If anything, people with a track record of amassing wealth should be treated with more suspicion on entering public service.
If all of their other decisions are geared toward increasing their wealth, one has to wonder whether the decision to enter public service is also geared toward increasing their own wealth.
People don't want to do their jobs, but that doesn't mean they're completely unmotivated. Many people with jobs they're indifferent to, also have hobbies they pursue relentlessly.
If you want people to take a deeper interest in their jobs, give them more money. Way more money. Way, way more money. If you want people to pursue deeper understanding of their interests, give them more free time.
To the extent that "shallow knowledge" is a problem, I think it's likely because most people spend a lot of their time doing boring work for not-enough money.
Yeah, it seems like we could solve a lot of social problems if we had a lot more nurses, school teachers, mental health pros, librarians and psychologists, and if they all had deep knowledge and high motivation.
It would be worth paying triple their current salaries to attract more people with greater commitment and enthusiasm.
We would all be richer, and could probably pay for the extra compensation through reduced crime and violence, lower healthcare and public benefits, fewer prison inmates to guard and house.
Not to mention the dividends that would compound over decades with each new generation from this modest investment.
I wish I could go deep into something useful and interesting but the compensation is really an issue. I guess for now I'll continue to make sure ads appear in youre lists of text updates :(
Absolutely. Anything less than a salary that guarantees a single family home paid off, and a large amount of savings, within 10-20 years, is not enough to completely stop looking for side hustles that might lead to those things.
It may be protected by law, but in my opinion, why the hell would you want anyone who doesn’t need to know your income, know your income if you can choose not to disclose it?
To quote that great philosopher Shoresy: “So dumb”
Generally having all your coworkers share salary puts you in a better negotiating position - so there is an obvious financial reason if its reciprocated.
I see a different perspective. Unless all salaries are equal and capabilities and efforts of those receiving them are perceived to be equal, the only thing that salary disclosure really does is create morale issues within an organization. If you perceive that John Smith is weak and lazy, but know he makes 20k more than you, that creates discord within you. If you attempt to negotiate an increase based on that knowledge, you might find that your organization doesn’t have the same opinion of John Smith’s value to the organization than you do.
> If you perceive that John Smith is weak and lazy, but know he makes 20k more than you, that creates discord within you
You say that like its a bad thing. Emotions exist for a reason. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also slavery.
> your organization doesn’t have the same opinion of John Smith’s value to the organization than you do.
In which case there is two possibilities. Either:
They are right, in which case this gives you the insight to look into yourself and fix it or emulate john smith.
Or b) they are wrong, in which case you can probably go somewhere else to get more money. Or you could figure out why they are misestimating your value and fix it.
No matter the situation,more information always gives you an advantage.
If you have to have total salary knowledge of your co-workers and them you to measure your self worth and value to your organization, I find that unbelievably sad. You should know your value and whether or not it jives with your comp. If you are unhappy with your compensation as compared to your perceived value, ask for more. If you are unable to get a good “read” of your value from your employer, move on.
While I don’t have to manage people any more (PTL), I am pretty sure if I had an employee come to me demanding more comp because of a colleague makes more, I’d ask them why they weren’t arguing from their own merits and capabilities instead of from a colleague’s weaknesses.
You said anything about self-worth? If you measure your self-worth by how much you are paid, that's pathetic as it has very little to do with instrinsic factors.
We live in a capitalist society, and employment is a business arrangement. There is nothing wrong with trying to maximize what you get out of employment (whether monantary or otherwise). Why would you sell yourself, if not to get paid? Part of effective negotiation is knowing how much comparable people make. Your ecconomic value is not what you bring to the company. It is primarily how expensive it would be to replace you with someone who could bring something equivalent. Knowing that cost gives you the upper hand in negotiations.
After all, if you were doing it for the love of coding, you would just be working on open source projects, not working for a company.
> While I don’t have to manage people any more (PTL), I am pretty sure if I had an employee come to me demanding more comp because of a colleague makes more, I’d ask them why they weren’t arguing from their own merits and capabilities instead of from a colleague’s weaknesses.
When it comes right down to it, if you are a manager you have a budget. If you are on that side of the table, your job is to keep expenses down. One way of doing that is to manipulate people into thinking their ecconomic value is less than it is. A great way to do that is to steer the conversation away from objective measures like, the going rate is $x, and towards subjective things like, i do the job really well, which dont have an objective price tag attached. It's easy to argue the fair value of a job well done to whatever you want it to be. There is no wiggle room for: the going rate is $x.
I mean, if you really do truly think this way, do you do this in your other business dealings. If you were buying a car, the other car lot had an equivalent car for 10% less, and you wanted to try to negotiate down, but the car salesman said something like "why aren't you arguing from your own merits as a potential future car owner, instead of from the weakness of other car salesmens?", would you think that is a reasonable thing to say?
If one of your negotiation points why you should be paid more is because your colleagues are paid more, you are basing the starting part of your negotiation from a position of “I’m average”. I honestly cannot see how this helps you in anyway.
Sure, managers have budgets and want to keep costs down, but in a career that spanned a couple of decades+ in tech leadership, I always had the flexibility from my employers to assemble the best team I could within my budget. I never had to manipulate people like you are describing. Frankly if you are working for a company where you perceive that happening…you should probably exit asap. That’s toxic.
Yeah, this was also my first thought. Granted, TikTok and Bytedance although they exist in the US are basically operated just like their 996 sweatshop brethren in China.
Many of the people who lost more than they can afford to lose were naive, not greedy. I believe that's the author's main point.
The problem is that cryptocurrency purveyors have marketing budgets, and cryptocurrency skeptics do not. It's difficult for people to get the message that cryptocurrencies are a scam when the promoters are running superbowl advertisements, and the detractors can only comment on the internet.
Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO. They don't really control much in a practical sense. In terms of global response to the pandemic, I think we both under-reacted (at the start) and over-reacted (towards the "end"). China could have stopped the virus if they had locked down back in November/December of 2019, instead of updating their WeChat filters. Whereas by mid-2021, we were past the point of controlling the virus, but NPIs continued in force for a while longer before people realized they were mostly pointless.
China didn't know they had a virus at all in November 2019. The 16th of December is the first documented hospitalization in Wuhan. A wastewater sample in Italy collected on 18th of December was later found to be positive. 23rd/24th of Dec was the first sample collection in Wuhan which was sent to be analyzed for a novel pathogen. 27th-30th of December is when the alarm bells started really going off in China. The first official messages and international alerts went out on Dec 30th and on Dec 31st Reuters published it's first report.
So the virus had been in Italy at least 2 days after the first hospitalization in Wuhan, and around 5 days before doctors collected the first samples which were sent off to labs which later determined it was a novel virus.
You actually can't blame China for not acting before they really had any patients or knew anything was going on.
That's useless since he didn't cause any suspicion in medical authorities, he was just a 55 year old patient, presumably with pneumonia. He was of no public health significance until the retrospective analysis was done in January.
> Agreed. I don't quite understand the focus on the WHO.
Some conspiracy folks consider the WHO, just like the UN, the manifestation of the NWO global government that secretly controls everything.
Didn't help that Trump had some weird hate boner for the WHO to such a degree that the US left it, plus a lot of "WHO is in the pocket of China to suppress the truth!" hysteria around t he same time.
Then there was this whole episode of, mostly US conservative media, creating a shit-storm over this WHO tweet [0] by interpreting that tweet as "WHO said it doesn't transmit between humans, WHO has been wrong and shouldn't be trusted!"
Those positions are surprising to me, for two reasons:
① Finger-pointing an institution that has very limited funding, and very limited power, for corruption, is like blaming the river for sea level rise. Sure, if you dig into the numbers, it contributes to the result; but fundamentally it is not the cause of the problem, and there are much bigger fishes that deserve much more scrutiny.
② Blaming WHO for a tweet where they simply report the words of the Chinese investigation with attribution, at a time where many countries with actual power pretended there was no risk, feels disingenuous.
Forget about conspiracy though, the WHO should have a relatively clear and narrow mandate, while the UN is known to be a toothless assortment of petty bureaucrats involved in everything with no clear consensus. The only thing they share is the goal of their members to grow their personal fiefdoms.
Hum... Looks like it was already a worldwide pandemic at December 2019, and in several countries already by November. So no, China trying that wouldn't have much of an impact.
I don't know if it would be possible to detect the virus earlier if it happened on some place that wasn't trying to cover it up, but when we got to know about it, it was already too late to contain.
I find that terseness has a real downside when debugging code. If you need to get down to the level of what is actually executing, having to unpack all that compact code involves many more things than I can keep in my short-term memory.
Compactness is great for things that are true and work, but when there's a bug in there somewhere, terse code requires a lot of scribbling on paper.
Mathematicians use very terse notation in formulas, but accompanied by a lot of natural language text. The equivalent in programming would be terse code with long comments and documentation.
Many programmers instead see self-documenting code as the ideal outcome: maybe not very compact, but virtually free of comments (and with documentation at least partially autogenerated).
In reality, successful open-source projects tend to have many comments in the source code. Often not one-liners, but detailed descriptions of functions, their arguments and algorithms, motivation for the choice of the implementation and so on.
Arthur is famous for his very dense programming style. Most C programmers would scream when seeing this code.
In his view (and others in the terse scene), it is much better to have everything in your application readable on the screen at once than to have great names for things or a lot of white space to comfort the first timer reader.
To them, once you've sufficiently studied that screen or two of code, you can understand all of it at the same time. If it's spread out over thousands of files, it's very difficult to understand all of it, which leads to bugs, unnecessary abstraction, and the need for advanced tooling just to work with your own project's code.
He wants to see the code "all at once" so he can understand all of its behavior without paging around and shifting his focus to another tab, window, etc. To get there he makes a lot of tradeoffs in terms of the code formatting and naming conventions. He also, in b, creates a dense set of interlocking macros and abstractions that can make the code very hard to follow.
Critics and the uninitiated say that his code is like old school modem line noise: random punctuation intermixed with bits of understandable code. I would suggest that he's actually quite careful with the abstractions he chooses and they are actually not always the most dense, highly compressed code structures available to him. He chooses wisely and his code rewards deep study.
Yeah, Arthur Whitney's code is extreme (he is one of a kind) but the sentiment is something i wholeheartedly subscribe to.
The key point is this; once you've sufficiently studied that screen or two of code, you can understand all of it at the same time. If it's spread out over thousands of files, it's very difficult to understand all of it,
Because there are so many interlocking concepts in code you have to keep as much as possible in your head to build up the entire picture. This is where concise, terse and direct-to-the-point code shines; nothing gets in the way of putting all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in front of you so you can "get" everything at a glance. A good example is K&R C style espoused in their book which i used to find difficult in the beginning but now understand. Always put as much of relevant code as possible into one screenful.
> If your unit economics don't work then you're fucked...
From the company's perspective that's certainly true.
As a regular person I'm more worried about the companies whose unit economics work too well. Companies like Amazon have so much momentum that it seems like they could go on indefinitely, instead of eventually failing and making room for new entrants.
Companies whose unit economics don't work transfer wealth from investors to customers, then get out of the way. Companies that work too well can become an inescapable force.
> Companies whose unit economics don't work transfer wealth from investors to customers, then get out of the way.
Not always. Consider the rash of subsidized “we’ll pick up your dry cleaning and then save by doing the work at a centralized facility elsewhere). These parasites wiped out the network of local dry cleaners, in particular in SF.
You could say, well, they wiped out the buggy whip makers. But actually they wiped out the infrastructure and then went bust, leaving a desert (in dry cleaning terms) behind.
This is the pessimistic view of Uber. If Uber was just subsidizing car rides, that would be fine. But since they’re dominating the industry in an unsustainable way, they’re hurting public and private transportation infrastructure. Cities aren’t investing in trains or buses because of Uber, but if Uber goes under, we’re going to be out of luck.
> they’re hurting public and private transportation infrastructure. Cities aren’t investing in trains or buses because of Uber
i dont think you can blame the lack of public transport investment on uber. and there's no hurting private transportation infrastructure - that's just private cars! People who ditched their car because of the availability of uber isn't getting hurt if uber goes away. They can just repurchase a car (after all, they saved money not owning a car previously, so they must be ahead already).
So Uber is the culprit behind the lack of public transportation and infrastructure development? Lol...In 2006 when I came to the US, the train between LA and SF took 13 hours. Today in 2022, 18 years later, it still takes 13 hours.
They mean "actual" dry cleaners that clean in the shop - almost all those you find are fronts for some massive cleaning warehouse somewhere else (check to see if they have any machines on-site).
Even if that's the case, how does that make it a dry cleaning "desert"? I only care if I can get my clothes cleaned quickly and I've never had any problem with that.
Not the OP but I assume it has something to do with the loss of same-day or 4 hour turnaround-type services (which if you need try laundromats, some offer fluff and fold services where they'll wash for you).
> Consider the rash of subsidized “we’ll pick up your dry cleaning and then save by doing the work at a centralized facility elsewhere).
Is that not the default business model of dry cleaners globally?
Chemicals like PERC are nearly completely banned in residential/commercial zones. Almost all dry cleaning in the developed world is done in centralised depots in industrial areas, for health & safety reasons.
No, most dry cleaners use more friendly chemicals locally, and only send out things like leather goods. Otherwise, how would they be able to do sub 8-hour turn arounds?
It's never happened, though. Buffett likes to say something along the lines of, "I like to invest in businesses that could be successfully run by a monkey, because eventually they will be."
My prediction is that every behemoth of today will be tomorrow's Sears Roebuck, GE, West India Trading Company, etc. At some point, they'll become mired in bureaucracy. Enough incompetence will eventually rise to the top to allow competitors to pounce.
I'd bet on that, if I had to.
That said, I may easily be wrong, and I honestly share your concern about Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.
In particular, I want a successful OSS phone competitor to Apple and Google. I don't think something as important as our telecommunication devices should be run by a duopoly. There's no freedom in the phone market the way there is in the PC market, and I'd really like to see that change.
I agree with the premise. Success is never immortal. The gap, however, is in societies being intended to be immortal. If you let companies run amok, so the thinking goes, when goes the company so goes the country. Limiting companies’ power let’s them creatively destroy one another without threatening the culture at large.
It takes an awful lot to actually kill a company (often fraud or similar), but a company that is no longer dominant the same way is usually considered to have "died". Myspace still exists, but Facebook is clearly the one to beat in that sector.
If Amazon retreats to being AWS-only, I'll consider them to have "failed", even if AWS continues to be a success.
I think the silver lining is at the time of their peak Sears etc. seemed unstoppable. And it took only a few decades for that to be undone. And that is basically guaranteed to happen to any behemoth simply by their inertia and inability to stay relevant for a long time.
> Whereas if we do actually do it, we might fail, which will be hard to take.
It's hard to take because unless you've already got substantial financial security, you may end up broke, and may no longer have any readily available "for-the-money" job opportunities afterward.
This is the big thing for me. I know full well that failure is not only possible but highly likely, and that the price is my financial safety net being expended. The ego hit isn't the problem, it's the resulting inability to pay bills.
Thankfully I like my day job quite a lot so my strategy has been to try to drive down cost of living where reasonable and accumulate more padding than is actually necessary, so when I finally commit to doing my own thing I'll be able to fund multiple attempts, preferably with some downtime between each to prevent burnout. Success is still anything but guaranteed but I figure that my chances are better that way than if I were stressed and in a hurry trying to make things work before my bank account ran dry.
I feel like that’s reasonable, but I’ve never attempted it because I think I would do the same thing with money that I do with time; fritter it away until I get desperate enough to light a fire under my ass.
Not OP but I read this as it’s hard for the ego to take.
Even for bets that require little financial investment (i.e. digging deeper into physics) and occupy R&R time - failing can be hard to take.
We like to believe we are the version of ourselves capable of doing anything. If you do nothing - you can die believing you wasted your potential. If you do something and fail to meet your own expectations, you can die knowing there wasn’t any potential there to waste.
This is so true. I think the fantasy that we have the capacity to do amazing things in our lives, but there's some external force stopping us, is a lovely, ego-saving one.
I've always thought, I have some great ideas and if I'm ever able to take some time off, I can build something that will surely be successful. A few months ago, I decided that this is as good a time at any at striking out on my own, so I quit my job to pursue my own projects.
With a few months under my belt, I'm realizing, wow it's not that easy. Doubt starts creeping in: Maybe I don't have what it takes. The fantasy I had is starting to crumble a little bit and I start to wonder, if I give up on this dream, what other fantasy can I fall back on when times are tough and I want to dream of a better future?
> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month.
That seems excessive if you're expected to be able to log into your work system within X minutes.
Having to be essentially home, near a computer, 25% of the time (1 week out of 4) is a pretty heavy burden, especially for people who prefer to be out, rather than home.
It's a heavy burden, and a lot of teams might want to consider a longer interval, but there's a lot of legitimate scenarios where it's just not feasible to distribute an oncall rotation among 8+ people. I would definitely point more towards 1 in 6 as the ideal minimum.
If all of their other decisions are geared toward increasing their wealth, one has to wonder whether the decision to enter public service is also geared toward increasing their own wealth.