I'd rather see Google make donations to the education system. We've seen that there are limits to money in politics. Once you get past a certain point, what we really need is a strong educational system so people can make rational decisions.
I feel like our era of technology is being monopolized or it's preventing equal access. Software can no longer be developed with a couple of people and make a large impact. VC money is designated to a certain group of people. This isn't what technologist wanted to create. We hoped that technology would create tens of thousands of small impactful teams, not a handful of oligopolies.
I really enjoyed the section about working with the search engine and how we typically use search. Naturally, when we come across a problem we search to find solutions. When your problems are generic, it's easy to find an article that gives you an exact answer, but the deeper problems that you work on or the more specific they are, the less likely you'll find an article you can follow to fit your needs. That's where it's important to form models and sharpen tools for inference. It's more likely that you'll have to read a handful of articles and take segments from each article to formulate an answer.
You have to think of it in a deeper context than it being binary. It has very similar properties to oil. It's also fixed, but technology has done some phenomenal things to extract more of it with greater efficiency. The same is true for land and housing. UBI, self driving cars, and a greater shift away from working in offices are all going to change how we live and the type of land we will want to live on.
1. People in the comments below have addressed this. Not really sure how this creates a greater power divide than the current system. Having money allows individuals choices.
2. Again, providing people with money will allow them to have more choices. If housing becomes too expensive in my county, I now have a greater degree of freedom to move and this creates more competition for rental rates.
3. This is one that I feel like most people miss the forest for the tree. You're right, it's going to happen. I just don't think that a portion of bad actors in the system should prevent that massive benefits it can create for the people in society that will spend it in more productive ways. I've heard arguments of how it will create disincentives in society. That people will choose to no longer work. But when I ask the exact same people that pose that question if they would stop working if they had $14,400 provided to them every year, the answer is unequivocally, no. If you're looking for policies that solve all problems, you're not going to find any.
I think this is a situation where employees need to leave the company. We vote with our choices. If we don't deem this to be appropriate, we must respond in kind. It's not simple and not everyone has the choice, but for those that can, should.
Lots of good points about living below your means. Also define what you want. I'd hate for someone to live a safe and secure life and minimize risk only to get shafted by the system in the end. Some risk is worth taking. Taking on debt in certain situations is worth it. You just need to get aware of life in the event of failure and take that into consideration.
The article brings about some really good points. I find myself sitting down and studying without deliberate intent, which leads to countless wasted hours in my life. I think this is in part because you need to have some fundamentals down in order to actively learn, but mostly because it's just that much more work to actually do the core work.
What I don't understand, is why someone would be willing to buy 15 medallions at an "inflated price." My point being, you should have some basis on the PV of cashflows you can generate with each medallion. It doesn't seem like an extremely complicated financial problem in my eyes. At some point, you're cutting into any investment return you receive through cash flow and you're now expecting your returns to be generated through the appreciation of the medallion. That's probably where I would stop and think, I don't need to buy 15 of these things.
I didn't even realize that the companies mission was to create a product that was "healthier." I always assumed that it was to create something that was more sustainable...
You're not going got be able to find that type of knowledge in a couple of books. I used to work as an analyst programming mortgage prospectus documents and the one thing I learned is the system is purposely obfuscating and there are several incentive systems to keep this information private.