rlanday

8 ms·

31.
by rlanday 6y ago
The withholding is based on Google’s understanding of the law (it’s not like they could just decide to not do it). I can’t ask Google to change their interpretation of the law since I’m not a lawyer.
32.
by rlanday 6y ago
My concern is that I will file the New Jersey return and pay taxes on the money I earned while working and living there, and file the New York return and ask for my money back since I don’t live or work there, and if New York denies the ref
33.
by rlanday 6y ago
It is public information though that the US offices are closed and we don’t have to be back until July (it’s called “voluntary WFH” but they won’t even let us back in to pick up stuff we left on our desks).
34.
by rlanday 6y ago
> NYC could have issued more supply to reduce the price. Not really, taxi medallion owners are a powerful special interest group. Just like Bay Area homeowners. My other favorite YIMBY argument is that the Bay Area would have super cheap
35.
by rlanday 6y ago
The health benefits already have to be set up to account for where the employees actually live rather than where we work on paper. E.g. if an employee lives in New Jersey and commutes into New York, either the health insurance has to cover
36.
by rlanday 6y ago
They could, but they won’t. I think one reason is that management is trying to maximally maintain the pretense that we’re all going to return to the office in July (I don’t see how we can make everyone go back after ~15 months without losin
37.
by rlanday 6y ago
Books and computer chips aren’t really assets (unless they’re collectibles, I guess), they’re commercial products, so I’m not sure my argument really works.
38.
by rlanday 6y ago
Online music and movies: I think this basically all started with Napster which essentially allowed people to steal music instead of paying for it. That seems like a decrease in demand to me. I think an increase in supply in this context wou
39.
by rlanday 6y ago
Sure, the prices of oil and natural gas go down sometimes, or grow more slowly, because of increased supply, but let’s look at the graph of oil prices post-WWII: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-
40.
by rlanday 6y ago
I’ve seen people do things like compare Seattle and SF housing prices and say, “see, they’re growing more slowly in Seattle because they’re building more!” Even if that’s the case (possible, but there might be other factors at play as well)
41.
by rlanday 6y ago
The issue here is the people no longer work in Massachusetts. They may not even be setting foot in Massachusetts. My situation is that I used to work in Google’s NYC office but live in New Jersey (and have lived here since pre-COVID) and ha
42.
by rlanday 6y ago
If a Google employee ostensibly works in “the NYC office” but hasn’t set foot in the office in over >6 months (will be like 15 months by the time Google’s asking people to be back in July), lives in another state (e.g. New Jersey, maybe
43.
by rlanday 6y ago
I’ve been trying to explain to YIMBY-type folks for years that while, yes, supply and demand are both important, it’s extremely rare that the price of an asset will crash due to increased supply. It’s almost always due to decreased demand.
44.
by rlanday 6y ago
I think you might be overestimating the level of technical sophistication at play here—if you asked me “how can we verify that these emails are real,” I might’ve been able to come up with this idea, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing t
45.
by rlanday 6y ago
Mark Zuckerberg is a lifelong Republican political operative?
46.
by rlanday 6y ago
But this is not a decision they made based on anything their fact-checkers told them. This is a decision they’re making before they get the results of the fact check. Andy Stone did eventually follow up with a clarification: > This is pa
47.
by rlanday 6y ago
It’s not really possible for Facebook to take itself out of the equation—Facebook sets up its algorithms to encourage the spread of engaging content. So if a story spreads on Facebook, it’s because they designed their algorithms to make eng
48.
by rlanday 6y ago
I think Facebook is in kind of a sticky situation since their recommendations algorithms function similarly to a newspaper picking which stories to run. So on the one hand, if this story turns out to be garbage, they don’t have any obligati
49.
by rlanday 6y ago
I don’t understand this argument here: > Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the governme
50.
by rlanday 6y ago
30% federal plus 15% state is also higher than 40%, isn‘t it?
51.
by rlanday 6y ago
Didn’t PG&E also have to shut off a bunch of people’s power last summer to try to avoid burning down any more cities? I recall there was talk about this happening for an entire decade. So really at this point it seems like summer blacko
52.
by rlanday 6y ago
The hashtag is not #RestructureSTEM, it’s #ShutdownSTEM, and he’s apparently had it up for 11 days. In a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands, in all likelihood eventually millions, of people. In my view, that says all I need to know abou
53.
by rlanday 6y ago
That’s really cool. Is that a divided highway? How do the trucks back up and turn around there?
54.
by rlanday 6y ago
On what planet should “shutdown STEM” be a reasonable position to hold in the middle of a global pandemic where hundreds of thousands or millions of people’s lives depend on quality STEM research being done in a timely manner?
55.
by rlanday 6y ago
The truth of this claim is disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/ft63zn/dk64_memory_lea... The lead artist claims they’d always been planning to make use of it. There’s compelling evidence of a
56.
by rlanday 6y ago
Uber has the same problem as Groupon: scaling into new markets requires a team of people for each market. It doesn’t have great scaling properties simply by virtue of being a tech company.
57.
by rlanday 6y ago
Uber lost $8.5 billion last year. They’re notorious for continuing to operate despite it not being profitable.
58.
by rlanday 6y ago
How much higher can Uber’s volume get? They will probably never exceed the volume they were seeing a few months ago and they still managed to lose $8.5 billion last year. How in the world do you increase prices by that much without losing m
59.
by rlanday 6y ago
“Lose money on every sale but make it up on volume” is not a sustainable business model.
60.
by rlanday 6y ago
No, this isn’t really true. Look at all the people hoarding toilet paper because the price is below market equilibrium. If the price were higher, there would be less hoarding, and more people could wipe themselves.

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