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malandrew

8,806 karma · joined July 8, 2010

engineer @ google
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malandrew··on Trump sides with Musk on support for H-1B visas for foreign tech workers
Everyone of the things you've described are afflictions that are happening in the other two countries I have citizenship from (one of which is where I was born in and lived as a child). One is in South America and the other is in Europe. It's also happening in many other countries in the world, not just the ones I know.

That's a cancer that is ruining all developed or developing countries. America is just further along.

None of that negates what is still there in much of America that hasn't succumbed to these modern afflictions. I know plenty of folks that live and work near their parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and see their family often. I know folks who care for their parents without sending them to a home.

> kids cannot walk alone by themselves anywhere without someone calling Cops This is a city problem. In rural and somewhat suburban places, kids still live like this. In cities in Latin America and Europe kids don't go out walking by themselves either. This isn't an American issue. This is a rural/suburban vs urban thing.

That said, this problem is worst in places with less social trust and social trust is lowest in places without common culture.

> everyone at home buying shit on amazon and watching netflix

So much of this is because of the erosion of disposable income as cost of living has increased and wages have not kept up. No country in the world has had as strong a hobby/extracurricular activity culture like America has. In my younger years in America I knew tons of folks with tons of hobbies that simply weren't even options in other countries. You had magazines for every imaginable hobby. You had specialist mail order catalogs for everything. When I go visit friends in Latin America, some of them with hobbies ask me for help buying and bringing stuff that they can't buy domestically.

There's tons of nature and outdoor culture in America. Much more than other countries. We have amazing national forests and national parks. You have hiking, hunting, camping, rafting, kayaking, powerboating, sailing, etc.

The only hobby I partake in where the locus of the hobby isn't America is sailing. For everything else, most of the communities and manufacturers that make anything decent are all American.

Take something like the X-Games. Pretty much every one of those sports is primarily American in origin.

Besides that, you have things like American barbecues, tailgating at sporting events, roadtripping, Thanksgiving feasts, Fourth of July celebrations, Memorial Day and Labor Day festivities.

There's so much really. It just isn't apparent if you've only ever experienced life in major cities.

I feel like I've had a front row seat witnessing the decline of something amazing, but had the good fortune of experiencing many of the things that make America a great place to live. November 8th this year was a referendum rejecting many of the forces contributing to that decline and an attempt to reverse it.

> psychiatrists everywhere cause everyone is lonely

This is largely a liberal problem. Seriously go look at graphs of mental health diagnoses over time by political affiliation. Amongst those that identify as conservative or very conservative, you don't see the same mental health issues. A lot of the mental health issues are very different by gender. It's mostly an issue for women and it largely started in the seventies. Why that decline in happiness occurred for women, I will leave as an exercise for you to speculate on.

> 50% of population obese Happening in every country. America is just in the lead. There's nothing particularly American about this problem. Both the other countries from which I am a citizen are well on there way to the same obesity problems. I have my thoughts on why this has happened here and is happening in other countries too, but it's off topic.

Culturally, America up until about 30 years ago was much higher trust when it was much more European culturally. Stuff that we didn't have nearly as much of when I first arrived were things like jeitinho (Brazil), combina/protekzia (Israel), wasta (Middle East), guanxi (China), viveza criolla (Hispanic Latin American countries), blat (former Soviet bloc), etc. With immigration without assimilation and the formation of co-ethnic enclaves both in geographic communities and within companies, the US now has far far more nepotism and much lower trust today when I first arrived 30 years ago.

Honestly, this isn't even the first time the US has experienced issues and reversed course if you know your US history. A lot of these issues would be familiar to someone familiar with US history in the late 1800s to early 1900s. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which put an end to the mass immigration happening at the time and that gave those immigrants that were in America already at the time to form a new American identity going into WWII and in the post-war period. It's basically a process of simulated annealing.

This was reversed when LBJ signed the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act into law.

Immigration is neither an unassailable good nor is it an irredeemable evil. There are good ways and bad ways to do it. New blood and vitality has been amazing for America, but too much change too quickly without time healthy mixing to happen comes with it its own problems. Right now we need to course correct and go back to forming a single American identity with high trust irrespective of ethnicity, national origin, race or religion, and all nepotism in all forms (again ethnic, national origin, race or religion) needs to be condemned and rooted out.

malandrew··on Trump sides with Musk on support for H-1B visas for foreign tech workers
Bullshit that there is no such thing as American culture. I don't even understand how someone can say that with a straight face unless they've only ever lived in the bubble of a major US city that has a lot of immigrants.

29 years here and I've lived in four major US cities, one minor suburban US city, one tiny suburban town and my wife and I are planning on retiring to an extremely rural red-blooded American community hours from any major city. There absolutely is American culture. To say it doesn't exist means you either don't see it out of virtue of where you live or you don't see it just like a fish doesn't know it's wet. I've also lived in two wildly different countries from the US. There absolutely is American culture.

I could actually live much much better in one of the other countries for which I have citizenship than in the US.

How long have you lived in the US and where have you lived since moving here?

malandrew··on Trump sides with Musk on support for H-1B visas for foreign tech workers
One more thing I would add is if we don't address the training and skill issue of Americans, that isn't a racial issue that impacts only those of European descent. Every immigrant that comes here and has children will have to deal with that for their kids. Folks from country X and country Y are going to find that their kids are in the same unfortunate situation as American kids of European or mostly European descent. They too are already find themselves displaced by immigrants (even from the country from which their parents hailed) for jobs and housing if we don't fix immigration ASAP.
malandrew··on Trump sides with Musk on support for H-1B visas for foreign tech workers
I voted for Trump and an immigrant and I'm mixed on immigration.

I've been in the US for 29 years now and I'm a US citizen. I'm more American in attitude than most Americans I know.

I consider myself a nationalist. Immigration has been both good and bad for America and both sides in this debate are being super dishonest.

First and foremost, I strongly believe that elected representatives should represent the best interests of their citizens and ONLY their citizens. The best interest of potential future citizens is not something they should even give a thought to.

Some immigration is in the best interest of the citizens of a country. Skimming the top 0.1% or maybe even just the top 0.01% of the best and the brightest abroad absolutely is in the best interests of Americans. That's the question that should be asked when admitting an immigrant: "Is this person a net benefit to the citizens of this country I was elected to represent?"

If the answer to that question is "Yes", then the next question should be "How should we admit this person to come work in the US so that Americans get the benefits and we mitigate any downside from allowing them in?"

Neither of these questions are being asked.

A country is basically a team like Elon said and we are in competition with other teams like Europe, China, India, etc. It is worth building out the best team, but that can't be done in a way where you hurt the citizens you were elected to represent.

Before I continue, one big point about American citizens. They aren't all white as has been misrepresented in this debate. A lot of them are first and second generation non-whites. American-born folks of Indian, Chinese, Hispanic, etc, descent are all American citizens currently being hurt by the H1-B program.

Couple of major issues with the current H1-B program:

First, it absolutely must cost more to bring in an immigrant to do a job than to hire an American. Under no situation should it be allowed to depress wages. If a citizen costs X, it should cost like 1.5x or some value like that to import the talent you need if you genuinely can't find the talent you need domestically.

Second, the visa should belong the the person being brought to the US. A company can sponsor them and maybe get exclusive access for some short period of time like the first year or so, but after that, the person should not have their visa tied to the employer that sponsored them. If they get a good perf review after their first year on the job, they absolutely should get an extension to stay another N years like 3 to 5, but at this point they are totally free to work for any other company with zero risk of losing their visa status if they choose not to continue working for the employer that sponsored them. If that employer wants to keep them, they'll have to pay the premium to keep them and treat them well. No immigrant should ever feel like an indentured servant.

Third, scrutiny should be applied to all companies involved in using the H1-B program as a visa mill and to co-ethnic nepotism.

You absolutely need to make sure that companies aren't "selling" the visas. For example, someone in country X should not be able to pay or perform a favor for a company in the US to get a visa. A genuine need needs to be demonstrated and we need to make sure there is no quid pro quo.

Co-ethnic nepotism is another big one. Executives and managers should not be able to sponsor H1-Bs from their country of origin or from their religious group. If the CEO of a company is from country X and manager of the team is from country Y, then the H1-B visa cannot be filled by someone from either country X or Y. There are 195 countries in the world. Removing the United States, country X and country Y, still leaves 192 other countries from which to find talent.

Lastly, we need to focus on assimilation. I have citizenship from three countries myself and I choose to live in the US because I value US culture (or at least what it was 10 to 15 years ago).

If I wanted to live and work in the other countries in which I could legally work, I'd move to those countries. I don't want that. I want to live and work in the US because I value US culture. If you disproportionately bring in immigrants from particular countries, you turn the US into those other countries for better and for worse. This happens both at the national level and at the local level. I don't want it at either.

In fact, when you disproportionately bring in people from country X into a specific locality, you make it harder for those folks to assimilate. This allows the formation of ethnic/cultural enclaves. This should not happen. You should have a mix of folks from multiple countries in a place so they actually co-mingle and assimilate to become Americans. Not hyphenated Americans, but bonafide Americans that adopt America as the home and the country in which they pride themselves.

Completely disregarding assimilation is going to kill the Golden Goose that Elon Musk values. He can build SpaceX here in American but not in country X or country Y. However, if we culturally turn the US into country X or country Y or just kill the current culture we have now with an indiscriminate immigration policy, then he won't be able to keep building SpaceX in the US in the way he has in the past. He may be able to fix the regulatory hurdles to getting to Mars with DOGE, but he won't be able to fix the culture of the country if we don't prevent the negative aspects of the change in culture. America today is already a much lower trust culture than when I moved here 29 years ago and the continued loss of trust threatens being able to get anything done together as Americans. Coethnic nepotism within a firm, for example, absolutely hurts the ability for that firm to fulfill on its mission as different enclaves within the firm fight with one another for a bigger piece of the pie instead of working together to grow the size of the pie.

America isn't just an idea and it isn't just an economic zone. It is a nation of people and the makeup of those people can evolve over time, but it should remain a nation of people.

Basically, I want to Make American a High Trust Culture Again. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. It's culture and it requires assimilation and a common identity.

Our motto is e pluribus unum, not e pluribus pluribus.

malandrew··on I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days
Lol. This sounds like my house. My spouse and my nephew (who lives with us) cannot for the life of them ever close any kitchen cabinet doors. They both always leave them ajar, never leaving them fully opening but never fully closing them. It drives me nuts.
malandrew··on GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
It doesn’t work like that though for publicly traded companies. Even if you bring in more revenue that they be are paying you, it can be attractive to fire you to juice the stock price on Wall Street.
malandrew··on I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I’ll often quickly go back and forth to an app I’m crafting a reply in to make sure that iOS doesn’t evict it from memory and cause me to lose my progress while I look things up in another app. Bloody annoying.
malandrew··on Turkey earthquake: please keep 28.540 clear for communications
I’ve been commenting to my partner all day that it’s crazy how little this has shown up in social media without me actively looking for it by searching on Twitter. I think I saw maybe on post on FB all day and maybe 2 in my main Twitter feed. No company wide email from the thoughts and prayers crowd either. It’s been eerily silent for such a major disaster.
malandrew··on The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)
The only solution is to aggressively defund until there is only budget left for teaching.
malandrew··on 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye
Oh, didn’t realize that was Turkish.
malandrew··on 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye
Why?
malandrew··on Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard
Most sailing dinghys should have weather helm and will turn up into the wind, causing the boat to end up in irons (mainsail luffing and depowered)
malandrew··on Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard
I know with sailing you want your boat to have weather helm so it turns up into the wind and eventually ends up in irons, but if you have autopilot engaged, you can’t forget that. Do you know if any of the newer autopilot systems will head up into the wind if they lose contact with the remote that singlehanded sailors will attach to their vest?

I’ve seen lots of videos of singlehanded sailors where they aren’t wearing tethers in nicer weather.

malandrew··on Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard
IMHO aUrooj inflated life jackets generally make no sense for kayaking. It’s too easy to end up in the drink casually and it’s like $60+ per re-arming kit.

Are those fishing kayaks so stable that they have very little expectation of going overboard comparable to being on a powerboat or sail boat? I use touring and whitewater kayaks myself.

I kayak and sail so I have life jackets for both use cases (two type V rescue jackets for kayaking and 4 type V inflatables for sailing to accommodate friends and better the much safer European spinlock deckvests, which are not USCG approved, so I keep USCG approved inflatables on board too)

malandrew··on Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says
I have.

Only once or twice this egregious. Most of the time however it’s explicit diversity incentives for executives if they want to hit their perf targets. If you can’t get the hires, the other way to game it is to shrink the denominator if you fail to increase the numerator.

malandrew··on There’s no such thing as affordable housing
Major cities would better serve the homeless and mentally ill by spending those dollars outside the city in low cost of living places. First their dollars will go further and they’ll be able to either support more people or they can support the same number of people better. Second, you put the homeless and mentally ill in places that are less competitive where they have a greater chance of being able to get back on their own two feet and support themselves. Educated college graduates struggle to thrive in cities like SF and NYC. If those folks have a hard time, there’s no hope for the homeless and mentally ill, so you’re just keeping them in a place where they have no chance of achieving independence. It’s inhumane really.
malandrew··on Cal.com: Open Scheduling Infrastructure
https://gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsown...

Required reading

malandrew··on Heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future
The problem I have with mini splits is that they are an architectural eyesore. Are there any high quality ones designed to be built into walls discretely like cove lighting has done for lighting?
malandrew··on Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
I have a love-hate relationship with runbooks. I see them as tech debt for things you haven’t yet automated or made clear enough. If someone needs to go read a doc to understand what they need to do, you’re already behind.
malandrew··on Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
It does to me. These are likely people that are living in lower quality housing with more people packed in per square foot of housing out of necessity. I don't have actually data to back up this assertion, but this has been my personal observation of folks that do the kind of informal work that allows them to be paid under the table.
malandrew··on Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
> In countries with state pensions, some of the taxes are saving for retirement.

It's only saving for the retirement of government workers at the expense of the private sector. That's pretty clearly theft. There should be absolutely no government programs give benefits to only government workers paid for by non-government workers. You're basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.

malandrew··on Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
Some taxes are the price of civilization. I don't know how anyone can look at our current taxation scheme and how it is spent and make the argument that what we're subject to in the US is civilized. Just look at how much of taxes go to government largesse in Washington DC and bombing people that don't look like us abroad.

It's 2023. We have the technology to run more and more parts of the government in a way that we pay directly for the things we use so that each need currently met by government is forced to be more efficient if people saw how much they are paying for that. Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome. If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.

malandrew··on Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
I pay my taxes, not because I want to but because the state has right to licit first use of force and can throw me in jail if I don't. I personally have too much to lose so I comply. There's nothing moral about paying taxes because there is no consent involved. I'm not paying for things I'm using. I'm having money taken from me with no guarantee that I get something in return comensurate with how much is being taken from me with the threat of violence.

That being said, I'm not going to take exception with the people who are economically at the bottom and whose lives would be far worse if they didn't do what they can to avoid having their pockets picked by government. I wish my pockets weren't being picked but if someone else is able to avoid that fate, good for them.

It's far more moral for these people to keep the fruits of their own labor to make ends meet than for them to steal from other productive citizens trying to make a living, which is what we'd be forcing them to do if there was no way for them to avoid having their pockets picked by the government.

malandrew··on Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
Yeah, it's still a problem, but the problem is with the powers that be that set the rules for what it means to live officially. The wages are less of a problem here than the theft by government of the fruits of ones labor.

The wages payable are still at the mercy of what the market will bear. If these people could not find a way to live officially, in many cases it's highly unlikely that the wage could rise to cover their cost of living and the taxes to be paid, meaning the job would no longer exist.

At the end of the day, you can't tax a society into prosperity. Every tax dollar spent needs to be justified on an ROI for society.

malandrew··on Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage
This raises the point that I don't think gets enough attention: taxes for many are a barrier towards life goals. For some like the folks you mentioned, it's a barrier to putting a roof over your head or buying your first home. For others, they can afford housing, but taxes are the difference between being able to save for retirement or not.

That's not to say that there aren't things of value we get for our taxes, but there are a LOT of ways that our taxes are squandered, especially at the federal level, which sadly is the largest chunk of taxes. We all pay the most in federal taxes and get the least in return for federal taxes. State taxes are the second most paid and we get see benefits from them than federal but less than local. Local taxes are often the least amount but the most likely to be spent on things that actually benefit you personally.

We could help everyone make better progress towards life milestones like owning housing and saving for retirement if we collectively held government accountable for how it spends our taxes and reduced taxes across the board.

malandrew··on Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse
If it’s so little of GDP, it shouldn’t be hard to make a reasonable off to buy out the water rights.
malandrew··on Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse
They did cause it by moving there and building a life there (including building their gardens). If the city had remained a small backwater town, this problem wouldn’t exist because the farms are 75% and the 25% consumed by the city today would end up as surplus each year replenishing water supplies.

The farms predate all the new usage. The new usage from urbanization caused the deficit.

malandrew··on Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness
Hollywood also had more days of great weather than anywhere else and this was especially important for maintaining production schedules.
malandrew··on Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness
It’s easy to imagine it moving. The people doing the work are the ICs (individual contributors), and up until recently, SF was the only place to go to have a top notch career in tech. People sacrificed to live in SF as junior to mid level engineers because eventually they would get to the point where they are a senior engineer and make enough to afford housing. But now the housing has gotten so expensive that even the senior ICs have difficulty justifying sticking around because they are on a treadmill that takes years to save enough for a down payment (as prices keep rising). You need like $400k saved to buy in SF and you’ll still end up with a $6000/mo mortgage. You have to be a couple. Enough have figured this is a raw deal and have fled to other places like Seattle and Austin. So many in fact that you can now have just as promising a career today as someone could only get in SF 10-20 years ago. Eventually SF will find it hard to attract new ICs to the area and you’ll end up with an aging cohort of mid level managers, directors and staff level engineers that have fewer and fewer people to manage.

Companies won’t keep increasing total comp for junior engineers in SF when they can grow their offices in other cheaper cities instead.

You need a robust pipeline of junior folks and SF is increasingly strangling that pipeline and other cheaper cities are as attractive as SF once was.

malandrew··on U.S. stock market returns – a history from the 1870s to 2022
China is also expected to see population collapse. They are rapidly aging and there’s no sign that that is reversing.
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