pseudo0
pseudo0 on Hacker News
You can go online and see what people are actually willing to pay for older, low-mileage cars. It's not much of a premium over similar cars with typical mileage. You can't really blame insurance companies when the valuations are determined by what people are actually paying for used vehicles. Sure, you might do an impeccable job of maintaining your car, but a future buyer has to go off of a mechanic's assessment, plus they won't have a manufacturer warranty to fall back on. There's also the issue that newer models generally have better fuel economy, more safety features, etc. Cars have actually gotten cheaper over time after accounting for new features and reliability improvements, which puts additional downwards pressure on the price of used vehicles.
> Currently, the IRS mileage rates for business is $.70/mile, do any of the gig economies pay this? [1]
I used to get paid that rate at my old job and it was an amazing deal, it was way over my actual costs for the vehicle. With a small fuel-efficient car I was covering my gas, insurance, and depreciation with a few trips each year. It was effectively my work paying for a free car I'd get to use the rest of the time.
That's the issue with using one number as a very rough estimate, it has to account for everything from contractors driving work trucks to someone commuting in a Model 3.
To clarify I was referring to her getting upcharged by unscrupulous taxi drivers, not rideshares. Rideshares were an improvement since we could book her a ride with a known up-front cost, and get pick-up/ drop-off notifications.
> *Sidenote: people with dementia should probably have someone in the car with them to be sure they get to the appointments. That solves the issue of shady people taking advantage of them for the most part.
Her dementia was still fairly mild at that point, she could easily manage taking a taxi from A to B, she just wouldn't push back if the guy said it was $30 when it should have been $10. It's tricky to figure out the right supports and boundaries at that stage, especially for elderly people used to being self-sufficient. Convincing her to stop driving was hard enough...
Lots of people in the US need to own a car already and the vehicle still depreciates sitting in their driveway. The correct calculation there is the marginal cost (faster depreciation rate, gas) versus the income from a ride-sharing app. But yes buying a vehicle specifically to do delivery or ride-sharing is a bad decision.
Except when the "meter is broken" or they take the scenic route. My grandmother with dementia routinely got charged double or triple the expected rate for trips to medical appointments, until we figured out what was going on and started booking her rideshares.
> Before jaywalking was a thing, newspapers blamed drivers for accidents, assuming people had the right to walk anywhere (as they always had) and cars needed to yield.
This is not the full story, even before cars came into common use, society had to figure out how to manage pedestrians coexisting with horses and carriages on public roadways.
Eg. Check out the UK's Highway Act 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Act_1835). It criminalized riding or driving a carriage on the footway (sidewalk) and made both pedestrians and drivers responsible for using due care to avoid collisions in the road.
This was a long-term societal shift to having dedicated infrastructure for both pedestrians and vehicles to avoid collisions, not some sort of sinister auto industry scheme.
A delivery robot has much fewer externalities than your typical delivery person. In a lot of big cities, the person delivering your order will typically be using an illegal e-bike or scooter, flagrantly disobeying traffic laws, and completely uninsured. Oh and good luck enforcing any judgements on them, since they look nothing like the ID used to register for the app.
Often attacks like this involve first getting on the VPN (leaked creds, a n-day on a web-accessible endpoint, etc) then running wild on the internal services that everyone assumes are safe.
Fortunately jobs.now makes them available for free.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim here - that there are jobs that can't be done at any wage by any of the 165 million working Americans, and yet these jobs don't qualify for an O-1 (extraordinary ability) visa. How about justifying your argument instead of constantly burden shifting? It's very tiresome.
In this entire comment thread, you have not managed to name a single example of one of these mythical impossible-to-fill jobs.
This is literally econ 101. Price is a function of supply and demand. If there is a mismatch between supply and demand, the price shifts until they are in equilibrium. There are 165 million workers in the US, for 99.9% of jobs there are plenty of qualified American candidates who can be hired for the right price. Employers are not entitled to hire an employee at a particular wage.
Don't you see the clear contradiction between the claim that the employer is paying the market wage, and the fact that they can't hire an American worker at that price? Clearly the claimed "market wage band" is wrong if they can't actually hire a qualified American employee at that price.
Note that there are also plenty of other factors besides wage, eg. 24/7 on-call, working in a remote location, mandatory overtime, etc. Even if an employer actually is paying the market wage for the general job category, there is likely a reason why American candidates are not interested.
If employers can't pay the market wage, they can't afford a worker. This is what drives productivity gains for the economy. Inefficient business models die off and are replaced by businesses that can use labor more effectively.
> You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed.
You can offer them more money, better work/life balance, a more fulfilling job, etc. When the government allows the hiring of foreign workers on visas, it's tilting the playing field in favor of employers. Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
Exceptional talent is a different argument - most H1bs are average at best. Claiming to be unable to hire for an entry or mid-level software engineer job is absurd.
Golf courses are a better comparison. Data centers use a fraction of the water that it takes to keep the grass green for a hobby enjoyed by a handful of people.
It depends how it's set up. Often a block will reserve a certain number of rooms for attendees, to ensure people will have somewhere to stay close to the conference site. Usually any unbooked rooms in the block get released closer to the event date.
Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
Low-quality post that reads like AI slop. Someone likely put three sentences into a prompt and told it to expand it into a full-length piece.
Missing (2019) - this story is seven years old.
They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.
It's just currying favor with Carney's voter base, senior citizens who are middle class and up. They uncritically read the headlines from the Globe and Mail or CBC that claim Canada is "standing up the Trump" meanwhile the nation stagnates, and the best and brightest move to the US. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for 15+ years, while the US has had an incredible economic run. The results speak for themselves.
Funny that you mention Granta, given their recent issue with allegedly AI generated work:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/20/granta-magazin...One thing to note here is that the Unslop contest rules required generating the entire work with a single prompt, no editing or modifications allowed. Those are pretty challenging conditions that leave a lot of improvement within easy reach, all it would take is an editing pass or two.
They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.
In the context of trying to hide the evidence after a member of their anarchist collective shot a law enforcement officer in the neck...
That stat is off by a couple orders of magnitude. The total number of death penalty convictions overturned by DNA evidence is 29 (as of 2025). There are a couple thousand death row inmates right now, and the denominator here is all the people who were on death row in the last 20+ years. That's a rate of significantly <1%.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/first-death-row-exoneration-inv...
Rural Alaska... Just about the most inhospitable climate in the US, remote, and with a very high cost of living. Teachers can find work just about anywhere, they have little incentive to stay in Alaska.
The solution for this is simple - pay them more. There are plenty of recently graduated teachers who would work in Alaska for a few years if it paid off their student loans or let them save up a down payment on a house.
That's the whole point of price signals though: luxury foods like strawberries will get more expensive if young, physically fit workers are in higher demand. People will shift their consumption accordingly. Maybe the strawberry pickers will end up working in nursing homes, and that's fine.
Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.
That's an opinion piece from a NGO...
> Foreigners are overrepresented in the crime statistics compared to their share of the population. This is due to factors independent of origin
It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah to admit that migrants are commiting more crime per-capita, and then build a statistical model to try to claim that actually more migrants doesn't cause an increase in crime.
What percentage of the Japanese workforce is working in the fields? Most industrial economies are in the 1-2% range for agriculture. And someone in their 50s can easily ride a tractor. Manual labor in the fields is not a productive use of labor in a first-world economy - the fact that it's still happening demonstrates slack in the system that can be absorbed.