agentofoblivion (u/agentofoblivion)

agentofoblivion commented on OpenAI engineers earning $800k a year turn rare skillset into leverage bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/zuhayeer

mnky9800n · 2 years ago

Can you not get a loan that's only 4 times your salary? Sorry for my naivete it just seems reasonable a bank would loan that except for the scale.

agentofoblivion · 2 years ago

I’m sure you can, but you can qualify for loans that do not make for a happy life. You start calculating CA taxes and what that monthly house payment is with todays interest rates and I don’t think you’ll be feeling rich. Broad strokes: while salary is double compared to Seattle, home prices are triple or more.

Quick numbers: monthly take home on $800k in CA is $33k (40% tax rate!). Monthly payment on $3M according to Zillow is about $20k a month. That leaves $13k for all family expenses and saving for retirement. In Seattle, our credit card statement averages $8k, so I wouldn’t feel great about that margin.

agentofoblivion commented on OpenAI engineers earning $800k a year turn rare skillset into leverage bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/zuhayeer

postmodest · 2 years ago

"Why would employees stand up for Sam if he were the guilty party?"

800,000 reasons is a lot of reasons. I've never cracked 200,000 reasons, and that might be enough.

agentofoblivion · 2 years ago

$800k sounds like a lot of money, and it is of course. I considered chasing it, because it’s within the realm of possibility for me. But when I looked at housing in the area, I was shocked to find that $800k was not enough. Regular ol’ houses are $3M plus, and the schools are shockingly not that great. I live in Seattle, where I own a home that’s expensive compared to most other places, and still I couldn’t make the math work without taking a big drop in quality of life. You could, of course, just rent, but $800k is such a big number that I just assumed if that was my salary, I wouldn’t have to think twice about affording a nice house.

agentofoblivion commented on One year post-acquisition, X traffic and MAUs in decline, report claims techcrunch.com/2023/10/17... · Posted by u/webwanderer

rvz · 2 years ago

It was complete hysteria a year ago from a highly emotionally charged audience. I think we have given the doomsday folks plenty of time for their predictions around the complete collapse of Twitter / X to manifest and it turns out that it did not happen and the platform is still alive.

Obviously the so-called 'exodus' never happened and their top predictions have failed to come true [0]. But it just shows that even most HNers at the time fell for the media exaggerations because it was the click-bait trend. Happened with the so-called collapse of Meta and once again with Twitter / X.

The deaths of both Meta and Twitter / X, have been greatly exaggerated. It is time to admit that such predictions like this [1] and this [2] aged extremely poorly 1 year on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295543

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

agentofoblivion · 2 years ago

Downvotes by those that were in on the hysteria and don’t like to have to face that about themselves.

agentofoblivion commented on Americans Are Still Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow wsj.com/economy/consumers... · Posted by u/lxm

lotsofpulp · 2 years ago

> Unrelated but Zillow says at 7.5% interest rates that house is now $750k+, weird... makes no sense... counter-intuitive, except for how tight the supply/demand situation must be)

I highly doubt this estimate is true, outside of very specific locales. Always ignore Zillow/Redfin estimates, and just look at comparable sales in the recent past.

agentofoblivion · 2 years ago

If your algorithm worked better, don’t you think that would be the algorithm? You think those models don’t consider recent sales?

agentofoblivion commented on Can affluence and affordable housing coexist in Colorado’s rockies? nytimes.com/2023/08/17/bu... · Posted by u/pseudolus

agentofoblivion · 3 years ago

This article works hard to paint one picture, and then presents arguments and evidence to the contrary. It’s basically a sob story about local musicians and ski lift operators not being able to afford housing, as if that’s a new problem. Then:

> Even as Summit County adds waves of remote workers, it has experienced net negative migration since 2020

You click the link of that data and it talks about how the local government is desperate to attract workers and full time residents, rather than having mostly vacant second homes.

I presume they want to attract wealthy workers, given the choice, since that spending will be local and help the economy. So, assuming they get what they want, which is an influx of wealthy, employed people, it’s entirely clear what will happen to real estate prices. I’m sorry, but no one ever said you’re entitled to only having to play guitar in coffee shops to support themselves. That’s what college kids do, who don’t own houses.

agentofoblivion commented on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging theatlantic.com/politics/... · Posted by u/slapshot

kelnos · 3 years ago

https://archive.is/rznQr

We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything.

> State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures.

And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.

> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”

And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.

It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.

But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.

agentofoblivion · 3 years ago

a.k.a., "that's not real communism".

agentofoblivion commented on Uber posts first quarterly net profit wsj.com/articles/uber-q2-... · Posted by u/boeingUH60

agentofoblivion · 3 years ago

I remember reading plenty of thought pieces a few years ago saying this was impossible, and that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money. That there were no economies of scale to bring costs down, etc., etc. I would love to see a "what we got wrong, and what we still have right" post from one of these people, but I won't hold my breath.

agentofoblivion commented on Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt triblive.com/news/childre... · Posted by u/Geekette

julienchastang · 3 years ago

Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible.

> "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of white applicants admitted to Harvard between 2014-19 fell into one or more of these categories. Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants."

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-preferences-...

agentofoblivion · 3 years ago

Headline in 5 years: “Endowments from alumni down 50% and no one knows why!”

agentofoblivion commented on Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social/@sysop408/110... · Posted by u/ZacnyLos

wpietri · 3 years ago

I don't think you're quite getting the moral lesson in telling stories about gods punishing hubris, so let me spell it out: titanic arrogance is bad and comes with consequences, so don't do it, kids. The point is for people to see particular kinds of suffering as both appropriate and necessary.

I agree that people enjoying suffering generally is pretty bad, and I avoid it. But I make an exception for people who cause suffering receiving the just consequences of their terrible actions. If Musk were just some guy who were living a quiet life and then got cancer or something, I'd feel for him. But he's not. He's someone who's been aggressively a jerk for more than a decade.

His deciding to take on being a CEO of yet another company, one he didn't really understand except as a user, was bad enough. But as a former Twitter user and employee, I've had to watch him destroy something that a lot of people, me included, worked very hard on. I've had to watch him harm thousands of people quite directly, and many more indirectly. And all for nothing more than his arrogance and some half-baked clout-chasing notions.

So I am absolutely going to enjoy the fuck out of his serial rake-stepping. Could this be bad for me? Well that's a question I will take seriously from somebody in saffron robes that spends 10 hours a day meditating. But it's not one I'll entertain from the Volunteer Musk Defense Brigade, and especially not from one of its members who was busy performing lack of empathy recently on this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35824824

agentofoblivion · 3 years ago

Yes, pride -> fall, I get it. Although it's the celebration of the fall from the sidelines that I'm questioning. I can feel the spite in your words--towards me, towards Musk, and the "other side", which are a faceless group you call the Volunteer Musk Defense Brigade, of which I'm apparently an unknowing member, I guess because I don't think some technical glitch is that big of a deal. You seem to feel lots of spite for people you've never met. I think there are plenty of tragedies written of people destroyed by their spite--maybe Notes from the Underground qualifies.

And in an irony of ironies, you crawl through my post history and take objection to me expressing my lack of empathy for those that make repeated bad financial decisions, but you're not only defending that very sentiment, but taking it a step further: enjoyment of the suffering. I hope you find peace, brother. I'm going to put my robes back on and get those last few meditation hours in now.