Why should healthcare be tied to employment?
"Quit fucking around" and institute a national, single-payer plan that covers everyone, like every other modern industrialized country.
Why YC went to DC
101–110 of 407 posts
Re: Why YC went to DC
#102> And finally, we need more steps like the FTC’s recent move to ban all employee noncompetes (no carve outs, no limitations, no exceptions). YOU need to be out there beating the drum for a major exception to this. With out laws to ban raiding (and we dont have those on the federal level) this is a bad policy. It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale. > Seco…
> It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale.
Doesn't California already ban non competes? The industry has seemingly thrived there and I've never heard of it being a problem.
Re: Why YC went to DC
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still plenty of reliably sources for magnet links to The Pile, e.g. [1]. The DMCA takedowns are just a minor inconvenience. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20230820001113/https://academict...
Thank you. How’d you dig this one up?
[1] is the first result if I google "the pile torrent". It doesn't link to the torrent because of a DMCA notice, so I just used the wayback machine to retrieve a version from before the date of that notice. Don't tell the publisher.
1: https://academictorrents.com/details/0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f7...
Re: Why YC went to DC
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is frankly challenging to reconcile 1st amendment protections and a CU repeal. I'm not sure what the solution is, [...] Reconciliation: Companies aren't human entities. Non-human entities aren't entitled to 1st amendment protections. Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money. I have yet to hear a convincing argument ab…
I'm not so convinced about that reconciliation! Most media in general is not conducted through individual entities. Even the small film maker or newspaper is usually going to be organized as an LLC, even if it is just a single person trying to submit their film to a festival or something. These should be subject to governmental regulation if they touch on political topics? I think this is significantly thornier than…
That's why they're intrinsically linked.
If you mandate that non-human entities have an 1st amendment right, you cannot have meaningful campaign finance limits.
Ergo, because it's worth having campaign finance limits, in the interest of allowing the best candidate / idea to win, I think it's worth threshing through stripping 1st amendment rights from non-human entities.
Regarding how one weighs what sort of speech would then be allowed and disallowed is a difficult problem, but the above needs to happen before it can even be started on.
Now, we have a frankensystem where reality (unlimited finance) and policy (limited finance) differ, which is never a healthy state.
Re: Why YC went to DC
#105> And finally, we need more steps like the FTC’s recent move to ban all employee noncompetes (no carve outs, no limitations, no exceptions). YOU need to be out there beating the drum for a major exception to this. With out laws to ban raiding (and we dont have those on the federal level) this is a bad policy. It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale. > Seco…
> It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale. Imagine a skilled worker taking a new job that pays better. What a nightmare scenario.
This isnt about workers.
Let's say tomorrow that you find a better way to do search. It's going to crush google, and MS.
You hire a team, smart people the VC's throw money at you. Everyone is happy. Your growing and the next darling of tech.
Google comes in and offers to buy you out. You decline cause you know that they are blockbuster and your Netflix.
In retaliation google hires all your staff, and sends them to the roof to rest and vest.
Thats great for the dozen people who got a great deal from google. It's bad for the rest of the world.
Re: Why YC went to DC
#106> And finally, we need more steps like the FTC’s recent move to ban all employee noncompetes (no carve outs, no limitations, no exceptions). YOU need to be out there beating the drum for a major exception to this. With out laws to ban raiding (and we dont have those on the federal level) this is a bad policy. It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale. > Seco…
> It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale. Doesn't California already ban non competes? The industry has seemingly thrived there and I've never heard of it being a problem.
In CA there is also a ban on raiding:
"California law protects employers from raiding by competitors. An employee or competitor may not take a large proportion of your employees with the intent of driving you out of business. You must prove the employee or competitor had bad intent. Evidence of intent includes emails, texts, and witness testimony about what the bad employee or competitor did or said when soliciting your employees."
From: https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/stealing-employees-in-cali....
Re: Why YC went to DC
#107little tech? i don't buy it. the entire point of YC is growth
Somewhat with you on this one, I assumed the title was YC (being big tech) were upping their lobbying game - it was after reading it that I came to your point of view.
Re: Why YC went to DC
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who was in DC area but isn't any more, talent in DC area is not anything to write home about. We have a ton of talent on paper because government requires gobs of tech workers and prefers they have advanced degrees but since it's just boring enterprise work, the spark of innovation is snuffed out quickly. Most of startups in the area are catering to the government. There are already VC/PE/Startup accelerat…
Having lived in the DC area for almost two decades, I don't agree. There are absolutely pockets that match your description but, if that's all you see I think you might be stuck in a bubble. I see so much more. There are cool companies that have been and are being built here (I was going to list them, but the Washingtonian "DC Tech Titans" list has lots of good examples), many not B2G... and people who still have 'th…
everyone is moving away from us-east, the talent is mostly in northern virginia and focused on defense not actual tech talent,
i took a brief look at that "Tech Titans" list and frankly it is not that impressive, compared to an actual hub like SF, NYC, Seattle or even compared to tier 2 hubs like Boston or LA.
i mean they're counting "Vox Media" as a tech startup... which is very DC, I guess. many of the others also are due to regulatory reasons, like Revature or Wirewheel.
i lived in DC for 20 years.
Re: Why YC went to DC
#109> And finally, we need more steps like the FTC’s recent move to ban all employee noncompetes (no carve outs, no limitations, no exceptions). YOU need to be out there beating the drum for a major exception to this. With out laws to ban raiding (and we dont have those on the federal level) this is a bad policy. It means that google doesn't have to aquire-hire your team, they can just poach all of them wholesale. > Seco…
I'm curious how you define "raiding"? I could imagine cases where a well-capitalized company hires all the members of a competitor's team at 2x salary only to fire them six months later with the goal of destroying their competition.
But other than that I'm not sure I see a problem. If a company "can just poach all of [your team] wholesale" then they were probably being under-compensated to begin with and are better off at their new company. After all, the primary point of banning noncompetes is to protect employees from employers who use noncompetes to suppress their wages. The increased competition is a nice ancillary benefit, not the primary motivation.
Re: Why YC went to DC
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we wanted a competent government, we should have far fewer people paid a lot more and hired in a more aggressively merit-based process. Our current government is from an era without computerization where you needed lots of grunts to process things like SS claims, etc. That is simply not this era. This. IMHO, the military's regular reassignment also solves a lot of bureaucracy-at-scale problems (even if it create…
What makes you believe the military is immune to "bureaucracy-at-scale" problems? From my vantage point, it may have both large bureaucratic issues and massive churn. (And it's not immediately clear to me that the former isn't partially a result of the latter.)
The mandatory rotating post system is an effective redress to the "in this job until I die" problem and the ills it creates.
That's not to say there aren't other ills, but that's a pretty major one of large bureaucracies and causes serious effectiveness issues downstream.