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Re:42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings on Friday October 19, 2018 @04:13PM (#18259662)
I won’t tell you what to do with your money, but there are a lot of cheap fun cars to drive out there. If you want fun to drive combined with new features like automatic lane keeping, dynamic cruise control, etc. you may need to shell out a little more for it.

I encourage high-earning tech workers to save more money in general - these are boom times. $60k pays rent on a room in the bay for a long time if you’re unemployed. I’m gonna buy the house before I lease the Tesla. But don’t know about your personal financial situation.

The person who buys the failed business is not the same person who put in the original $1M.
Huh, I’ve used this development pattern before, but never re-used the same branch after merging code into master. I’d keep the new feature behind a configurable flag so it could be enabled in local or dev environments. Multiple branches might get created and merged to master over time. The feature would be tested in the dev environment (and maybe on a subset of users in prod), before the flag is flipped to enable the feature in prod.
Re:Stripe Is Now a $20B Company on Wednesday September 26, 2018 @02:22PM (#18078802)
I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive. At the scale of Uber, it may be worth keeping both systems running and split usage between the two to negotiate the best rates.
Re:People Like You More Than You Know on Thursday September 20, 2018 @07:07PM (#18036108)
I’ve had the same issue, and it’s really tough. I’ve had some success by asking people questions, paying attention to the answers, asking follow up questions, sharing details about myself if relevant. It doesn’t come naturally and I don’t always do it right, but it has allowed me to become friends with some people who I wouldn’t have been friends with otherwise.
Re:Inside Facebook’s Election ‘War Room’ on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @07:12PM (#18028407)
That’s FB using the official election-influencing methods. The controversy here is about the government being upset that people are influencing the elections outside the approved channels.
Re:America’s Student Debt Machine on Tuesday August 28, 2018 @12:36PM (#17860258)
The tuition is free though.
True in my experience. I’ve had salary go up 10% and equity double when getting promoted. So equity goes from a small portion of total comp to the majority.
Sure, but a lot of these drivers are marginal members of the workforce in some way. I have a friend who is on disability. Lyft is the only job he’s ever been able to hold down, because he can’t show up for work reliably. I think this “abject poverty” framing is very misleading, it assumes the worker is trying to live on their own with the driving gig as their sole source of income, when they are probably living with family or roommates, and/or have another job.

I think Uber and similar have a valuable role in matching a latent supply of labor, an unmet demand for transportation, and wasted resources in the form of cars sitting parked 95% of the time.

It’s not like we were going around paying people $20/hr to drive us home from the bar ten years ago and those jobs went away - that activity simply wasn’t happening (excluding some very rare areas where taxis exist). It would be nice if we could cause Uber drivers to get paid $20/hr with benefits now, but if we passed laws requiring that, the economic activity would probably just go away because most people wouldn’t be willing to pay high enough fares. The driver would be sitting at home on Friday night instead of getting paid to drive the drunk kids around.

Uh, it’s a pretty huge difference. Millions of people live in that kind of wage in the US. It’s the difference between drivers being completely irrational or maybe the gig being worth their while.
With no bosses, there’s nobody saying: “no, you have to use this one.”
Re:Planet Money on Bay Area Housing Costs on Saturday July 28, 2018 @05:39AM (#17632413)
And other people don’t want to pay more rent than they encountered when they arrived.
I don’t get it, you just described that same application as pure evil?
Re:In 2018, Tumblr Is a Joyless Black Hole on Thursday July 05, 2018 @02:26PM (#17465562)
I remember experiencing that myself, closing the window, and leaving with a sour opinion of tumblr. This sounds like a very solvable problem, and one that could have measurable results with a high ROI if fixed. Wonder if they’ve tried it.
I own a fancy ebike, but never use it since LimeBike came to town. Storing and securing my bulky and expensive 50 lb electronic device is such a pain.
It might be surprising given how hot the market is, but the # of homes actually changing hands is pretty small. Prop 13 provides a strong financial incentive for homeowners not to sell. With relativey few homes going on the market compared to the area’s population, the salaries of an unusually small slice of the income distribution can affect the average home price.
Re:The rich world needs higher real wage growth on Sunday July 01, 2018 @04:44PM (#17437451)
I think we can all agree that if the costs of high-speed transit were low enough to support hubs in every city city with spokes going to all nearby suburbs, all sorts of problems would be solved.
Re:What to Do When a Loved One Is Severely Depressed on Thursday June 14, 2018 @06:05PM (#17315852)
I can’t promise that it’s the same for everyone. But for me, the pain faded. Thinking about it still brings up some emotions, but so much else has happened since then that the loss is nowhere near the forefront of my mind.
Re:WeWork Is Raising Funds at $35B Valuation on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @11:10PM (#17308960)
Wait, how do they have a positive margin at all if they are losing all this money?
Re:What to Do When a Loved One Is Severely Depressed on Friday June 08, 2018 @06:23PM (#17270222)
I’m sorry for your loss. The same thing happened in my family. It gets better with time.
Re:Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid on Thursday June 07, 2018 @04:14AM (#17254153)
I don’t think the economics work for mining only during power gluts. The cost of the mining equipment is high and needs to be amortized over the longest period possible.
The PE ratio of the entire stock market has increased by a lot during that period: http://www.multpl.com/table

You could say that everyone has higher growth expectations, or perhaps capital is just cheaper?

If you compare Apple’s PE ratio to the S&P 500 and tech companies in particular, you’ll find that the market is already expecting relatively low growth.
Re:How Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it on Saturday June 02, 2018 @01:15PM (#17215425)
Without a doubt, stealing code like this is against policies at Microsoft.
Why does the border matter? If somebody across the border is getting ready to fire a cruise middle at me, should I just let it happen?
Housing supply is in part a collective action problem. Lots of people will benefit from development somewhere else, but lose out from the local effect of development down the block. If the net effects of a development are positive, but the negative effects are concentrated whether local power can block the development, less development will happen and people are worse off overall.
Re:America has a truck driver shortage on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:08PM (#17175161)
Just curious, how does cheating the books work for a driver?
Re:The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy on Monday May 28, 2018 @12:05PM (#17173128)
All those people you listed are still cogs in the machine, to varying degrees. The CEOs are beholden to the boards, who are beholden to the institutional investors, who manage my 401k. Certainly, the CEOs have higher leverage over the system on an individual basis. But anyone whose wealth is increasing mainly through return on capital is a member, if not a leader, of the capitalist class.
Suppose:

1. There exist some quality “merit” with a random uniform distribution across the population.

2. Some systems used to measure merit are biased for and against different subgroups of the population.

3. People obtain power and wealth based these biased measurements.

4. Subgroups with more power and wealth expend resources optimizing their performance on the tests, further biasing the results.

5. The winners in this system label it a “meritocracy”.

This story rings true to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean merit-based systems are all bad. They can still provide lots of opportunity to the poor who have enough aptitude they can still beat the test despite the bias. Other systems may have worse problems.

In practice, organizations like Mozilla still have a competitive merit-based hiring process even if they say they oppose meritocracy. They might attempt to apply a correction to unbias the merit measurement. Getting rid of the trappings of meritocracy might make it a more welcoming place to work for everyone and raise the total merit (even if there’s no way to measure it).

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