As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit.
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity
In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working.
Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.
Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity.
Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job.
Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
Might be worth adding that US comparisons aren't quite relevant. Poland is a relatively new member-country, not an existing state within a long standing union.
The Polish economy and success is simply the result of disciplined economic decisions and hard work. Apart from few political turbulences and ongoing constitutional crises we've managed to spend all the investment correctly. An enormous and matter-of-fact win-win.
Federal support for disadvantaged states is different (though really shouldn't be).
There is no federal support for disadvantaged states in the sense we are talking about with the EU. You’re referring to the fact that federal taxation is progressive, so states with more rich people carry a larger share of the federal tax burden than states with fewer rich people. You can think of that as a form of subsidy, but it’s really just how progressive taxation works. The alternative would be a system where the federal tax burden is apportioned based on population, which is what the constitution required before the 16th amendment.
The EU system is totally different. About a third of the EU budget is allocated to reducing economic disparities between member states. The U.S. doesn’t have anything like that.
Most other federations have formal mechanisms for ensuring fiscal equity between their federal constituents – Australia has the Commonwealth Grants Commission, Canada has its Equalization Program, Germany has the Länderfinanzausgleich, Switzerland has Nationaler Finanzausgleich, Brazil has the Fundo de Participação dos Estados, Mexico has Participaciones Federales, Argentina has the Régimen de Coparticipación Federal de Impuestos; the UK is a devolved unitary state not a federation, but it has the Barnett formula – the United States is unusual in being a federation without formal fiscal equity mechanisms, although its informal mechanisms (progressive taxation, social security, welfare, Medicare/Medicaid, Congressional earmarks and pork-barrelling, etc) end up achieving much the same end with less transparency in the process.
And I don't know why people keep on comparing the US and the EU. One is a federal nation, the other is a supranational entity. Other nations with federal systems–Canada, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil–are better comparators–comparing an apple with (smaller) apples instead of with an orange.
Progressive taxation and welfare don’t achieve the same end, because they’re directed to individuals rather than the government. Mississippi can’t use social security payments to build infrastructure.
Also, programs like Medicaid aren’t as redistributive as you might think. For example, Mississippi gets less federal medicaid spending per capita than Massachusetts, New York, or California, despite being the poorest state: https://ffis.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SA23-01.pdf (p. 4). In terms of federal K-12 education funding, Mississippi receives about $3,000 per student, but California receives almost as much, $2,750 per student: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti.... Utah meanwhile receives only $1,300 per student, while Alabama receives about the same as New York, at $2,400 per student.
> Mississippi can’t use social security payments to build infrastructure.
Indirectly, it can, because social security recipients spend the payments they receive, and then some of those payments incur state sales taxes, and contribute to revenue of businesses which pay further state taxes (such as income tax for employees).
And direct federal grants can't always be spent on infrastructure either – you can't use Medicaid funding to build highways.
> Also, programs like Medicaid aren’t as redistributive as you might think.
In FY2024, Mississippi residents received (per capita) $11K more in federal spending than they paid in federal taxes; only West Virginia, Alaska and New Mexico received more.
Meanwhile, Texas residents paid $2K more per capita in federal taxes than they received in federal spending; New York residents $4K more per capita; Massachusetts residents $5K more per capita; California, New Jersey and Washington state residents $7K more.
Nebraska got the worst fiscal deal of any US state, with its residents paying $10K more in federal taxes than they received in federal spending
> you zoom out from individual programs and look at the overall fiscal balance
Right, but the overall fiscal balance is driven by the revenue side, not the spending side. More specifically, it’s driven by revenue from the top 50% of households, who pay 90% of all federal income taxes. New York pays more than Mississippi because it has more high income households than Mississippi. You can think of it as a subsidy, but we don’t usually think of it that way. By the same logic, asian american subsidize white americans, and white americans subsidize hispanic americans. Any time you draw a line around a higher income group, that group will pay more taxes. We typically wouldn’t call that a subsidy from one group to the other.
The point at which a tax system becomes redistributive rather than “fair” is hard to pin down, and a little (but not completely) arbitrary. If society decides that the federal government should provide social support for kids with disabilities, how do you pay for that? Under your math, anything that isn’t a head tax (equal per person) is a subsidy to lower income states like Mississippi. Even a flat percentage rate tax would mean that New York would end up paying more into that system, per capita, than Mississippi. But most people would call a head tax very regressive. Zooming out further: who benefits the most from a naval base in Mississippi? Your math presupposes that Mississippi gets all the benefit. But there is a strong argument that California and New York and their finance-based industries benefit more from the U.S. military.
Putting all that aside, the systems we are talking about in Europe aren’t just progressive taxation. The EU has progressive taxes in a sense—countries fund the EU based on their income levels. But the EU also has transfer programs where poorer countries get direct subsidies to foster economic development. We don’t have anything like that in the U.S.
The distinction we draw is somewhat arbitrary, but there’s also a logic that richer people benefit more from funding the government even if they get the same amount of services per capita. When the feds spend money on a naval base in Mississippi, who gets a greater benefit from that? Folks working in the base in Mississippi, or the folks working finance in New York whose incomes are tied to the U.S. having the world’s reserve currency?
Had no idea about the history and the 15%/15% split but when the topic comes up I just remember how good the 30% seemed back in, what, 2008?
It made perfect sense that this shiny new iOS platform would take 30% of a cheap app to ensure that it matches the high quality of iOS. These were little productivity apps and games at the time.
This however - I just don't understand what the need is for an app at all for Patreon. Isn't this a website/platform kind of thing? Wouldn't an app just be an additional window into the Patreon platform?
What's next - 30% of my pizza price goes to Apple because I ordered it on my phone?
> What's next - 30% of my pizza price goes to Apple because I ordered it on my phone?
You joke but this already happens with places like DoorDash. They take 30% of the order from the store owner after adding their own additional fees to the order that customers pay.
Someone I know owns a pizza store and his prices are 30% higher on DoorDash but some people still pay. The big difference is it's not a monopoly. He offers regular delivery at normal store prices and 95% of his deliveries go through that.
I was working for a small software company at the time and we thought it was outrageous. We were selling our software online direct through our own web site and the cost was far lower. A few percent for credit card processing fees, and the server/bandwidth cost was inconsequential.
>This however - I just don't understand what the need is for an app at all for Patreon. Isn't this a website/platform kind of thing? Wouldn't an app just be an additional window into the Patreon platform?
That's the other part of the surrogate war happening with mobile. The web was unregulated and hard to profit off of, so Jobs took great strides to push the "there's an app for that" mentality that overtook that age. This had the nifty side effect of killing off flash, but it's clear the prospects didn't stop there. Not to mention all the other web hostile actions taken on IOS to make it only do the bare minimum required to not piss off customers.
It very much could just be a website with no reliance on IOS as a dependency. But Apple clearly doesn't want that.
>What's next - 30% of my pizza price goes to Apple because I ordered it on my phone?
I'm pretty sure Apple has discussed things exactly like this.
Their upper management really does tend to think that 30% of any monetary transaction on an Apple platform belongs to them. Too bad our government is too busy being ran by the billionaires to do anything about these abuses from billionaires.
Really hope the 2nd wave of Sherman hits these bit tech companies hard if/when this regime inevitably falls. I just hope there's something left of America when it happens.
What? No. There are countless reasons why the wall fell but TV wasn't one of them. East Europeans didn't 'see' anything 'on TV' that would suggest anything other than what was endorsed by local authorities.
Trade was a big factor though. As the collective quality of life in the East was deteriorating, efforts were made by authorities to save the dire situation by opening trade and some degree of freedom of movement with the West. As this plan failed economically, a side effect was that it only became common knowledge across society how big the gap in quality of life really was.
The idea that free internet access will magically change the situation for Iranians on it's own is naive.
If the computer was the bicycle for the mind, then perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind? Gets you there, but doesn't necessarily help build the best healthy habits.
Trade offs around "room to do more of other things" are an interesting and recurring theme of these conversations. Like two opposites of a spectrum. On one end the ideal process oriented artisan taking the long way to mastery, on the other end the trailblazer moving fast and discovering entirely new things.
Comparing to the encyclopedia example: I'm already seeing my own skillset in researching online has atrophied and become less relevant. Both because the searching isn't as helpful and because my muscle memory for reaching for the chat window is shifting.
It's a servant, in the Claude Code mode of operation.
If you outsource a skill consistently, you will be engaging less with that skill. Depending on the skill, this may be acceptable, or a desirable tradeoff.
For example, using a very fast LLM to interactively make small edits to a program (a few lines at a time), outsources the work of typing, remembering stdlib names and parameter order, etc.
This way of working is more akin to power armor, where you are still continuously directing it, just with each of your intentions manifesting more rapidly (and perhaps with less precision, though it seems perfectly manageable if you keep the edit size small enough).
Whereas "just go build me this thing" and then you make a coffee is qualitatively very different, at that point you're more like a manager than a programmer.
> then perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind
I have a whole half-written blog post about how LLMs are the cars of the mind. Massive externalities, has to be forced on people, leads to cognitive/health issues instead of improving cognition and health.
I’ve also noticed that I’m less effective at research, but I think it’s our tools becoming less effective over time. Boolean doesn’t really work, and I’ve noticed that really niche things don’t surface in the search results (on Bing) even when I know the website exists. Just like LLMs seem lazy sometimes, search similarly feels lazy occasionally.
This is the typical arrogance of developers not seeing the value in anything but the coding. I've been hands on for 45 years, but also spend 25 of those dealing with architecture and larger systems design. The actual programming is by far the simplest part of designing a large system. Outsourcing it is only dumbing you down if you don't spend the time it frees up to move up the value chain.
Talk about arrogance, Mr 45 years of experience. Ever thought that there might be people under skyscraper that is your ego? I’m pretty sure majority of tech workers aren’t even 45 years old. Where are they supposed to learn good design when slop takes over? You’ve spent at least 20 years JUST programming, assuming you’ve never touched large scale design before last 25 years. Simplest part my ass.
> Ever thought that there might be people under skyscraper that is your ego?
I do, which is exactly why I found the presumption that not spending your time doing the coding is equivalent to a disability both gross and arrogant.
> Where are they supposed to learn good design when slop takes over?
You're not learning good architecture and systems design from code. You learn good architecture and systems design from doing architecture and systems design. It's a very different discipline.
While knowing how to code can be helpful, and can even be important in narrow niches, it is a very minor part of understanding good architecture.
And, yes, I stand by the claim the coding is by far the simplest part, on the basis of having done both for longer than most developers have been doing either.
> And, yes, I stand by the claim the coding is by far the simplest part, on the basis of having done both for longer than most developers have been doing either.
My understanding is that the problem is exacerbated by the shape of surrounding terrain and atmospheric conditions. I.e. the city is in a cavity and on cold days there is a mass of high pressure that pushes all the smog down.
But you are correct I believe (hailing from Wro here) - there have been many countermeasures implemented and cities are packed with sensors. Only so much can be done.
> So, Schmidt had inside knowledge of before following Apple into the smartphone category?
That's the theory/assumption. Android started as an OS for blackberry-style phones with physical keyboard, non touch screens.
Almost as soon as the iPhone launch, Schmidt left the board, and Android pivoted to a multi-touch interface almost immediately, and a year later the HTC Dream came out.
I don't think anyone has any real proof of wrongdoing but the timing is certainly suspicious
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
reply