heylook

...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...

> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers.

In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering. 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management, design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing, engineering functions alone.

> The president isn't in alignment with Gender Ideology or "wokeness" as is often put. The large majority of these programs support those ideas.

When you say "large majority", do you have any evidence or data to point to that isn't just Elon going "Look at all this fraud I found!!!" and then none of it turns out to at all be fraud?

> I believe that the electoral system prevents a candidate from say, simply winning all of the urban areas, or exploiting some similar demographic divide that would could exist in a pure popular vote system.

What about simply winning all of the rural areas? Cause that's literally what happened.

> Tariffs are a terrible idea though, but would take them if we got rid of the income tax.

$4,700,000,000,000 income taxes

$...100,000,000,000 tariffs

Dude, what is wrong with you? Tens of thousands of real, human people trying to support tens of thousands of real, human families. That's what your joke is about.

> To put some numbers on it, to add a column of data to the system I worked on required on average about 20k hours of coding work.

20,000 hours is 10 years of full-time work for a single person. If you "didn't work with this system for long," it is quite simply statistically impossible that you could have witnessed enough projects to have anything resembling an accurate "average".

Orrrrrrr you misunderstood and have been doubling down repeatedly when the real numbers are literally on the same screen as your comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121043

>>>>>>>>>

Guess what? You can see all this information, because of government transparency (not DOGE):

https://smartpay.gsa.gov/about/statistics/

>> GSA SmartPay statistics for fiscal year 2024:

    $39.7 billion in total program spend.
    $506 million in refunds earned by agencies/organizations.
    $441 was spent on average for each transaction.

> Term limits lead to institutional knowledge and skills being concentrated in unelected staffers and lobbyists.

Who cares? They don't get to cast the votes.

[flagged]

> because they are always less effective than private enterprises.

I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true. Private and public entities (and employees) certainly have different incentives, but they also have different mandates, and I've certainly known plenty of inefficient private enterprises and efficient public ones. Do you have any way of verifying or proving this idea that you can share?

I've seen it, sighed, fixed it, and ensured the necessary accounting adjustments assigned the loss to the business instead of the customer. Seems that last step, which is the most important one, wasn't followed here, which is the real shame.

> Meanwhile, Alex Jones is calling a hearing next week to accuse the bid process of being rigged https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857223561754059168

Alex Jones is not a reliable source

> Not a mention that Taiwan and TSMC might have a secret "what we will do if China takes over" department.

There's no "might" or "secret" about it. They advertise it widely on purpose.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-euv-machine...

And in that circumstance you are allowed to maintain your health insurance (COBRA) or buy a new plan ("qualifying life events," which also includes things like marriage and moving).

The comment you're responding to was alluding to if people could choose to not pay for health insurance until after they got injured or sick and then needed the benefits.

From Wikipedia:

The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government. The public option was initially proposed for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but was removed after the independent US senator for Connecticut Joe Lieberman threatened a filibuster.

As a result, Congress did not include the public option in the bill passed under reconciliation. The public option was later supported by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 2016 and 2020 elections and multiple other Democratic candidates, including the current President, Joe Biden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_insurance_option

One party agreed to pay the other party close to a billion dollars to stop the lawsuit from continuing. Why did they do that?

> Crime is a function of inequality

I think the prevailing attitude is more like, "Yes, crime is a function of inequality, but it's also a function of X, Y, Z other things, and leaving them out does more harm than good to the discourse."

I think you either replied to the wrong comment or are maybe confused. Telegraph Hill is quite far from Haight Ashbury (as much as anything can be far apart in a 7x7 mile city).

At the margins, more people would have more ability to try to work around the market power of landlords. More time for political advocacy to rollback NIMBYism, or loosen zoning, or to build their own home, or to make an additional purchase that makes a marginally cheaper rental more acceptable.

> But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy.

I'm curious to hear more about why that would be the case. Money swaps hands constantly and we have explicit ways that a single dollar can become many multiples of itself (aka you get a dollar, you put it in a bank, the bank lends me 90 cents, I put it in a different bank, they lend you 81 cents, one of us gets another loan secured by our assets, etc, etc, etc, now how many dollars are there?).

Ding ding ding. We have a winner. It also really matters which people get the money. For example: we printed gazillions of dollars after the 2008 financial crisis, but "inflation" was super low that whole time. What happened? We gave that money to banks and owners of financial assets, so the stuff that they buy more than others was what got inflated aka houses and startup equity (yes, your startup equity!) and the stock market and yachts and stuff. In 2020 we gave a bunch of money either directly to every individual or to their bosses to give to them, so a different set of things got inflated. What do wage workers buy more of with their money? Groceries et al. Home rental prices are through the roof, but home purchase prices are not. My guess is we see home price deflation (or at least lower-than-otherwise inflation) unless interest rates start getting cut again, which they will probably do because the people that get to influence and make that decision all benefit financially or politically from cutting those rates, but I digress.

So my (old, bachelors) degree in econ gives me a story that makes sense, but surely a more recent or grad-level or professional economist can probably point out all the ways I'm deluded. One of my physics teachers once told me that every year they start by telling you that everything you learned last year is a gross oversimplification and now they're going to teach you the way it "really" works.

I'm not convinced you would need to. "Students" cease to be students immediately after graduation, so they wouldn't really be "students" anymore, right? So "none of the downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students" doesn't really seem accurate, does it?

Even reading it more charitably, students and recent graduates still probably would like access to credit cards, or the housing rental market, or whatever. Bankruptcies stick with you for 7(?) years, so you'd also have to think about whether you'd be locked out of the mortgage market, auto loan market, what-have-you, while your peers are able to make those moves.

Bankruptcies are also like a whole legal thing with a judge and everything, so I doubt we'd see every single student getting their whole debt discharged instead of a judge just being like "Didn't you, like, just spend all this money on getting the training required to get a high-paying job? Seems like if you plan on working anytime soon you should make some payments."

Also lenders can just like, be more selective or restrictive in other ways? Higher interest rates, requiring more established co-signers, etc etc etc. Honestly the strangest part of this is that we've normalized saddling 18 year-olds with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

In fact often the most efficient, effective, and long-lasting value creation has nothing to do with money at all.

> Abuse is always highlighted (or minimised) because of ulterior motives, not because of the abuse itself.

That strikes me as almost tautologically untrue. It simply doesn't seem possible that every decision about how much to highlight or criticize or ignore a country's abuse of their legal system could be based upon ulterior motives. It implies that there can never be genuine moral outrage, and honestly, for me, that just makes your whole point and outlook feel unfounded or uncommonly sad.

For example, how much of the criticism of Otto Warmbier's detention in North Korea is based upon ulterior motives? Is it all of it? Or is it like, 50% or 10% or less? And if it's a smaller amount, are you actually highlighting a hypocrisy that is meaningful enough for it to be the main thrust of your comment?

It feels like someone cooked you a gourmet meal and you said, "Food only ever tastes good or bad because of the salt."

Sure, but like, that's not what we're talking about. OP says western society is "outsourcing the job of perpetuating the population," as if there is some shirking of responsibility going on, or we all need to care about this for some reason. That's macro-level, not the personal choice to have children or not. No one is asking them to do that, so it's unreasonable to foist responsibility back on western society and then shame them for not fulfilling that responsibility.

Why is maintaining the human population at or above present levels something that so obviously needs to be done?

> My point is that that morality is impossible to justify in a godless universe.

You say that, and it's good that you did because the arguments you're making don't work together to prove your point in the way that you think they do. What about a godless universe makes morality impossible to justify? Is it that god is the only possible source of morality or meaning or value or something? Because you haven't proven that and can't just take it as axiom.

> Permissive western societies are outsourcing the job of perpetuating the population

Why does the job of perpetuating the population need to be done at all? At what levels? Why those levels? Does it matter where that population lives or their quality of life? Why or why not?

> But essentially self-interest takes over completely.

Orrrrrrrr... maybe... it doesn't? Maybe even when we're all alone and have to figure things out for ourselves we can come to understand ourselves in genuine relation to those around us and discover a kind and empathetic morality built from logical first principles? Even without the fear of the judgement of almighty sky daddy?

>> Pretty insane that Sam Bankman-Fried decided to plead not-guilty.

>Would easily bet that was his decision.

That's a tautology. His decision to plead not-guilty is literally his decision.