rsj_hn

I didn't realize that air dominance prevented enemy missiles from hitting surface ships. That's a rather unique definition of air dominance.

If your enemy has access to satellites, long range sensors, submarines that can fire hypersonic anti-ship missiles, and modern air defense systems, then a strategy based on the assumption of air dominance will fail.

Let's also not forget that the U.S. has never achieved air dominance over any nation with sophisticated air defense systems. The last time the U.S. actually tried to fight an air war against an enemy with access to relatively modern air-defense systems was in Vietnam, where 3700 US planes were shot down (and about 5000 helicopters). Air defenses are much better now, which is why Israel - with its advanced F35s -- is so afraid of Syria's S300 systems that it only uses standoff weapons when it raids Syria, proving once again that long range missiles are what matters, and outdated concepts like "air dominance" are only relevant when the enemy is limited to RPGs and Toyota trucks.

The data you cite does not say what you think it does. In fact, it makes the very mistake I was pointing out in my original post -- failing to control for rates of prostitution and other risky behavior and simply comparing rates of violence based on gender only.

Simply citing a study that makes no attempt to control for rates of prostitution does not disprove my argument. Repeating a myth does not make it true, even if you repeat it over and over again.

There is no increased risk of being a victim of violence for being transgender that is not fully accounted for by the increased risk of engaging in prostitution. It is just that transgender people tend to have higher rates of prostitution.

> I'm seeing a lot of claims here that DEI initiatives are about actively hiring under-qualified under-represented candidates to change the demographics of the company.

This is exactly what DEI is, and I guarantee you that your own company, if it is of any substantial size, systematically hires under qualified candidates because of DEI. It would require a hermetically sealed reality-avoidance filter to not notice this. While there are some people who walk around with these filters on, the vast majority of people do not, and will readily tell you exactly what DIE is about once they feel safe enough to speak honestly with you. Listen to them.

This is hacker news, so they are going to be focusing on tech layoffs, but really there are layoffs happening in all industries, and tech is about the middle of the pack.

In terms of complaining about growth companies being too aggressive in hiring, I mean, that's the point of a growth company. Almost all companies gearing up for fast revenue growth get fast headcount growth as part of the deal.

For some data, you can look at BLS layoff by industry reports here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t05.htm

The biggest hit industry has been arts, entertainment, and recreation. The second biggest hit was construction. The third biggest hit was professional and business services, and information was fourth biggest hit. After that, transportation, trade, and utilities. The usual safe sectors like government are doing well, but mining and manufacturing as well as retail have done pretty well.

My personal theory is the reason for all these news articles is that media has been hit really hard. So the journalists writing for media are in mass panic mode -- not a good time to be working for either a news website or legacy news outlet.

Parenting strategies, like war plans, rarely survive first contact with the enemy.

Last time I was in the housing market in San Francisco, earthquake insurance was not mandated. Can you point me to the law mandating it now? Perhaps you mean it's mandated by your bank when taking out a mortgage? That's a private sector decision that depends on your bank and your loan.

Anyways, you are confusing the issue of whether insurance is mandated with the fact that no private insurer will cover it, and so the risk is socialized and the only providers are government.

That's what people are complaining about -- that private insurers walked away from covering flood/earthquakes in regions prone to the same, and so the government has to step in to insure the correlated risk. This causes no end of outrage for Florida but is somehow just fine in California. And my only point was to point out this hypocrisy and argue that there are good reasons for government to cover correlated risks and that there is nothing wrong with either state or those who choose to build in either state. They can accept risk or they can purchase government insurance.

1989 was, what, 34 years ago? This is a 5-10X generation event to you, I guess. I can't even begin to unwind all the innumerate assumptions, but motivated reasoning is powerful I guess.

There are fewer places where it is more reckless to build housing than coastal California.

By the same logic, all the houses built in the earthquake zones of San Francisco and LA should also be raised.

I've noticed that there has been mass hysteria in some California-centric websites that flood insurance must be provided by the Federal government in Florida, but not that earthquake insurance must be provided by the Federal government in California.

Botton line, the private sector doesn't handle this type of correlated risk well, and somehow picking on Florida when California does the same thing is pretty weird. We know there will be a big earthquake that will level a lot of property in California just we know there will be a big flood in Florida. Yet "entitled fucks" keep choosing to live in these states. Life goes on.

I don't think this is due to illegal aliens, without which our construction industry would be in even worse shape, but rather that there have been massive declines in the competence of domestic workers across the board, and this has been hidden by outsourcing, importing skilled workers, and technological growth (e.g. have machines do things that domestic workers cannot), so that you see productivity declines in those areas where you cannot outsource and you cannot pay extreme wage premiums to attract people with basic reasoning skills.

You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.

> This narrative that the market forced them to do layoffs feels flimsy when they have so much money, doesn't it? They had other options.

The options they have is to abandon positioning themselves as a growth stock and say "we are now an income stock". You are right, this is a valid choice.

But think a little about what this would mean for Google. This is a company that has one cash cow -- Search. Pretty much everything else is losing money. But only a small share of Google employees are actually needed to run search. So if they tell the market "We are no longer a growth stock", then why are they spending all this money on money losing projects? The rationale up until now was that these are moonshots where some of them would turn into the next big search. That's what a growth company does, but not what an income generating company does.

So my guess is that Google does not want to transition to being an income earning company because that would require laying off a lot more people. You can lay off 80% of Google's staff and just keep search, and then turn those profits over to investors. Google does not do that because it is still promising growth.

But I agree that at some point, the market isn't going to accept the growth story for Google, and this type of transition will happen. Google has also been sucking up a lot of first class talent and putting them to work on money losing projects without a lot to show for it. Those top developers really belong elsewhere, from an economic efficiency point of view -- they should be working on things that really are legit growth opportunities.

The "payment" can be taken in the form of higher share price, share buybacks, dividends, future dividends, etc.

It does not have take one specific form or another. Despite the fact that Google doesn't pay dividends, it's not a charity. Investors purchase shares of Google in order to get a return, and they have a choice between buying Google or a mortgage bond or ATT, etc.

Now for growth companies like Google, they are effectively "paying" investors with promises of stock price appreciation and high future dividends. This is why they are more sensitive to stock price declines than income investments like a cable company. It's a two edged sword - they are faster to hire and faster to fire and are more responsive to their share price.

At some point, the growth companies discover they need to start paying dividends or doing regular share buybacks in order to stabilize their price, when their growth story is no longer believed by the market.

I will assume you are asking in good faith, so here goes.

What you think of as "profit" -- e.g. just some random, arbitrary, completely free bonus that Google should be grateful to have at all -- is actually the cost of capital for Google. It is a payment to equity, and the amount of the payment is determined by the interest rate as well as the time path of expected future earnings, adjustment for risk, and other factors. The presence of these other confounding factors often confuse people and make them think profits are arbitrary. They are not. Just because something is complex doesn't mean it is random.

Now when the interest rate increases, that required payment goes up, because investors always have a choice of buying a share of google or buying a bond, and if the bond pays 7%, then buying a share of google should also give you 7%. Now, that 7% could be taken as future growth, as a number of things, but it still needs to be competitive with the bond, which is itself set by government policy in setting interest rates for the economy in such a way as to limit inflation. So we see that companies paying employees a lot of money without actually generating profits is related to inflation. Stop and think about it.

Recently, the government has not been doing a very good job of this and has set the rates -- the payments -- too low, causing inflation to be too high. It's now trying to correct, raise the rates, and so the required cost of capital -- the required profits of companies like Google -- have to increase.

Now suppose Google doesn't do that, e.g. it says "these profits are enough and you should be glad to have them". What investors do is say "well, I'd rather buy the bond" and so they sell their google shares and buy bonds, and in this way the value of Google falls up until the profit rate (profits divided by market price) is compatible with the bond. Well, so what? If Google shares sell for a dollar, who cares, since all that matters is that there be no layoffs, right? Well, when the market share falls below the liquidation value of the company, investors buy up the outstanding shares and liquidate the company. But long before that, there are lot of mechanisms -- e.g. stock options, voting on the corporate board -- that are designed to encourage decision makers to be aligned with the interests of shareholders so that you generally do not see companies trading for less than their scrap value for very long. And this does not need to happen to the whole company, most will scrap unprofitable divisions and projects and not stick their heads in the sand and wait for the whole company to be scrapped. What's an example of a company that has a ton of unprofitable projects? Hmm, one such name comes to mind.

So now we see why, when interest rates go up, businesses struggle to increase their profit margins -- and those that do not go out of business. It is no different for the farmer that needs to earn a higher return on his crop when interest rates rise, so the business needs to earn higher margins when interest rates rise as well. The higher interest rates cause a reduction in investment, which generates a reduction in spending and they incentivize more savings (deferral of spending), and in this way they reduce inflation, which everyone is complaining about as it hurts workers' standard of living.

It depends on whether the tech is itself inherently sensitive or whether it will just be used for defense among other uses.

A lot of defense stuff falls in the latter category in which case you can start by needing to hire some sales engineers with security clearances who meet with the defense customers -- mostly contractors themselves. The devs don't necessarily need clearance.

If you are making something sensitive -- like a new nuke -- then you will have trouble going the start up route. IN-Q-Tel, DARPA, these programs were designed to fill the gaps.

But if you are making an AI for drones, for example, or some new polymer that has good materials properties that would be useful on a tank, then you can ease into it as these have multiple applications and you just need your SEs to meet with the defense people and say "hey, we have this cool tech, are you interested in it?" and then if they are interested they will work with you on clearances by helping sponsor key employees and letting you know what their requirements are and how you can meet them.

In many cases an acquisition by said contractor is your exit.

Imagine you are running a restaurant and normally you get 100 people a night and you service that with 10 staff, and you know for the next year you will get 200 people a night and can support that business with 20 staff and then after it will go back down to 100 people.

So you can choose to:

1. Refuse to hire the extra staff for a year and lose out on the profits of 100 customers a night for a year.

2. Go with the flow, expanding when demand increases and contracting when demand decreases.

Most people will go with option 2 as that is what gets you more money and also allows the economy to respond to price signals in a rational way. This is particularly true of growth companies like Google. The idea of a growth company is not to maintain constant revenues and employment over time. People who go to work for Google should understand that Google will hire more staff when demand goes up. But then they should also understand that Google will cut staff when demand falls.

That it's predictable that demand goes up and down does nothing to change this calculus. It's like people blaming the home builders in 2010 for expanding home building. I mean, when there is an increased demand for new housing, why wouldn't they expand home building?

But were you actually denied boarding, or just worried about it? The restrictions may affect what kind of credit you get for missing a flight, but you will never be banned from flying the airline - that's absurd.

Back in reality, people miss flights all the time. Not only are you not banned from flying the airline, you often get a credit that you can apply for your next flight.

The idea is you get the content for free if you also get the ads. Why do you think publishers don't expose an API client that serves their content for free?

The issue is why can't Twitter charge for tweets via their API, but offer them for free in a browser if they are served alongside ads. Perhaps their own internal research suggests so few people would be willing to pay that it wouldn't be worth maintaining the API, but it would be nice to hear more info about this.

Or an audience desperate for some diversion, especially a risk-seeking audience.

But no reason the machines can't just pay out 100% and so offer risk to people who want to buy it in small doses without making money off the troops in aggregate.

Anyways, much better than state run lotteries (which have way worse payout odds than slots).

I gave multiple examples related to energy, education, environmental policy, crime, etc, and urged you to learn how to use a search engine to look up surveys. You fixated maniacally on not liking that the word "wall st" appeared in a blog title.

FYI, California students have among the lowest reading comprehension scores (and math scores) in the nation.

There are many surveys out there. California generally competes with Illinois and New Jersey as the most hated state and the most dysfunctional state.

For example, https://www.cagrocers.com/california-repeats-worst-run-state...

It has a broad reputation for dysfunction in basically every area. Energy -- it imports 20% of its electricity from the rest of the nation's grid to get around wacky anti-carbon rules for domestically produced energy, and as a result has the highest energy costs in the nation as well as suffering from rolling blackouts. It is the state of constant fires because of forest mismanagement due to a politically influential "don't chop down our precious trees" faction. (California's chronic fires are also blamed on global warming). It has one of the worst education systems and a truly insane educational policy ("we will create 5 million Galois' by eliminating math classes!"). Terrible homeless problem. Terrible crime problem. A shrinking population. Massively dysfunctional housing market. And one of the highest tax burdens. Massive infrastructure problems.

Etc.

It's really hard to think of any area of public policy - from tax policy to education to energy or crime -- and say "Hey, what California is doing is working really well, we should emulate that". Just compare how California stood in areas like test scores, crime, housing affordability, energy prices in 1970 versus 1990 versus today. You see a peak and then a decline followed by collapse.

Nothing hurts some Californians' feelings than the simple fact that the rest of the nation no longer looks to them for guidance.

Yes, California is still big. But it's no longer a leader. The idea "but California did this" is no longer an argument in favor of something. It's often an argument against doing something.

I am sorry if this triggers you, but it's reality.

Scroll down to the part where something was actually enacted as opposed to being promised to be enacted long after the legislators leave office. These "plans", "pledges" are about as reliable as carbon net zero promises. It is purely performative. You may not have noticed, but carbon emissions keep going up. As does coal use [https://www.iea.org/news/the-world-s-coal-consumption-is-set...].

But lets have another pledge, it will all be phased out in 2040!

Also, the part about California leading the nation has stopped being true a long time ago. California is an object lesson in government dysfunction, wacky ideas, a crazy, utopian electorate that is disconnected from reality and a shrinking population as people flee to more sane jurisdictions where things actually work. It is by far the most hated state in the nation, and is generally used as a slur.

I very much doubt this will happen. Toyota announced it will continue to produce ICE cars, and other major manufacturers will walk back their vague "goals" once the utopian goals are revealed to be impractical. Or perhaps the goals will just keep getting pushed forward and there will be lip service paid to them during the annual Davos conferences.

Several US automakers may not make it, though. They are long past their sell by date anyways, and will probably go out of business after abandoning ICE production.

That's not how the current administrative state operates. The white house can nominate the head of the EPA (and a layer of bureaucrats beneath them) and the Senate must approve the nominations. These are political appointees.

The white house cannot say "fire person X" who works for the EPA but was not nominated, because there is (supposed to be) a wall between the political appointees, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and the professional appointees, who are supposed to be protected by a web of laws and whistleblower protections.

So while many people think that the President is the "head" of the administration and can just order it to do whatever he wants, that's not how it's supposed to work. The set of things the EPA is supposed to be doing is set by legislation and the manner in which it does things is also subject to oversight. That doesn't actually stop the politicization of these agencies -- e.g. the CDC studying racism as a public health crisis or gun crime as a disease, or having the IRS investigate conservative groups, etc. The boundary of this tug of war in which the President tries to order an agency to do X and his opponents sue him saying "you can't do this" is exactly the issue of lawfare and the constitutionality of various executive orders. Many such attempts at directing Federal agencies fail or are ruled unconstitutional, but the overall effects of appointing ideologues to leadership positions is felt in things like the newspeak so common now in public announcements.

if you aren't using Lisp, then are you even a real driver developer?

I wouldn't at all be surprised if we get a flood of relatively cheap to maintain EVs from China, as a parallel of the durable and cheap cars we got from Japan in the 80s. Except this time, it wont be so much that the components themselves are reliable as that they are standardized and all the DRM is removed so that they can be affordably serviced. I don't think the future is very bright for domestic auto makers. First, they foolishly declare they will stop selling ICE vehicles, handing that entire market segment over to asian competitors, and then they screw the pooch with EVs via user-hostile designs. 2021 was the first year since the 1930s that GM wasn't the best selling car maker, being dethroned by Toyota - a company that really does make lower TCO vehicles.

A lot of people assert that EVs have a lower cost of ownership, but there just isn't a lot of data to support that. Yes, on the one hand you have fewer moving parts. On the other you have a huge amount of new tech and a rapacious service model.

For example, Teslas are more expensive to maintain than the ICE industry average - $832 versus $650 for other cars. https://jalopnik.com/advisor/tesla-maintenance-cost/#:~:text....

In terms of fuel, well that very much depends on what happens to electricity prices when a lot of people start plugging in their EVs. Again, people assume they will just remain the same in response to an increase in demand, but color me skeptical. The only way electricity prices can avoid rapidly increasing is if it becomes illegal for you to plug in your EV.

You should in general be suspicious of anyone making claims about total cost of ownership calculations, and heavily discount such claims -- whether it is your local IBM/Oracle salesman or your local car salesman. It is usually a mechanism to justify higher up front purchase prices. Next time someone refuses to be price competitive with other options but makes an appeal to TCO, ask them to put that into writing -- that your TCO will be lower otherwise you will get a refund on the purchase price. Just watch their mouth drop.

It is only strange because you don't understand the situation. In most developed countries, university education is "free" for a select group that test highly or get good grades. It is not true that 100% of the population is offered free college education, usually 10%-30% of students are given this opportunity, based on their academic performance.

That is also the case in the US, when a comparable share of the student body is offered scholarships (~1/3 of students)-- that's what happened to me, I never paid a penny.

What we are talking about here is those who would never be eligible for a university education in "most developed countries" being able to buy their way into the classroom in the U.S. Others are able to get scholarships to a local university but prefer to buy their way into a more prestigious or desirable university. For example, many are offered tuition wavers to a local community college but prefer to pay to enter a different institution. Or they are offered a tuition waiver for a local university but prefer to go to a more expensive private university, etc. There is a whole chain of selectivity.

Whether or not this is a good idea remains to be seen. More and more, people are coming to the conclusion that the cost isn't worth it.

There is a second issue about whether American universities are actually good (from the point of view of the student) compared to the rest of the world, or whether they are good (from the point of view of select faculty) because they have such huge budgets. Here, too, the situation is mixed (and deteriorating).

Bekenstein wrote an interesting paper on MOND in 2010 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3876

But again, the 2017 experimental data [cited previously] in support of Lorentz invariance and the 2016 bullet cluster data in support of dark matter basically killed MOND in the eyes of most researchers.

As I said before, nothing wrong with writing papers exploring the consequences of MOND or trying to come up with alternatives, science does not work by consensus, but the bar for dropping Lorentz invariance is really high given the experimental support for it.