81–90 of 381 posts
> "When money is not at the forefront of your mind when you're doing your job, it allows you to be more passionate about what motivates you," she says. I spent the first several years of my career working in academia for a poverty level wage. I can confirm from my own experience that when you worry about not being able to pay rent and all the bills, it's very difficult to be productive, much less in a job that requir…
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Do you imagine that the size of sewers, hospitals, schools, and power plants to serve 100K people are the same size as those to serve 500K people? If you've got existing, working infrastructure built out for population X, you have a lot more building to do to support 5X. Often that requires tearing down existing, functional infrastructure and replacing with larger.
Yes, but it's usually less than 5x more. I don't really see your argument. The per capita expenditure should be the same or less. If really necessary, just charge real estate developers for it.
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Btw, I think Google could already either pay 70k+ to every employee or is pretty close. They just need to make sure that all the janitors and baristas are employed by subcontractors.
what would a barista or janitor get paid at Google today? I always thought that they did use subcontractors for these roles? I must misunderstand, are you implying that employment via a subcontractor would increase their salary?
It's all a bit tongue in cheek and silly.
It does have some real world consequences because of some regulation that requires companies to publish some information about the ratio between CEO pay to lowest paid employee.
But as we noted here, who is officially an employee and who ain't is flexible.
Uber and eBay and Amazon are an even more extreme example: Uber drivers and eBay sellers are at the heart of what makes those companies tick. But they are not employees.
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There is a difference between a team of people, and the set of people working individually. An extreme example - there is a reason a SEAL team is called a team . This is the problem with wage discussions. People equate a measurable commodity like gasoline to the number of hours worked at a specific job. Sometimes this is a sufficient analogue, but often times reward mechanisms are more complex than that. There is a g…
I am a contractor and I would expect to be paid the market rate for my skillset. The market rate for a .NET developer in the UK is about £350-400 a day (outside of London) in the UK. An Angular JS developer gets between £450 and £500. Thus at the moment (despite not being fond of it) I am (re-)learning Angular JS in my spare time so I can go for these higher paid roles. The same is generally true for the salaried mar…
This approach has shown to substantially improve my quality of life.
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I mean technically it can be true that everyone is on 70k, and some people are on more.
How's that? It can be true that everyone is on at least 70k, and some people are on more. It can't be true that everyone is on 70k, and some people are on more. If you're on 80k then you aren't on 70k are you?
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I am a contractor and I would expect to be paid the market rate for my skillset. The market rate for a .NET developer in the UK is about £350-400 a day (outside of London) in the UK. An Angular JS developer gets between £450 and £500. Thus at the moment (despite not being fond of it) I am (re-)learning Angular JS in my spare time so I can go for these higher paid roles. The same is generally true for the salaried mar…
"But generally how else are you going to gauge the compensation of any individual reliably other than market rate?" If you were a business owner, what would be the correct referral market rate if the people whose compensation you are gauging is a tight knit team with years of experience on your specific business and customer needs?
Documentation helps, but people knowing their way around the code is better.
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Dirt has become enormously more expensive. The more dignified term to use here is 'land prices have increased.' One could argue that the quality of the dirt has improved a lot; or at least the quality of its location. The US in 2020 is a much richer place than the US in 1950; so we'd expect land to cost more. (But in addition, there are those restrictions on housing supply that I already mentioned.) You are right abo…
Not sure where you’re going with the can’t buy crappy stuff anymore argument, from another perspective, most things built today are crappy Chinese junk compared to things built 70 years ago, if they existed 70 years ago. Mending and the art of repair has been forgotten by most - if your TV has an issue, you’re more likely to buy a new one than fix it, even if it’s possibly repairable for less than a couple hundred bu…
Ignoring the big 'if': most goods today are better than what we had in 1950. Especially if you compare the quality of goods that required the median worker to work the same amount of hours.
The 'junk' you talk about takes minutes of work to earn enough to buy. And most of the time, that's good enough. The stuff that you spend a few hours of pay on, is mostly so much better.
Another commenter already pointed out that the example of repairability don't really hold up. It's mostly because wages have increased that repairing those things doesn't make much sense any more.
Just think how much time even well-to-do middle class women used to spent on darning socks and mending clothing. Basic clothing is too cheap to measure these days.
Cars need much less maintenance these days.
It's easy to view the past with rose tinted lenses. But most things were really crappy.
See https://www.gwern.net/Improvements for more on this perspective:
> clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”; the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien3, clothing companies routinely burn millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than the cost of selling them, and Africa is flooded by discards.
> materials science has produced constant visible-yet-invisible improvements in textiles yielding, among other things, far better insulated (and cheaper) winter jackets: instead of choosing between winter coats which make you look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or freezing (and if you get wet, freezing anyway) or exotic ultra-expensive garments aimed at mountain climbers, you can now buy ordinary (and much cheaper) winter coats which are amazingly thin and work even better to keep you warm—so much so that you have to be careful to not buy too well-insulated a coat, lest you swelter at the slightest exertion and be placed between the Scylla of overheating & the Charybdis of opening your coat to the freezing air to cool.
I submitted Gwern's piece at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865
Such an inspiring story, I wish more people were like Dan Price.
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There is a difference between a team of people, and the set of people working individually. An extreme example - there is a reason a SEAL team is called a team . This is the problem with wage discussions. People equate a measurable commodity like gasoline to the number of hours worked at a specific job. Sometimes this is a sufficient analogue, but often times reward mechanisms are more complex than that. There is a g…
I am a contractor and I would expect to be paid the market rate for my skillset. The market rate for a .NET developer in the UK is about £350-400 a day (outside of London) in the UK. An Angular JS developer gets between £450 and £500. Thus at the moment (despite not being fond of it) I am (re-)learning Angular JS in my spare time so I can go for these higher paid roles. The same is generally true for the salaried mar…