machinebun

11 ms·

1.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 known as passing laws to impose a penalty on unwanted behavior.
2.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 $)
3.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 by a group of engineers - and even then, it's a fir
4.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 personal choice or by way of visa restrictions etc). Yes, there is
5.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 middle-of-nowhere that are just as good as SF engineers but
6.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 pay bands for those fields are so much wider. I thin
7.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 is that the US has a very tough immigration system and
8.
by machinebun 5y ago
> 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 before the move. If they have to move back in o
9.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 market environment, but don't think for a moment that the
10.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 can implement a salary cut whenever it wants.
11.
by machinebun 5y ago
> 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 that moves away both changes the pool of options that em
12.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 equal to the alternatives, given some reasonable
13.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 should pass the common sense/reasonableness s
14.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 the right to personal privacy in my opinion - I don't th
15.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 (since wealth = power, and public status also = power, and
16.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 in jail (or rather that he should be pardoned). Sometim
17.
by machinebun 5y ago
> 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. A market rate involves actual buy
18.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 taxes depending on the end result of your company).
19.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 debatable whether it was legal (because he was an officer&#x2F
20.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 friends in high places who want to invest in my
21.
by machinebun 5y ago
> 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 made public, it should happen in the future so everyone is
22.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 (rent), so it acts a bit like a bond. Bonds have been r
23.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 life quality is much better than a negative or neutral slope
24.
by machinebun 5y ago
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 brand is now just a real estate/leasing business)
25.
by machinebun 5y ago
> 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 to actually have a competitive market for remote work
26.
by machinebun 5y ago
Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the same expenses. P
27.
by machinebun 5y ago
I'm a Russian immigrant to US and very much anti-Putin, but in order to understand the Russian perspective you have to understand the psyche and history of a country, not just facts. And that's a lot harder to do - there are some
28.
by machinebun 5y ago
> My rationale is simply that more dollars to go around means that one dollar is worth less. Simple logic, rather than fancy economics, I guess. You're looking at the total supply (which is true in the long term, since those dollars
29.
by machinebun 5y ago
Them having the cash doesn't necessarily mean they spent it; plus, they could have spent it on deleveraging their debts (and not on consumption). I tend to agree that all the inflation we are seeing right now is supply chain related (w
30.
by machinebun 5y ago
It basically happened in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_bonds

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