machinebun

Well, I disagree with that, and if I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws to make it unprofitable for people to buy out housing and have it sit empty.

Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty on unwanted behavior. Just as GP mentioned - vacancy tax.

That's how the country works. It all depends on who has more people in agreement, and can make more of a rallying cry (and has moneyed interests on their side).

(I'm also in favor of land value tax as opposed to property tax to encourage productive use of land. And severely relaxing zoning restrictions)

You will still have to pay capital gains tax in $ once you pay for something in Bitcoin though (assuming that your bitcoin has appreciated versus the $)

Short answer is no.

There is no good way to measure the value generated by an individual engineer in most cases (in large enough companies), only the total/average value produced by a group of engineers - and even then, it's a first order approximation. Hence, the market is not efficient.

Those frictional costs (of moving) are the whole problem. SF salaries are where they are at because of those frictional costs (people choosing not to move to SF, whether by personal choice or by way of visa restrictions etc).

Yes, there is a subset of people that have disproportionate leverage no matter where they are at (by virtue of being really really good devs). But that represents only a minority of SF devs.

The SF salary is high because of high demand and low supply (of competent engineers). If you move remote, you increase the supply of competent engineers (there are likely people in middle-of-nowhere that are just as good as SF engineers but don't want to move because of other reasons - hence market inefficiency). Since you're increasing supply with the same demand, now the SF salary is going to drop (and establish a new market clearing price with the new supply & demand dynamics).

I think in the long run the SF salary (for the average developer) will be a historical anomaly in a place and time - kind of like the California Gold Rush in the 19th century.

(If your argument boils down to SF having more strictly more competent engineers than other places and that being the cause of the pay discrepancy, I strongly disagree)

No, since there is no good way to measure how much a person's individual work is worth (in software engineering). There are ways to do that in finance and sales - that's why the pay bands for those fields are so much wider.

I think the reality is the best engineers are probably worth on the order of multiple millions per year or more (assuming they are working at a place with leverage), and the average engineer is probably worth much less than they are making now. That's the power law we see with YouTube creators, for example. If people had reliable ways of identifying who is actually a really high performer, the pay bands might look more like that. The pay smoothing (since it's hard to make an accurate measurement of efficiency) actually benefits the average engineer over the super high performers.

Yes, and the cost of labor in that case is not everyone getting an SF salary, it's everyone getting a much lower (but equal) salary. Part of the reason that SF salaries still exist is that the US has a very tough immigration system and artificially restricts the number of people who can claim one of those SF salaries (H1B quotas etc). Same thing for doctors (foreign doctors mostly can't practice medicine in U.S.), lawyers, etc.

Believe me, there are Russian programmers earning 1/3 of a U.S. engineering salary that are much more technically competent - the only thing stopping them from capturing the true "value of their work" is that damn market (and U.S. immigration system...)

> Again, not true. That employee can simply... move. You've ignored that.

Well, yes, but we're arguing that they have the same leverage in their new place of residence as they did before the move. If they have to move back in order to exercise that leverage, their leverage is actually location-based, and they will have to choose between their old salary and old location and new salary and new location.

Have you missed out on the last 50 years of history of American labor and union busting? Programmers are not special snowflakes in this regard, just currently in a very friendly market environment, but don't think for a moment that the people in charge wouldn't do the same thing if they had the option to (which remote work certainly helps with).

Pay cuts are a pretty accepted alternative to layoffs during recessions... I think it certainly depends. It's more of an ethical question - as legally, I'm pretty sure the company can implement a salary cut whenever it wants.

> Except that a Google employee moving to someplace with a weaker economy has not reduced their leverage. These are people who have the power to simply move back.

A Google employee that moves away both changes the pool of options that employee has (only companies that offer remote or local ones in his new place of living - versus companies in (SF, NY, whatever)), and the alternative options that the employer has (he is now being compared against a much larger pool of people who can work remotely). That is indeed decreasing leverage.

I keep hearing the trope of "people are paid the value of their work" come up, and it's completely false and absurd. People are paid the market clearing price (a.k.a. better or equal to the alternatives, given some reasonable amount of searching effort).

Yes, this means there are many engineers in SF that are actually/currently paid MORE than they would be in an efficient market (and there are many software developers in developing countries that are paid LESS than they would be in an efficient market). Right now there's enough money going around that nobody cares about market efficiency, but if we have an actual, deep recession in the sector, I expect all the music to stop (and the efficiency of the developer market to go up on the whole).

In software we can pretend to ignore these discrepancies, but it becomes patently obvious if you've ever dealt with international companies who discriminate based on nationality for people doing the exact same job (and not in software, where you can argue talent - literally the exact same job - two performers doing the same act in the same show. I've seen pay discrepancies of up to 2.5X or more for an American Expat in Hong Kong and a worker from the Philippines, for example). It's all about what your individual alternatives are.

Whenever two people have conflicting absolute rights, who's right is more absolute?

That's why rights are always relative. The Bill of Rights is a good starting place, but any law should pass the common sense/reasonableness standard - we already make many [reasonable, common-sense] exceptions to the right to free speech (i.e. shouting Fire! in a theatre for a cliche example, or incitement to violence)

The innocent until proven guilty only applies in criminal court, not in civil court by the way.

Personal privacy is good, but there are some societal things that should supersede the right to personal privacy in my opinion - I don't think any single right should be absolute.

We have a disagreement in what makes a public figure then. I believe that over a certain level of wealth, the wealth alone makes someone a public figure or a figure of significance (since wealth = power, and public status also = power, and celebrity status = power).

If someone is powerful enough to have power over other people (which the wealthy certainly are), then they should account for that power with appropriate responsibility.

If you don't want to be a public figure, don't accumulate exorbitant amounts of wealth.

I believe that if the leak is proven to be in the public interest, no one should go to jail (but that it should be the rare exception).

I also don't believe Snowden deserves to be in jail (or rather that he should be pardoned). Sometimes you can't fix things without breaking the law - everyone does it on a daily basis with few consequences (jaywalking, etc). Sometimes it has to be done on a larger scale in order to shed light on injustices - otherwise the power of the few will prevail over the power of the many.

> purchased his founders’ shares in PayPal through his Roth IRA during PayPal’s formation."

> That's literally the market rate.

That's not a market rate, that's a price-fixed rate. A market rate involves actual buyer and seller transactions and an actual market (a couple of people shuffling stock amongst themselves does not a market make)

If he had put Bitcoin in there at $0.01 back when it was trading at $0.01 - that would be a market rate transaction (since there was a market for Bitcoin at the time). That would have been much less problematic than what actually happened (and there would be no "substantial control" problems either with the Bitcoin investment).

Sure - there's no problem with valuing those shares at $0.001 in general, because there's not much that valuation matters for in the short term (eventually you will pay different taxes depending on the end result of your company).

However, Roth IRAs specifically are a tax shelter and have contribution limits, so valuations matter a whole lot for them (difference in $0.01 per share vs $0.001 per share would be a difference of $500M vs $5B today). That's why I think illiquid (or non-market cleared) securities should not be allowed in Roth IRAs.

What happened was Thiel buying 1.7M shares of stock in his own startup at a value of $0.001 per share in 1999 in his Roth IRA (and then cashing out for $30M+ in 2002). It's debatable whether it was legal (because he was an officer/director of the company and that law is on the books), but the better question would be - should it have been illegal, and the answer to that, in my opinion, is a resounding yes.

I believe non-public investments should be banned from Roth IRAs (and that we should close all of the backdoor loopholes to them as well). They were meant for a certain group of people at the outset and were then twisted around in knots to provide more tax-breaks for the well-off (which should be rolled back). I think mega backdoor Roth should not be a thing, rollover Roth IRA should not be a thing - bring Roth back to it's original vision.

Sure, $0.001 is the value on paper (and under current law). The point is, it's exploitable (let's say I'm an Apple engineer, I start a new company and get a wink wink from some friends in high places who want to invest in my company doing X. I put in my founders stock into IRA in return for first dibs on placement for the investor - 1 year later company has valuation, my stock has risen many %%. Sure, I'm technically doing everything legally, but practically it's somewhat equivalent to insider trading + avoids taxes).

I would personally ban non-public investments in Roth IRAs. That way a debate about market value doesn't have to happen.

> Debating wether tax returns should or should not be public is a great debate to have, I agree. The country should be having that debate. And if we decide tax returns should be made public, it should happen in the future so everyone is on the same page.

The same way the Snowden leaks were instrumental into regulation about surveillance, leaks like this are instrumental in crafting better tax policy, so I would say they are a public good. It's also not-quite possible to do it via completely legal means (as vested interest opposition is too big and has too much capital - the only way to battle against them seems to be to do it via not-so-legal means).

So in this case the fight is punching up against people in positions of power, not down onto people that have no power, so I don't see a direct issue with it. If you have power, you should also have the proportionate responsibility.

It's a complicated relationship. The prices of assets are related to the price of debt (the cheaper the debt, the more expensive the asset). Housing is an asset that pays a coupon (rent), so it acts a bit like a bond. Bonds have been riding the coattails of decreasing interest rates for the last 40 years - if interest rates increase then stocks, houses, bonds etc are going to deflate.

While inflation with low interest rates might increase the value of assets - inflation that leads to higher interest rates might actually do the opposite. So it ends up being a choice of the central bank which way to push this thing (although there is a lean towards keeping interest rates lower for longer because of the size of the U.S. government debt interest payments)

Due to hedonic adaptation, what matters is not the absolute state of existence, but the trajectory that that state takes throughout your life.

(a small positive slope in terms of life quality is much better than a negative or neutral slope at the same level - or even at a higher level).

And people underestimate the importance of relative standing as opposed to absolute. Ultimately, we are a packet of genes that are made to reproduce (with a brain attached). Relative standings matter a lot more than absolute quality of life as far as reproduction is concerned (and as far as our genes are concerned). The human brain is but a simple abstraction on top of those genetic drives.

> standings

McDonald's has been reducing their number of workers and franchising as per their 2016-2017 plan. So most of the people that work at McD are not even their employees (since McD the brand is now just a real estate/leasing business).

> Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few.

You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market for remote work. I think things were moving in that direction but slowly (as things tend to do) - COVID just accelerated the trend.

Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the same expenses. Plus taxes and such. I'm not sure what the delta really comes out to though.

I'm a Russian immigrant to US and very much anti-Putin, but in order to understand the Russian perspective you have to understand the psyche and history of a country, not just facts. And that's a lot harder to do - there are some metaphysical manifestations of that collective psyche that will be opaque to any outsider looking in.

You have to realize that lots of Russians still remember gangs of actual criminals roaming around in the 1990s and being afraid for their physical safety; food shortages and everything else from the late 80s through to the end of the 90s; inflation that made your savings disappear before your eyes (and shortages/limits of all physical goods which meant there was no way to escape it). My grandparents had enough savings to buy four cars at the start of inflation (quite a bit of savings at the time), and after the inflation they ended up being able to only afford two couches with that money. And that's just the 80s/90s.

Historically, Russia has a very bloody history and suffered greatly in WWII (and generally has suffered the highest percentage of losses in any violent conflict); the attitude a lot of people have there is "better the devil you know than the one you don't". And it checks out historically - the Revolutions that have historically been attempted in Russia didn't exactly lead to anything good for the average person.

So while yes, all of the things you outlined are evidence of a cancer in the system, a lot of people still see it as better than the alternative(s) that they tasted in the 90s - which is why the situation persists. You're starting to see pushback from the generation(s) that grew up after the Union collapsed and that have no memories of the 90s, but otherwise the collective pain & memories are quite strong.

> My rationale is simply that more dollars to go around means that one dollar is worth less. Simple logic, rather than fancy economics, I guess.

You're looking at the total supply (which is true in the long term, since those dollars have to be spent eventually). However, inflation in the short term has much more to do with velocity and actual spending - if all of that money just sits in bank accounts, there will be no inflation.

So looking at the money supply in isolation will tell you nothing about the actual inflation. It's about what's happening to that money.

Them having the cash doesn't necessarily mean they spent it; plus, they could have spent it on deleveraging their debts (and not on consumption).

I tend to agree that all the inflation we are seeing right now is supply chain related (with the one exception of graphics cards - the liquidity injected into the system probably made price of crypto go up which accelerated the demand for GPUs, so the GPU issue is both a supply problem & demand problem)

It basically happened in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_bonds