bokonist

12 ms·

31.
by bokonist 12y ago
Yes, that is the premise. In my comment, I take the assumption of restricted immigration as a given, and then propose how the quota can be most sensibly allocated. There is a completely separate debate over how high or low that quota should
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by bokonist 12y ago
Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes t
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by bokonist 12y ago
Fair point. Using the word "mean" was a poor choice. There may still have been essay worth writing, but it should have been called "Petty people fail." Or he could have titled the essay "Assholes fail" and focu
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by bokonist 12y ago
The dictionary defines "mean" as "Selfish in a petty way. Cruel, spiteful, or malicious." If you take the definition of mean to be "selfish or spiteful in a petty way", then yeah, most successful people are not
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by bokonist 12y ago
Let me clarify slightly - a desire to improve the world on a large scale (like what a startup founder wants, which is what we are talking about) is synonymous with a "lust for power." If a person only wants to improve the world on
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by bokonist 12y ago
There was another side to the story - https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d... I don't think any of us in the peanut gallery can really know if Tom Preston is a good or bad person, without
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by bokonist 12y ago
The trouble with this thesis is that most people are situationally mean or nice. People like Steve Jobs or Lyndon Johnson were legendary for being charming to people they needed but abusive to people who were under their thumb. Zuck can be
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by bokonist 12y ago
Sam left out the two innovations that have made the most difference to my life in the past 10 years: 1) the Google Library project, which scanned tens of millions of books and made them free online. 2) ebook readers (first the Kindle, and n
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by bokonist 12y ago
The true learning experience of college is that it throws you together with people that you would never hang out with by choice, and so forces you to broaden your perspective. Huh, my take on college is the exact opposite. Public secondar
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by bokonist 12y ago
This can be done with a low level of risk. So why isn't there any attention given to companies that, given a couple years of salaries for a few technically competent founders, could reliably and sustainably deliver 20-40% growth over
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by bokonist 12y ago
I mean a sharp, unexpected deflation as it actually happens in the real world. In the real world, deflation starts with either a collapsing debt or asset bubble. Bank runs wipe out deposits, a housing bubble bursts, the stock market crashes
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by bokonist 12y ago
The purpose of QE is to create inflation. Inflation means that prices of goods and labor go up. The only reason prices go up is if consumers or employers bid up prices. What has never been explained in a satisfying way to me, is how QE resu
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by bokonist 12y ago
Scott Sumner is wrong about the impact of QE. Read Winterspeak and Warren Mosler. Or just use simple logic. How does QE improve the balance sheet of the average person? All it does is swap one piece of government paper for another piece. If
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by bokonist 12y ago
The problem with deflation is nominal rigidities, i.e. sticky nominal wages or the prideful worker effect. Hence you'll need to fire the workers with wage > productivity, and those workers will refuse to accept new employment since
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by bokonist 12y ago
Pulled chicken with salsa - 3 pounds of chicken, mixed breasts and thighs. 48oz salsa, three cans of 15oz beans. Mix together, put in slow cooker for 4 hours on high. Pull the chicken and mix in a cup of cheddar cheese. Simple, satiating,
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by bokonist 12y ago
My diet was partly portion control, but I also weighed food and used myfitnesspal. It did require greatly simplifying my diet. I would make five pounds of food at a time in a slower cooker, and have my meals all portioned out for the next f
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by bokonist 12y ago
I had great success starting from a strict calories in vs. calories out diet, and then iterating on what I ate to make myself the most satiated per calorie eaten. Turns out that the diet that solves for satiation ends up being a lot of plai
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by bokonist 12y ago
Neither of those cases would be especially well addressed by your proposal. Really, wouldn't option #1 help the normal, hard-luck people quite a bit? It would give you a permanent bed, and address to get mail, etc. while you applied
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by bokonist 12y ago
I actually agree with you 100%. My dorm living proposal was a simplification. There would have to be different forms of living based on what the individuals could handle. I should have said, there should be government funded, permanent livi
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by bokonist 12y ago
For most of the duration of the evolution of the human race, humans were living in groups of < 50 people. Cities of tens of thousands of people are a very recent phenomena. That said, evolution did not halt 5,000 years ago, and there pro
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by bokonist 12y ago
Many of those people would actually like jobs, but the gap between where they are, and what is required to even work at McDonald's is huge. That is why the job needs to be community provided, guaranteed, and tailored for that person. E
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by bokonist 12y ago
"What is the fundamental difference between a beggar telling a sob story and the woman who stops you to talk about the ACLU/Planned Parenthood/<charity of the week>? Or are you for banning all public requests for money
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by bokonist 12y ago
1) Sounds a lot like slavery. What? You are being spitefully obtuse. With slavery, the entire problem is you cannot leave your job, you are owned, and at the mercy of your owner. With my first bullet point, I am simply creating an option
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by bokonist 12y ago
I really wish we could all, liberals and conservatives, could come up with a "grand compromise" with regards to the homeless. Elements of the compromise: 1) Guarantee all people access to cheap, government provided dormitory style
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by bokonist 12y ago
" These ideas are not based on the medical facts. People only need to be quarantined if they are showing symptoms and if you do not have a fever, there is no risk of you transmitting Ebola to someone. " Also, that above fact is wr
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by bokonist 12y ago
How many successful businesses have actually be built by using landing page tests as the primary mechanism to evolve the product idea? I feel like the lean startup fashion is overplayed. The most important thing for a startup is to have a l
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by bokonist 12y ago
If you think a programmers union should exist, why don't you go ahead and start it? Judging from your history of Hacker News comments, this seems like one of your major life passions. So if you really believe in it, why not do it?
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by bokonist 12y ago
And then what do you do with the coins, hope that one day you'll get the chance to use them? You dump the coins in a change jar on top of your dresser. Then once a year or so, when you have accumulated $100 in coins, you bring the ja
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by bokonist 12y ago
For the camera policy to work, we need cameras that are always on, for the entire shift. Officers should not even be able to turn them off. They should be issued at the beginning of the shift already turned on, and passed in to an independe
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by bokonist 12y ago
Here is the basic problem. When you build a product for savvy people, your interests are aligned. Savvy people will only pay you money when you build a good product. Thus, the only way you can make money is by actually doing good, by creati

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