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Credit is something entities are willing to extend because they expect to get paid. Once you break this expectation, no one's going to lend. People and businesses have to borrow, explicitly or implicitly on an ongoing basis. Credit makes the world go around. No one is going to lend if the government makes it possible not to pay and still keep the other side of the transactions. This completely breaks the economy.

And policy decisions cannot be made instantly. The moment something like this is close to being implemented, this will freeze the credit system entirely. And there goes the economy.

We got a global financial crisis last time due to a small number of actors becoming less creditworthy and it being unclear whether they could pay their obligations. That slight change in expectations threatened to freeze the entire economy. To do this on purpose for every entity such that no one is creditworthy? That's insanity.

This simply doesn't work at all.

First, the situation is not that dire to start with, most people and businesses can meet their obligations. We don't have anything remotely close to a financial crisis. It makes no sense to effectively turn the entire economy into a command economy and effectively declare a default to save what appears to be a fairly small part of the economy that will have trouble. You can have targeted intervention and get most of the benefit without dragging the rest of the economy into this.

Second, you can't just remove credit from the system. Credit is fundamental to nearly all transactions at scale - transactions in the real world aren't atomic, which means businesses are always dealing with receivables and payables, not to mention lines of credit that are designed to help businesses manage them.

There are tons of offsetting contracts, whether in terms of derivatives or insurance, and no one is going to be able to figure out which side of each contract is covered and which isn't and how to price anything given the uncertainty. Do health insurance companies have to pay hospitals? Do car insurance companies have to pay? These are all payments. Nothing happens in an economy without a payment. Do you have to pay insurance premiums? The effective result of this would be all financial markets not functioning and nearly all real markets too, since they are tied to the financial markets for pricing, settlement and credit.

It would be like the global financial crisis but a substantially worse version where every company becomes the Lehman Brothers. You'd have to basically nationalize everything across the entire world and run a command economy because the markets simply won't function at all even on a purely basic level.

This doesn't work. Credit is an essential part of the modern economy and not everything can be shut down. For people to consume even the very basics, lots of intermediate transactions need to be made using credit and if you cease interest payments entirely, no one will lend and the system will freeze. Keep in in mind that no government actually has any authority to do this either, as credit markets are global. To unilaterally cease payments and order ceasing of payments is akin to (but actually worse) national default, which will completely disintegrate the financial markets globally. Even for ordinary people around the world to just survive, we still need international trade.

At a high level, credit and money are simply means to align incentives across a wide variety of actors and ensure cooperation. While theoretically it's not impossible to reorganize the economy as not to need it, it would effectively require a complete command economy and I don't think anyone would be able to do this effectively in the short term without completely destroying any semblance of the market economy in the long run.

The obvious play here is just to pay individuals (not businesses) enough money and access to healthcare in the medium term and to let businesses (that aren't obviously strategic to national interests, those can be considered separately) do what they need to do. There are already legal mechanisms in place for businesses to avoid paying creditors and landlords. This is a strange plea for a handout. If the market changed as to make their rent abnormally low relative to their profits, they wouldn't be paying extra rent.

For residential tenants, rent forgiveness at least makes some sense, though I think direct payments to individuals are fairer and avoid cascading effects. For businesses that during the good times keep all surpluses for themselves as profits, to argue for rent forgiveness during the hard times is comical.

Sure there's value in this sort of reassignment but what usually happens in that case is:

1) Private equity acquires the assets at bargain basement prices and proceeds to squeeze out whatever profits they can. One of the most common ways this is done is by laying off staff.

2) A competitor buys them out, leaving less competition. Also followed by a large layoff to reduce redundancies.

3) The business is reorganized to maximize short-term efficiency, regardless of the cost to others - customers, partners and society at large.

These aren't bad outcomes per se, but I suspect that those that are reflexively against corporate handouts wouldn't be happy about these either. The general point of an industry bailout is to avoid outcomes like this since in crises, these can add to the pain. The actions taken to ensure your own company is financially solvent are often counterproductive if they are all taken by all parties involved. And various markets involved - whether in terms of labor or capital - are also likely not functioning efficiently enough to absorb the resulting dislocations.

And typically bailouts are not great outcomes for the shareholders involved. Bailouts can be great for the management, but only to the extent that it's also great for most employees. As long as the shareholders (and creditors to a lesser extent) take a big cut, there isn't a huge moral hazard either.

I've never really been worried about disease outbreaks in the past but this is different.

> she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area.

This isn't the right set of qualifications when it comes to understanding the total impact. Aside from the front line staff often not having a high-level understanding of epidemiology, I also don't think she understands the economic costs of containment.

Early on, there was a huge amount of complacency because we've been successful in the past and nothing like this ever came to pass. Expertise in some narrow field can only go so far - unless they are familiar with this particular case, how different it is from other pathogens they have experience and sufficiently mathematically inclined to be able to extrapolate beyond the existing data. We have a once-in-a-life type of pathogen IMO and 25-years of experience may not matter much if they are merely looking back in their experience to find similar situations.

> She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy.

How people tend to respond to events like this is part of the reality of the situation. You can't simply hand-wave away the social, political and economic consequences of the expected responses and how that affects the disease-fighting efforts.

This reminds me of the financial crisis - if you did a top-down analysis, it pointed to an unprecedented situation and it was easy to see how the market actors would response in a way that would compound the crisis but but most experts had never seen something like this, didn't have a comprehensive understanding of how things work, had never seen true panic and had some flawed models telling them that in some perfect world, things are fine and some of the earlier market movements were irrational overreactions.

In isolation, this is fine but if this is a harbinger of things to come, it seems quite problematic. Tobacco use is extremely strongly correlated with schizophrenia and while this would be difficult to ascertain, likely schizotypy spectrum (most of whom would be undiagnosed) as well. This may not be an ADA violation per se, but it seems to have that type of effect.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia_and_tobacco_smok...

Edit: Wouldn't this potentially fall under disparate impact?

I think we may be past the point where even this would work - too many startups are offering deals that are transparently awful in a way that discredits the startup ecosystem at large. I've gotten a few early-stage startup offers recently and every single one came out to be over a 50% paycut (even accepting their generous valuations) despite the fact that I made it relatively clear where the total comp needs to be for me to move forward and I was assured that at the end of the process they would be willing to make it work.

Meanwhile, if you apply the same math to the founders and their equity, in every single case they are paying themselves multiples of what they are offering me and significantly above their own market value, despite them not having done anything yet beyond getting seed funding.

What then happens is that startups like these end up getting what they pay for - they get the appropriate level of talent at market price. This maybe a market-optimal result but the cumulative effect of all these startups doing this is that most top people have sort of written off "working at a startup" as a reasonable career option, because of pay and what pay implies about the talent level of the people they would work with. This hurts all startups, even those that are willing to pay up to get the right talent. And if top engineers won't even consider your company, offering top-tier comp may backfire - you run the risk of overpaying for the same talent you could've gotten at a lower price. It's hard to break out of this cycle - consider how the same few schools are able to persistently attract the best students - and I suspect the entire startup ecosystem is trapped in it.

None of this logic applies to equity granted to employees, which are already subject to vesting. The argument you're making is actually for founder vesting, which is a separate issue.

My understanding was that this idea of education being about learning for its own sake was from an era when only the children of the privileged class received higher education and since their future as part of the future elite was more or less guaranteed from their upbringing and connections and it was thought important than the future members of the elite class are broadly well-educated, not merely specialists in their roles.

The reality now is that education is more or less for everyone and most people, even at elite institutions, don't have a clear path to being a member of the elite without working super hard for specific career goals. It would be odd, then, for some of those students to continue to pretend that they have a clear path to being a member of the elite and learn the kinds of things that are disproportionately important for the members of the elite, when they have to accomplish a lot to get there. The world is simply far more competitive.

This is a great article but I think it misses the counterpart to the professional class - moderately well-to-do small-business owners, millionaire next door types. I think these are heavily represented in the top 10%. They are not as well-educated, lean much more to the right than the professional class. Economically they identify more with the 0.1% and consider themselves capitalists, but culturally they identify more with the working class.

These two groups seem diametrically opposed to each other, much more so that they are with the actual elite or with the actual working class.

I am talking about that exact point - "not much goods or services that you can store for more than a year" and elaborating why that is an important thing to understand. The point of the GP was that the goods and services consumed by those that don't work have to be provided by those that do. A lot of people don't understand this because individuals can save through money and other financial instruments almost as though they are storing goods and services that can be consumed in the future.

But this analogy fails at a larger scale - an entire generation can't just save up enough while they work and expect to be provided for in retirement because what they saved up are just claims on future production - their consumption still has to come from the production provided by future generations. Their claims cannot and will not automatically cause the excess production to occur.

Now this is a purely hypothetical problem and we're arguably in a world with the opposite problem (too much productive capacity, too many people trying to save and not enough demand). Though arguably even this problem is due to too many people to save up to prepare for the other scenario, decades before it happens.

It's important to keep in mind that the older generation that needs to be supported right now and the generations before had plenty of kids and the problem does not exist at the moment - it's more about what happens if the trends holds and the generations that are at well below replacement rates start retiring.

Also, most of the wealth held by the top of the wealth pyramid is not what has already been produced, but merely claims on future production. I doubt people at the top of the wealth pyramid consume all that much as a fraction of the society's productive capacity - either they are holding onto existing claims or creating new claims by making investments that would increase the future productive capacity.

So if there was a production gap and the youth is not able to support the older generation due to the lack of productive capacity, moving the wealth downwards would exacerbate the gap, because you'd be redirecting some of the productive capacity towards consumption rather than investment.

Money, or for that matter nearly all wealth, are claims on future production - for these claims to be worth something, others have to work. Money and other financial assets can solve a problem for yourself because the rest of the society would then effectively owe you part of what it produces but the value of these claims is contingent on the production.

In the real economy, what matters is production, investment and consumption - money is just a social construct designed to incentivize people to do consume/invest/produce the right amounts of the right things.

Savings glut isn't just at the level of individuals though - as long as it's in the form of savings, it doesn't matter who does it, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, social security, insurance companies, etc. But that's just on the supply side.

The real problem is on the demand side of funds, we've run out of low-hanging fruits and marginal productive investments, whether in infrastructure, tech or labor are returning less than before, which drives the rates lower. This is in turn driving up the prices of existing profitable enterprises and premium real estate, squeezing out both productive ventures and labor.

Interest rate has nothing to do with profitability - it's just a price that balances the supply and demand of funds and on the short end, it's heavily influenced by monetary policy and on the long end, it's heavily influenced by the inflation and growth expectations. Lots of consumers borrow at very high rates and it's not because they expect to be profitable with the money they borrow.

Whether you put your money in a piggy bank or a bank account doesn't impact the productive capacity of an economy. Keep in mind that money can be created out of thin air and that's effectively what would happen if enough people cashed out - it would reduce the supply of money and the central bank would make up for it until the desired level as measured by inflation would be reached. Other than some volatility this would create if it was coordinated, it would have little impact on the real economy.

This is fair too but I think most experienced engineers for whom stack is a valid consideration have some experience with at least one dynamically typed language and one statically typed language and can self-select out of roles if they have a strong preference either way. And I don't know anyone for whom this was an actual blocker as opposed to an annoyance (in either direction) that they got used to after a while. On the whole, I think it's less likely for this to be a serious issue than, say, the details wrt how the system is architected and how the organization is run, some of which you won't really get to know until you start.

That's fair - what I meant by it being a different career isn't that skills aren't transferable at all but that you solve different kinds of problems entirely, as distinct from a difference in stack. And if you hired me then as a mobile developer, I'd have quit, so you don't want to hire non mobile engineers into mobile roles. Language/stack is a red herring here in the sense that Java backend development is a lot closer to Ruby backend development than it is to Android development.

> Why would a company choose someone who doesn’t know the stack they are using over someone who does? Let alone 6-12 months. > Knowing the ecosystem, best practices, frameworks, etc takes longer than a few weeks. > Sure I could learn Java or Swift in a few weeks, but does that mean I would be a competent Android or iOS developer?

I would separate this into two separate categories - big tech companies (or others with similarly large shared internal infra) and others. For big tech companies, for most positions, the tech stack is proprietary internal stuff such that knowing the language and best practices only get you about 10% of the way. For other types of companies, it's generally more important that you hire people with the right business context than the exact tech stack.

With that said, native mobile development isn't just a stack - it's more of a different, though overlapping, career path - the main reason not to hire non-mobile developers into a mobile role isn't that the stack is different and takes time to learn, but that the workflow is so different that they may or may not know what it is that they are even signing up for. Hypothetically, you'd rather hire someone with Xamarin background with no Java experience for an Android java role, than someone with no mobile dev experience, but lots of Java backend experience.

My first mobile development experience was a moderately complex Android project on an app that was used by tens of millions of people daily. There was no ramp-up - I had zero prior experience before signing up for this project, never even played around with any mobile development before and I had never professionally programmed in Java - and I was the sole engineer working on both mobile and backend. It was a little painful but everything shipped on time.

This depends on the company but my understanding is that in most tech companies, there's not much distinction between being an ML engineer and being a research scientist/engineer with a Ph.D, in terms of the type of work or compensation, provided that you aren't in a pure research role (i.e. you were hired because your research is highly regarded by academic peers in a narrow field and get to do something close to original research with fellow academics). Most Ph.Ds aren't qualified for the latter type of positions either and the number of non Ph.Ds that are qualified would be entirely negligible.

This seems contradictory - if you're auto-rejecting CVs with information like that, you're not judging people on merit. I personally wouldn't include information like this myself and would ignore any such information on resumes but I don't see how this would disqualify someone - there are no resumes with just the information you need to judge the candidate, no one customizes resumes specifically for your personal criteria. Being upset that someone included information that you prefer not to see and throwing the resume out as a result seems even worse than judging people based on their interests - you are using arbitrary personal criteria that have nothing to do with merit to disqualify people.

The portfolio does not allow you to compare one candidate against another and the same guy I had to fire also had a great portfolio, probably like yours and was a good fit on paper. It doesn't tell you how well the person works nor how quickly the person is able to deliver. And quite frankly, no one has time to read through all your code either. And even if they did, how does reading your code help me compare you against another candidate with a completely different set of credentials in an objective way? Without understanding the context under which the code is written, it's useless - I don't know what problems it solves, if it solves any problems anyone actually had, what constraints you were operating under and what challenges you faced and how you were able to handle them. Say, if I were to give you a thousand github profiles, do you think you can realistically rank them in order of how good the owners are?

As I said, this is just not how things are done at modern tech companies and there are good reasons - hiring managers generally don't have the authority to arbitrarily bypass standard processes because hiring managers are inherently biased towards hiring someone good enough for the time being, even if it lowers the bar. So the goal isn't to hire somebody that the hiring manager feels is good enough, but to objectively compare thousands of candidates against one another in a systematic way that keeps the bar sufficiently high enough. You should understand at least what the problem is before you can criticize the solution.

Also, generally speaking, if you pay attention to research into hiring, the two things that really stand out are that 1) general abilities are more important than specific skills and 2) standardized processes outperform ad hoc evaluation. If you're asking to be evaluated on ad hoc credentials that cannot be objectively compared to others (most people's best work cannot be shared) - you're asking people to forego processes. And that is simply not known to work very well, mainly because it's not evidence-based. Your unique set of accomplishments that cannot be compared is not known to correlate with any measure of performance because there's no way to say, people who tend to have accomplishments like yours tend to perform at a certain level.

I also don't know what you mean by "top-shelf" corporation but I'm not aware of any top software company that doesn't basically do this - your claim to have been a hiring manager at a top-shelf corporation isn't consistent with your lack of understanding of the realities faced by top-shelf corporations where there are far more candidates than qualified due to paying well above market and the need to ensure that the bar is kept consistently high, regardless of the motivations and qualities of individual hiring managers and interviewers (unless your top-shelf company isn't actually a software company, in which case it's likely not top-shelf at software).

None of this proves that you're a good fit, either generally at a company or specifically on a team. Empirically, tech companies where executives and managers were mostly software engineers at one point and are considered best places with best talent almost uniformly have standardized hiring processes with whiteboarding algorithms and what not. Companies run by non-technical MBAs that aren't known for software talent tend to either not give such tests and/or have ad hoc processes where hiring managers hire whoever they want based on what they like. While hard data on hiring processes are difficult to get, I think this puts the burden of proof on those who are adamant that this is not an effective way.

More importantly, you need to look beyond yourself. I'm an old developer and I don't like to be grilled on algorithms either. But my understanding is that it works very well and that no one's ever come up with anything that's better in terms of effectiveness at scale. Giving random hiring managers discretion to hire who they want simply doesn't work if you're a desirable place to work and need some minimal level of competence across the board. What do you think would work any better? This focus on how it feels from your perspective is fine if you all you're trying to say is that it sucks for you personally but ultimately if you're trying to prove that this is a bad process for those who employ it, you need to make a case that there are better, more efficient processes. Every process will lose some qualified people - so that you may have been qualified, but were rejected isn't meaningful evidence against the process.

Btw, appeal to special credentials as a way to criticize standard procedures is an implicit argument that hiring managers should be given discretion to bypass standard procedures to hire special candidates. I've never really seen this go well, at a level below, say, industry pioneers. I do distinctly remember the one time I did that as a manager to hire someone with a rather long series of accomplishments who refused to take coding tests - I had to fire him rather quickly. The interesting part, other than the complete absence of any sort of actual productivity, is that he couldn't work with anyone, was right about everything and his long list of accomplishments was constantly used as a reason why he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to and any rule he didn't want to follow was stupid.

So I don't think standard algorithm tests are that great as a filter, but at the very least, the willingness to go through it communicates some level of willingness to do things you don't like or aren't best at. A huge part of what makes engineers successful isn't the ability to do things they are good at, but the willingness to do things they are not good at.

I found this fascinating so did a bit of research:

Both the National Review article and this piece (https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2012/04/words-and-deeds/) by Flemming Rose credit Alan Borovoy for having been the original author of that passage (in his 1988 book When Freedoms Collide: The Case for Civil Liberties).

The New Yorker article is based on Bob Mankoff interviewing Flemming Rose and it looks like Flemming Rose may have been slightly misquoted in a way that made the attribution less clear: the bit where it says:

> In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

Flemming Rose is attributing both sentences - "pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor" & "As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it." to "a present-day civil-rights campaigner" or Alan Borovoy.

So I do agree with most here that you shouldn't care one way or another about getting feedback and the author seems to be overreacting somewhat, I do want to share that for each of my last 3 rejections from startups, I did receive politely worded feedback as to why I was rejected. So again, while I do agree that the author is overreacting in the sense that it's not helpful to emotionally react this way, I don't think his expectations are necessarily out of line - it's possible to treat candidates better and the more candidates expect to be treated well, the better the industry will be.

On top of this, the criticism regarding how the author is self-unaware (I don't entirely disagree) seems especially misguided because often how self-unaware people become self-aware is through constructive feedback. With that in mind, since the author seems to be here, the one piece of feedback I have is that:

"I sent over some different code, it was a 5 line code change that halved the average response time of an API."

I don't know if the author was at this point interested in the job or not (if this was a joke, please disregard) but some clever 5-liner is extremely unlikely to impress anyone looking for a senior engineer and is impossible to evaluate in isolation. Also most of the work involved in "halving the response time" - again, assuming a reasonably complex system - is identifying where the bottleneck is, not writing the simple fix to address the issue that was discovered. You're expected to write substantially more code than that even in a 30-minute technical screen. When people are looking for code samples (again for a senior engineer), they are looking to see the ability to design and organize larger chunks of a system, make trade-offs between different architectures and ability maintain good code hygiene over a larger sample and so on - providing a 5-liner raises more questions than it answers.

The starting point for this series is the global financial crisis and the drop seems to be driven mostly by Eastern European countries whose economies have been rapidly growing over that time period.

Again, this doesn't really compare to Google - if somebody started up a business within Google and only had about New York Times level of success, it may very well be in danger of being shut down. New York Times has about 3 million subscribers. Youtube Premium had 1.5M about a year after launch and it's on life support. Youtube Music has 16 million subscribers a year after launch and it's barely successful enough not to be cut. These are ancillary services run by small teams. Google has Android, Chrome, Search, GMail, Maps, Photos, Calendar, etc, etc, many of them actually manage lots of your data on your behalf and/or require real-time location capabilities. Of course providing these services requires a long privacy policy if they want to honestly cover what they do with user data.

"California Today" needing a location capability - I'm not sure if you're entirely serious. Why would it need to access your current location - people read local news for where they live, not where they happen to be. And whether you're in California or not is not something that changes frequently. Nor is California Today a travel guide - it has no relevance for people who happen to be in California. Do you actually know if it's based on your real time location? I doubt it. And even if it was, it doesn't have to be.

Also looking at this - https://www.nytimes.com/column/california-today - it consists of an article every other day or so? This is why they need the location data? And it doesn't look like it's a customized feed at all - seems like everyone gets the exact same feed. What data do they need to put this together? And it looks like they have a signup sheet - https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/signup/CA - are you sure they don't automatically sign you up based on your permanent address? I mean, consider the level of location access (frequency and granularity) needed to show New York news vs California news and compare that against, say, turn-by-turn navigation.

Also I just downloaded the app and it has "Australia" as a top-level section by default (I'm in the US). Are you sure user location is used meaningfully for anything in the app?

And no this is NOT nit-picking and it directly counters the entire point of the article - Google's privacy policy is long because it actually covers what is being done with the data, as opposed to the New York Times policy, which states that they outsourced data collection/monetization third parties so anything goes and it's not their fault.

New York Times is saying much more than that - they are saying that they are using an unspecified number of third parties each of which is operating independently while having potentially full access to customer data. And throwing their hands up in the air and saying that they have no control over any of this. Google isn't their only vendor and at least Google is likely to be operating within some bounds - you don't know what their other vendors are nor what they are doing. This renders the entire privacy policy moot from the consumer's perspective.

And no this is not something they have to do. The idea that they cannot control what their vendors do is completely absurd - they have contracts with these vendors so they can state exactly what vendors are allowed to do under these contracts in the privacy policy. The only excuse here is that they are either too embarrassed to put what's in these contracts and/or they have no idea what's in those contracts. What NYT is doing is more or less equivalent to selling their users' data, which Google does not do.

I'm not underestimating anything at all - how many news organizations have apps that run on Android? How many of them run Google ads? Google's privacy policy has to account for all of that. And all of that is a relatively small business compared to Google's cash cows. They are not at all comparable in terms of scale or diversity of services offered. Yet, in terms of privacy policy, they are quite comparable. Back when Google's business was at NYT's scale, its privacy policy was considerably shorter.