moxious

While the mainstream argues about whether bitcoin is or isn't this or that, while bitcoin attracts all the attention because of its spectacularly high price, people are working on blockchain things all over the place, relatively quietly in the background.

Whether or not bitcoin does this or that is immaterial to growth of non-currency blockchain applications.

I don't really know what should be done about salaries. I don't really believe that "fairness" can be defined, or even if it could be, that you could get a global workforce to agree on a definition.

On the other hand, I'd take the opposition position of yours and say that we should be incentivizing people to live in big cities for [many reasons](https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-big-cities-matter-more...). It is not perfect or tradeoff-free, but nothing ever is.

> The market is a tool, not the objective.

This perspective I agree on. Specifically, markets are a tool for finding prices, because we've observed all throughout humanity that alternative methods of pricing (and hence resource allocation) go poorly. It's the least worst system! If you need to do that thing (establish prices and distribution of resources with minimum waste) then the market is a great tool.

If you're trying to solve some other problem (establishing "fair" pay) -- then I agree that appealing to the market is like pounding nails with a saw. It isn't even supposed to do that thing.

In Buffer's case, they're trying to go after fairness, which is fine. But this overall post above (bringing us back to topic) is that they're starting to introduce factors that are swinging them back towards the market. The market is pretty tough to ignore in the long term, irrespective of our feelings about its fairness.

I don't follow this at all. Yes companies are made by people not places, but people are in places. Those places matter a lot. Where will you find better people, in downtown London or rural Iowa?

Given a group of 7 people (posit some great team) their output is the same irrespective of location, sure -- but how did you get those 7 people? If you were in rural USA, your probability of ever having arrived at that situation is already much lower.

If location truly didn't matter, then you'd be able to move your SF team to Iowa and save a lot of money, but that's not going to work.

It doesn't have to be a huge city. I'm in a midsize city not in the Bay area, and I agree with everything you're saying about places like Boulder.

I wrote this to contrast any size city with places like the endless suburbs or rural areas, not to create a hierarchy of "biggest is best".

Problems do also scale with size, so it's not like the massive benefits of cities are tradeoff-free. For as great as San Francisco is purported to be, they have a huge homeless problem that they seem to do relatively little about.

This is excessively cynical, for two reasons; in the Buffer model, the CEO's pay is subject to the formula too, and in a startup where people are getting equity, your financial outcome is tied to the success of the company, and your main risk is the failure of the company, not some faceless person siphoning the dollars off.

Whenever you sell your labor, obviously the buyer of that labor thinks it's worth more than what they're paying for it, otherwise they wouldn't do it. So you're always working for someone else to make money unless you own your own thing.

It's just a question of degree there.

Remember, labor is just another thing we buy and sell.

In other markets, like those for cars, there are specialists that focus on naming fixed, non-negotiable prices. What buffer is doing seems pretty similar.

Like I said, the market has lots of options for devs. I don't know if they're $50k off...when I said not all devs care about salary, I'm talking about the last 10%. I don't know anybody who ignores $50k.

You tell them that at startups, titles are total fiction not used to describe job responsibilities but to participate in a branding effect for the company.

And then you describe your actual duties and experience.

I don't think titles matter at all because they're always different everywhere you go. The only exception is if you're a committed ladder climber and you're going from one place with a rigid hierarchy to another similar place. In this case jockeying for title position can be important.

Not all developers care about salary first.

I see this overall approach as more like flying a flag and publicly indicating culture because there's a particular crowd they want. This is how they advertise what's important to them and draw like minded people closer. That seems 100% legit to me, and super useful for any dev considering them that they're so straightforward.

No one has to like it or choose it for themselves, but I see it as nothing but laudable. It's a big wide market out there, and this is a quirky option I'm glad exists

There are a zillion reasons to live in high cost areas aside from job liquidity.

The magic of concentrations of people is that the advantages scale faster than population growth because of the network effect.

Which, separately, is why cities are awesome and population density is a good thing for the planet and most people, even if it upsets some people that they can't have a big yard.

If people were truly paid for what they did and not where they were, this would probably exclude most Bay Area people since they're at the top of the market. Perhaps your company has adjusted to the normalcy of SF rates?

OTOH, location matters a lot. Otherwise your company wouldn't be in the Bay Area. Centers of gravity are a thing. Why not pay for location? Even if an employee is remote only, if they network well where they are, it's worth paying for location.

That comes across to me really strange. Labor is a market just like bananas or mobile phone data. How does it make sense to pay the ceiling price of all markets, everywhere?

I'm all for personally earning more money, but this also disproportionately rewards people who live in cheap places.

I applaud transparency in general and the intent here is noble. One of my companies considered adopting the old model for a time.

However:

> The new formula now includes an elastic part that adjusts to the cost of living and market influence of salaries for different roles.

The transparency and simplicity of the old model was its key value. The more complex and hard to assess terms you put in, the more you lose transparency and make salary assignment something that can be "massaged" to fit the circumstances. And I think having a formula is supposed to be the antithesis of that.

But this is a really hard damn problem. Markets aren't the same, and people's egos are real. Algorithms don't tend to do well when one of the things in the balance is "people's perception of fairness" since fairness is an emotional and non-quantitative concept.

You can tell they did some pragmatic compromising. Because, well, they're still in business.

Well it's probably not fair to call it an Easter egg if it had a commercial tie-in and presumably resulted in money for Firefox. Those are called ads. No matter how whimsically they're packaged

But yes, people do like to get up in arms about free code bases that they don't pay for. People need to keep in mind the Facebook rule -- that when you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer, you are the product.

So what's the plan to sustain the existence of the fork?

Browsers are very complex and expensive to keep cutting edge.

Oh come on. A publication like the Economist lives for stuff like this, as a story of this magnitude would have lots of knock on effects.

Daily press does tend to go after blow-by-blow stuff but you're selling the media short. The entire Trump collusion thread right now is itself crazy complicated and it's in the news daily.

If that much money were spent, someone would have to be receiving it. That's enough money to make thousands of unicorn companies....per year. WTF

Thought the same thing. So if the conclusion is true why is this also not being picked up by major news outlets? It would be major news

With that amount of money the federal government could make a few interest payments on its debt and not even really make a dent in the total

It could be both. Just because they're paying Amazon an arm and a leg doesn't mean they have the ability or the time to do a better job for cheaper.

Please avoid getting too wrapped up in the metaphor. You don't mine it, there's no TNT involved, that's just a word.

And it may behave "like" gold in some respects but in many other crucial ones it does not.

BTC is not a useful raw material in any industrial process. It requires a P2P network and extensive global infrastructure, so it won't still be sitting there inert in 1,000 years, when the Power is out, in a crisis. BTC can't be alloyed with other cryptocurrencies to produce other value added products.

You can't put BTC leaf on your fancy pastries. There are no other downstream businesses that specialize in assaying the purity of your bitcoin.

They do understand it but this disagreement masks a deeper issue -- they think economics functions just as it did some years ago and others disagree. With differing underlying assumptions, both sides' arguments are rational.

"Past performance is no indicator of future returns"

New things come along, and they don't have to make sense in the old worldview in order to be good. So the analysis of 60 year olds, even the really smart ones, is less valuable than it sometimes appears.

HOWEVER -- the opposite is also true, "flavors of the month" come and go, and proving worldwide utility takes more than convincing a lot of people to buy for a period of time.

It's going to take years to see the outcome and who is right. Humans are absolutely fucking terrible at predicting the future. Don't buy the hype.

Do your own research, run your own experiments, and hedge your own risk.

Put a lawyer in charge when your strategy is to defend lawsuits against issues and mitigate the fallout of issues, rather than to, you know, prevent the security issues

I think it has a reputation as a pseudo science because it's derived from religious practice. While religious practice isn't always bunk (as is the case here) assuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic.

Plenty of people do use maven, but there's a lot of power in being the assumed popular option, which sbt is.

And here we see the problem with 4-word summaries of very complex instruments. Any summary will be sort of true from one perspective, but missing a lot, and probably wrong from other perspectives.

Cryptocurrency, like rocket science, is complicated and dangerous. It shouldn't be attempted to be understood in 4 words

Privatization was mostly done under Clinton in response to the fact that federal workers were even less effective, often more expensive, and impossible to fire. contractors aren't all wine and roses but before you knock them you need to carefully understand the alternative and why things are as they are.

Why would they do this? It doesn't seem to make much business sense other than to be PR for the grocery company.

They've given Musk $5k x 25 trucks ordered, on promises of trucks delivered in a year or more, from a company that usually misses its deadlines. And oh by the way the truck doesn't have a price yet, so they're not committed to actually buying.

Maybe they're just giving tesla an interest free loan for a few years for PR?