mbillie1

10 ms·

31.
by mbillie1 9y ago
It's not enough to travel, save, have any remotely expensive hobbies (sports equipment for just one of many examples), or survive a car breakdown, buy a car if you don't already have one, and so on. It's funny that you budget
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by mbillie1 9y ago
In the US at any rate you need a fairly significant amount of disposable income to meaningfully be free. Of course you are "free" to (attempt to) acquire this income, and most people reading HN will have already done so. But for a
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Good, I hope this spells the death of this horrifying product.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> Everyone should read Piketty. Absolutely, unreservedly agree.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Because it's HN, where opinions other than "hooray libertarian technocracy" are frowned upon.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
I haven't paid much attention to how they run as a business but I am a happy consumer, I get 2 excellent podcasts from Patreon at a price I am happy to pay. Hope they stay in business.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
I meant more, "can we not debate it here ," as in on HN. These discussions always end up going nowhere immediately.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Actually can we not debate it, and stop couching our barely-disguised political motivations in pedantry?
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by mbillie1 9y ago
It's hard to invest if you don't have any money, and as the article points out, investment income below $38,000 is already untaxed. Mortgage rates are a tricky lever to manipulate. Wealth redistribution (in the form of taxing capi
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by mbillie1 9y ago
It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These
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by mbillie1 9y ago
In my experience, since Messenger / Hangouts / etc all support persisted, named chats, people start treating them like chatrooms rather than like text messages. I don't want notifications for a chat room (where there's a
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Same. I initially only uninstalled messenger (which intolerably presented me with a popup asking me to enable notifications EVERY TIME I OPENED THE APP ), then got rid of the FB app. Now even on my laptop facebook.com is pointing at localh
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by mbillie1 9y ago
I call my both my senators and my congressional representative almost daily. It's important to do, I think more people need to be active in that sense.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Blockchain technology would prevent a web app vulnerability? What on earth?
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Credit algorithms, specifically your FICO score, are not transparent. There is no reason beyond the naive assumption of good faith on the part of these companies to believe that they don't make or break at least your credit SCORE.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Nationalization of credit agencies - or even regulation governing exactly how credit scores are computed, and making that information transparent to the public - would be a huge step forward. Credit-determining algorithms are presently a bl
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by mbillie1 9y ago
I would pay $5/game to stream US professional sports a la carte from my laptop (for the games I want to watch).
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Ask HN: Startup success/failure rate at different ages
1 points by mbillie1 9y ago|1 comments
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by mbillie1 9y ago
So... the estate tax is what you have a problem with?
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by mbillie1 9y ago
In fairness, there are plenty of other places in the country with good tech scenes where you wouldn't face this anxiety. None of them quite like the bay, but it's not as though you have to relocate to Flint MI or someplace with ze
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> Free speech is a cultural value I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. Then I guess you're in favor of passing legislation to this
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Companies can be fined and executives imprisoned for say, selling weapons to terrorists. There's no magic hard line between "moral" / &
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies. Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or
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by mbillie1 9y ago
Nothing of substance to contribute but I'm immensely pleased to see Freddie DeBoer writing again.
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> For each Planet Fitness, much of the cost is upfront. That is, they have to buy the property, renovate (or build), and then buy all the machines. As said before, this is not remotely accurate. Firstly, nearly all of these franchises re
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by mbillie1 9y ago
> Except that the incremental cost of someone using a Gym is almost zero. Once you have enough members to cover the rent & employees, it's almost all upside. Huh? What exactly do you think a gym's principal expenses are bey
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by mbillie1 9y ago
If you actually use it, sure. Not unlike a gym membership, you let the aspirational purchasing of some people partially subsidize the cost for the actual user base. I'm not making any ethical stand for or against this practice, but it
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by mbillie1 9y ago
The people objecting that this is not cost effective are missing the point that most people who use this service will simply subscribe, forget, and go to the movies no more frequently than they do now (after a month or so). It's why pl
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by mbillie1 9y ago
I think the parent comment is referring to the abundance of comic book derivatives, sequels and uninspired remakes that have become increasingly prevalent of late.

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