rangeofmotion

It blows my mind that UpWork does so well as a platform. I have never had a good experience using it. And I don't know anyone who says good things about it.

I think there is a real market opportunity for a startup that can provide a way to connect businesses who need short-term or specific project work (i.e. they don't want employees) with freelancers who want to work in that mode while (and this is important) avoiding the creepiness and flaky nature of UpWork. Conversely, it would also need to avoid being too similar to having the middleman as an employer.

I probably know 50 people who would jump on a platform that hit this sweet spot in a heartbeat.

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared and willing to sell everyone else out so they can pay their mortgage? Are there efforts internally to try and stop them from centralizing everything? What's going on here? I know only a couple of people who don't think Google is a real problem today.

I have spent a lot of time with a lot of families from wildly varied economic backgrounds. I'm not talking about people with brand new cars and 3,500 square foot houses (that would be a McMansion, I believe). I'm talking about Hondas and weather-worn Dodge pickups parked at a condo or a very modest house in a working class neighborhood.

Sure, the keeping up with the Jones thing is happening with a lot of people. But that does not appear to be the bulk of the problem. Heck, just drive through the country and tell me if you spot more McMansions or more McShacks.

I don't think you can say concretely that this would be stealing. That would be an extremely simplistic view. Remember, I'm talking about "bills that are well known in the culture to be unreasonable". For example, we can firmly say that the price of higher education has been inflated beyond reason and certainly beyond its actual value. Many have said it. Papers, articles, documentaries, and so on have been produced about it. The current popular theory is that the government guaranteeing the loans incentivized the colleges to hike up the fees drastically, screwing an entire generation by gouging them unreasonably. And if you want to say that students didn't have to make the choice to go to college, well, then you're ignoring the fact that people have been drilling it into young people for quite some time that they won't be able to make it in future America if they don't get a higher education degree. I know parents today who are extremely cash-strapped who nonetheless feel they need their kids to go to college so they won't become serfs in the future economy. I even know parents who have gotten divorced purely so that their kid could receive some form of financial aid (only one parent income shown) so they would be able to afford college. So a ton of students and parents felt like they had no choice but to accept these loans if they wanted to make it in America's future economy. And this idea continues today, though it's slowly starting to receive some pushback. On the whole, these people didn't go to college purely because it would be a fun way to study creative writing. Essentially, the colleges rode the wave of fear and hiked up the price, bolstered by the government guaranteeing they would get paid no matter what. One can ultimately argue that the colleges stole from the students who have historically felt like they had to go if they wanted to make it and be able to secure a middle class position in society.

Unreasonable price inflation combined with a sense of necessity or even physical necessity (health care) exists elsewhere in our economy as well. You can argue that our current political situation is due largely to people who are mad as hell over their life being impacted negatively by these things.

As for what life essentials they'll spend the money on, well, we can ask the burgeoning van dwellers movement (people who live in their cars) as well as those people who are running GoFundMe campaigns so they can afford medicine or a medical procedure. You can ask people who are moving out of the country because they can afford a better life in places like India (I just read about this the other day). You can ask the people who just marched to Canada to buy insulin at a reasonable price.

But is that the type of society we want? One in which a rather large percentage of the population is dealing with those terrible choices regularly? And the rest of the population says "you should have been smart enough to not fall for it"?

Personal responsibility matters for sure. And to have freedom we have to allow personal responsibility rather than try and protect everyone from everything. But if someone comes up with a clever way to put a massive number of people in debt by leveraging common human failings, to the point that it threatens their ability to have shelter, do we not do something about it rather than allowing that clever someone to just become king (metaphorical)? Not to mention, wouldn't we want to head off both the growing apathy by some and the growing anger by others towards the rest of us lest it eventually threaten the country itself and its character?

I can understand this sentiment. And it certainly applies to some people. But honestly I don't think the majority of people struggling are driving fancy cars or living in McMansions. Most of the people I personally know (which is a lot of people) drive an average car, live in an average home or condo, and don't live lavish lives. Most are just saddled with some combination of common factors like high cost of housing, student loans, unexpected medical bills, etc. The majority of people are just trying to live average lives but are constantly having to walk a tightrope for just that.

I get what you're saying. I agree that college and university should be looked at differently going forward for a lot of people. It's just that there is a problem that exists right this minute, with an entire generation of people who already took the loans, not realizing the outcome they would face. I'm just looking at all the wreckage and sense of instability people have all around me right now, and it seems to make sense that some collective action should take place. Unless we just want to punish people until they are middle aged or older for not being financially savvy when they were 18 years old.

But my point wasn't really to pick out just student loans. Not just due to people being burdened with student loans but a wide variety of other issues... We're more and more seeing people who hope to be able to save their own lives with GoFundMe campaigns because they can't afford to stay alive. We're seeing the idea of owning a home fade for giant swaths of the population. One third of the country is currently "subprime" in the eyes of financial institutions. And my understanding is that percentage is expected go up. The Dollar Store's massive growth is predicated on the forecast of "a permanent underclass in America". I'm seeing, hearing, and reading about so many people having a hard time every single day. And I'm reading about the country readjusting to accommodate the situation as a permanent reality. If the institutions cannot help, then I do think it's probably reasonable for the people to force the issue, given how prevalent we are seeing these problems become.

What I don't understand is why people don't band together and simply refuse, collectively, to pay bills that are well known in the culture to be unreasonable. In particular, student loans. But also a few other things. My god, I know so many people who are struggling that it seems like everyone is struggling. I know people making six figures who are worried about losing their homes. In fact, I've known so many people who have either lost their home, almost lost their home, or are worried about losing their home that it makes up probably a majority of the people I know. Did we forget somewhere along the line that a home is just a patch of dirt with four walls and roof thrown on it? Should it really be that precarious of a thing? How many people do you think go to bed every night worrying about becoming a homeless person? We've turned into a culture that literally has a market that gambles on whether or not people will be able to keep their homes! For christ sake! What kind of sick shit is that? And the whole thing is predicated on people accepting the idea that they have to pay all their unreasonable bills and stressing themselves out willingly over the process of paying them. At what point do people throw their hands up and say "fuck it, this is unreasonable"?

Oakland was just ranked as one of the 5 worst-managed cities in the United States based on the following factors: 1) Financial Stability, 2) Education, 3) Health, 4) Safety, 5) Economy and 6) Infrastructure & Pollution.

And then there's this...

"A United Nations expert on housing explicitly singled out San Francisco and Oakland as the only two U.S. cities that are part of a 'global scandal'". "[The U.N. Special rapporteur] cites SF and Oakland along with worst slums in the world", calling the "'cruel and inhuman' treatment of the homeless 'a human rights violation'". She went on to say “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen”. "In several respects, she said, the situation in California's cities [she was speaking from Oakland] is worse than other parts of the world"

"In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [the U.N. Special rapporteur] said. "They had no running water. They stole electricity." The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland"

"Every person I spoke to today [in Oakland] has told me, 'we are human beings,'" said [the U.N. Special rapporteur] about her conversations with camp residents. "But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong."

I wouldn't call it "a nice place".

I don't know which roads the vigilantes are focusing on. But my guess is they aren't concerned with the less frequently used roads on the hillsides. They're probably more concerned with the ones that should be obvious to city officials to fix sooner rather than later. The ones that impact people significantly near the higher concentrations of homes and places of business.

The road conditions in Oakland have been this way for decades. And whenever you talk about a problem like this in Oakland, it calls forth the general condition of Oakland, which very much is a moral problem (both due to the alleged corruption that keeps it from changing as well as the fact that you can barely enter the city without being confronted by extreme poverty and people with severe mental health problems who are just left behind). The holes in the road have at least one thing in common with the overall state of the city: neglect.

Oakland is a disaster. If I recall correctly, someone from the U.N. went to Oakland a year or two ago and declared a humanitarian crisis or something to that effect. I remember the wording was quite strong, saying that it matched conditions in third world countries they've been to which are in crisis. How people can just step right past so many homeless people and so much obvious city disrepair and human brokenness for years on end is beyond me. Yet Oakland and nearby Berkeley are home to a lot of people who are considered "progressive" and "caring" and who supposedly want a better world. If you can't achieve positive results for the people in your immediate vicinity (which the people of Oakland and Berkeley very much have the power to do, especially with things as simple as potholes), then do you get to count yourself as a person who can say they are working towards a better world? Thumbs up for these so-called vigilantes. They talk less and act more. I just hope they don't let the mayor co-opt their efforts by letting her go around saying she's all about it.

How crazy is it that we allow companies to take a percentage cut of EVERY transaction we make? How often do you NOT use a credit card or some other payment system with a middleman? It's become so commonplace that the idea of replacing cash entirely seems normal to people. And yet this normal state of things involves a middleman taking a cut of EVERY transaction!

Jurisdictions literally have to enact laws today to prevent businesses from going completely cashless, which essentially means jurisdictions have to enact laws to prevent middlemen from taking a cut of EVERY transaction made.

The cash system does not require middlemen in order to transact. And people have historically not been denied the ability to handle cash, as they are denied credit cards or bank accounts today (yes, a sizable number of people are denied even bank accounts and/or are forced into bank accounts with high monthly fees in order to just get a debit card, which is arguably the most basic requirement for purchasing most things today). With cash, people who had some financial difficulty do not get extorted even more (in the form of having to pay for "subprime" services) on top of an already existing percentage cut of every transaction that the middlemen already take.

Unless a new platform can reliably offer a no-fee or at least an absolutely ridiculously low fee transaction platform that absolutely does not deny anyone access nor extort anyone for the ability to gain access, AND we can be reasonably assured that no central organization is using it as a tool to load people onto its platform for later extortion....essentially unless we can get almost exactly the same open access as cash...unless we can get that, I don't support it, and probably neither should you.

(Disclaimer: I admittedly haven't looked into the details of Libra yet)

This is my experience with older skilled programmers as well. For the most part, I notice when there are technical folks in their 40s and 50s on a project, the "gee whiz" is thankfully tempered by the benefit of experience, and the projects have a more concrete results-driven character. "There is nothing new under the sun", as they say. And when you've seen the signature of a pitfall before, you can spot its many variations. Less chasing after chimeras. More driving at the actual business goal.

The heavily youth-driven focus of tech hiring has always struck me as ultimately very dumb. And I think this is also reflected in the god-awful interviewing practices that everyone is familiar with. I don't see older engineers promoting those practices that are talked about so much in the industry as being borderline absurd.