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300k in 3-5 years? You can get that much in RSUs from a publicly traded company, and you can sell those for cash every quarter and buy a house before the 4 years are up.

For me to work for a startup, the upside scenario needs to be an 7 figure payoff to be worth giving up the sure thing of bigco stock. And even then, the utility function from money is logarithmic so I’d still go with bigco.

I think the surplus from self-driving tech is going to go to the owners of self-driving IP and consumers.

I’ll gladly give my house to the bank and rent again if it means everyone can afford a place to stay.

International tax law doesn’t seem very relevant to the housing crisis.

I don’t believe it’s true that rich people are getting to write off college costs as a donation. They might be paying them out of a tax advantaged 529 account. The magnitude of this advantage is such that middle-class people probably care the most about it.

The big ticket items are Medicaid and teachers.

I wonder if people assume Siri failed to understand the query when they hear its request for clarification. I think it should include some context, eg: “Which x do you want opening hours for?”

I think it’s interesting to look at the patterns of historical usage mentioned in the wiki. The phrase always originates with an accusation by party A that party B calls party C useful idiots, but there’s never any evidence backing up the accusation against party B. To me it just seems like a condescending way of dismissing party C - essentially an argument meant to invalidate popular support for party B. It’s not necessarily wrong, but I think without evidence it’s essentially a tactic for party A to deal with the cognitive dissonance arising from their distaste for party B combined with party C’s support for party B.

Now I’m getting in the weeds and questioning the motivations of party A. I suspect this might make party A feel the way party C does when people call them “useful idiots”. And perhaps it demonstrates how this line of questioning is an endless rabbit hole.

If you see people expressing an opinion that’s useful for the rich and powerful, it’s appealing to imagine that the people expressing that opinion are shills. But I think saying such out loud lowers the quality of discourse. If we go around accusing one people we disagree with of being shills, we aren’t learning or participating in an exchange of ideas, which is the point of a discussion forum like this.

There’s a perfectly sound explanation for those posts that seem “shillish”: sincerely held beliefs that are different from yours. I think fanboyism and ideology motivate a lot more people to argue on the internet than money. If you want proof of this, look at all the teeming masses arguing for all sorts of causes that the rich and powerful don’t care about.

Facebook, Google, and Netflix are known to make better offers than Apple and Amazon (although those two are capable of great offers and have both employed thousands of engineers who became millionaires after stock appreciation).

Google seems to have no trouble playing music from Spotify for me. It can even manage it while I yell my song requests from the shower.

Maybe they can’t be bribed with cash, but could they be bribed with a nice contract for the company they founded? Or threatened for access to a market?

I don’t know, in the Bay Area 150k is entry level and big companies pay 250k or much higher to senior engineers. Whenever I hear about pay in Europe it’s a fraction of that. It may be worth it for a different lifestyle, I’m not making that argument. Regardless, from the company POV it must lead to different choices about buy vs. build.

When heating you usually turn some energy into heat. When air conditioning you use energy to move heat out of the conditioned space, emitting waste heat somewhere else. If you’re doing it outdoors, it seems like the waste heat is going to make the local environment even hotter, and in the worse case would cause some kind of air conditioning arms race. Outdoor heating doesn’t have this problem.

Given what I’ve read elsewhere about the lives of migrant workers in Qatar, I can imagine a dystopian scenario where stadium visitors enjoy a cool breeze while workers beneath are being blasted with heat. Hopefully they have engineered a safe way of dissipating that heat energy.

I wonder if we’ll see independently-owned drones doing deliveries ala Amazon’s driver-partner contractors. I suppose it depends on how much drones cost in capital and how much liability there is to make it worth it for the big cos to distance themselves that way. Employment costs probably aren’t much of an issue.