logicalmonster

Anything large usually has many contributing factors, but I can see at least a few ways that the overreaction to Covid has contributed to worse healthcare today and for many years to come.

> One of the biggest causes of health problems in America is excess weight, and officials tried to scare healthy people to do nothing other than sit at home for a time, which caused a lot of people to gain weight they otherwise wouldn't have and caused a lot of future problems that should have been prevented. As a small anecdote to illustrate this, the local government here chained up the outdoors playground and gymnastic equipment to prevent people from exercising. This was the McNamara fallacy applied to healthcare in its purest form.

> A lot of basic healthcare shut down for a long time. So not only was there a normal healthcare backlog, but when issues were finally caught later on, they might have been far worse at that time than they otherwise would have been. I'm sure this has an ripple effect on the future.

> Some healthcare professionals lost their careers over vaccine mandates. Anecdotally, I know a Doctor that had a very bad reaction to the first Covid vaccine and was still forced to choose between subsequent doses or lose his career. And I know many people have been discouraged from entering the healthcare field because of this loss of bodily autonomy. Certainly, a greater supply of doctors and nurses would help ease any healthcare shortages.

> This is harder to illustrate with any kind of data, but I think a lot of normal civil society has broken down because of the unnecessary disruption from Covid. People are less pleasant, less accepting of their neighbors, more impatient drivers, more stressed out, etc. I think this is the kind of thing that has some overall health impact on the community as a whole. I acknowledge that it's almost impossible to measure this point in an objective way.

I think a good answer to a non-technical crowd might be something like "I make websites". That is about as simple and easy to understand as you can get. And if they followup with any questions, you can give more detail about your industry and work that you do.

I'd think that many of here are some form of software developer, and many of us do miss the "Wild West" of the Internet we grew up with.

So, the big question is what's stopping us from building fun projects to bring back what we miss?

Is the problem the financial risk and the harder path to making money? Is it the fear of being cancelled/deplatformed? Is it we're afraid of looking stupid if we guess wrong and create a failure?

> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.

1) Wanting to look at the root causes of an issue is always commendable, but the problem with this kind of analysis on HN is that it's a community of very smart people trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals through the lens of a high-IQ. You're trying to find the logic in what they're doing and putting yourself in their place to explain it with a logical reason, but you can't conceive how different the world is for the low-IQ people looting and stealing and harming others. Their reasons for crime might be far different than the reasons you try and see based on what you might do in their shoes.

2) I think that simply explaining that current crime comes from poverty and needing money is an explanation that falls flat. Much of the human experience has been in immense misery or poverty that the poorest person living in the US today can't even conceive of. Poor people in the US can still have TVs, smart phones, and more food than they can even eat. Poor people in the past used to literally sometimes die of starvation and have to choose whether or not they were willing to eat rotten food or hell, even rats or worse to survive. They had to risk working in extremely dangerous mines, factories, etc to barely eke out survival. Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? They had it much worse! Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? No, I don't think it's poverty. Something else about the world has changed other than "poor people need money so they resort to crime."

3) My thinking is that something closer to an extremely high and increasing time-preference is what is causing a lot of these problems. Whether it's through the influence of technology, apps, music/movies/tv and other cultural causes, many people have been conditioned to value the dopamine hit of immediate gratification far more than thinking about the long-term.

One pay rate for equivalent skill levels seems like the fairest way to let people choose the lifestyle in the location they want.

And keep in mind, this applies both ways. If you currently live in a high cost of living area, nothing about this policy prevents you from taking that high wage and moving to a lower cost of living area and similarly benefitting.

I think having that choice is a great thing.

There are going to be many unanticipated social costs to the criminal overreaction to Covid-19 that we're all going to be paying for for decades. This is just one of them.

> I strongly advise not carrying around lots of cash,

It's a dumb idea to carry loads of cash for many reasons, but this shouldn't dissuade you from using physical cash as a tool for many day-to-day purchases.

While it has some bad properties (can be lost/stolen/damaged, can't be transmitted digitally, government can inflate it at will) it also has some properties that are also very valuable (relatively private, easy to trade and interact with compared to crypto and other forms of money, and can be relied on when the power goes out)

While clever as a timesaving tool to look up syntax, it seems kind of dangerous to rely on AI for this without checking and verifying its suggestions. CLIs are very powerful. You can make big changes to complex systems with one random one-liner with the right flags.

Now the problem is that state of the art AI can seem incredibly smart in a large portion of cases, but it might act jaw-droppingly stupid in that 1% of cases. You can get used to trusting it too much and accidentally make a bad command. If you're trusting that the machine's suggestions are right and aren't careful, you can easily blow up your system.

Do you trust AI to not royally screw up your system that 1% of the time it makes a goofy suggestion?

1) Job titles can be pretty meaningless and are inconsistent throughout the profession. A senior or lead developer at an average non-tech company might barely qualify as a junior developer at a more technical firm. Some 26 year old who isn't very good might manage to get an inflated title simply by consistently job hopping every couple years.

2) If you had to give an objective definition of a senior developer, it might be somebody that can design and plan out complicated product features on their own and who others turn to for guidance. That doesn't mean that seniors don't sometimes need to collaborate with others, but generally they can figure out how to solve most of their own problems without having their hand held.

How does that help gamers? I'm not saying I'm a fan of Epic's game store or that anybody is poised to post a serious threat to Steam's dominance anytime soon, but it seems like a good thing that Steam has some competition to keep them honest.

I'm not suggesting OP is wrong, but here's 2 small counterpoints.

1) Where is the data (beyond an anecdote) that shows that no-code solutions generally cost 10x more to build?

2) Putting aside these initial implementation costs, do these no-code solutions have other advantages, such as being less costly to maintain, or being far quicker to customize when needs change? There's always some tradeoffs to take into account.

> There's a minimum of $1.2 billion in annual interest payments on those loans.

That's a big number, but in an of itself doesn't really say anything conclusively without knowing the rest of their expenses as well as revenue.

Since X is now a private company, does the public have access to that other info other than making guesses based on past years' financial filings?

A few questions based on reading the comments here.

1) Why are people so certain that the claims that X should profit are incorrect? X did cut a massive percentage of their staff, and presumably whatever infrastructure changes they've initiated in the past months to save money should be done by then. Nobody can perfectly predict the future, but reducing expenses drastically seems like a good step forward in achieving their goal.

2) Why are people acting so personally hurt if X thrives? I don't even see this level of animosity for companies that deserve this level of ire, like companies that deliberately pollute the oceans or even the cable companies.

3) Are people rooting for X to fail? I think competition for Facebook and other social media is a great thing, and X still has a certain connection with the zeitgeist that I don't think can be matched.

4) Why are people ok with the rampant deadnaming of X? Do better!

1) The idea itself is fine, and for an MVP the site is attractive. Though the general concept should probably should be polished up significantly with more FAQs and explanations and many other things.

2) Your website seems optimized to do sort of a "startup elevator pitch" rather than focusing on the real usage that average people can get from it. Seeing stuff like "Kickstarter is for Projects Taskwer is for people" at the top does nothing for me, but "Raise funds for your education, business venture, emergency, rent, and more" is closer to the right message to focus on IMO.

3) I don't know what normal people would think of your website, but to me it seems glaring that the example stock images you use on this site aren't real users. From a technical/nerd perspective, it feels inauthentic and I'd rather see real phone photos than obvious stock imagery, even if stock photos technically looks nicer.

4) If you're committed to a free service, perhaps a .org domain might work better, though check on the legality and potential issues with that. That really hits home the message that you're not a mega-corporation, and potentially look into seeing if you can figure out non-profit status if that's something that you're genuinely serious about.

5) One glaring omission is the lack of an About page that tells us who you are. You're obviously somebody. Do I trust you with my info with no name attached to it? It would be great to tell the world who you are for the sake of credibility and some measure of assurance that you're not giving private info to a scammer.

6) Besides social media, I'd say to try and approach people on Craigslist begging for stuff to post their stories on your site and help guide them in posting the right way. Hell, you can even offer to write up and polish their content for free. There are also subreddits associated with personal poverty, finance, and other things you might want to see if you're able to reach out to people on.

7) Why are there no social media links on your site? You should consider a Facebook, X, Insta, YouTube, TikTok, Snap, etc to show off some credibility, as well as connect with people looking to raise funds for their projects.

1) You're guessing about what's going to happen in the future like it's a complete given that only good things would result from this and enough other states would join in. I would point out that (this doesn't involve speculation) we already know that some companies don't want to compete in locations that have these policies, which isn't ideal for New Yorkers.

2) Your positive speculation might be a little more reasonable were we entering great economic times where companies were rushing to hire anywhere they can. In troubled economic times, companies have a lot more leverage to seek the best deals they can and can exclude locations that are more trouble than they're worth.

Lasting for 5 years in any company means you were doing some things right.

Right now you sound very defeatist and negative and it would be tough for somebody to hire you if this is the mindset you convey to the world.

Treat this as a creative writing exercise. Sit down and list the things you did, and spin them as positively as possible. Even if you didn't do something perfect, so what? You think every company out there is doing everything perfect?

In what industry were you operating? What was your role? What hats did you wear as a consultant?

You sound a little negative and self-defeatist about everything, whereas a lot of people would be able to spin even a startup failure as an amazing learning and growing experience.

What have you been doing until age 36? Did you work in sales? Did you work in some other field that gave you some unique experience and skills?

Even if you feel that you have some weakness in technology, you might have some strengths that other people in technology won't have.

> Likely the requirements listed will be inaccurate as well.

Where are the requirements actually accurate?

For what it's worth, the actual written requirements for many tech jobs are very questionable. In many cases, there's a big disconnect between the people writing the job ads and the people who actually communicate what they want.

And out of sheer laziness or lack of knowledge, there are plenty of recruiters that do things like post JavaScript jobs as Java jobs, as one example I've seen.

> a vast improvement over the current situation.

Personally speaking, this only seems to be a very marginal improvement over the current situation if you consider the impact of legislation in a vacuum and magically wish away any possible unintended consequences.

Does your analysis consider that at least some employers will not want to deal with employees affected by this? You might wish that this wasn't a thing, but it is.

Maybe this legislation isn't as questionable in good economic times where companies are rapidly hiring as many people as they can wherever they can, but it seems particularly self-destructive in a market where employers have the leverage to look anywhere.

What are you going to tell those increasingly desperate New Yorkers who start getting sad feedback like the following? "Thank you for your application to our company. Unfortunately, this role is not currently eligible for New York State residents. Have a nice day."

I have 2 main critiques of this legislation.

1) This seems like a fairly decent bit of legislation for some standardized professions, particularly those that are often paid hourly, work in person and cannot be outsourced out of state, and in many cases are the most economically vulnerable. I'm thinking that it would be pretty decent for dishwashers, cashiers, gas station attendants, etc to know if a job is offering say $15-18 per hour or $20-25 per hour. But this seems horrendous for salaried remote knowledge workers, particularly those that have the ability to negotiate a better deal. And additionally, there will be unintended consequences of this legislation, such as some employers not wanting to deal with New York employees.

2) If the goal of this legislation is to prevent exploitation, it seems that requiring a salary floor would be important, but requiring a salary ceiling would be a negative part of this legislation as it makes it a lot tougher to allow employees to have the room to negotiate.

Or they can simply plan to let you go long before the options vest. Now, you may or may not have a legal case, but the difficulty in that is extreme.

> What's would be the purpose of such liberal experiment? I don't see what is there to learn about it.

Not that the only group of people who want to bother nobody else need any justification for living their lives as they see fit, but how else is humanity going to learn about the different ways we can organize society if we don't try them out?

It would be phenomenal for humanity if people with ideas outside of the box organized as they saw fit without outside interference and we all get to see what works and what doesn't.

A big part of the answer is that many people have a fear of looking stupid or having their ego shattered. You're probably not going to be laughed at for trying to do what others have already tried and that society accepts, but you risk being laughed at for trying some unique new marketing idea you came up with.

Another part of the answer is that very few people are experts at all of the skills needed to start a business: being a domain expert in some field, understanding technology, understanding business and money, understanding people, being good at communicating, understanding design, being a good writer, etc. If you're smart, you know that you don't know everything, and you're willing to hear out the advice that others provide.

I'm not certain what kind of impact AI will have on the marketplace, but it seems like a good idea to store what you value locally regardless of what happens with AI.

Sites die off. Online web archives aren't reliable or completely trustworthy. And censorship of many forms seems to be occurring more and more.

With storage so cheap, there's little downside to saving what you like.

My question is very logical. We can all hypothesize plenty of reasons, a couple of which you mentioned, but knowing specifically why OP values employment with FAANG might help provide better life advice.

Just curious. Why are you so motivated by getting into a FAANG company?

For us mortals who don't read every single SEC document, what is the criteria used to determine if something is "green" or not? I could come up with a few examples of where a green label may or may not be really misleading.

While staying at your job, can you create your own tech company and create a few websites or do any other random work you find?

This might have 2 benefits to you in your current situation.

1) Any little side jobs you pick up will allow you to brush up on your skills.

2) You can add this company's projects to your resume as recent experience that fills in the time gap, putting you in better position for future employment.

Can you please point to where I ever endorsed sending death threats?

PRO TIP: You can't.