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In practical terms it means public subsidizing gay lifestyle in US by 28k/year - it’s the only demographic outside of sex workers for whom this drug make sense and will be routinely offered.

It’s just not sustainable.

European salaries are laughably low even compared to low ball offers from US startups.

Essentially options for good (but not great) sr engineers are

1. Get 120k salary in Europe (on higher end)

2. 500k at FAANG in US (salary + RSU)

3. ~200k at startup in US + lottery tickets

Both option 2 and 3 strictly beat option 1 (especially after taxes) so European should get off the high horse and recognize reality that they are poor and exploited by companies and government.

Redwood City has terrible schools (relatively) and many people consider excellent schools for their kids as hard requirement.

Germans were pretty good at exploiting ethnic grievances in multiple countries - Czhech vs Slovak, Croats vs Serbs, Bulgars vs Greek and Hungarian vs everyone that have nothing to do oppression and fight for homeland.

People underestimate what a clusterfuck of ethnicities pre WW2 Eastern Europe was. Resettlement after WW2 created much cleaner ethnic maps and arguably the reason we had 80 years of mostly peace (Yugoslavia was last country with mix of ethnicities and wars in 90ies cleaned up it too).

Would you support blocking BLM and black supremacist propaganda too? Essentially you are just proposing traditional government censorship. The good thing about Soviet TV is that it had only wholesome content - not that western capitalist stuff.

Alternatively 10 to 14 new colonies without voting right with people getting less than citizen rights (something similar to status that Baltic states have for ethnically Russians). You have to deserve right to vote.

I assume that if it’s done at scale it will change trade balance and middlemen country will see their import taxes rise. It actually creates self interest for countries to prevent this behavior and block such activity as it will hurt genuine export.

We do not have to be net exporters of coffee - Indonesia can buy US cars, corn and wheat for example to balance trade.

Even serious discussion of Chinese soldiers in Canada or Mexico is clear casus belli and surefire way for those countries to be occupied. Chinese soldiers on the border is existential to US and when dealing with existential risks countries tend to put funny concepts such as UN charter or human rights aside.

Canada is absolutely indefensible with no strategic depth or ability to get new supplies. Mexico is harder to occupy but their military is a joke and again easy to block all external supplies. Very doable.

Unlikely. Ukraine does not have scale, manufacturing base and talent for that - right now it's mostly assembling drones from Chinese parts with very little innovation on top of that. People talked about AI swarms but very little of that materialized at the front line. Larger drones require satellite connections, advanced materials, etc - Ukraine does not have that either. I expect Ukrainian expertise in war drones will stagnate and become obsolete very quickly after the war.

Real time content recommendation algorithm can be rebuilt from scratch relatively quickly (weeks). At the beginning it won't be as effective as current TikTok algorithm so iterations will be required but frankly treating algo like something that can only be done by Chinese engineers is silly.

When TikTok developed recommendations it was novel and on the frontier but now how it's done is much better understood and with GPUs availability can be implemented by any good ML team. Similar to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other, the secret sauce is content and users, not algorithm.

Most geopolitical rivals already blocked US social media - Russia, Iran, China. Brazil blocked and forced X to censor opposition Brazilian politicians. It's already happening.

EU/NATO members can't outright block US social media for obvious reasons (military protection is not free). They try to do sneaky things to control social media with DSA, etc.

India/Indonesia and a few other countries are already debating banning foreign social media companies. India was the first to ban TikTok (for the same reason that US is banning TikTok now). US and India are not really rivals and US can retaliate against India if US companies are blocked so math is that it's not worth it to block for now but it can change in future.

Most other countries are not capable/do not have economy and critical number of people to have viable clone of social media. They block social media from time to time during elections, etc.

> It also helped that Hungarian candidate when tiktok was used by Russia to push him...

That's actually misinformation and narrative invented to support coup by Romanian security services/supreme court to cancel elections. No Russians were involved. TikTok campaign was financed by center-right party but backfired in unexpected ways.

https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...

Good point. With that, with Starlink and soon Starlink direct to cell, this capability is becoming much less important in an emergency. Starlink already provides Internet and soon everyone will have satellite capable phone (I assume texting will be prioritized in emergency for bandwidth).

It could be false flag operation to create pretext for NATO/EU to block shipping to Russian ports in Baltic Sea.

Similar to Nordstream destruction in 2022 it could have been either Ukrainians or CIA/NSA. This could be last attempt by current US administration elements to create leverage for the Ukraine before negotiations start.

Quality of your life depends not only on your house but also on houses around you. When I go out, I want to see nice, well maintained houses with no garbage outside. What happens without HOA in low middle class and poor areas are broken cars, garbage everywhere and unkempt lawn. In wealthy neighborhoods you generally do not need HOA as people maintain their property on their own.

US should respond symmetrically and freeze accounts of some random(with Durov arrest), EU (threatening letter to Musk) and UK (prison sentences for mildly offensive tweets) are fighting to limit free speech under very similar pretenses that freedom of the press was limited in Nazi Germany or USSR (fighting foreign influence, “misinformation”, protecting kids) Some societies are robust and can afford free press/free speech while keeping peace major Brazilian company. /s On a serious note it’s interesting to see how countries around the world from France and internal cohesion. Modern multicultural and multi-ethnic states in EU may have to become way more authoritarian to keep going.

Well, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore and a bunch of other places clearly demonstrate that you can have high inequality and close to zero street crime.

We have nationals/citizens of every major US adversary working in those companies with looser security practice than security at local warehouse. Security check before hiring is a joke (mostly checks that resume checks out), laptops can be taken home and internal communication are not segmented on need to know basis. Essentially if China wants weights or source code, it will have hundreds of people to choose from who can provide it.

I think Google does it now. One problem is see is that people may optimize for price tickets and not business goals to get bigger credit. Business need is 2 day trip but people may extend it by 2 days to get cheaper air tickets but on balance it will be more for the company due to additional hotel cost.

I almost always book tickets for business travel 1-3 day before the trip. I am completely price insensitive (I do not care if my employer pays $100 or $400 for the ticket), my schedule is hard to predict ahead of time (if there are no important meetings on Monday, I will fly on Monday. If something important pops up I may fly on Sunday or on Tuesday). Downside is smaller seat selection (I mitigate by always checking if aisle seat available before booking) and sometimes convenient flights sell out.

Guidelines are written by product, legal, privacy, comms, policy and other folks in HQ - raters (psychopath or not) do not really influence them. Guidelines in my experience suffer from "design by committee" syndrome but everyone working on them is pretty empathetic and genuinely tries to do best inside constraints.

Acceptable/Unacceptable violence is clearly defined in guidelines with examples - no moral judgement from rater is required.

On raters - they are doing pretty mechanical work and we generally do robust quality checks. Some % of tasks are randomly sent to two raters and if there is disagreement, task is sent to auditor. Raters with high disagreement rate with auditor are coached and if disagreement rate contienues to be high, they are fired.

Overall quality is controlled by using "golden set" - tasks that have "right" answer decided by HQ. We look at disagreement between raters and right answer.

There are other ways to control for quality - this is all pretty standard and everyone is doing the same things. Does not really matter if rater is phychopath or not if he can follow guidelines.

I worked on tooling and organization of those queues for several companies so I am very familiar with the topic. This article is a bit misleading and contains mostly half-truths

- Queues with gore and violations pay more than regular queue. You can be paid $X/hour for marking traffic lanes or roughly $1.5-1.8X for looking at somebody getting killed. This is personal choice and some people handle it better than others. If you have high empathy, you should absolutely not do it. On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care. This is similar to real life jobs - what you see in queues is not that different from what police see day to day in downtown SF or South Chicago.

- Same goes for sexually-explicit/porn queues. If you are 18 year old male you should absolutely not do them - it will fuck up your sexuality (similar to watching porn 8 hours/day). You will also burn out in a couple weeks anyway. The most success we saw was with 50+ year old women working from home - some worked on those queues for years.

- From the article you will notice that Africans worked on African countries queues/moderation - so it's not even imperialism or whatever where they worked on rating rich-countries content. They rated their fellow Africans.

- Africa is not that big in content moderation. Reliable coachable people are hard to find and infrastructure is not great. Salaries are also pretty high - I am not sure where they find workers for $1/hour but we paid significantly more. India does way more moderation, people are more reliable and overall it's much easier to work with Indian BPO.

Trans people and trans right are such a US/EU and a few Asian countries issue and some say fad - they literally do not exist anywhere else as a matter of public policy or visibility.

Biggest manifestations of unaffordable housing are people commuting 2h one way and/or living 2-6 people per room dorm style.

Homeless problem (exotic poor) is completely different and mostly unconnected to housing affordability problem. You can’t house drug addict or mental regardless of housing prices. They will just destroy it. Locking them up is the only solution.

Those activities are mostly against policy already but current political environment makes it impossible to enforce nuisance laws. Ticket price is a reasonable alternative even if it hurts a few deserving poor people.

Considering budgets that homeless-industrial complex spends on homeless in NYC/SF/other big cities with homeless, 10k will have absolutely zero impact on anything.

What many people do not realize is that one function of tickets is to prevent access to public transportation to people below a certain income threshold. If you do not, you have people using public transport as homeless shelter, urinate, smell badly, openly doing drugs, etc which leads to normal people stopping using public transport and then happily defunding it (as nobody reasonable uses it anymore - too dangerous and unpleasant).

You can’t outsource liability to a random Chinese supplier with no significant presence in US. Small Chinese company will sign whatever agreement you want and promise to do whatever checks you need - and then do absolutely nothing. What are you gonna do if something goes wrong? Sue them in Chinese court? Good luck.

If you want actual compliance, you have to send actual person (that you trust - it’s another big problem as that person can get bribed) in flesh and blood to verify everything and essentially be part of supplier team. That’s the only way.

That's what I did last summer and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. If you are on 5G, in 20% of cases it works really well, in 60% of cases other people on the call can tell that your connection is not fiber but overall it's ok, and in 20% of cases Zoom just does not work and you can't have productive conversation.

Hotel wifi is 50/50 - sometimes works, some times does not regardless of the price. I stayed in $400/day Mariott with crappiest wifi imaginable (after paying for Premium internet I got unstable 5MB).