mactrey

Gatekeeping this intuitively universal spoon metaphor isn't going to make disabled people's lives better. A world where only disabled people get to use the spoon metaphor isn't going to have any more people feeling compassionate and empathic toward disabled people. The extension of an idea or metaphor to new situations doesn't devalue it; rather it shows that it is a powerful and useful idea. And before you make baseless claims, I also suffer from a chronic and incurable condition.

It may even be that:

* Normal-Person will increase profits by 5% and will dutifully inform the media of those gains

* Super-Exec will increase profits by 5% and will give a charismatic interview leading the market to believe that profits may increase by 10% the next year, which is reflected in an outsized 30% rise in the price of company stock

The board will hire Super-Exec for $50mm/yr because they all hold stock in the company and are thus more interested in the stock price than in the company fundamentals.

If companies are willing to hire after five months of training and let people continue to learn on the job then that is the very best option for these "new coders." The quality of learning that you do on the job is so much higher than what you do in the classroom that it should be every new coder's goal to get the bare minimum of skills required to get hired, and then get started on your real learning.

That is true but also people come to care about what they do. They may not be "passionate" about work but it is what they spend the most time doing, it is their main source of daily challenge and problem solving, it represents social interaction, and it is their main source of pride and accomplishment and personal striving. To just up and leave work leaves a huge void in their lives. People can learn to fill that void with art or gardening or various other things but it may take years and years of discipline and self-reflection to become satisfied.

Yeah, the voice is the key. The gender ratio is skewed so much at higher ranks that an obviously feminine name will simply be assumed to be ironic. I would imagine the toxicity/sexual comments would increase by an order of magnitude if the voice was female-presenting along with the account name.

I get 1.5% cash back on purchases with my credit card. I'm essentially recouping the interchange fees.

> How is it possible to pull this much money out of the American economy without crashing it?

The money isn't pulled out, though. It is redistributed to people, many of whom will immediately spend it, and others will invest it in various (hopefully efficient) ways.

> Why would a national government do this?

The problem of entry and exit. Say one state like Massachusetts implemented a UBI. Then we could expect many people to move to MA from surrounding states, or do whatever they can to have a legal address there. However I think there are possible solutions to this and a state-by-state implementation is actually possible. For example, Alaska has their dividend program and I think the results from that have been quite good.

> I don't think we need to be paying anyone who makes over 50k

I think I agree which is why I'm more in favor of a negative income tax or other means-tested system than true UBI. But if I were to argue in favor of an "everyone gets the same" program I'd say something like, implementation is somewhat less complicated, or it's easier to explain to the public.

That you can help more people if you have more money is simply a fact, it's not an argument based on the statistically average behavior of wealthy Americans. And as to the sources of wealth, the economy is not a zero sum game. Lebron getting paid $30mm doesn't take money away from anybody.

As far as Warren Buffet goes, I don't worship him - he got pretty lucky, was a little bit disciplined, and rode a wave of increasing value of American stocks for 40 years - but to say he has been a "premier monopolist" (hint: having high profit margins on the back of brand recognition like Coca-Cola and Apple have done is not what a monopoly is) or is a "parasite on economic growth," is only your own preconceived bias.

And as far as the behavior of the very wealthy in general, the things you describe are things that the middle class or the poor do as well. The vast majority of human beings are assholes, unfortunately. If you do happen to be a good person, though, I think the world is better off if you're wealthy than if you're poor. And if you set out to do the most good possible in the world, then choosing a career where you can make a lot of money, and then donating a large portion of it, is not a bad way to go. Doubly so if you can help people along the way, as many doctors or lawyers with pro bono hours do.

>at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'?

But of course those are highly correlated - it's easier to help a lot of people if you have plenty of surplus wealth and time to share out. I'd imagine that Warren Buffet will end up helping more people that almost anyone else in the past 100 years despite never really having a goal other than "make lots of money."

I can't say this is going to make a big difference in how I use pandas but I've ran into the bizarre "can't have nans in an int Series" annoyance in almost every pandas project I've worked on, so good on them for fixing that.

There should be a "parental controls" toggle.

1. Is is better to, say, spend $2mm to remove nonfunctioning buttons, or instead to reduce wait times at the DMV? I think you could make the argument either way; personally, I don't experience much mental anguish about the existence of buttons that might or might not work -- I would rather save the time/money at the DMV, DEQ, filing state taxes, etc. Note that adding signage still costs money and is also only a temporary solution - signs need to be replaced every few years, depending on the initial implementation.

2. If it's overly difficult for handicapped people to press the buttons then they should never have been implemented in the first place. But considering that they exist, if they are difficult to press and pressing is required to cross, isn't that just altogether worse for disabled people than if they are difficult to press but entirely nonfunctioning/nonrequired?

It's not really lying if the buttons used to work, now they don't, but they're expensive to remove so the government just leaves them there. It's at worst a lie of omission. The moral question is more like, is it the government's responsibility to spend money removing a nonfunctioning button to save people the negligible amount of time/effort it takes to press it? The answer is probably not considering that there are lots of ways the government could save people time/effort by spending more money but doesn't.

A huge part of a human's APM is meaningless spam, for example right-clicking the same unit multiple times to attack it, or setting the same waypoint thousands of times in the early game when there's nothing to do. The computer might be at double the human's effective APM, if only we had a credible way to measure that.

I'm not sure I understand how that hurt actually takes place. These companies are essentially acting as charities, donating a portion of their profits to reduce the cost of a tech education. Some people who might not have been able to pursue education in tech are now able to. Do those people not benefit? Do the companies not benefit? Then how is society harmed? Would society really be better off if these companies remitted that money to shareholders as dividends, as is their right?

It seems to me that the complaint begins and ends with the assumption that if something is good for a big corporation then it must be bad for society at large, and vice versa.

The point is that there is little to no evidence that screen time is bad (or good), just a lot of speculation. The argument against screen time is essentially the same as the one used against GMO foods: "it's new, so it's probably bad." Obviously that's not a strong argument but people in these comments seem to be accepting it without reflection.

Did the people in this thread even read the article? It suggests that the effect of eating potatoes or wearing glasses on childhood well-being is greater than the effect of screen time.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that marginal return is materially positive for all feasible n

Presumably that 2% growth is annualized.

I analyze every game, win or lose, so I often ignore the immediate rematch request. I accept more rematch requests on chess.com because... analysis is not free! Essentially the ease of use and free availability of high quality analysis tools on lichess outcompetes my desire for a quick rematch.

Not drinking can have a negative sociological and emotional effect regardless of how society views alcohol. I've had numerous interesting/strange life experiences that probably wouldn't have been possible without alcohol. I'll gladly pay the price of having a few bad hangovers and worse factual recall to (hopefully) continue to have those kinds of experiences.

Well the population of the U.S. is still increasing at about 2% per year, and the global population faster than that, so a company staying the same size is actually shrinking as a proportion of its market.

I think I agree with this take. Do we really think Waymo cars would be so cautious with merging if a Waymo crash were received with the same level of fanfare and financial repercussions as an ordinary commuter crash? I.e. a $1,000 financial hit and literally nobody cares.

Most of the "mistakes" in the video looked to me more like a hyper-cautious grandmother than an A.I. that fundamentally doesn't know how to drive.

My impression is that the vast majority of podcast listeners skip through ads, because that's what I do. It's easy to hit the 15s forward button four times and get right back to the funny interesting stuff. It's a lot harder to skip the ad if the funny, interesting host is riffing over the entire ad read - which means that the listener is still getting the product info, even if the host is making fun of the copy the whole time. Other hosts I've seen include references to the products they're hawking in the actual show (host response to guest's story about sleeping on a mattress on the floor: "I hope that mattress was a Leesa!") and I imagine they're getting a little premium for that.

I can't either. I've always thought it was due to allergens but I really don't have evidence to support that. I've never seen a doctor for it.

Indeed, and I can see my parents paying for it

It's because non-monetary benefits are a good way to attract talent in a tight labor market, which is more or less how the software developer market has been for the past twenty years. Developers like going to conferences, so they like working for employers who pay for them to go.

Think about why tech companies provide ping-pong tables and nap-chambers (obviously unproductive) and yet Wal-Mart isn't sending its warehouse workers to warehousing industry conferences (presumably at least somewhat productive).

Small quibble: the "... See More" link on course information pages is hard to click on - seems that the clickable part of the link only has height of 1px. Using Firefox 63.0.1 (64-bit)

> However, I have trouble believing that the "knowledge workers" who will join Amazon would otherwise have been unemployed and underpaid.

No, but they might otherwise have been employed somewhere else, like SF. It's a zero-sum game, which is part of the reason why this whole bidding for corporate headquarters business is silly from a national perspective.

It's not really hyperoptimization if the cost of voting is prima facie higher than the value. I think it's on the "get out the vote" side to prove that voting is worth it - and I don't think the average American would be swayed by a statistical argument proving that the value of voting is greater than 0.