Viewing profile — 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 know…

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 b…

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 persona…

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…

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 pa…

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…

> 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 …

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 ma…

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 …

> 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…

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 equ…

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 …

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 t…

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…

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 …

> 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.…

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 t…

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 debatab…

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 fri…

> 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 ma…

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 …

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 l…

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…

> 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 t…