Newlaptop · HackerTrans

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

I've been surprised that the news that Strategy (formerly Microstrategy) bought 3x the total amount of mined bitcoin in the past year didn't cause bigger waves.

A single corporation is issuing debt at 11% interest to buy all the bitcoin being produced and a huge chunk of the additional sales. That's such an obviously precarious situation that I figured the news would cause a crash as people tried to get out of bitcoin before Strategy has to start liquidating, but it looks like there's still some runway left.

Newlaptop

vor 19 Tagendiscuss

I just checked, and the SAT math section covers algebra, trigonometry and statistics.

Look at this list:

  Quadratic equations and functions (vertex form, roots, discriminant)
  Polynomial operations and factoring
  Exponential functions and growth/decay
  Radical and rational expressions
  Function notation, composite and inverse functions
  Nonlinear graphs and their transformations

A genius student who had never been taught those subjects wouldn't even know what the symbols meant. A mediocre student who had studied SAT-style questions for weeks leading up to the test would likely outperform a high IQ student who last solved those types of problems over a year prior.

Standardized tests can be a great resource for assessing students, but they're not just testing for intelligence. Test-prep courses average increasing SAT scores by about 200 points. That's not because they're increasing the intelligence of the people taking them.

Newlaptop

vor 27 Tagendiscuss

Voters rejected a proposal, and your response is that the result will be more parties that support the type of thing that the majority of voters just rejected?

In a sense, you may be correct, but who cares? The majority of people voted against xenophobia, some people are still super xenophobic and will continue to try to implement xenophobic policies, and the majority of people will keep voting against them.

Newlaptop

letzten Monatdiscuss

And the safety-focused AI lab ends up being the most dystopian one. Is that irony?

Scary future, where we'll all end up increasingly dependent on AI models, but those models will hide knowledge and refuse to help with any manner of things that the people in power don't want the rest of humanity to access.

Newlaptop

letzten Monatdiscuss

California has 10% income tax vs 0 in Texas. Austin property tax is 2% vs Palo Alto at 1.4%.

Salary of $150k in Austin requires $282k in San Francisco to be equivalent. Source: https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/austin-tx/san-fran...

To make sure that wasn't an anomaly or misrepresentative, I also checked https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator for Austin vs San Jose and got similar numbers: $150k in Austin requires $288k in San Jose.

You can argue that the Bay Area wins on weather, politics, startup ecosystem or whatever, but comparing taxes or cost of living is not where California wins.

Newlaptop

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

This comment seems like 15 years outdated to me. I'm curious what you think "normal" pay and "startup" pay are. Or maybe how early you're drawing the line for defining "startup".

Being in the first handful of non-founder startup employees at some seed stage company is probably not the most lucrative thing, but once companies are post Series A, as far as I can tell they tend to be comp competitive with bigger companies.

Obviously not many companies can compete with Meta or Jane Street for salaries, but that's true whether you're talking about a startup or the majority of the S&P 500 companies.

Newlaptop

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

"Environmentalists" is a large, diverse group and nuclear energy has been a controversial topic splitting the group for decades.

Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.

Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.

The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.

Newlaptop

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

> I guess I just don't get it

Imagine you liked something, then realized that thing was bad and you didn't want to do it anymore. Then somebody offered you an alternative without the ethical problems.

I ate meat for like 30 years, then as I learned more about the realities of the meat industry in the US (suffering of animals, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, pollution of air and water, exploitation and harm to workers, etc) I decided I couldn't buy meat anymore. I like having burgers and sausages and such, and Beyond meat gives me something that tastes good, is easy to cook, fits into a healthy diet.

Newlaptop

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Reservations have no federal restrictions against development. In fact, they are exempt from regulations that restrict nearby land, which is why casinos are such a common usage.

People born on reservations are US citizens, with full rights and privileges to live and work anywhere in the US they choose, as well as access to capital to start businesses within the reservation (subject to regulations from within the tribal government).

The dependency on federal funds is true in many cases, but some tribes operate such profitable casinos or other businesses that being born a descendant of the tribe is akin to being born a descendant of a Rockefeller or Kennedy.

Newlaptop

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

> US instantly becomes a pariah state

Aren't we already?

The current administration has torched relationships with essentially every allied country except Israel. From Toronto to Taipei, and across NATO and BRICS, people see the US as a chaotic bully to be dealt with, not a friend or role model.

I don't think that "other countries won't like it" carries any significance at all to the people in power.

Newlaptop

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

Payroll taxes on $160k salary are $12,240. Employer contribution to health insurance is maybe $6k - $20k. Retirement maybe $5k. Still under $200k.

Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k

Newlaptop

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

Surveillance capitalism is going to swing around to full communism.

Airfare, hotel rooms, now even groceries will have their price adjusted based on ability to pay. Getting a raise will have no impact on one's life, as all prices will automatically increase to absorb the additional income.

Newlaptop

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

There are ~700k h1bs out of ~157 million American jobs. So about 99.6% of jobs in America are held by Americans and 0.4% by h1bs.

Newlaptop

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.

I'd rather sleep in a shared room at a hostel and use a toilet in a stall in a communal bathroom than in a hotel room without a proper door on the bathroom.

Newlaptop

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

You've got your cause and effect flipped.

They don't sound like AI. AI sounds like them, because this is exactly the type of content that the LLMs were trained on and tuned to replicate.

Newlaptop

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

Journalists really need to stop using "millionaires" when they mean billionaires, centi-millionaires and deca-millionaires.

About 1 in 5 American households are millionaires.

"Millionaire" as a label is mostly describing mundane middle-aged, middle-class people who have spent a few decades paying down a mortgage and saving 5-10% of their salary into their 401k. As a group, they pay both the highest percent of their income in taxes and their taxes are the largest share of the federal budget. It shouldn't be used to mean "rich" the way it would have in the 1960s.

Newlaptop

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.

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