aetherson

57 ms·

1. 751.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   Corporations are made up of people. How would you go about restricting corporate speech without restricting people's speech? And, more so, why would you want to? Scenario A: 1,000 people organize into a company. One of those people i
2. 752.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   I think that you're misunderstanding your parent, who is not, to my reading, saying that people will show up at your work and beat you up or yell at you, but rather that they will campaign to get you fired. For example, Scott Alexander
3. 753.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   Doesn't the fact that Amazon did in fact leave kind of prove you wrong?
4. 754.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   The bay area is certainly very high cost of living. But not massively different from New York, which is also very high cost of living.
5. 755.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   The point of the grandparent was that you could live "less than 60 minutes" from work on over 100k a year. I don't doubt that someone can live in Manhattan on less than 30k per year -- my wife worked in nonprofit when we met
6. 756.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   You can do the same in the bay area. People who are complaining about how unaffordable the bay area is on six figure salaries are either wanting to be much closer than one hour from hot spots, owning a house, having a kid, or some combinat
7. 757.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   Are you sure about that? Giving tax breaks to large employers is pretty standard practice. What was unusual about the Amazon debacle was how public it was.
8. 758.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   This seems like it's maybe a useful corrective for 18 year olds who have a black and white view that Atlas Shrugged is a practical guide to an ideal society, but it's not a particularly insightful commentary on actual US politic
9. 759.▲
   by aetherson 8y ago

   Do you mean, "should not be dabbling in option plays"?
10. 760.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    Maybe! I mean, that's definitely one way it could go. Or maybe the extra money wouldn't get spent on medical R&D. Or maybe more money spent on medical R&D is reaching a cost/benefit asymptote where there's not
11. 761.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I wish people didn't phrase things this way. There's no single "meaning" to all of this. It's a bunch of different people with different priorities making different cost-benefit tradeoffs. I mean, what would you d
12. 762.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    They may also feel that it's not actually lower-cost for them. For example: say your doctor uses a somewhat lower-tech, kitbashed uterine balloon on your wife during postpartum bleeding. And say she dies anyway (as someone surely wil
13. 763.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I'm not sure that spending on elections is where the power is either, but certainly any claim that lobbying gives you durable political power is at best undersourced.
14. 764.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    They're the owners of the company. They get to (collectively) decide when they want to cash out.
15. 765.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I don't think that's true. Glass died because nobody could think of anything to do with it. Talk about "glassholes" dominated the conversation because there was no other subject to discuss. The explorer program was su
16. 766.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    It most likely won't kill anyone who currently exists, which are the only people you're claiming have rights. My point is that once you start considering the counterfactual world of 150 years from now in terms of, "What harm
17. 767.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    So let's say that you have a magic button that will give every person on Earth now living a 10% improvement in their material living conditions for the rest of their lives -- and will completely destroy the world in 150 years. That giv
18. 768.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    You raise taxes and redistribute money from the wealthy to the less-wealthy. It is not, like, outlandish to hear the claim that this would improve the economy, or at least be no worse for the economy than not doing it. I mean, it may not b
19. 769.▲
    South Korea's program of higher wages and taxes – so far, it's not working(nytimes.com)

    163 points by aetherson 8y ago|228 comments
20. 770.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I think a lot of critics of the article in these comments bailed out of the article partway through. The article is an examination of the origin of sexual selection. Are sexually selected traits linked to adaptive traits (originally, even
21. 771.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    Note that the article is from approximately 20 years ago.
22. 772.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    To be clear, I wasn't remarking on why futurists think the way they do, I was commenting on what makes someone a "well-known" futurist. The Age of Spiritual Machines is a catchier title and more interesting book than The A
23. 773.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    There are a lot of predictions in there that are either correct or kind of, "Well, I mean, sort of." But if you step back and look at the forest instead of the trees, it's clear that we are much less technologically advanced
24. 774.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    Italy used to be a dozen city states... And before that, Italy, France, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, a bunch of Baltic nations, England, and a bunch of others were all one state. The number of states waxes and wanes throughout hi
25. 775.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I was reading some tangential article the other day which suggested that porn services had difficulty with Visa not doing business with them.
26. 776.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I spent a month in Germany in the mid-90's as a high school student. At the time, Bay Watch was big thing, and the (friendly, nice) people I met had a pretty tough time wrapping their heads around the idea that my experience, living i
27. 777.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    So, look, don't do this. This isn't about whether and to what degree "companies" are cartoonishly evil. And when you divert the conversation into that very well worn path, you distract from other problems. There are lot
28. 778.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    I agree that when people talk about the DMV, they're most likely talking about the lines. When people talk about government inefficiency in nearly every other context, they're talking about money.
29. 779.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    This seems weird, if we're talking about the same definition of efficiency, which I would say is the resources, denominated in money, needed to produce a given result. So let's say that the government produces one driver's li
30. 780.▲
    by aetherson 8y ago

    Word. I don't love Slack, but IRC is awful, and an open protocol replacement for Slack would have to make easier many of the features that Slack has and IRC lacks.