sunshinelackof

We can solve this, will we? No. Unless someone can convince the world's population to stop burning fossil fuels. The pain is already here for a lot of people and we're not doing anything about it.

As an American this is pretty embarrassing. Somehow trying to absorb the benefits of another government's regulation and billing it as creating a "freer" market is more popular than solving the problem here? I don't buy it, I can't imagine a lot of other people really do either. I'm also not sure that it would even work. That is supposing Canada wouldn't respond to lukewarm hostility with measures to counter this. It feels like we're civically brain-dead. Said sitting on a stash of decade old epi-pens.

I can't imagine building subsidies and alternative fuels will undo the last 200 years of emissions. Structural changes that will reorganize our lives will be necessary. We are in a privileged position, in that we can make these structural changes in a favorable way now before we're faced with a reality that forces these changes on us.

It's scary, but there's nothing I can do. We need approachingly authoritarian action on this issue by world leaders. They've had the data for decades. And the longer they wait, the more dramatic the changes to everything will be. Certainly economic freedoms taken for today will be a thing of legend (and possibly horror.)

General workplace advice: Know how much you want to work. Don't get exploited into doing extra work. Do your best not to take work home. Your boss it typically useful, but ultimately he's not your friend. Keep your dignity and try to have a life outside of work.

Other than that, know what interests you and what doesn't interest you. Don't be afraid to reevaluate your interests over time. Don't be afraid to ask questions. If you think you're correct, be confident and say it.

Some people will say a breadth of skills is important and they are. But don't seek undue skills just because people say they're important. Do what interests you and you'll find a way to make it work out. Though in general, having a base of knowledge in complexity, algo, and data structures will help you find a job quicker. Every computer science program will teach this though.

I'm not sure of the potential for growth on either end that podcasts have. Certainly they remain popular with more educated consumers, but I wonder if it's a case of being unable to see outside of your bubble. On the other end, podcasts have always been super cheap to make. That isn't going to change. Most people have historically just made them for fun or out of passion.

There's probably little hope in growing a platform of highly produced podcasts that supports a bunch of creators, regardless of who does it. I think think these efforts will crash and burn. But this isn't a problem for the people who've been recording on a Zoom and paying $5/month to host their libraries for the last 10 years.

As long as they don't touch the UGB.

While in my opinion the minimum raise should be raised quite a lot, there are a lot of labor reforms needed. In particular for work that falls outside of the salaried work. Waged, contracted, seasonal, and temp workers do not have a lot of power in the labor market. It's actually a pretty hostile environment for individuals who don't want to collect a salary and sit at a desk.

I view the problem through this lens. That essentially we have a labor surplus because the current regulatory environment is designed around salaried office workers - barring a few holdovers in the form of labor unions. The total size of the labor market is larger than the carrying capacity of office jobs. As the environment has aged firms learned how to play the game and have pushed a lot of small competition out. Meanwhile laborers compete for a smaller pool of office jobs or hope they land on their feet.

This is really the nature of regulation though, it can rarely be meant to last forever and should receive continuous development and audits.

> voting exclusively on how credible a politician is on tackling global warming

This is really the only important thing that we can do. Except maybe not flying in an airplane, there is little the average person can do in their daily life to inhibit climate change. Whether due to preventive policies or due to resource shortages our lives will change in the near future. Expecting individuals to shame themselves when the society at large encourages the opposite is counter-productive.

It is not to say that anyone is wrong to choose to live more frugally. More importantly, we need to recognize that any hope we have must come from the top down. We have more research and more solutions than we've ever had for any problem, but we don't have someone to pull the trigger.

I can take a few days off for no reason. Most people cannot. 40% of American households cannot afford a $400 expense. That means they're at the whim of their employer as to whether they ever get a break and if they do they're going to take the overtime instead. Most people aren't simply chasing the money either, they're just trying to live.

Leisure is a commodity that is out of the reach of many people now. It is no longer a part of life. This will not change through individual choice, it requires a coordinated reorganization of our society.

Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...

> see Panama disease for bananas for an example

Extinction level blights similar to these are not often found in the natural world. They're only a thing because we (humans) eliminated genetic diversity from crops through grafts and clones. If the plants reproduced naturally its likely that a range of genetically diverse children would have been resistant to the fungus.

I won't speak for other countries, but in The US leisure and general livability are commodities now, not a part of life. The talk about shorter work weeks feel to me like they're rooted in growing fears that these commodities are pricing out many in the "professionals class." This isn't meant with snark, but it's an uncomfortable conversation for everyone. As we stand today there are plenty of people, fully employed, who don't even have a savings let alone time for leisure. I don't think we working professionals will ever see anything meaningful change in working time until we can have the larger conversation about why we work, why we value it, and who should benefit from it.

Calling a degree useless because its value is not realized by the market today is myopic. If there were an explicit disincentive to study neuroscience, it's very unlikely that you would have textbooks summarizing decades of work in neuroscience.

This sort of thing basically existed in 1800's with surgeons. They weren't valued for their work and had a social stigma placed upon them. It took surgery a century to dig out of that hole, only thanks to the people who were dedicated enough to it.

The solution isn't to tune properties of the university to make it more efficient in the market. The university is not very compatible with markets. Professors and researchers are employed to study specific areas of research, typically independent of their market values, for decades. Of course it's all really important, that research feeds into a framework of tools that societies and corporations utilize.

The solution more likely involves making life easier for people who don't want to continue education. The high cost of college represents a fear that if you don't go to college, you're more likely to end up poor. From this perspective a lot of people are attending college that wouldn't if they felt they had other options. It's not hard to understand why people have this fear. 40% of American households don't have $400 to spend on an emergency. Unless we address the fear that opportunity is increasingly scarce the cost of opportunity will continue to rise.

Data ownership doesn't imply agency and control. In the future I own my data, so what? Does every company simply just demand access to all of it so I can use their services?

For data ownership to really matter users/consumers need to be able to bargain on equal terms with companies, probably collectively.

I'm not going to claim that IQ quantitatively describes some useful aspect of individuals. I'm not trying to justify a natural aristocracy. Moreso if we actually did identify this relationship between long term success and high IQ scores then maybe we can identify paths to success through other measures.

Again more conjecture, but maybe IQ has more to do with concentration and abstract thinking. If there were a relationship between wealth and childhood trauma/stress that could impair abstract thinking, it would make a good case for policies designed to prevent childhood trauma, in particular those brought on by poverty.

The weakest part of social security is that it's thought of as a pension and not as a service that government provides to the elderly and disabled. If government wished, it could be funded fully, regardless of whether it's "solvent."

It's not question of financial viability as much as it is a question of how much value we, or The US, puts on the lives of the elderly. Or otherwise framed as: How little we can spend on the elderly without the reemergence of poorhouses.

There are obvious concerns about having a healthy and productive tax base, but that will always be the case. Implicating the tax base for the existence of a government service is just politics.

IQ, flawed as it may be as a measure, is sometimes touted as one of the best predictors of success in life. It's just conjecture, but maybe there's a feedback loop there.

Government can with the stroke of a pen decide to fully fund any program. Even in the case of social security it's just an accounting mechanism. Anyone who says that social security and medicare depend directly on a larger taxable population today is lying. Young people being told that today are being lied to.

> given the track record of the federal government doesn't sound like a good idea

For the vast majority of Americans, their only interactions with the federal government are through social security and through medicare--two of the most widely popular functions of government. Government has plenty of failures, but that's the nature of enterprise writ large.

Typography often takes into consideration the width of the text explicitly and how it influences the style and tone of the document. While I don't imagine that everyone is doing this, it is a thing. The nearest analog I think of is maintaining the aspect ratio of an image. You might still understand the piece of media if it's not in its original format, but that was not the intent.

I'd go even further to suggest that idleness itself has value and doesn't need be justified by the belief that a mind with fewer external stressors is more productive. It's only worth clarification because the idea of "wanting, but not needing" to work is incredibly foreign and through our current lens can only be interpreted as "needing to work, but enjoying it more."

Even so the relation isn't simply a matter of scale. Corporations can do a lot things that people cannot. Notably, corporations can live for hundreds of years, some maybe forever. Simply put it would be nearly impossible for a baker to compete directly with a corporation in the same market. By contrast the baker's assistant could directly compete with the baker given the time and resources.

Corporations insulate individual actors from the market in return for a corporate wage. The baker enters the market to pursue his own interests, but when USA Bread Corp. hires thousands of bakers, those bakers are no longer perusing their own interests but instead the interests of the shareholders of USA Bread Corp.

With this perspective it's reasonable to expect that a corporation that has every available advantage over the independent worker should serve and improve some common good.

Individual ownership of data doesn't solve the problem because there's an inherently unequal relationship between the data's owner and the data's consumer. The consumer whether public or private has limited use for an individual data point and is really interested in the collective sum of individuals' data. We see this unequal relationship in plenty of other domains and it always collapses into giving into the demands of the larger entity just for the privilege to participate.

What really would make more sense is the collective ownership of data. Allow for data owners the power to form a body to collectively bargain with entities that want access to their data.

Getting caught up in the freedom of speech question is folly. In context it reads as a not-so subtle dismissal of racism. I’m not even questioning the right to free speech. But when the first response to platforms removing white nationalist content is about “just wanting to have a conversation,” people of colour tune out. Freedom of speech is a valid concern, but I think in this instance it belongs further back in the sprint queue.

In regard to comments concerning why it only addresses white-nationalism, understand that these statements are made in the context of North America’s on-going flirtations with white nationalism going back 300 years. It’s not an easy pill to swallow and speaks little about individuals regardless of colour.

> Are you saying that it's bad if my coffee beans are glistening with oil?

It isn't inherently bad, but it's usually a sign of more mass produced coffee. It's easier to roast coffee like that because it all tastes pretty much the same which is good if you need to make the same coffee for thousands of different locations. And some people enjoy the carbonic taste of coffee like that.

More lightly roasted coffees will have big differences in flavour that's not really possible to control for on a mass scale I don't think. Especially between origins and varieties.

I experienced this in college when I worked as a cashier at a grocery store. One particular "song" comprised entirely of whale noises. I probably heard it 15 times a day and it was always the target of employee aggression. For some reason the manager just refused to put on something else.

I am shocked this hasn't happened sooner. It speaks to the lack of agency the average person has even in a government job. Politics and money grant agency for people, but most Americans have limited access to either.

While personally I don't think anyone's work can be worth billions a year, I don't think people necessarily have a problem with the dollar amount of money that the wealthy have. In my view it's the feeling of impotence and lack of agency people feel. If you work a normal job that most people would expect to work their whole lives you feel powerless for the most part. Your only option is to plug away for an indeterminate amount of time until you retire (?) And it's not guaranteed you'll work there forever as the lifespan of most jobs has shrunk.

It leaves a paternalistic relationship between the business and the average worker. They don't get to feel like they're interfacing with the labor market, they're at the will of their employer. They should be grateful that your employer provides healthcare otherwise they might actually die. Maybe they should open a GoFundMe if they can't afford it. They should respect the patronage of private donations and privately funded grants your city benefits from.

The reason why universal programs are attractive is because they give the average person a sense of agency. Because they're universal they aren't a "handout," they're part of what it means to interact with society. Everyone pays in and everyone gets paid out. But if they're not universal they quickly become handouts for the poor instead of features of society.