danielrpa

It makes him an expert at making money, which perhaps maps to being good at contract negotiation, government influence, business Management etc... (But not infectious diseases)

I've abandoned SEOogle for DuckDuckGo 3 years ago... Couldn't be happier.

> but as both a smoker and a former FB employee equating them is a stretch.

We shouldn't equate them. Facebook can scale out its ability to do harm in ways that Big Tobacco couldn't even dream of.

Immigration from Latin America and Asia are certainly helping SI in the US. However, there is a loooooong way ahead... And forget about Celsius, this one is nowhere to be seen.

Same here. It's quite decent for these use cases. I also use it for light gaming and toilet Internet browsing.

I still remember my top-of-the-line Google Nexus 10 Tablet bought for $500... No more software updates after a couple of years. To make matters worse, the very last update had a bug that would trigger a tablet reboot (due to a hard crash) every time I used the Youtube app for a couple of minutes.

Because US tech companies are the most successful in the world and there is an immense demand for workers located in US-friendly time zones. It's simple market economics. I wouldn't be surprised if there is more demand for highly skilled tech workers in California alone than any other country in the world.

If you are in tech, it's not common to need a roommate outside the few super high cost of living cities in the US. Many of my SoCal friends have roommates, but none of my Dallas or Atlanta friends do (of course you can have roommates if you want, but at around <30% rent on income, it's not really required in most cases).

Not defending YouTube, but I think that the letter said that some advertisers won't accept "sexual" content and thus her income would go down? The big question here, as I see it, is whether it's fair to call that "sexual" content.

The Internet rules, but we lost something innocent and good from those times. Discovering a BBS was so exciting - new games, new filez and, most importantly, new friends! A lot less toxicity and higher quality interactions.

I am the parent and I work at a FAANG now. But I did have a company right out of college (which failed).

FAANG now is a means for saving for my next enterprise, which hopefully will happen very soon.

Amazing!

"Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.

I'm voter in the United States and this is on my top 100 problems list.

Probably a lot cooler gear... But perhaps not feel as incredible as the 8-bit stuff felt back in the day. Kids nowadays were born with tablets, LCD TVs, mobile phones and photorealistic games, so the changes they observe during their childhood are largely incremental. VR glasses are cool, but with more primitive graphics than regular games.

The videogame experience that started in the 80s was a revolution in electronics, not an incremental change. That felt like Aliens had come to Earth to give us something coming from the future, it was a paradigm shift. My kid looks at his Playstation with excitement, but I've never seen the absolute awe that struck me back in the 80s when I first saw, for instance, Dragon's Lair... Or even, somewhat later, the NES, which the brought Arcades home.

I live in a place without the soda tax. I'm noticing that kids aren't into sodas as much as they used to. My kid and his friends all dislike sodas. There could be other cultural trends alongside the tax.

Is finding work for ex-convicts with coding skills a startup opportunity? Perhaps doing coding jobs for small businesses?

Sundar Pichai is probably the weakest of the FAANG executives - if not one of the weakest Fortune 100 executives. Google's search result quality, reduction in overall prestige and lack of new major products are just a few indicators of that.

But speaking in general, there is limited correlation between executive compensation and company performance. You can DuckDuckGo it if you want to find the evidence for this statement.

The CEO and upper management might simply not care about the long-term viability of the company. Cashing out in the short-term sounds more like what these executives generally do.

Please help me understand one thing, while having in mind that I'm not particularly for or against single payer. My problem is that I don't buy the top argument for single payer I'm seeing here.

Many people here are arguing that healthcare is expensive, is a basic human need and it's really hard to get it in the US if you don't have a job paying for it. Even when jobs help out with the premiums, it's still hard to pay for it in California. All true.

Do you know another basic human need? A place to live. Without a place to live, you are homeless - which is normally seen as even worse as not having access to healthcare.

A place to live in the bay area is really expensive, more so than healthcare. I don't live in the bay area, but it appears that a reasonable rent for a place for 3 people is around $3500/mo or 42K/year. This is more than out of pocket (no subsidies) Kaiser + average healthcare expenses.

If the government is supposed to pay for healthcare in California, why isn't it supposed to pay for rent? Both are basic needs and quite expensive. Serious question.

Unfortunately you don't really own an individual license to the content if you get a BluRay - your content is still tied to the media. Some of my BluRays are unplayable due to scratches, which means that my license is gone. Ok, these are the terms, but with terms like that piracy wins.

I'd like a full quality, DRM-free file with my BluRay purchases. And then I'd just skip the BluRay and buy the file itself...

They don't sell the DRM-free file because of piracy... But in fact, there is more piracy because they don't sell the file!

> Let me pay money and download a DRM-free mp4 that I can keep forever and watch anywhere. I'd do it and so would a sizable percentage of existing pirates.

This. DRM is a major incentive for piracy. I regret every single DRMed music and video purchase I've ever made.

Legal considerations aside, pirating can be a fun hobby. In the early days of computers, pirating was one of the best ways to meet other computer geeks!

Additionally, thanks to pirates and data hoarders (and the Internet Archive), we have a LOT of intellectual property preserved that would otherwise not exist due to fuzzy ownership and copyright complexities.

Hubris yes, but perhaps not wrong. I'm not sure if the progress between 1922-2022 was as significant as the progress between 1822-1922. These are two 100-year periods of immense progress.

Have in mind that he's referring to the 100 yr period that brought us cars, airplanes, railroads, telephones, light bulbs, electricity, electromagnetism, relativity, evolution, etc.

My 12 yr old now feels naked without the mask... Perhaps the mandate isn't very useful, but kids are so adaptable (evolutionary trait!) that this isn't in general a big deal for them.

Renting isn't like owning a house. You can be kicked out of your rental unit if your landlord decides to do a number of things, such as converting your rental to a condo or sell the property. Rents can go up arbitrarily.

A paid off house gives you a type of stability, belonging and security that rentals don't generally offer (at the expense of flexibility and mobility). I'm not trying to say that owning is better than renting, just that they are different enough for the "buying your house isn't an investment" statement to be mostly true.

Migration patterns overwhelmingly demonstrate that people are migrating from high density cities to low density, "hardcore suburban" cities. In the US, high density living is a boutique lifestyle choice that is constrained in the offer side (NIMBY), thus the prices. The fact that there are people willing to pay for this lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a majority, or even a significant percentage of the overall population.

This varies a lot across the country. Most of the local suburban streets are maintained through a combination of local city/county and gas taxes and don't come from the "city money" general tax pool. Not to mention that most states don't have a dense city to speak of, so they are in practice >95% low density.

The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.

Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.

Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).

Thank you, that's very informative! If you don't mind me asking, what would be an example of a high end insurance plan? Is this like a low deductible ("Gold") plan from regular carriers like Kaiser and Anthem?

One thing I've always been curious about: what insurance plan, if any, do the rich use in the US? I'm not talking about the 1% but the 0.1%. Let's say, a famous movie actor or singer. Do they use fully non-insurance, out of pocket healthcare for primary physicians and specialists? What about surgeries? I wonder if there is in practice a separate health care system for them.

The ability to walk in quiet, open spaces with low pollution is one of the top advantages of low density suburbia.

Low density suburbia can, and usually has, plenty of walking spaces with a ton of nature around. I lived in multiple suburban neighborhoods and I was always either within a short (and easy) drive to a park or had great walking areas in the neighborhood itself. Contrast with high density, where you have to deal with pollution, noise and potentially crime just to walk to a park (and in the park itself)

Regarding "fear or interacting", in my experience I have a lot of more interactions, of the cordial and polite kind, with the few neighbors I have in my low density area than I've ever had when I lived in a high density city where you can feel like an ant in a colony.