Longtermism reminds of Soviet version of communism where problems of today were justified in the name of “the bright future”.
Readit Newstimavr commented on Longtermism, or How to Get-Out-of-Caring While Feeling Moral and Smart pestemag.com/books-before... · Posted by u/colinprince
timavr commented on What do people want in a co-founder? blog.ycombinator.com/what... · Posted by u/sandslash
- Decent Human Being
- Hard Worker
- Wicked Smart
- Someone I want to spend time with
Still. The biggest hurdle is building what people want.
timavr commented on Notes on Living in Los Angeles sashachapin.substack.com/... · Posted by u/kruipen
I feel like the author covered this pretty well. If you have the luxury to organize your life around the terrible traffic (e.g. living and working in Venice) it's fantastic. If you need to get on a highway to get to work your experience will probably be much worse.
Sure, but if I can work from home in Malibu, it is a sweet deal too.
But for most people in LA, it is not the case.
timavr commented on Notes on Living in Los Angeles sashachapin.substack.com/... · Posted by u/kruipen
Lived in LA for a decade plus.
The biggest problem in LA is the traffic, plus that you need a car to go anywhere.
Try to go on average day from Griffith Park(Observatory in the picture) to Santa Monica(surfing). You will hate your life.
People who live in LA are kinda used to crazy traffic, but if your value your time, LA is not the place to be
timavr commented on $1B feud involving Leonardo's 'Salvator Mundi' edition.cnn.com/style/art... · Posted by u/timavr
Just wondering at what point it stops being business and becomes theft.
50% mark-up $100m painting seems excessive.
"loans can be discharged in bankruptcy."
To me the idea that in a 'free country' today you cannot clear your debts through bancrupcy sounds crazy, it's a practice that belongs in history books along with debtor prisons, bondage, endentured servitude, feudalism, having public holiday 'execution day' and slavery.
In the UK we used execute people for vagrancy.
For starters there are two types of loans in the system, federal(92%) and private(8%).
Federal is less of a loan, but more a subsidy that you have to repay at later date if you can. There is no market mechanism involved, government sets the terms and rules. Overall if you have your shit together(push paperwork on time), it is nearly impossible to default on that type of a loan. So for all intense and purposes, those loans are just another hidden tax.
The benefits of this system is arguable, but for America where people hate to pay taxes and government needs to put people through college, this is not a bad option.
But... There are two massive problems in the system, private loans and the way colleges charge for education. First a lot of colleges are free to set fees any way they like, as a result in many cases federal loans are not enough and people are forced to take private loans. The problem with private loans, that they are completely market driven(higher, fees, higher costs, depends on your assets etc), but you can't get rid off them via bankruptcy which is absolutely nuts.
Overall the whole system regardless of country is very unfair and regressive in nature(poor people pay more then rich) and represents an example of broken social contract between government and its citizens. As student debt skyrockets, it also impacts the broader economy and forces people to go into debt to pay day to day expenses.
But maybe it is all by design. It is much easier to control people if they are in debt very early on in live vs debt free.
timavr commented on HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know rachelbythebay.com/w/2021... · Posted by u/atg_abhishek
Many people think that they live in a free democracy.
In reality, something like 50% of all working people are employed in a strict hierarchical organisation that is essentially feudal in its nature.
Most employees are the equivalent of serfs, overseen by lords, with a king in charge. The common employees don't get a vote. Their managers are not elected. They don't get a say in policy. The managers in turn form a strict hierarchy, much like in feudal times, with a top-down structure. A junior manager cannot say no to a senior manager. Nobody can say no to the CEO.
In this picture HR is essentially the inquisition. The inquisition was most certainly not the friend of the common man!
If you buck the system, if you step out of your place, if you're a commoner upsetting a lord, then you will be treated much like your ancestors would have been treated long ago: You will be put to the question. The inquisition will spare no pain to determine exactly why you stepped out of line and upset the natural order of things.
Very on point. We have democracy on a government level and have 1 day in 2 years to select our representatives. For the rest of the time we have to please our boss, that we have not much say about and that has a lot of power about economic circumstances.
Yes, we can always find another boss, but mentally on day to day basis it is not that different to dictatorship.
timavr commented on Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year reddit.com/r/LambdaSchool... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
Lambda School run into the realities of education economics.
As a society, we decided to subsidize high performers so they can actually focus on building/researching things and securitize everyone else.
The fact of the matter is educating high performers is cheaper short term( they teach themselves and process information better) and exponentially more valuable long term (they get good jobs, go into business or lead lucrative fields) If we sort out people based on similar ratings as applied to bonds, Lambda school works with Cs. It doesn't mean that everyone is bad, it just means on average the level of people is bad. All A people are picked by good unis via scholarships. B people can't get a scholarship but have good enough grades to get into B schools and pay via a loan or via relatives.
Lambda School is focusing on everyone else, but hopefully, there is a lot of everyone else. The model should have been on looking at Cs and separating good Cs from bad Cs. A good C is normally a student that didn't have opportunities or environment to become A, but have innate ability to do so, given the opportunity and resources.
If you don't really have the tools to distinguished good Cs from bad Cs, you can enroll as many people as possible and hopefully RNG your way to success. The problem with that strategy is that a lot of bad Cs will be unhappy with job outcomes, struggle with courses, generate bad press impacting recruitment, and more importantly be a massive drain on teaching resources.
I still think Lambda School is onto something but trying to do this via hypergrowth focused VC funding is a challenge.
On another topic, the hack I use in recruiting people who didn't have the opportunity to learn CS is to ask them to do CS50 in their own time. About 90% of people never come back, about 5% start but never finish or take too long to finish, and about 5% knock it out of the park. Those 5% generally were always worth my time advising and if we were lucky working with them. It doesn't mean they will become rockstar programmers, but it means they have learning ability and with enough time and resources will become a net positive to the company in a variety of engineering and engineering adjacent roles.