freyr

You’re being too hard on yourself.

You suck at interviewing, you suck at applying to high-paying jobs, or you don’t live near high-paying jobs.

I worked briefly for a company working on WiFi sensing, and besides fall detection, nobody could give a compelling use case.

When pressed to come up with a motivating vision, the big idea was lights turning on automatically when you enter a room.

I guess? Like a lot of R&D, it seemed a solution in search of a problem.

I agree regarding the moat, but I think Netflix could still do fairly well as one of N big players in the streaming space.

On the other hand, I think we could see FB utterly collapse over the next decade. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

He also retweeted claims that the Covid vaccines killed twice as many people as they saved.

Being critical of the vaccine is one thing, but that crosses into an extraordinary and borderline mathematically-infeasible claim that defies virtually all the published data and observations provided by the rest of the scientific and medical community, and requires strong evidence to support it.

Perhaps. But this means that when Covid deaths dropped to ~1,700/week nationally over the summer and 25-44 year olds still had ~800 excess deaths/week, almost half the people dying of Covid-19 in the US were young and nobody was talking about it. Seems unlikely.

Google has 28.9% share, Facebook 25.2%, and Amazon has 10% and growing fast. Not a monopoly, and the incentive is there: if search results are consistently bad, people will stop searching as much, and revenue and market share decline.

> It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause.

Did it, though? We see deaths increase in August/September during the Delta wave, but we don’t see them decline when Covid cases fell drastically earlier in the summer: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh

That suggests 25-44 year olds may be experiencing an elevated death rate that persists even when Covid cases were low.

That’s a good suggestion. Here are the excess deaths for 25-44 year olds: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh

There’s definitely a significant rise in excess deaths among 25-44 year olds coinciding with the Delta peak in August/September.

Something interesting though: In the Covid “valley” of June/July, when Covid-related deaths were at a record low nationally, 25-44 year olds still had a ~35% increase in excess deaths. I’d expect a drop in excess deaths close to prepandemic levels if they were being driven mainly by (short-term) Covid effects during that time. It seems like the baseline death rate increased independently of number of active Covid cases.

Covid deaths were accompanied by a steady increase in overdose deaths starting in early 2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm), rising from from 68k to 97k over the course of the pandemic.

I don’t have time at the moment to do the math, but I’d suspect most of the increase we’ve seen in the past year is due to Covid, but with the increase in overdoses and other causes contributing much than noise since 2019. This could explain the higher death rate that persisted throughout the summer.

What exactly am I derailing? An unsubstantiated claim made by OP that contradicts details provided in the parent article?

“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths … there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319 … the moving average of daily deaths from COVID-19 is less than half of what it was a year ago”

“Lazy” is not reading the article. And if “derailing” an unfounded assumption to better understand these deaths is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

The random hypothesis was made by OP, who inferred that the 45% increase in deaths is due to Covid-19.

I would guess a lot of that 45% is due to Covid, but how much would be a guess, and I suspect OP is just guessing too.

Overdoses are historically one of the leading causes of death among people in this age range, and we’re also setting records for overdose deaths this year [0], but that gets no almost coverage compared to Covid. I think it’s reasonable to keep in mind that overdoses could also be contributing to that 45% uptick, unless we have evidence to the contrary.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202...

OP says deaths among people 20-40 are up 45%, and inferred that this is due to Covid. That’s the hypothesis being made here. And it contradicts what’s in the parent article, namely that many of these deaths are from causes other than Covid:

“The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319.”

I’m suggesting that other leading causes of death among people in this age range could possibly be up this year, and contributing to this uptick, perhaps by a significant amount.

For example, in SF, the number of people in this age range dying of overdoses far outnumbers the people in this age range dying of Covid. Nationally, we are setting record numbers of overdoses, driven mostly by fentanyl.

”In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in November that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020 to April 2021, with about three-quarters of those deaths involving opioids — a national record.” [0]

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202...

[1] https://vtdigger.org/2022/01/02/opioid-overdose-deaths-poise...

[2] https://www.wfmj.com/story/45563074/mercer-county-sees-recor...

Do you have a link or source?

Overdose and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young people. If Covid deaths were 5X higher, we’d see a much much larger overall increase than 40%.

Edit: Your numbers are for the total population, not young people. The death rates and leading causes of death are drastically different between young people and the general population.

No, it’s not what-about-ism. It’s a suggestion that the two numbers being thrown around are accompanied by some bare minimum of detail to have a meaningful conversation.

OP made the link to Covid-19, which seems very plausible, but it’s not clear if they have facts to support this or it’s just a guess. Suicides and overdoses are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans. It’s irresponsible to discuss a 40% increase in deaths and imply this is all Covid-19 without any evidence.

What he said is this:

> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

This is not suggesting that anybody’s right to vote should be revoked. It’s pointing out that women have typically voted in opposition to libertarian/capitalist policies. And he might not like this outcome, but not liking something is not the same as saying it shouldn’t exist.

I’m not a libertarian and I’m opposed to many of Thiel’s viewpoints, but we can have an honest discussion about what he has and hasn’t said.

You missed the point, which is that Thiel is the “libertarian” OP referred to, not the Austrian which many people incorrectly assumed.

Thiel can also be a libertarian who registers and votes Republicans in our two-party system. Libertarianism, whatever you think of it, is more of a political philosophy than a political party, and Republicanism is definitely more of a political party than a political philosophy.

How many Covid-related? How many drug overdoses? How many suicides?

OP is almost certainly talking about Thiel, not Kurz.

Thiel is a libertarian, and is ostracized by many in tech for rejecting the tenets of Bay Area progressivism. Kurz is not, as far as I can tell, a libertarian.

Show me a 3-4 bedroom house for $1M, and I’ll tell you how many hours the commute would take.

I work on the Peninsula. 90% of 3+ bedroom houses currently on the market here cost over $1.75M. Those below that, in the bottom 10%, are what you’d expect to find in the bottom 10%. There are many great places to live where I wouldn’t be forced to choose between that or spending a couple hours a day in traffic. Less money and higher quality of life.

I’m not OP but my numbers are similar.

I spent most of my twenties in college and grad school. Then worked in the Midwest in my early thirties making $100k-$130k.

I moved to Silicon Valley and took a job for $150k. That was a downgrade considering the much higher cost of living, but it seemed like a good stepping stone at the time. I stayed at that company for way too long working towards a promotion that was dangled in front of me but never came, and finally switched to FANG for a 2X increase in total comp.

And many people at my age in the company make about 2X+ of what I make now. The housing prices here are so crazy that I’m ready to throw in the towel on SV, even if it means a pay cut. My QOL was highest outside of the Bay Area working for less.

- person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.

- the chief male character in a book, play, or movie, who is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom the reader is expected to sympathize.

- (in mythology and folklore) a person of superhuman qualities and often semidivine origin, in particular one whose exploits were the subject of ancient Greek myths.

Or you’re underestimating the difference between what appeals to you and what appeals to the average visitor.

It wouldn’t make sense for them to show objectively “crappy” content to every new visitor, just to get OP to turn on their recommendations. What we consider crappy is what other people consider entertaining.

You might try this paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2020.1...). From the abstract:

“Using new data from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP), this paper provides a basis for an integrated account of the Canadian housing market in the last two decades. It shows how the housing markets in Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Toronto have become de-coupled from local incomes due to significant flows of foreign capital.”

Regardless, is there a case to be made why a country should allow its housing supply to be treated as an investment vehicle, instead of the more beneficial purpose of housing its citizens? In cases like this, where a state’s obligation to the welfare of its people seems self-evident, the burden of proof is on you to to show that the massive and widespread foreign investment in real estate leading up to a housing affordability crisis somehow was not a factor.

“The PHDA dataset was used in order to calculate the ASMRs by vaccination status and Table 3. One of the main strengths of the linked PHDA is that it combines a rich set of demographic and socio-economic factors from the 2011 Census and 2019 Patient Register with pre-existing conditions based on clinical records. This unique dataset was linked to NIMS and Test and Trace to allow us to analyse how ASMRs differ by vaccination status, when people were infected relative to vaccination, and examine the characteristics of people by vaccination status and infection date.

The PHDA contains data on approximately 79% of the population of England aged 10 years and over and includes 85.9% of all deaths of residents in England that occurred between 2 January 2021 and 2 July 2021 and were registered by 28 July 2021.“

Is remote assistance good enough though? It probably works fine when you have a fleet of 100 cars on the road, but 10,00? 1,000,000?

How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.

The worst interviews I’ve ever experienced, hands down, were from startups. They asked the most ridiculous whiteboard problems, and that generally just identifies the candidates who crammed most the leetcode.

The mega tech companies interviews, by comparison, were surprisingly more reasonable.

The startups have probably adopted this approach because it’s all they know, but nobody is forcing them to.

Except “nobody” here is often millions of people.

This doesn’t seem to be the case for Square, at least.

You can buy a bag for a few cents or bring a bag.

You’re living life on easy street if this is what you consider “gravely inconveniencing.”

He’s saying that she usually drinks in moderation, isn’t he? Doesn’t seem like a “yikes” statement, unless I’m reading it incorrectly.