ceeplusplus

> Why has the US minimum wage only barely begun to budge past the $7.25/h it was set to in 2009, despite that being below poverty lines for most of the country?

Nobody actually gets paid $7.25/h. Amazon pays $15/h or more nationwide. That's a baseline. In HCOL areas shitty big chain jobs like Target/Chipotle/Starbucks pay $18-22/h and restaurant servers make 25-30. Making those numbers bigger just enriches landlords unless you vastly increase the amount of housing in HCOL areas.

Compare the Chinese household savings rate to the American one, and I think you'll find people in the US do indeed spend frivolously. Note that living in HCOL locations beyond your means is still spending frivolously. You don't have a right to live in NYC or SF. If more people realized that, then supply of low wage workers would drop in these places and wages would go up.

Is a burger flipper or barista serving the same number of customers in four days as five? No? Then where are the diminishing returns there?

Pretty much any reasonable white collar job already lets you work however many hours you want as long as you get the job done and you show up to meetings.

Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts. "Republican" governors in blue states are not really the type of right wing Republican you're thinking of, they're usually just moderates like Biden.

Texas and California are both extremely powerful in national politics. Neither has an incentive to give that influence up just to play at being a separatist.

CA has been blue since 92 [1].

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/8/13563106/e...

You mean things that can be challenged in court as opposed to a unilateral, unelected bureaucracy?

But nation states have never been restricted by export bans. For example the US during the Cold War bought titanium for the SR71 from the Soviet Union. And Russia is buying chips on the black market today for its invasion of Ukraine.

Your survey seems very flawed. It puts an average SRE at 175k yet the CxO's only make 200k. Are you sure you're not excluding stock based comp in those numbers?

In any case, even if you go by the data in your survey, a machine learning specialist is supposed to make 150k and a mobile developer 144k. Those are still a lot more than 70-80k.

> Yet in the real world, geography, and luck/ability to bootstrap to HCOL areas plays a huge part

Considering the bar to get into a FAANG is just 4-5 leetcode medium-hard questions, I think there is little gatekeeping happening. This isn't investment banking where if you don't go to an Ivy you can't get in. And there are a lot more firms than FAANG paying big salaries.

> I think you're underestimating how wide the gap is between the bimodal peaks

IBM is your quintessential example of a consulting bodyshop. If anything, they would be at the lower bimodal peak, not the higher one.

Sure, but then you are hiring less skilled talent that is probably incapable of working on pricing and matching algorithms (which along with scale are the real advantage Uber has, since everyone can make a crappy iOS app and call it a day).

If the algorithms didn't matter then Uber wouldn't be maintaining 70% marketshare in the US.

Also, a quick look at levels.fyi says salary at IBM (i.e. your median salary dev) for a senior is 192k. Compared to 80k for a ridesharing coop, that's still quite the salary cut. Don't forget a lot of these coops are based in HCOL areas like NYC.

I'd say the number of people willing to take a 5x paycut (it is literally 5x) for feeling better about themselves is pretty small. The number of those people who are qualified to work on matching algorithms and pricing algorithms is even smaller. And you need matching and pricing algorithms to compete against Uber and Lyft, because they can price discriminate (e.g. airport rides) against consumers and get better utilization out of drivers, so if they have to compete, they can pay drivers more than you.

But do high productivity / high demand employees earn outsized compensation? Software engineers at Uber, for example, earn probably 10x what drivers make. If you look at some of the recent ridesharing coop attempts in the US, they advertise wages of 70-80k for devs, which is just not going to work in a competitive market.

But there could be other causes. You are operating under the default assumption long COVID must exist. But non-grads on average are poorer, work in different environments, and have different health (i.e. obesity and diabetes) than grads. There could be any number of underlying health conditions causing brain fog and other long COVID symptoms. Obesity and diabetes are known to impact brain function and are correlated with Alzheimer's. Sedentary lifestyles and poor diet can also lead to low energy.

The reason I say placebo is because any of these pre-existing conditions could be blamed on long COVID. Think about it: you don't know much about diseases, you see CNN/Fox News/MSNBC talking about long COVID. You think to yourself, hey I've got those symptoms! You blame long COVID, even though the underlying cause could have been obesity, diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, diet, etc.

We know obesity is harmful yet the fat acceptance movement exists. Do you think those people are going to blame their symptoms on their obesity?

The data showing the difference between percentage of college graduates and noncollege graduates who believe they have long COVID seems to point to a placebo effect. I don't see why college grads and non-college grads would have any reason to be affected differently by a virus.

Different circles I guess. While my spouse's family considers government jobs to be stable and somewhat respectable, there is a lot more respect for FAANG and other high paying jobs. One is respectable, the other is prestigious.

Government can't afford to hire the competent talent, only the scraps after everyone else (even the consulting bodyshops) are done. The top GS pay bracket is lower than entry level engineers at many companies (not just FAANG, but also defense, F500 companies, etc.)

For context, this is what 100W of LED looks like [1]. Those signs don't come anywhere close to this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsrAV1Qh4fs

That average is over the entire benchmarking suite, including single thread tests and when tests are loading from disk or otherwise not fully saturating the CPU. Some of those benchmarks in that power consumption number are GPU only!

Take a look at the AOM AV1 power consumption graph (https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2208044-NE-6850U700026&s...), it clearly displays huge drops when the test stops running. The CPU is turboing to 30 watts in 75% of the run.

If you use the 15W hard cap performance numbers (low power mode), performance drops 20-40%.

> Apple also exceeds the stated tdp during peaks as well but we don't have that information atm

We actually do. Notebookcheck recorded 20W usage on a peak MT load (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-M2-Entry-Rev...). The MBA is fanless so it's physically impossible for it to substantially exceed that amount without frying your lap.

> And remember there's a 14% perf gap between the two

Like I said, power is not equal at all.

> x86 isn't behind in performance and that you're not making sacrifices in that department to maintain software compatibility with the x86 ecosystem

Comparing the lowest end chip from one vendor to the highest end chip from another is not exactly a great look. Especially when the Arm chip is basically matching the x86 one while having only a few years of software optimization work.

I thought existing Starlink needed a phased array antenna to get decent signal strength. How the hell is a cell phone radio going to reach a satellite?

It is not, the laptop tested with the 6850U has a 30W PL2 and 50W PL1.

5900HX TDP: 35-80W depending on boost setting. Most gaming laptops set it at 60W+.

M2 TDP: 20W

If I have a kid who is learning music, your plan screws over any opportunity they have to practice at home. I've lived in newly built apartments and even those are not sound proof.

Not to mention public transit is dirty and unsafe in any major city in the US because there is way too much tolerance for disorderly and disruptive people.

> a single mitigation

That is the only mitigation used in DALL-E 2, which up until recently was the only publicly available text to image model.

> I’d prefer not to have this awesome technology tainted out of the gate as a tool for racists and pornographers

Why is it your business what people do with the model? If people want to be racist they can already do so, they don't need a shitty model that doesn't work half as well as paying some guy in the third world $2/h to shitpost online. And I don't see the problem with pornography.

Marginal cost of using that is basically $0. The internal dataset is a sunk cost that's already been paid for (presumably for their other, revenue generating products like Google Images). Half of their dataset is a publicly available one.

Ah yes, because removing overly restrictive zoning is totally equivalent to complete deregulation of everything. I bet you support designating things which are not historic as historic landmarks too, so the poors can't move next to you.

> The killer with high property taxes is that you have to keep earning more as your property increases in value, or there is a real risk of you falling behind

That's a feature, not a bug. The entire reason California's real estate market is so dysfunctional is that people are disincentivized from selling due to Prop 13, so you have people living in oversized houses paying a tiny fraction of the property tax their neighbors are.

You "falling behind" means someone else gets a fair shot at living in the area without being disadvantaged by a 10x higher property tax.

Ideally the property would never increase in value in the first place, because we'd build enough housing to prevent that.

Sure, but if you're going to compare taxes you have to compare the effect of Prop 13 on property valuations, as that's basically a tax but with the revenues going to existing property owners rather than the state.

> but my experience living in TX is it is definitely not a low-tax state

Dunno, I'd take property taxes (i.e. taxes on consumption of real estate) over income taxes. Particularly since income taxes are progressive whereas property taxes are a flat percentage. Even if I paid $2k/month in additional property taxes, the difference in income taxes would still make TX cheaper.

I find that hard to believe. A quick look at Redfin says tax on this $385k home is about $564/mo [1].

In any case, the lower tax rate in CA gets baked into the property value (hence the sky-high valuations) so you're paying for it either way. Comparing equivalent homes in NYC/Jersey City or Boston to those in Silicon Valley or LA makes it easy to see the effect property taxes have on valuations.

[1] https://www.redfin.com/TX/Austin/2015-Ploverville-Ln-78728/h...

> is the US insulated from fossil fuel prices?

To a large degree, yes [1]. The US is affected by oil prices globally, but if OPEC decides to cut off the US it wouldn't have the same effect that Russia is having on the EU right now.

> also participate globally

In crises, the US has the option to restrict exports. The EU does not have that option because it is not a net producer of fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/natural-gas-p...

In a competitive market (I'd say even the biggest investors own <10% of the markets they operate in), rents are bounded by competition. The bigger reason rents are going up is there is not enough supply for people to live in. Things like environmental reviews, zoning policy, mandatory low income units, and "historical" buildings make it very unappealing or impossible to develop new housing.

At the very least, replacing all SFH with townhouses would give 2x density increase. Removing the height limit on new construction and allowing rebuilds of old apartment buildings without excessive permitting would probably give another 3x increase.