Well, I disagree with that, and if I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws to make it unprofitable for people to buy out housing and have it sit empty. Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty…
You will still have to pay capital gains tax in $ once you pay for something in Bitcoin though (assuming that your bitcoin has appreciated versus the $)
Short answer is no. There is no good way to measure the value generated by an individual engineer in most cases (in large enough companies), only the total/average value produced by a group of engineers - and even then,…
Those frictional costs (of moving) are the whole problem. SF salaries are where they are at because of those frictional costs (people choosing not to move to SF, whether by personal choice or by way of visa restrictions…
The SF salary is high because of high demand and low supply (of competent engineers). If you move remote, you increase the supply of competent engineers (there are likely people in middle-of-nowhere that are just as…
No, since there is no good way to measure how much a person's individual work is worth (in software engineering). There are ways to do that in finance and sales - that's why the pay bands for those fields are so much…
Yes, and the cost of labor in that case is not everyone getting an SF salary, it's everyone getting a much lower (but equal) salary. Part of the reason that SF salaries still exist is that the US has a very tough…
> Again, not true. That employee can simply... move. You've ignored that. Well, yes, but we're arguing that they have the same leverage in their new place of residence as they did before the move. If they have to move…
Have you missed out on the last 50 years of history of American labor and union busting? Programmers are not special snowflakes in this regard, just currently in a very friendly market environment, but don't think for a…
Pay cuts are a pretty accepted alternative to layoffs during recessions... I think it certainly depends. It's more of an ethical question - as legally, I'm pretty sure the company can implement a salary cut whenever it…
> Except that a Google employee moving to someplace with a weaker economy has not reduced their leverage. These are people who have the power to simply move back. A Google employee that moves away both changes the pool…
I keep hearing the trope of "people are paid the value of their work" come up, and it's completely false and absurd. People are paid the market clearing price (a.k.a. better or equal to the alternatives, given some…
Whenever two people have conflicting absolute rights, who's right is more absolute? That's why rights are always relative. The Bill of Rights is a good starting place, but any law should pass the common…
The innocent until proven guilty only applies in criminal court, not in civil court by the way. Personal privacy is good, but there are some societal things that should supersede the right to personal privacy in my…
We have a disagreement in what makes a public figure then. I believe that over a certain level of wealth, the wealth alone makes someone a public figure or a figure of significance (since wealth = power, and public…
> purchased his founders’ shares in PayPal through his Roth IRA during PayPal’s formation." > That's literally the market rate. That's not a market rate, that's a price-fixed rate. A market rate involves actual buyer…
Sure - there's no problem with valuing those shares at $0.001 in general, because there's not much that valuation matters for in the short term (eventually you will pay different taxes depending on the end result of…
What happened was Thiel buying 1.7M shares of stock in his own startup at a value of $0.001 per share in 1999 in his Roth IRA (and then cashing out for $30M+ in 2002). It's debatable whether it was legal (because he was…
> Debating wether tax returns should or should not be public is a great debate to have, I agree. The country should be having that debate. And if we decide tax returns should be made public, it should happen in the…
It's a complicated relationship. The prices of assets are related to the price of debt (the cheaper the debt, the more expensive the asset). Housing is an asset that pays a coupon (rent), so it acts a bit like a bond.…
Due to hedonic adaptation, what matters is not the absolute state of existence, but the trajectory that that state takes throughout your life. (a small positive slope in terms of life quality is much better than a…
> Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few. You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market…
Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the…
I'm a Russian immigrant to US and very much anti-Putin, but in order to understand the Russian perspective you have to understand the psyche and history of a country, not just facts. And that's a lot harder to do -…
> My rationale is simply that more dollars to go around means that one dollar is worth less. Simple logic, rather than fancy economics, I guess. You're looking at the total supply (which is true in the long term, since…
Well, I disagree with that, and if I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws to make it unprofitable for people to buy out housing and have it sit empty. Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty…
You will still have to pay capital gains tax in $ once you pay for something in Bitcoin though (assuming that your bitcoin has appreciated versus the $)
Short answer is no. There is no good way to measure the value generated by an individual engineer in most cases (in large enough companies), only the total/average value produced by a group of engineers - and even then,…
Those frictional costs (of moving) are the whole problem. SF salaries are where they are at because of those frictional costs (people choosing not to move to SF, whether by personal choice or by way of visa restrictions…
The SF salary is high because of high demand and low supply (of competent engineers). If you move remote, you increase the supply of competent engineers (there are likely people in middle-of-nowhere that are just as…
No, since there is no good way to measure how much a person's individual work is worth (in software engineering). There are ways to do that in finance and sales - that's why the pay bands for those fields are so much…
Yes, and the cost of labor in that case is not everyone getting an SF salary, it's everyone getting a much lower (but equal) salary. Part of the reason that SF salaries still exist is that the US has a very tough…
> Again, not true. That employee can simply... move. You've ignored that. Well, yes, but we're arguing that they have the same leverage in their new place of residence as they did before the move. If they have to move…
Have you missed out on the last 50 years of history of American labor and union busting? Programmers are not special snowflakes in this regard, just currently in a very friendly market environment, but don't think for a…
Pay cuts are a pretty accepted alternative to layoffs during recessions... I think it certainly depends. It's more of an ethical question - as legally, I'm pretty sure the company can implement a salary cut whenever it…
> Except that a Google employee moving to someplace with a weaker economy has not reduced their leverage. These are people who have the power to simply move back. A Google employee that moves away both changes the pool…
I keep hearing the trope of "people are paid the value of their work" come up, and it's completely false and absurd. People are paid the market clearing price (a.k.a. better or equal to the alternatives, given some…
Whenever two people have conflicting absolute rights, who's right is more absolute? That's why rights are always relative. The Bill of Rights is a good starting place, but any law should pass the common…
The innocent until proven guilty only applies in criminal court, not in civil court by the way. Personal privacy is good, but there are some societal things that should supersede the right to personal privacy in my…
We have a disagreement in what makes a public figure then. I believe that over a certain level of wealth, the wealth alone makes someone a public figure or a figure of significance (since wealth = power, and public…
> purchased his founders’ shares in PayPal through his Roth IRA during PayPal’s formation." > That's literally the market rate. That's not a market rate, that's a price-fixed rate. A market rate involves actual buyer…
Sure - there's no problem with valuing those shares at $0.001 in general, because there's not much that valuation matters for in the short term (eventually you will pay different taxes depending on the end result of…
What happened was Thiel buying 1.7M shares of stock in his own startup at a value of $0.001 per share in 1999 in his Roth IRA (and then cashing out for $30M+ in 2002). It's debatable whether it was legal (because he was…
> Debating wether tax returns should or should not be public is a great debate to have, I agree. The country should be having that debate. And if we decide tax returns should be made public, it should happen in the…
It's a complicated relationship. The prices of assets are related to the price of debt (the cheaper the debt, the more expensive the asset). Housing is an asset that pays a coupon (rent), so it acts a bit like a bond.…
Due to hedonic adaptation, what matters is not the absolute state of existence, but the trajectory that that state takes throughout your life. (a small positive slope in terms of life quality is much better than a…
> Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few. You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market…
Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the…
I'm a Russian immigrant to US and very much anti-Putin, but in order to understand the Russian perspective you have to understand the psyche and history of a country, not just facts. And that's a lot harder to do -…
> My rationale is simply that more dollars to go around means that one dollar is worth less. Simple logic, rather than fancy economics, I guess. You're looking at the total supply (which is true in the long term, since…