chadash

Apparently, there was an $11 "content delivery fee" for the TV. As if buying the cable channels and having them "delivered" to my home are different freaking things. As if you can buy the rights to watch cable at the comcast store, but if you want it at home, you gotta pay an extra $11.

These companies are going to whine and scream about these changes, but they really brought this on themselves.

As just one example, you can securitize the revenues from golf courses. You can say, hey, i own six courses bringing in an average of $100m a year. I'm gonna take that $600m cash flow and sell it in an asset-backed security in order to raise money to finance the acquisition of more golf courses. Then I'm gonna tranche up those securities, because I found that I'll make more money selling 50% super safe and 50% risky than selling it as 100% middle-of-the-road risky. This example isn't really a hack anymore... it's almost the norm. But someone had to have the initial insight and then figure out if this was legal.

The parent said, "more equal", not equal. There is a big difference between saying that everyone should have the same exact wage versus we should narrow the gap between the highest and the lowest paid people.

And there are plenty of examples of people with massive contributions to society who didn't get paid very well. Van Gogh lived in poverty. Albert Einstein was certainly not poor, but I'd have a hard time believing that his "contribution to society" is less than 1/10000th that of Jeff Bezos. For that matter, my elementary school teachers contributed a lot to society. So do many others. I don't believe that the parent comment is arguing that teachers should make as much as CEOs, they are just saying that the gap shouldn't be so ludicrously large.

Meanwhile, there's many companies in a second boat. Companies that are doing fine but are worried about choppy waters ahead. Perhaps they are hiring for key roles or to fill spots of people who leave. But on the whole, they want to protect what they have and don't see this as the time to push for major growth.

The good news is that there is definitely a third boat. Companies that are raising money because they have an outstanding product or idea. Companies that raised large amounts of money before things started going sour. And of course, profitable companies with sound businesses that see opportunities to grow further. It seems to me like there are still a significant number of companies in this third boat, so I wouldn't be too worried yet. That said, if you are swimming around in the ocean right now, the water is definitely getting cold. I'm not saying to get on any boat that comes around, but you probably don't want to wait around for a 100ft yacht.

Yes! This is a particularly true for most software engineers. I have a friend who is a doctor whose contract says that if quits, he can't practice medicine within a 30-mile radius for 12 months. His only option would be to move to a different area, take a job with a horrible commute for a year or to wait it out. On the other hand, as a software engineer, I've never been in a situation where my thought is to move to a direct competitor. My skillset is broadly applicable to many industries, and it wouldn't be strange to do one gig for Home Depot, the next one at Google, followed by a role at Tesla.

Another candidate gets an offer and sees the non-compete clause (which is the same across all of Acme Corp's 10k employees) and asks for that to be removed. As the hiring manager, what do I do? My boss leads a division but doesn't have authority to change boilerplate contracts. Neither does her boss. So we need to go to Legal. But who do I reach out to there? The company's general counsel doesn't have time to deal with this. So I guess I start emailing around? Who do I go to who actually has the authority to change this? It becomes too much of a hassle and I turn candidate #2 away. Oh, and by the way, had candidate #2 signed the contract, they would have been banned from working for any other company whose business is primarily selling Fancy Widgets to people named Bridgette who have 11 fingers. It probably wouldn't have been an issue anyway.

My point is that people sometimes overthink this. Yes, non-competes are bad. I'd argue that they are immoral and certainly bad policy. But not every non-compete is created equally and sometimes maybe you'd be better off negotiating for other things that might be easier to negotiate on and would be more useful anyway. If you are a software engineer, it's often unlikely that you'd find yourself working for a direct competitor anyway.

The problem is that there's a selection bias for attrition. It's possible that your worst employees are the ones who stick around the longest.

Say you've been wanting to close down an unproductive division and let go of low-performing employees in other divisions for a few years now. You sure as hell weren't going to do that in early 2022, when you'd risk a lot of other employees jumping ship at the first signs of cracks in the house. But in 2023, you can do layoffs and get away with it.

With cars, more expensive doesn't necessarily mean that it will last longer. In fact, the opposite is often true. I would be willing to bet that a typical Corolla is capable of getting more miles than a $100k Mercedes.

Yes, the average car is far more expensive, but if you are looking to optimize for cost and just need something to get from A to B (which is what the article seems to assume), then a Corolla is a perfectly good vehicle.

> Which is precisely the point: Ferris has staged this adolescent fantasy of omnipotence expressly for his best friend.

> Ferris himself is, for the most part, a fabulous cartoon—half James Bond, half Holden Caulfield. But he understands the very real crisis Cameron is facing and takes it as his role to push his friend into emotional danger.

In fact, that way of life might mean you work more hours if anything. If you live in Miami and work four days a week in NYC, you are likely working very long days. You are not near your friends or family or your chores… that could be four days devoted exclusively to work, say 12-14 hours a day, followed by a Friday working remotely. I can see why a salesperson might need to be in person 4 days a week. But I have a hard time imagining that five days is necessary. VP of Sales has plenty of administrative work to do, and many meetings can be over the phone anyway.

To call this employee “half time” is insane.

If you taxed revenues, some businesses would just be impossible to run. I have to imagine that there are grocery stores and pharmacies in the Faroe Islands.

In other words, the kind of person who is actually in a position to negotiate the terms of their contract. What bugs me most about the current situation is the ubiquity of non-competes for low salary employees, who have the least amount of leverage to negotiate contracts. I'm much less concerned about staff engineers at tech companies and portfolio managers at hedge funds, although I'd prefer to see non-competes banned altogether (except perhaps for non-competes for owners selling a company... I think it's fair that if I buy your ice cream shop, we can agree that you can't open one up across the street the next day).

This gets thrown around HN a lot but I don't think it matches reality. Say I work in machine learning algorithms for show recommendations at Netflix. Amazon hires me to work on their machine learning algorithm recommender on Prime Video. Sure, I might have NDAs to protect what I learned at Netflix, but how does Netflix realistically show whether or not I disseminated that knowledge at Amazon? It's not like they can just ask to see Amazon's code to see if the knowledge has been ported over to there. The only way to really show that I infringed an NDA is for someone to rat me out, which is probably pretty rare. To that end, I understand why companies want non-competes (I'm not saying they should be allowed to have them... I'm just saying that there are reasons that they exist beyond "we don't want employees to leave). In finance, it's very common to get a paid non-compete where you get your full salary for as long as the company wants to enforce the non-compete. Companies aren't paying these high salaries just because "training cost is expensive and it's to limit staff from training at one company and leaving". They are doing it because they actually fear the consequences of the employee's new firm competing with them based on the knowledge that the employee has. For this reason, it's also pretty common for companies in finance to not pay out gardening leave when they aren't worried about the employee's new company directly competing.

source: https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/conne...

In a more just world, Equifax would go out of business and the assets would be divided among the affected parties. The fact that that won't happen isn't your buddy's fault. At the end of the day, sure, he gets high fees, but if the lawyers in the equifax case were to distribute their fees to victims, maybe I would have gotten $6 instead of $5? My point is, I'm mad at Equifax a lot more so than your buddy.

> The company said there will be a “two-week cooling off period” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.

The company isn't saying no recurring meetings. It is saying, "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think carefully about which ones we really need... and by the way, it's okay to decline a meeting that you don't think you'll gain value from.

I personally think that an occasional reset to figure out which meetings are actually necessary is a good idea. Also, sometimes there are personal/political reasons for joining meetings that you aren't going to get much out of. Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.

They were bigger than this, but still small. They said that 36k bags is about 1.5 years of sales for them, so that's 24k bags/year, or about 65/day (using a 7-day week calculation). 24k bags at $15/bag is $360k/year revenue, which is still quite small, especially if you have employees (and I believe some of these bags were sold through local stores, so that means revenue is less).

I guess I'd say that's significant as well? I don't need to analyze the numbers in much depth to see that there's an upward trend in people getting flu shots over the last few decades...

> Also, what would happen if we would normalize for better treatments, better vaccines available with each passing year? Or that shouldn't be taken into consideration?

Not sure what you are getting at here. Your original comment said "There is absolutely no relationship between the number of flu “vaccines” given and deaths from influenza." By the very sources that you gave, it's pretty clear that there is a significant correlation between the percentage of the population getting flu vaccines vs the rates of influenza mortality. In the time period you describe, the rate (which takes into account populationsize) of influenza deaths went down by almost half.

Now sure, correlation isn't causation, so it's entirely possible that there's some other factor leading to drops in flu deaths. Which is why the CDC has a pretty comprehensive page about how they determine the effectiveness of the flu vaccine [1] where they discuss methodologies, including shortcomings.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm

i.e. adjusted for population size, influenza deaths went down significantly between 1959 and 2016.

As a counterpoint, I probably wouldn't dig into this too much. But even if I did, would I find it strange that someone got laid off and then used their time to build up a company that didn't work out? Probably not. And if I realized that it was a half-assed effort... so what? Why is that worse than time spent playing video games? Sure, if you told me you were working on building a company and you didn't have any progress, I might feel that you were dishonest. But if you've got at least something to show for it (a basic product, even with zero sales), I think it's fair game.