mfringel

I typically thought of "wealthy" as discernible through a single question:

"Is the vast majority of the money you spend on a daily basis from capital, or wages?"

If capital, you're wealthy. If wages, you're not.

The problem I have with the "blame the consumer" trope is that there's the implicit "and if consumers had full pricing knowledge, The Market(tm) would correct all of the other issues, and healthcare in the US would be fixed." I assert this mostly through anecdotal evidence based on where these conversations tend to go.

I also find it to be some of the most disingenuous handwaving I've seen in recent memory. No one is going to comparison-shop when they have a ruptured appendix. Worse, if they think they can just "tough out" the abdominal pain because they can't afford the doctor visit _or the treatment that might result from it_, they'll just die.

Just to head something off... if your answer to "What if people still can't afford healthcare?" is "If you can't afford healthcare, then you're not contributing enough to society to receive healthcare.", then I thank you for your candor and your ideological consistency, and have you considered that you might be a sociopath?

What will you give in exchange for that evidence? A differing opinion with sufficient evidence to back it, or merely a less-wrongian meta-comment on styles of discussion?

The former is valuable. The latter is worse than uninteresting.

<Looks at the current state of social media.>

Come again?

Very nice!

I didn't see it on the image, but maybe it got cropped out. Did you give credit to the original author for the code/idea?

...or on top of an existing building.

I'm inclined to agree, but can you say more about that?

"Just wear headphones" is the "Just hit delete" of the new millennium.

I'm not shy about calling people out on self-serving narratives. If that article pointed at "startups should be more pliant to VC narratives", I'd be throwing down the rhetorical penalty flag, calling Projection on the offense, and telling them to try again.

That all being said... it appears that you're assuming facts not in evidence.

That's a fair point. The next question is "What do better options look like, and how do we get there?"

High interest-rate loans are one thing. Forcing payment for the company's lawyer is another. Broad-spectrum mailing of loan offers with (what looks like) no assessment of ability to pay is quite another still.[1]

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[1] Or even worse, selecting for people who they know can't pay immediately, so they can rack up the margins/fees. That would be one of the typical definitions of "predatory."

"Correlation's not causation"

Is not some magical incantation

With just a word or two of proof

We all get closer to the truth

- mfringel the rhetorical safety officer

[IANAL]

Indeed, the California WARN Act[0] explicitly says "layoffs"[1] instead of "employment loss", which would cover termination.

However, it's also true that courts don't like it when you try to get cute. It should be interesting.

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

Why is retail flow specifically profitable? Nearly entirely market orders? Something else?

If you have no service level requirements, you definitionally have 100% uptime.

That's not my interpretation of that comment. To wit:

There are only a few things you can know about someone clicking 'buy' as the result of an ad:

1. The ad platform booked top-line revenue

2. The seller booked top-line revenue

3. The buyer exchanged money for something they thought was worth it at the time of purchase.

That's it. Even #3 is conjecture, but it's likely enough that I'm willing to run with it for sake of argument.

We do not, and short of asking, can not know if that purchase added value to the buyer's life.

It's not a norm in the states, no. Typical restroom stalls in the US have about 10" (25 cm) of clearance between the bottom of the door and the floor.

Your anecdote on notification use cases has been noted by the Ministry of Statistics. Thank you for your participation.

Thank you for posting this. I was running low on middlebrow dismissals today, and I'm full up now.

Yes, and distribution of the benefits from deadweight loss reduction has also been a matter of study, and that's the topic on the table.

Two things:

1. That's a non-sequitur. Drug rehab programs that are part of prison diversion schemes are implicitly a matter of public policy. A single individual writing a single check is meaningless in that context.

2. "Saint or GTFO" is a debate tactic used by the foolish who think their opponent is a bigger fool.

I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority of the (United States) populace signed up for.

The legal Expectation of Privacy[0] continues to be important, even if there are people who think that it was a legal handwave that only existed due to lack of adequate technology.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy

Vacuous truths are still vacuous.

And that, in a nutshell, is why corporations are their own moral entities, and not just "made of people".

If they're discreetly seeking other employment, you have now blown their cover. A couple of things about that:

1. "If they're looking for another job, they can have no guarantee of secrecy." -- Sure, but is it your job to out someone?

2. "I need a second opinion on their references, just in case they're giving me bad ones." -- So.... what exactly is your threat model, here? "Catfished by a candidate" stories are interesting because they're rare.

3. "If I tell other people they're looking, I can reduce their leverage by making things awkward for them at their current job." -- Hey look! I found the sociopath!

Bonus Thing: It's a small industry, and people don't go away. You've now marked yourself as someone who can't be trusted with knowledge about someone's else career choices.

Using a literalist expansion of YIMBY doesn't seem constructive.

Do you demand the same locality standard for people who block building housing and/or upzoning in places that aren't their domicile or directly adjacent to it?

In your view, how close does someone need to live to construction to have a preference about whether it happens or not? It sounds like your metric is "they should be made personally miserable, so that they regret asking for it in the first place.", which is begging the question a bit.

It appears you're saying that "A YIMBY's only valid political stance is to advocate for the destruction of the building they live in, otherwise they can be safely ignored."

I'm assuming I'm wrong, and I sincerely hope I am. "Saint or GTFO" arguments are pretty facile.

Not everything legal is moral, and not everything moral is legal.

There are a couple of things mentioned in that sentence. Can you say which one you think is the "ultimate first-world problem?"

That's a novel interpretation. Can you walk us through how you got there?

Can you tell me more about your previous affiliation with Facebook?