bokonist

14 ms·

61.
by bokonist 12y ago
I am actually interested in your psychology. I have a sort of a long term career dream of starting a community/small city as a startup. Such a community would necessarily not be run as a democracy. I have found that there exist "t
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by bokonist 12y ago
Do you think that the board of trustees for a university should be elected by those students and others living on university owned property? Many universities own far more than 1 square mile, they are essentially mini-cities with their own
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by bokonist 12y ago
I've thought about the same idea. But I do not know how to actually make the simulation a sandbox for interesting experiments, rather than just having the results depend on whatever assumptions the game designer made.
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by bokonist 12y ago
I love the idea of building a city as a startup, and competing with other cities by being a superior product. However, my vision for the perfect city is quite different than OP's. My ideal city: * Density is between 5k-8k per square mi
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by bokonist 12y ago
Well if you do not have a computer at home or access to books, then no, you won't be able to make it. But the solution would not be to spend money on schooling, but to buy everyone who cannot afford it a computer and a Kindle with a su
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by bokonist 12y ago
So why is college so damn expensive? In the modern economy, you need access to a high-paying career path in order to have economic security ( http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/01/20/economic-classes/
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by bokonist 12y ago
Anybody who has the aptitude to make a career in a given field, has the aptitude to teach themselves, with a bit of guidance from a syllabus, a professor, and/or a TA. Most learning inherently must be done by the learner. The learner h
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by bokonist 12y ago
" spending the other $600 billion evenly between education, infrastructure and investing in new businesses/re-training. " I have recently started to believe that most people get the casualty wrong between education/train
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by bokonist 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7908527
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by bokonist 12y ago
I'm not sure how both you and rodgerd could mis-comprehend me so badly. What I am describing is exactly how things work in the U.S. now, except that if you cannot find a job and your benefits run out, the government will give you a job
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by bokonist 12y ago
For reference, this is what I fear: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/world/europe/10britain.htm... <quote> >In its four most deprived neighborhoods, some 30 percent of the residents of wor
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by bokonist 12y ago
"However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary." That negates the experiment. There is little incentive to quit your job or loaf when the free money is
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by bokonist 12y ago
I answered that same question here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907937 I think most people are not natural aristocrats. They are not going to be tinkering in their home laboratories, crafting programming language
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by bokonist 12y ago
It really depends on the mental illness. Most mentally ill people could do something , most of the time. What exactly they could do would depend on the particular illness. Many are not currently hireable because even one episode a week is
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by bokonist 12y ago
If SF or NYC wants a higher wage, the city could augment the subsidy out of its own tax coffers. I am however, very much against the idea of taxing a machinist in Alabama to subsidize wages in NYC. I am also amenable to the idea of having t
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by bokonist 12y ago
That wouldn't be the last sixty years of explosive innovation and social growth, would it? You mean the most inventive and creative sixty years in all of human history? The sixty years prior were pretty explosive too - we got the car
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by bokonist 12y ago
Yes, exactly. The economic right wing has a valid point, that many small business owners cannot bear the burden of a higher minimum wage. Asking a factory owner who is barely making payroll due to competition from China to boost his wages c
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by bokonist 12y ago
No, I said very clearly in my original comment that everyone gets a job, even schizophrenics and quadriplegics. There is something that everyone can do. If you are physically disabled you can monitor security cameras or transcribe city
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by bokonist 12y ago
"The Man" does not exist, although interest groups certainly do, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy always holds, and I'm always willing to entertain conspiracy theories. But my impression is that the highway system was built beca
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by bokonist 12y ago
Just look around your own company, (arbitrarily) less than 50% of your workforce creates (arbitrarily) 95% of the value. That was not the case at my last company, as we were quite cutthroat about cutting away deadwood. But the company was
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by bokonist 12y ago
Then they go hungry. When they are ready to work and to eat, their local employment office will be ready with a job and a paycheck. But in the meantime, they need to stay off my lawn. I am a believer in anti-vagrancy laws, so I think with t
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by bokonist 12y ago
In addition, and as I discuss in the post, right now we can't "solve" poverty because poverty is a moving metric, usually defined as a percentage of income, rather than as an absolute value. Yes, and this reminds me a point
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by bokonist 12y ago
I'm with Alex generally, but disagree with this sentence: "We could make the choice to pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow" In the last sixty years, a tremendous amount of money has be
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by bokonist 12y ago
There is a basic problem with socially conscious investing. Let us take the Kantian/golden rule perspective and imagine that every "good" person invested with a social conscious and avoided evil companies. The stock prices of
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by bokonist 13y ago
" But, for some hope, see: professional organizations... " While those organizations are good for the profession, they are bad for the country as a whole. The AMA expends much effort on making the barriers to entry in the medical
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by bokonist 13y ago
" The actual facts in the global warming debate is that we've recorded these temperatures at these locations across the globe, and they appear to be rising over the last century. " To be clear - the only fact involved is the
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by bokonist 13y ago
"Greed is what is (at least, at risk of) killing us and the planet." If you are going to get that general, why not say the core problem is that we live in a universe where the core biological law is natural selection/survival
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by bokonist 13y ago
But on the other hand, doing that just pushes complexity around. This. In my experience moving to small teams, service-oriented architecture, and semi-open allocation, the underlying problems of coordination were not solved. We had all so
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by bokonist 13y ago
typical work boredom becomes a crippling, anxiety-inducing disability There is a secret for overcoming this boredom: podcasts. Ticket-munching isn't actually that bad if you have a bunch of queued up podcasts and audiobooks that you
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by bokonist 13y ago
Given that labor costs are the single largest expense for these types of business it's not unreasonable to reach the conclusion of those she's rebutting with this article. Whaaaa? The largest expense, by far, is most certainly c

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