.

Also, given the increase in automation and outsourcing of non-critical functions to less expensive areas (even moving back office functions to New Jersey would contribute to the trend), it's likely that there are fewer low-paying jobs on Wall Street as compared to the past. For instance, if you look at the source data linked to in the article:

https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/press/pdf/wall-street-bonu...

The total amount grew by less than the amount per person from 1985 to 2011 (despite Wall Street being a much bigger part of the economy that employs far more people) and this means the sample in 2011 is likely biased towards a more elite subset of finance professionals.

At least in my experience, people who get away with a small amount of work are almost always senior people who are highly regarded by the higher-ups. It's difficult to get away with doing very little work as a junior person in any org because 1) you don't have the autonomy to choose the work, 2) you're considered fungible, so you're given relatively fungible work, which is easy to size and compare against others, and 3) you're not trusted, so managers scrutinize your work more. The caveat is that it's hard to overcome these issues without having worked hard at some point - the key is having some level of expertise within the company along with the trust of the higher-ups who would rather focus their energy on ensuring that less trustworthy people don't mess up.

The leverage doesn't have to be high - the only reasonable conclusion you could make is that the owner doesn't have a lot of cash savings outside of his properties and likely doesn't make that much money from his job (in relation to the losses incurred). Alternatively, he may just be cheap and also trying to make a point. Even if he owns his properties outright, tax and maintenance aren't free and not everyone can afford to lose money from their income-yielding properties.

I have no idea what your point is.

You could make the same point for just about everything. Starting a restaurant doesn't help anyone because you're just buying food ingredients, labor and real estate and turning that input into food and anyone can do that so you're not increasing the supply of food. Investing money in the stock market certainly doesn't help anyone since you're just buying existing securities that were already issued. The economy as a whole is full of things that aren't that important independently that you could make a convoluted argument against, even those things often add up to a functioning economy with a robust system for price discovery.

Also, some concrete thoughts on the economics here:

1. Investors of this kind (those who buy relatively modest housing units to rent out) are far more sensitive about prices (because the price has to be justified by what they can charge in rent) than buyers who plan to live, who do not have a clear anchor. Therefore, they contribute to price stability - they will tend to buy in bad markets and sell in hot markets.

2. Transaction costs are extremely high in real estate and for most people that are able to choose between buying and renting, by far the most important factor isn't affordability but how long they plan to live in a give place. Actual home buyers tend to choose buying over renting precisely when prices are high and when they do so, they tend to buy larger and more expensive units than they would otherwise rent because they take into account future needs. This leads to increased demand as you turn marginal renters into homeowners.

3. People that are able to choose between renting and buying are typically well-off and making things slightly more affordable to entice them to buy isn't a social good.

4. People that are unable to afford buying units and are forced to rent are the poorer ones in comparison. These people benefit the most from a housing unit being turned into a rental because unlike the previous class, they do not have the flexibility to choose between renting and buying.

Nothing you're saying makes any sense:

1. This isn't an example of systemic risk - I suggest you look up the phrase since you keep mentioning this.

2. Lowering rent has nothing to do with mortgage agreements - I have no idea what you'd think one has anything to do with the other. And no this isn't a huge issue in NYC. Sure, you're going to have a hard time refinancing an investment property that's not yielding much in rent, but you're going to have an even harder time if it's vacant. Rent is a price - most landlords are going to try to charge what they can given the market - this generally has nothing to do with how the property is financed.

3. If the markets for rentals and buying are related, that still doesn't change the fact that buying a place to rent out is demand-neutral in aggregate. Sure, there's one less housing unit to buy, but it also takes a renter out of the market. So if the markets are intertwined, then reduced rental demand -> reduced rent -> reduced housing price. The only thing that reduces demand for housing is moving out of the city.

If a building is built to be rented out, does the builder typically rent out the place? No, it will be someone who buys the building, typically with large amounts of borrowed money, who will then rent out the place. Builders build (often also with borrowed money) because they can then sell the building to someone who can buy. This is all part of the economy.

And you're certainly misusing the term "systemic risk" here - a small-time landlord borrowing money to buy a rental does not in any sense contribute to any kind of systemic risk. They are taking on personal risk in the hope of generating a return on their investment.

You're still not making any sense. How does this contribute to systemic risk? How does "adding housing supply" change anything with respect to systemic risk? And this person was renting out a place they already own.

This is all gibberish - economically, if a marginal landlord buying a property then renting out contributes to the increase in real estate price due to creating additional demand then they equally contribute to the decrease in rent by creating additional supply.

Why does Vienna provide this service if it adds no value?

How does that relate to your assertion that people buying a place and renting it out do not add any value?

This doesn't make any sense. A lot of people either don't want to buy due to their own personal circumstances or can't afford to buy. People buying places and renting out increases the supply of rentals, which makes it easier for those folks to rent.

This makes Amazon look terrible but you do have to wonder about a world where politicians that control the most powerful government in the world are incentivized to play petty gotcha games on Twitter with their supporters cheering on, while we expect private corporations to be the adult in the room. The main reason why this makes Amazon look bad while politicians who do this (not taking sides here, this is clearly a bipartisan thing) get a pass is that our expectations for politicians are now so low that we don't expect anything but petty grandstanding and finger-pointing, while we expect Amazon to rise above partisan criticism.

Gods Unchanied and CryptoKitties decided to mutually acknowledge each other's NFTs so that they can each sell more NFTs, since they are both NFT sellers first and game developers second. There's no incentives for any game publisher to unilaterally accept NFTs created by other game publishers. And this collaboration only works on a 1:1 basis - there's no good way to generically support all NFTs that come from a collective marketplace in a useful way and no incentives to do so without having your own NFTs acknowledged by others.

Who makes money from the original NFT? Why would the game company not want to capture the revenue with their own NFTs? And why would Decentraland then honor the NFT some other game company issued, instead of issuing their own? Any entity who's providing utility associated with the NFT is going to want to sell their own NFTs - why would they do all the work only to have some third party capture the value?

I think that's exactly what I said? This contrasts with the medical school where I guess in theory you could reapply, but large parts of your application are going to remain the same.

Are you talking about US-based top global management consulting firms and actual strategy/management consultant roles (since top consulting firms often do other things like technology, tax/accounting, etc)? I guess that's possible but I suspect that in that case, it's largely because roles in these offices aren't quite desirable from a comp or a career track perspective. The reason why management consulting is hard to get into is because it pays well and it promises a career track where you can get to a 7-figure income and potentially go directly into the upper management of F500 companies afterwards without working your way from the bottom. If that's not a realistic path from a satellite office (I have no idea if it is or not), then it wouldn't have the same draw. If it is though, I mean it has to be competitive, right?

> I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

I'm not sure if the chances of success are any higher for getting into a medical school in the US. As a one-shot thing, a FAANG interview loop may be tougher, but there are a lot of big tech companies and you can keep trying your luck. I think Amazon alone has like 50K software engineers, they churn engineers like crazy and the hiring bar isn't quite as high as some of the others. Whereas if your undergraduate credentials aren't good enough or you simply don't do well on standardized exams, you're kind of out of luck in terms of getting into a US medical school. I could be overestimating the difficulty of getting into the least competitive medical school in the US, but my understanding is that they are all pretty difficult, leading many people to go to a medical school in the Caribbean.

Top management consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, ec) are insanely competitive and won't consider anyone without elite credentials, i.e. top grads from elite undergraduate programs, MBAs from top schools, Ph.Ds from good research programs, etc. These opportunities are far more scarce and require more effort overall as well. I suspect that some of these firms could hire more or less randomly from those who make it to the interview stage and do nearly as well, since their resume filtering is extremely rigorous, while their skill requirements for most roles aren't that high outside of being smart, analytical and willing to travel and work insane hours. Big Tech is substantially more egalitarian in terms of who they let through to the interview stage, while the actual job demands somewhat esoteric skills that go beyond just being a smart, analytical hard-working person, which necessitates a more meaningful filter.

I suppose Big Tech could do something similar (skip leetcode stuff for people who have credentials such as prior experience at top tech firms and/or tangible research experience at top research institutions) but I suspect that would not go over well with most people that have issues with the current hiring processes.