Earlier quoted context omitted.
We seem to have gotten very good at building marketplaces for standardized things and surprisingly bad at matching people when competence is hard to measure in advance
Competence is chain of trust. Chain of trust is adversarial to current market forces.
True Rate of Unemployment
191–200 of 380 posts
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#192Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail. Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you…
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate. I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford. LVT simply wouldn't be a good sy…
Well, I (and most economists) disagree. I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electric…
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#194Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…
I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.
Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.
Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is a cliff, such that a the 2 adults, 2 children on 22,500 gross income may have access to $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [linked in other comment]. However if that same household earns just $5,600 more annually nearly all of those transfers cease to be available and the total income accessible becomes $36,400. It really is a case where making more is too expensive. That's less than 11…
And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period. It is, simultaneously , impo…
I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.
My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.
The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.
The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#196also it's interesting that these institutes still dont know how to do well understandable and intuitively readable graphs by not starting at a real reference point all thew time (not starting at 0, but sometimes at 20)!
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search engines were good at this, before the Internet optimized for it. Once the the Internet optimizes for ai search, it too will go the same way
Search optimisation is deterministic. The algorithms are quite sophisticated but even an older LLM can easily work around them right now. There will be some kind of AI arms race but I think the net effect of that will destroy search as a platform. What arises from the ashes? I can only speculate. Possibly distributed search. Possibly something like torrent swarms. uTorrent's distributed search has been available for…
LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently equity appreciation is desirable for HNWIs because wealth isn't taxed, only income realized is. The more their wealth appreciates, the more viable it becomes as collateral they can borrow against, raising their borrowing capacity. CEOs, the board and the major shareholders fall under this group too. Stock buybacks artificially inflate equity value - cash rich companies buyback their stock just to deploy tha…
Hacker News Wannabe Investors?
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#199Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…
1. Those who have so much money they pay whatever is needed, getting screwed by countless middlemen.
2. Those who do everything by themselves full time and overtime.
3. Those who have lots of broken equipment, unfinished projects, and house or apartment waiting to be refurbished.
Re: True Rate of Unemployment
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting. That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent. So I would say, you don't want to find a person,…
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't! Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money. A friend of mine is a woodwind…