radpanda

I’ve always seen UBI as part of a post-scarcity sci-fi future. Once the robots run the farms and deliver the food and build the buildings and so on, and there just isn’t enough work to go around for humans, of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population (both morally and to prevent uprisings). Sure, in this sci-fi future you can live in your basic pod and eat basic food for free or you can work a little or a lot to try to upgrade your situation.

But I don’t think we’re there yet. We do have a lot of industries that rely on shit jobs that people would rather not do. If we, IMHO prematurely, try to institute a UBI now we’d be in for a world of pain along the way as the prices of basic services skyrocket without robots being ready to step in.

I think I prefer alphaguess.com’s simpler interface

> You could look at this as an abitrage opportunity where a business throwing out bulk waste has to pay for it, but if you distribute it to individual citizens whose trash bin still has a bit of room in it, you can throw it out for free.

Yeah, that’s what I figured was going on here. Reminds me of pizza delivery (in the US anyhow), which relies on pizza delivery guys not paying attention to the cost of vehicle wear-and-tear and proper insurance so your pizza is cheaper than if every pizza place owned properly maintained and insured vehicles.

> Nobody ever cared where anyone worked from

Was it really this way in general or just with some little startups who didn’t mind taking risks? As far as I remember employers always cared where remote workers were for tax and other reasons (sanctions, compliance with local regulations, etc).

Another reason in favor of reliance on contractors, at least in a couple of federal agencies I’ve worked with, is to improve diversity metrics. For agencies that require lots of technical workers, the reality is that means a heavily male workforce. But agencies (up until a few months ago) liked to tout that they were “model employers” with very diverse workplaces, and near gender equity. Then you actually show up and notice the building is full of the usual (for tech) contingent of white and Asian dudes but they don’t count as employees for diversity statistics.

That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.

Sure, there’s the math, but there’s also the human nature part of it. If you’re sitting in the right lane doing the speed limit, watching dozens of cars consistently zip past, it feels like you’re “falling behind” all of that traffic. I wonder how that will be received by the riding public.

Waymo rides are also potentially slower because they strictly follow speed limits. Not really problematic in downtown SF but it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be received by riders when they expand to highway driving where most people generally expect to drive over the speed limit.

Buy back the Mavericks (probably for less than he sold them for), fire Nico Harrison and trade to get Luka Dončić back.

Oh, you mean about 18F? I’d just keep trying to draw public attention to what appear to be hasty decisions made by this administration that aren’t actually beneficial to the country.

I’m not a big George W Bush fan but this quote of his has stuck with me for years:

> Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions

Seems like it might be the exception proving the rule. People say “every” restaurant these days needs to use something like Toast to provide online ordering and needs to play nice with DoorDash for delivery and needs to host ghost kitchens to increase income, etc. Of course there’s that one old-school place with the established reputation that does simple dine-in only and is thriving. But the new upstart can’t just not play the game - that privilege is reserved for those who have already won.

> Alternate title: Lack of Government Interference Allows Properties to be put to Highest and Best Use

From the article:

> Arizona even passed a law in 2016 making it illegal to regulate short-term rentals at the local level

Does state government interfering with local government count as “Lack of Government Interference”?

I wish the NYT would have asked a follow-up to this question:

> Q: Could airlines close this loophole, if they wanted to?

> A: Yes, it’s their own prices that allow this.

> If they want to shut down skiplagging, they could do it tomorrow. One way to do it would be reducing airfare to hub cities. The reason the price is so high because they control this market and want to maximize their profits. It’s the reason hidden cities even exist.

I mean, yeah, that's true. To eliminate the allure of hidden city ticketing, the airlines could reduce the prices on some of their most profitable routes. But my understanding is that airlines don't tend to have huge profit margins overall. If government mandated that the price for segment A->B is always cheaper than A->B->C, would the airlines be able to service as many marginally profitable routes? How much of the comprehensive air network that we take for granted would disappear if such a rule went into effect?

I'm not generally a fan of the airlines. I think their pricing practices have become those of pathological assholes. But I guess I would actually prefer the status quo over a future with simple, straightforward air fares that only serve a fraction of today's airports.

I’m not the commenter that you’re replying to but I always get a different “feel” when using a native application like Excel than a web app. I can type as fast as I can think, switching cells, typing values, invoking keyboard shortcuts, etc, and every keystroke is interpreted as I intended. It’s incredible what’s been achieved in modern web apps like Google Sheets, but I still feel like I need to slow down at times to watch what the app is up to - making sure the cell was selected in the UI before entering text or watching to be sure the browser didn’t intercept a shortcut, etc.

I don’t know if we fully understand the human psychology there. It seems to me that when there are more options available, not only does our perceived value of each option drop, but our perceived value of the whole drops as well.

Any idea what percentage of their sales are actually hidden city itineraries? Every time I’ve searched with them I’ve seen few or no hidden city results, but I guess it’s neat to be aware of the option if it does exist.

Agreed. I like the idea of being hostile to the airlines so I’ve used Skiplagged to search for flights before but I’ve never found a hidden city itinerary that I actually wanted to take.

I’m guessing it probably makes sense with certain airports with high fees near concentrations of wealth? E.g. maybe London->NYC costs more than London(->NYC)->Albany because NYC airports have high fees and airlines presume wealthier clientele bound for NYC?

I'd also note that Ford's attempt to dodge the tariff here wasn't successful. The US DOJ sued and Ford coughed up $365 million to settle the lawsuit: https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2024/03/11/ford-...

Same reason we have TurboTax instead of a government website to type our taxable income numbers into.

I’d imagine somewhere there’s an engineer-artist putting such a print in a brightly lit locked box, which is programmed not to open until the interior light has shined long enough to eradicate the image on the print. (No idea if we have circuitry and LEDs that last long enough to make such a thing feasible).

I get that, that’s one way of looking at it. But other folks look at train vs plane for more utilitarian “getting there”. Depending on your situation and what you consider the train ride to be, the value offered by the train can be considered a reasonable deal or outlandishly expensive.

Yeah, I felt like the “you have to be wealthy” hand-waving in the quoted section wasn’t very explanatory. Are lenders giving the ultra-rich great interest rates here as a loss-leader to try to attract other business from them?

> First, this type of planning is generally not economically feasible unless the taxpayer has a net worth exceeding around $300M. If you’re worth less than that, you’re not going to be able to command attractive loan/line of credit terms from investment banks. You’re going to have to get a plain vanilla product from a retail lender which is going to have relatively high interest rates (typically the Secured Overnight Financing Rate plus some amount of spread) and other terms that make implementing “buy, borrow, die” expensive enough that you aren’t much better off (or you’re much worse off) than you would have been had you sold the asset and taken the after-tax proceeds. (Caveat: even loans/lines of credit at retail interest rates can still be very useful for short-term borrowing needs.) Clients with a net worth exceeding around $300M, however, can obtain bespoke products from the handful of lenders that specialize in this market, and the terms and conditions of these products make “buy, borrow, die” a no-brainer for virtually everyone who has this level of wealth.

On the other hand if taking off work means forgoing income, taking the slower rail journey is even more expensive. Instead of taking 6 days off work to fly and take a cruise, maybe now I need to take 8. For retirees or folks who can work on a train, the calculation might be very different.

As a native Marylander I always find myself forgetting about Cumberland, which is a shame. As someone who has mostly lived in and around Baltimore, you head west to Frederick (aka Fredneck) for the small city in the middle of rural farmland. If you keep heading west you get to Hagerstown which feels way out there in farm country. And if you keep heading west you eventually move from farms to mountains and you hit Cumberland, which looks like a city that time forgot.

As other folks have commented, there’s some beautiful architecture and the old part of the city seems like it could be a bustling place. There’s a train station and easy access to the great outdoors. But the jobs have long gone and drug addiction has taken root for so many there. I don’t know the best way to revive a place like that but I hope something eventually works.

> Because Elasticsearch is not a reliable data store, organizations that use Postgres typically extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from Postgres to Elasticsearch

I’ll admit haven’t kept up with this but is it still the case that Elasticsearch is “not a reliable data store”?

I remember there used to be a line in the Elasticsearch docs saying that Elasticseach shouldn’t be your primary data store or something to that effect. At some point they removed that verbiage, seemingly indicating more confidence in their reliability but I still hear people sticking with the previous guidance.

FYI the article was about a find in the Republic of Ireland, not Northern Ireland. No idea about the relevant rules in either case though.

> a GS-12 getting paid around $68,000 per year (or $99k in very high cost of living areas like DC)

One valid sounding concern that I’ve heard is that the WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE-ARLINGTON, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA GS Locality Area underpays folks in DC by including farflung areas like PA and WV that skew the cost-of-living analysis. Whether that’s an intentional cost-cutting move or bureaucratic incompetence I’m not sure, but in the end the DC-area federal government pay ranges I’ve seen have struck me as quite low.

Deferred compensation plans exist partially for this reason (although obviously not every employer offers them).

> most car rental contracts via insurance will only cover up to 30 days, so you end up being on the hook for the car rental

That’s if your insurance is covering it right? My Volvo C30 got rear-ended a few years back and it took about 6 weeks to get all the parts in and get the repair done. The insurer of the at-fault driver covered my rental car the entire time.

> Basic ICE cars are essentially sold at cost, sometimes as loss leaders, because the manufacturers make a long-tail of money supplying parts and maintenance for the cars over their lifetime

Not just that but fuel economy regulations, (like CAFE in the USA) mandated average fleet fuel economy that must be met for automakers to avoid fines. GM had to sell a bunch of Cavaliers to be able to sell a bunch of (profitable) Silverados and Suburbans. With hybrids and EVs these days, regulations no longer favor the small car.