harryh

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP.

The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).

It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.

In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!

When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.

Brockman is off the board but not fired. Which is weird right? You'd think if he was involved in whatever the really bad thing is then he would be fired.

Median household income in America is roughly $70,000 per year. That is a roughly 20% real (not nominal!) increase over the past 40 years.

$10/month would represent 0.17% of that income.

Someone should start a company to sell business machines internationally.

Worse demographic ratios though which I think is likely more important.

The WARN act only applies for "mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment."

I'm honestly not sure how this would apply for a remote workforce. Consult your friendly HR or legal team counterpart. :)

Fair point about Canadian law being different than US law. For the < 5% of Stripe employees there, that does appear to be true. Though I would again point to my 2nd bullet point:

- There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they aren't)

This post should be flagged off HN.

Everything in the tweet is factually incorrect.

- Companies aren't required to pay severance when doing layoffs.

- There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they aren't)

- Employees fired for performance are absolutely eligible for state unemployment benefits.

I suspect that whatever climate benefits generated by eliminating commutes will be counteracted by the urban sprawl fostered by your first point.

There is no "someone" who could do anything about this.