ceeplusplus

Pensions are notoriously under/unfunded, particularly in local governments. I wouldn't count that as a guaranteed benefit. It may retroactively be cut in the future.

> Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today

They actually are, at least for pension contributions.

I think many of these are inherently poweruser features though. Most non tech-savvy people will rarely have to turn off their phone or clear their open apps (really if the memory eviction system is good this shouldn't even be a concern).

Some of the other stuff you mentioned is discoverable in my opinion. Swiping down from home gives you a search bar. Notifications being accessible by swiping down from the left is admittedly not as good as swiping down from the top bar in the older iPhones, but I think still more discoverable than the Windows notification system that requires you to click a button.

Oh they certainly still do have some bureaucracy, but you will never see an L3 at Google being promoted to L5 in 1 year whereas that is a (very rare) possibility at FB.

Google has a big focus on technical excellence and complexity. Facebook is the one with the impact focused culture. You need to get your PRs approved by language experts at G, while at FB people frequently ship things that are terribly written and have few tests.

Anywhere where there are committees that decide who gets promoted are not impact focused.

1. Minecraft has a lot of kids playing it, particularly kids whose parents blame Microsoft for poor behavior rather than learning to parent.

2. California recently passed a bill which would fine companies which fail to prevent kids from accessing features which are "detrimental" to children's health [1]. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want to get fined for what edgy gamers say online.

3. (speculation) The censorship police that have infected every other major online platform have now reached gaming.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-onlin...

Psychedelics are quite a bit different from heroin/meth/fentanyl. The problem is that SF tolerates the latter.

Not sure what you define to be a hellscape, but Market St definitely fits the bill especially after 8pm. I've never before had to worry about zombies but in SF you do.

If you think SF is the norm then you should visit a city with competent governance and see what normal should be.

Their strategy uniquely gives you the upside of internal R&D (pace, funding, and direction are set by you) with none of the downside (potential disruption by new technologies). Apple can drop a supplier on a dime if a disruptive technology comes out. If that same tech was being developed in house, there would have been too much internal politics and momentum for that switch to happen. But because they bankroll capex, they have control over the direction and pace of incremental R&D.

Testosterone is a known causative factor for aggression and risk taking. Men have more testosterone than women.

> Partner has agreed to make certain payments to the Company for (i) 95% of the approved capital expenditures Globalstar makes in connection with the new satellites described

The real secret that will be studied in business school for decades to come is Apple's supplier model.

> thats why its hard to get into medical school, as it should be

We literally have a shortage of doctors and this is your attitude? Someone who wants to make money is an equally good or better doctor than the person who wants to help people. Medicine is scientific: you either do the operation successfully or you don't. You diagnose the patient successfully or you don't. A person's motivations for becoming a doctor doesn't play a factor in their skill.

We don't ask McDonald's workers why they want to work at McDonald's, why do we need to do it for doctors?

> Are you one of those people that assumes if you simply mentioned race in your argument, you win by default? Pathetic.

Do you deny that terms like "well rounded" and "holistic" are used to discriminate against Asians? Or should I point you to SFFA vs. Harvard, which showed that your coveted "well-rounded" personality traits can be and are used as tools of discrimination? I'll remind you that Harvard intentionally reduced the personality scores of Asians to make them seem less "well-rounded".

Med school admissions would be fairer without requiring such things as "well rounded" candidates. Personality scores are subjective and subject to bias and foul play, MCAT scores are not.

I think you grossly overestimate the percentage of candidates at lower tier schools who would be qualified to pass a Jane Street (or really any HFT firm) interview. Even at the top schools the pass rate is incredibly low. In expectation you would be getting probably <5% of your new graduate/intern class from the entire bottom 80% of schools.

The quality level drops off very sharply after you go below the top 20-30 CS schools. It's just a matter of limited resources for recruiting. The common path taken by people who go to "lesser" schools is to grind really hard to get into a good MS or PhD program and then go to these firms.

I would take a smart doctor motivated by money over a dumber one motivated by caring for people.

The reality is all of the top surgeons, cardiologists, etc. didn't become those professions just because they were "well rounded", they were smart and they wanted prestige/money. It would be good for medicine to have more smart and ambitious people.

Well rounded is just a euphemism to discriminate against Asians through affirmative action.

Probably because the people pushing for free college etc tend to be ones studying the humanities, which gives people a bad impression of the whole thing. People make fun of Fox News touting lesbian dance studies majors, but the reality is most people don't support funding your bullshit gender studies degree with their tax dollars.

> the AMA agrees there is a problem and is onboard with expanding the pipeline

Oh come on, they could start by accepting everyone with a 3.5+ and decent MCAT instead of requiring that you have a 3.95, volunteering experience, clinical experience, and near perfect MCATs. The path is unattractive because it's filled with bullshit requirements that don't matter.

On top of this most med schools discriminate against their largest pool of potential top students: Asians. It's well known if you're Asian you need much higher MCATs and GPA to get into med school. How many people have been pushed out of considering medicine because of this?

Well, typically open book tests are designed with that ability to search in mind, so the problems are much harder and designed to test understanding rather than memorization. They often are also much longer, so you cannot just search for everything and still get a full score.

Gross receipts tax of 0.69% plus 1.5% payroll tax [1]. $20,000 trash cans [2] and arcane permitting processes for brick and mortar businesses. The city's leadership has their head so far up their ass about going after rich techies that they proposed a tax which was intended to target Amazon, but was so poorly written that they asked to retract it off the ballot because Amazon wasn't subject to the tax but small businesses were [3].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/politics/heres-what-a-san-francisco-2...

[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-activists-wanted-...

A substantial amount of housing, especially on East and West Coast, was built prewar or only just postwar. That housing has the potential to have toxic chemicals like lead and asbestos, poor plumbing, lack of insulation, and poor ventilation. It almost certainly doesn't have AC/central heating in places that don't require it year-round to be livable.

Unfortunately the author of this PR decided to include garbage like this [1] in it, so this PR is pretty useless.

[1] https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion/pull/103/file...

You're not serious? DC looks pretty expensive for an average worker, from a quick look at apartments.com. Housing is cheap in the South and in rural areas for sure, but any West Coast/northern East Coast city is very expensive. Suburbs used to be cheap but now are not so cheap after COVID+inflation.

Perhaps your expectations are calibrated based on European cities which also have housing shortages, like Berlin and London.

> Good. Find out how Walmart retail workers are doing.

Plenty of other examples of well paid workers and US SWEs paid more than EU SWEs. UPS teamsters are unionized. AT&T technicians are unionized. Both pay their SWEs more than EU companies by a substantial margin.

> did awesome job with generous money in creating enduring businesses with strong work ethics.

You could name companies which are actually changing how (European) companies operate. Zoom, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, the list goes on and on. None of which were started in Europe.

32 hours a week and 60k EUR/year doesn't cut it in a competitive market, and any founder will tell you that.

> And Housing in US is lot cheaper for majority of people.

Not in any major city. Clearly you don't live in the US.

> And non-FAANG type IT worker are also paid relatively high at the cost of other workers living perilous lives.

Those workers live perilous lives because cities refuse to build enough housing, not because a few workers have it good.

> those outrageously high FAANG salaries occurs because of

4) Much more generous VC funding leading to more competition between firms for SWEs, as a result of a more risk seeking / risk tolerant culture with stronger work ethic

Also you're ignoring that even SWEs at companies like Walmart Labs make much more than SWEs in Europe.

Usually what happens is landlord offers the underwater tenant a cash payment to get them to agree to move out. Ends up cheaper than going through the courts.

This is just supply and demand though, rents will hopefully be on the way down as a result of this.

I never said this organization is neutral. Merely that if you criticize this organization you should also criticize the ACLU for the same lack of neutrality.

From the ACLU:

"a reason to decline taking a free-speech case “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values." In selecting speech cases to defend, the ACLU will now balance the “impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression.” Factors like the potential effect of the speech on “marginalized communities” and even on “the ACLU’s credibility” could militate against taking a case." [1] [2]

[1] https://www.axios.com/2018/06/21/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speec...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-exp...

Your list looks impressive. But what cases did they choose to not accept that aren't listed there?

> I’d hope that any organization concerned with civil liberties would make the effort to act in a bipartisan, politically neutral way.

Funny, because you could say the same about the ACLU, but swap progressive/conservative.

I've had Cherry switches fail right as the keyboard's warranty was up. The switch feels soft after wearing out, it gets dust in it and starts double typing, etc. Pacemakers need to be 100% reliable, not 99.9%.

Then the people working there aren't rational actors. Amazon is paying $15/h nationally, why would anyone work for $7.25?

> even though they've had to cut hours and are now "drive-through-only" for big chunks of every day

And when everyone leaves for the higher paying jobs (as they should), they'll raise wages. That's how a market works.

> almost nobody in HCOL areas gets paid that

No, nobody in HCOL areas gets paid that, not only because state and local minimum wages are higher but also because the market price for unskilled labor is way higher than even local minimum wage. And if you're getting underpaid you should quit. There is plenty of access to market wage unskilled jobs, if those people are staying despite being underpaid that's on them.

> That extreme turned out to be unsustainable in today's labor market--again, at least where I live--so "the market" and "the real world" seem to be moving on.

Yes, the minimum possible being the minimum market wage that they can hire workers for (even if turnover is high). I don't mean they pay $7.25...

> So I can tell you that many employers already flexibly schedule their workers

Yeah, but those employees get paid only for the time they work, not 100% pay for 80% time. That's the point I was making.

> Either way, I'm happy to pay even 20% more for my hamburgers if my kids can get better treatment as workers.

What actually happens is those jobs get replaced with automation and your kids can't get fast food jobs in the first place. Order taking gets replaced with kiosks and things like fry production get automated [1]. It might not happen overnight but the tech is basically there already with computer vision and robotics.

My local Walmart is already 50% self checkouts (advertising $18/h wages, btw). Amazon has licensed their Amazon Go tech to 3rd party stores. If wages go up 20% overnight the impetus to buy that tech goes way, way up.

[1] https://misorobotics.com/

Chinese savings are dumped into housing because the stock market isn't trustworthy there, not because everyone decided housing is the most productive enterprise.

Also, dumping your money into savings accounts is definitely better than dumping it into 30% APR BNPL offers for designer clothing and electronics. Or gas guzzling, expensive SUVs and trucks. Ask yourself why Apple has a 50% market share in the US.

> doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth).

Saving doesn't mean saving until retirement, it just means not spending beyond your means.

> Do I expect a burger flipper working at a hot grill to be just as safe in hour ten as hour eight or hour six of a given workday? No, I expect that burns, for example, are more likely at the end of long shifts than the beginning

This is completely unrealistic - you clearly have never worked in food service or any sort of low wage customer facing role. There is a rush for each of the 3 meals of the day, and in between your volume is pretty low. And you never work a 10 hour shift, if anything they don't give you enough hours and you work 3-4 hour shifts.

> Then the receptionist can also work four days a week, with someone else filling in, rather than only those less visible

The difference is that the clever people who get their work done in 32 hours are still giving 100% output. The receptionist obviously cannot give 100% output if they are only present for 80% time.

> He reasoned that giving workers two days off instead of just one would enable him to push them harder, and get just as much work done while making happier employees, more loyal to him

No, it was not because they got just as much work done, but because it would reduce turnover [1]. It was a calculated economic decision. And in the real world, corporations have done that analysis and either decided on Ford's approach (as Costco has) or on the minimum pay possible approach (like Walmart). As a worker, you have the choice of going to Costco or Walmart to work.

I'll remind you that factory jobs needed a lot more training than fast food, which meant turnover cost had a real impact for Ford.

> But most businesses in which physical presence for given hours is important already have flexible scheduling to handle days of the week and times of the day at which business is busier.

But each worker still serves X customers per hour and works Y hours per week with flexible scheduling. If you suddenly have 20% fewer hours, then the worker has to get paid 20% less, else the business now pays more for labor. Considering a lot of restaurants operate on razor thin margins, this doesn't work out as well as you think.

[1] https://hankeringforhistory.com/history-weekend/