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The problem with analyzing HN comment and submission voting is we don't (AFAIK) have access to downvotes and that changes everything. We used to know the net votes for comments but that was removed years ago. Only submissions have net votes.

But what you find is that position matters, both for submissions and comments. There's a world of difference between being on the front page or not and being on the first page of cvomments (nad the higher on that page the better) for getting eyeballs (because people only scroll so far) and thus votes.

I mention this because both submissions and comments are heavily curated. It's more obvious with submissions where one post can stick around for 12 hours with 30 net votes on the front page while another will disappear within 15 minutes with 200+. Part of this is known. For example, the moderation team tends to dislike "political" submissions. I put that in quotes because what is and isn't "political" can be open to interpretation. Often on the Internet in general something is "political" if you don't agree with it and it's not if you are. You might even hear descriptions like "common sense" about the latter.

Comments are heavily curated too. Some of this is just rotating the top comments for freshness. Some of it is some sort of commenter rating where their comments will tend to be ranked high or low when fresh. And some of it is simply downranking certain comments.

On Reddit this would all be both more transparent and easier to visualize and analyze because we could sort by different critera, we could see total votes and we could see up/down vote breakdowns.

To be clear, no shade to the moderation team here. Just observing what happens.

One side note: I believe Shipwrecked isn't you but as a general observation to anyone, it reverses the mousewheel direction. Don't mess with scrolling.

Good work here. Just a few comments about your graph:

1. This may be personal preference but I would find the chart more reasonable if there was a horizonal line for where the cursor is. The way you have it, it feels a bit "disconnected" but maybe that's just me. I'm thinking of, say, how Google Finance does their charts;

2. You can probably compact the header into a single row/line;

3. I'm visually impaired and would like more contrast in the colours used accessibility-wise;

4. You have the submitter's name. That could be a link to their profilee;

5. This may just be preference but the tooltip feels "off" to me. This may be related to the above point about not having a line for the cursor maybe? But also the dark background doesn't seem to fit. Maybe it's the color too. I could just be nit-picking here;

6. Show number of comments maybe?

And the dashboard:

1. The cards themselves have a lot of wasted space. Again, you could link to the profile in them;

2. If you're scrolled down the page, when you click on a card you don't see the graph;

3. There's no hover over effects on the dashboard graphs. There easily could be I suspect;

4. I'm not sure a graph for raw score makes sense. It can only go up. Maybe show how many upvotes gained in that period?

5. The legend has different styling on the dashboard graph for some reason;

6. If you scroll down, click a card then scroll up you see the graph but you can't see what submission it belongs to. Maybe put some indicator on the graph or rethink how the layout works in general so you can see both the graph and selected card at the same time regardles of scrolling.

Anyway, good work.


took me 3 days but I got all of that implemented! the graph for raw score was more to see rate of score vs position on the page but upvotes gained kinda makes sense (probably not going to change for now since I love the pretty slopes). I spent quite a while tweaking all the colors to meet or exceed the webaim accessibility contrast ratios so hopefully thats better :)

thats some amazing feedback! i'll try to implement that tonight. Agree with you on the scrolling for sure; I know the people that made the website so i'll pass that on to them :)

Years ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a team effective: Project Aristotle [1]. The key factor? Psychological safety.

Fast forward to the present day and we are in permanent layoff culture. The maverick facade from Big Tech was dropped long ago. Employees are graded on a curve and 5-10% of those regardless of their actual performance will be deemed substandard just to fit the curve. A good portion of those will end up on PIPs or just be laid off. But even those on PIPs are more likely than not to be working there 6 months later.

This is an inherently cutthroat environment. Any pretense of psychological safety has been abandoned in favor of short-term profit seeking. While this is sold as a way of weeding out low performers and cutting costs (despite record high profits that's somehow still necessary), it's really a method of suppressing labor costs.

But having experienced this kind of toxic environment, it doesn't select high-performers, it selects the people who are most liked by management. People who are neurodivergent suffer disproportionately (IME).

My point is that in general nobbody is your friend at work. Not your colleagues, not your manager and not HR> They are to varying degrees protecting their own asses and you will be shocked how quickly someone who is nice to you at work will throw you under the bus to protect themselves ot simply to get ahead.

In a desperate bid to cut and suppress labor costs, managemen thas ramped up the toxicity and further undermined and destroyed any social connections you may make at work. But they've also destroyed the psychological safety that allowed them to do great things. Stack-ranking employees for likability on a curve and OKRs are not what drives success. Those things destroy success.

[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/


I really feel like we'd all be better off if Manufacturing Consent [1] was required reading.

The media is complicit in pushing domestic and foreign policy, is selective in what it covers and how it covers it and intentionally uses very different language to describe the exact same thing (eg [2][3]).

I generally agree that what the DPRK does and what Europe (or the US) does isn't really that different. Dig a little deper and look at the role the West played in creating the DPRK and the intentional starving (ie economic sanctions) we enacted, just like in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Venezuela.

European (and US) history of the last century is the neoliberals siding with fascists to quash anything communist or communist adjacent (eg labor unions). Germany might've lost the war but Nazism won. Whatever you do, don't look too deeply into the background of Adolf Heusinger [4] who was made the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

[2]: https://x.com/trtworld/status/1785959608168731091?lang=en

[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-how-media-langua...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger


Just to confirm, you believe the local media as perceived by their population (& by extension social media) has the same power to push back on policy in the DPRK as the EU?

Everyone in New Zealand is struggling unless you've been there for 10-20+ years (when you could still afford a house) or you're an immigrant who sold a house in your home country and thus you can afford a house.

The average wage in NZ is NZ$61k and the average house price is NZ$908k. This is absolutely unsustainable.

This same pattern is playing out to various degrees in Australia, the UK, pretty much anywhere in Europe (certainly Western Europe), Scandanavia any any large city in the US.

And as far as I can tell there's absolutely no serious political opposition to any of this happening in any of these countries. None. Your political choices are between the extreme neoliberalism with lots of racism and the slightly milder neoliberalism with slightly less overt racism.

This is all capitalism working as intended. Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy. Housing is being hoarded and artifically constrained in supply. People are being loaded up with student debt, medical debt and mortgage debt where we careen ever closer to the South Asian brick kilns.


> Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy.

No, it is a transfer from those who don’t own land to those who already own land. Roughly correlates to young/poor/immigrant classes transferring wealth (or maintaining wealth disparity) to older/richer/beneficiary classes.

That is why it is politically popular. Low and flat land value tax rates have always enabled this, but their effects were temporarily masked by the population boom allowing a lot of upward movement in the lower (non land owning) classes due to broad economic growth.


It's got little to do with the ultra-wealthy, who have their wealth in equity. The problem is the upper middle class who have their wealth in land. They are 30% of the population and command election outcomes against anyone who tries to change the status quo. To them, the housing crisis is a housing bonanza and they plan on keeping it that way.

I also take issue with buzzword "neoliberal", as if leftists would be any better with their rent control, NIMBY tendencies, and ideological hostility to supply-side policy (see Dean Preston in US, Zohran Mamdani in US, Adrian Ramsay in UK, Chandler-Mather in AU). In my estimation, they would be worse than any "abundance neoliberal", who at least have Austin, Texas as a successful case study they can point to, and who have ideas that make logical sense. The problem is not their policy ideas but the political reality they exist in where they're constrained in what they can do by a politically active plurality (landowners) that wish to persist the status quo.


There’s some truth to that, but I think it’s even broader. Here in Sweden there’s a widely understood term (”bostadskarriär”) that roughly translates to ”housing career” and refers to building wealth through home ownership. It’s often more important to your financial success than your actual career, even for the working class.

All this is due to regulations of course. In Sweden its a combination of tax rules, laws around borrowing, zoning regulations and construction standards that has kept the gravy train rolling.

It’s a bit hard to see how it could continue though. Feels like it could come crashing down at any point. On the other hand: I’ve had that feeling for 15 years.

EDIT: Monetary policy is the big one actually.


> and ideological hostility to supply-side policy

I'd think public, union, and coop built housing are all still popular with leftists, and those are all supply side policies.


Thank you

So tired of people talking about the housing crisis as if megacorp is the one buying all the houses to drive up prices. Yes, commenter, they do buy homes, but by far the single biggest player is regular people. They both are getting rich of the system and voting to keep it in place.

Even worse though...houses are still being sold at these insane prices. There are still fresh dual income high earning non immigrant non billionairs childs non megacorp investor regular people still coming up with the money.

I don't know whats worse, never being able to afford a house or seeing people you know (or thought you knew) somehow getting into one. And then voting down any build out initiative that would weaken their investment.


NZ did too little too late. There’s a bunch of Chinese who bought a lot… a LOT of houses in NZ. It’s one way of transferring money out of China is to use it for business. And they don’t need to leave China to do it. That was stopped but too late when they own 100s of houses.

First, the very idea of the "middle class" is capitalist propaganda. It's meant to divide the working class. It serves no other purpose. It serves to be aspirational for people to participate in a system they won't benefit from while allowing the slightly well off to blame the less well off for their own circumstances.

Second, the voters are absolutely complicit in this sytem because they think they're benefitting. But they're not. The ultra-wealthy are reaping the rewards.

Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.

So then you think "maybe I need to own multiple properties" but you're barely better off.

As for the rest, you're confusing a whole bunch of different things. "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics, designed to make status quo Democrats somehow feel good about being indistinguishable from Republicans.

Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed. For one, trust leftists would abolish private property (as distinct from personal property). You get to own your house. You just don't get to hoard land.

I do partially agree about Texas though. Texas's property tax system, at least up until recent years, is significantly better than California's (as one example). In Texas, seniors can defer property tax increases until their death (when they'll be collected from the estate) giving people a choice to downsize or not. In California, you can inherit preferential property tax rates because the voters voted in Prop 13 that allows Disney to pay property tax rates set in the 1960s on the backs of seniors not getting kicked out of their homes.

I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is. If you support the hoarding of private property and are pro-capitalist then, by definition, you're a neoliberal. That's definitional, not a perjorative.


> Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.

I agree with you on this.

> Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed.

That may be your interpretation of the underlying philosophy, but in practice, leftist politicians turn out to be more NIMBY than center-left liberal politicians. I'm not so interested in No True Scotsman type appeals on this point.

> "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics

It's laughable to equate "social democracy and targeted industrial policy but with less red tape when you try to build something" with Reaganite policies.

> I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is.

The deployment of the word "neoliberal" is almost always a slur and a misunderstanding. People use it as a catch-all category to mean "status quo thing I don't like", wrongly bundling up heterogeneous things that are vastly different. It's the left's version of "uniparty". A thought-terminating rhetorical device, not to be used in any serious analysis.


I suspect you might be confusing "leftism" with "liberalism with progressive aesthetics". This isn't a "No True Scotsman" type situation. If one supports private property, one is definitionally not a leftist. People love to call themselves "progressive" (moreso than "leftist", which has nasty socialist overtones; thank you Red Scare) because it makes them sound and feel tolerant and caring. But leftism isn't about social issues directly. It's economics.

The leftist solution to housing is social housing, meaning the government builds, maintains and supplies a significant percentage of the housing to ensure that everyone has a roof over their head. Vienna is an excellent example of this where the majority (61% IIRC) of all housing is "social housing". 50+ years ago the UK almost entirely got rid of landlords [1] and then along came Thatcher.

"Abundance" is indistinguishable from trickle down economics. The core tenet of "Abundance" is that if there is so much then everybody will get something, basically. How is that not trickle down economics [2]? "Abundance" doesn't challenge the status quo. It reinforces it. So Ezra Klein gets a ton of media and invited to all the good parties and allows liberals to feel good about supporting fundamentally right-wing policies.

And "red tape" here is just another way of saying "deregulation". The defining characteristics of neoliberalism are "free market capitalism" and "deregulation". I don't really care if people misuse "neoliberal". It still has meaning. It sounds like you just don't like being (correctly) labelled as such. That's really no different to people saying things like "the far Left" or "the radical left" about the Democrats, which is beyond laughable.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...

[2]: https://www.deanprestonsf.com/blog/abundance


It's not trickle down economics because social democracy is not trickle down economics. Industrial policy is not trickle down economics. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not trickle down economics. Funding public goods is not trickle down economics. Taxing externalities is not trickle down economics. Subsidizing supply is not trickle down economics. This is the problem with the leftist worldview where everything is either "neoliberalism" or "not neoliberal ism". It's an overly coarse worldview that doesn't facilitate useful analysis, it impedes your ability to disambiguate between different things. If you think cutting bad regulations as part of the policy mix is by definition Reaganite and therefore bad, then you really need to reevaluate things because not all regulations are good by virtue of them being regulations!

  "But leftism isn't about social issues directly. It's economics."
I am talking about people like self styled socialist Dean Preston (the guy you linked, who is a NIMBY that made California's housing crisis worse) or the various Greens parties across the anglosphere who occupy the leftmost end of the political electorate. Whether we label them as leftists or not isn't a hill I'm going to die on. The point is that the leftmost end of the spectrum are more likely to be NIMBYs and have some very wacky and economically illiterate ideas about housing policy than the center left. And I'm someone who supports social housing as part of the mix like what Carney is planning for Canada.

Are you under the misconception that "Abundance" is social democracy? It isn't. It is a defense of the neoliberal status quo. It doesn't challenge authority or the economic order at all. It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation and more wealth hoarding. That's why it gets attention from the mainstream media and the Democratic Party's donors and power brokers. It's Democratic Reaganism. I cannot stress this enough.

Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. Private developers will not build enough housing to meaningfully reduce housing costs. The "free market" (which isn't real) will not solve this problem. It takes government intervention.

YIMBYism is well-intentioned and I'm all for more housing. My point is simply that it will not meaningfully solve the problem. I'm sorry if you're offended by the label "neoliberal" but objectively, if you believe that deregulation and capitalism will solve the housing crisis then you are definitionally and objectively a neoliberal.

I'm not sure what Greens you refer to. You might be talking about Jill Stein, who is 100% a grifter.

As for Carney, I had a look at the supposed plan [1] and I see a bunch of demand-side policies where the private development sector is being somehow tasked with lowering their own profits. Housing in Canada needs to be cheaper. That means existing house prices need to go down. Only government intervention in the market can make that happen.

You want to see what a leftist housing policy looks like? Try this:

1. Massively increase property taxes on investment properties;

2. Tax worldwide income of anyone who owns property in Canada meaning the "beneficial owner" (so no hiding behidn LLCs and trusts). Property without a declared beneficial owner simply revert to government ownership;

3. Give the government the right of first refusal to buy any foreclosed property. Use it to build up housing stock. Banks can eat the loss;

4. Homeowners can walk away from properties that are underwater. They revert to government ownership as if they'd been foreclosed on. Again, banks eat the loss if there is one. The previous owners get to stay on essentially a perpetual lease paying affordable rent to the government;

5. A lot of development policies require a certain percentage to be "affordable" housing. There are a lot of games played with this. Ownership of all affordable units goes to the government. The government pays for these. If the price isn't agreeable, the property simply doesn't get approval to be built.

This would tank the property market. As it should. The goal should be for the Canadian government to own 30-50% of all housing units within 10-15 years.

[1]: https://economics.td.com/ca-federal-housing-plan


You seem to be mixing up democratic socialism, which is against capitalism, with social democracy, a more mainstream center-left prescription playing out in various European countries that Ezra subscribes to, which coexists with capitalism but is categorically not right wing or Reaganism. Ezra is basically "social democracy but where the good regulations are enhanced and the bad regulations are removed."

  > It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation
We definitely need more deregulation of bad regulations and not of good regulations. Some regulations are bad and they need to be removed. This is the non-ideological position that evaluates each regulation on its own merits. Not the ideologically possessed position that clusters every single regulation in a monolithic tent and says "deregulate it all because regulations are bad" or "maintain them all because deregulation is bad".

  > Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. 
And you are basing this assertion on what economic theory or what empirical research?

Compare rental inflation in San Francisco which has effectively outlawed private construction with Austin Texas where construction is more deregulated and housing starts are allowed to track demand.

Get a dataset of American cities, do a scatter plot of rental inflation on the x-axis against the change in per capita housing starts on the y-axis and observe the high R-squared.

It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.

I am not against a land tax and social housing as added measures but the inability to accept the efficacy of supply-side policies on purely ideological grounds will mean left-wing politicians like Dean Preston will continue to do more harm than good whenever they gain power. They don't know how damaging they are because they fail to grasp the basic facts of housing economics because accepting those facts violates the dishonest shibboleths they need to hold to (developers always bad, capital always bad, regulations always good, economics isn't real).


Like I said in an earlier comment, there are things about the Texas property tax system I like. But we can't really compare Texas housing to the Bay Area. Texas is flat with low-value land in all directions. The Bay Area is incredibly space-constrained in an earthquake zone.

I'm not defending the largely single-family home zoning of SF here. I'm simply saying that any affordability you get in Austin (which itself isn't really that affordable) is mostly by spreading in all directions, something simply not possible in SF.

If regulation was the core problem, wouldn't Houston [1] defy housing price trends having no zoning regulation? It does not (eg Austin [2]).

> It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.

No, they don't. I'm sorry but you are uninformed here. You are either confusing liberal policies with leftist policies or simply haven't seen a leftist policy or you're confusing opposition to deregulation as being a NIMBY and not understanding why.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS26420Q

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q


I'm sorry but rent control is what we need lest you want more occupied housing.

So what you’re really saying is NZ is for sale…

All countries are if you're VHNWI ($5-7M minimum) or on a skilled visa. Plenty of options open up for skilled visas with somewhat expedited naturalization.

No. Most of Asia can’t be bought. Foreigners cannot own property in lots of Asian countries.

Yeah sure, didn't Peter Thiel buy a chunk of it ?

> This is all capitalism working as intended

Supply constraint of housing by rent-seekers who have managed regulatory capture is absolutely not capitalism working as intended.


I suggest you read up on the history of capitalism, specifically the Inclosure Act [1]. The only difference between feudalism and capitalism is who is doing the rent-seeking.

We extend all of this to intellectual property too. It's rent-seeking all the way down [2]. Have you seen any of the documentaries (or the movie) about how Tetris came to be? Some enthusiasts in the USSR made it. The contribution of capitalism was just whole levels of sublicensing and distribution agreements.

Or maybe you think capitalism is responsible for innovation? Take drug research. Almost all novel compounds come of the education sector using government funding. The "innovation" here is for-profit companies marking that up 8000% and then lobbying for laws that forbid the government from negotiating prices or anyone from importing the same thing from overseas for 1% of the price. That's c apitalism.

Maybe you believe capitalism is about "free markets". First off, there's no such thing. Second, markets exist in every economic system and existed thousands of years before capitalism did.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down


I agree with 95% of what you said. The distinction between capitalism and free markets is very important - and most people conflate these two concepts which leads them to be manipulated. The only thing I do not agree with you is a minor quibble - most of the communist economic systems actively destroyed free markets. The only exception may be Communist China.

> Supply constraint of housing by rent-seekers who have managed regulatory capture is absolutely not capitalism working as intended.

Depends on whose intentions you mean. People who believe in free markets? Then not as intended. People who stand to benefit from rent seeking? Then as intended.

I would argue the second group are far more politically influential.


Good rant but a bit of a simplification.

NZers love to go off and do their OE (overseas experience) typically in their early-mid twenties often in hubs like London. A kiwi in their 30s who hasn't lived and worked overseas is the odd one out at parties.

Many of those people do extremely well. I know several who made millions in banking and IT.

Then they come back to NZ when they have kids and put that money into housing. These are some of the people paying $3M for a house. Others are people who have inherited wealth from their parents who invested big in NZ property last century (e.g. boomers). Others are wealthy immigrants from UK, SA, US even.

Yes that sucks for the local who has only been earning $61K but it's reality.

Add to that a weird situation where there is no capital gains tax on housing, with all political parties too scared to address that giant elephant in the room, and NZ offering an awesome lifestyle in many ways except for salaries, and and you have a perfect recipe for high house prices.

Is it sustainable? My view is that it is (not in the sense sustainable == good, but in the sense sustainable == can keep going for a long time). There's no god given right to affordable housing. There was a period in the 1950s where there was prosperity for all, but looking back, that was the anomaly, not the current state of affairs.


> There's no god given right to affordable housing.

Sure, but if you take everything and leave nothing for the masses, sooner or later they'll make your life miserable too. Whether that happens with regular ole crime, or revolution, one way or another the scales will be balanced.

If you want a comfortable life in your mansion, you'd better make sure that your butler and doorman can afford comfortable homes of their own and a decent standard of living.


You say it sucks but that's the reality. Why? It doesn't have to be this way.

Denying people shelter is violence.

We could end homelessness with a fraction of what we spend on the police and prisons. Yet we'd rather spend money on an increasingly militarized police force and the convict slavery system to protect property prices so Jeff Bezos can have $220 billion instead of $200 billion.

War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution. When people such as myself advocate for a decent basic standard of living at the expensive of the wealthy having slightly less, we're really trying stave off the guillotines.


Currently in many countries the social contract stipulates that the majority of the population refrains from voting for a system that confiscates the wealth of the top 5% and in exchange their lives are bearable.

Trump promised to address the problems of low wage workers, and in many places jihadists style themselves as social reformers.

Since NZ does not have the luxury to blame it on refugees or neighbours, I don’t think it is sustainable.


Sounds exactly like Ireland of like 25 years ago.

> There's no god given right to affordable housing.

There's also no god-given right to avoid a guillotine. These are all choices people make, and can make differently if given reason to do so.


I've thought about this issue a lot. What's become clear to me later in life is that I have ADHD and probably autism. This has not only hindered social relationships, it's lethal to your career to.

Why? Because a bit of autism tends to make you good at your job but allistic people can always seemingly tell you're "off", no matter how well you (try and) mask.

And ultimately career progression is a social game. It's not about being good at your job. It's about whether people like you. Sure there are some outliers who get far on technical ability but they succeed in spite of this not because of it.

So when you say you don't enjoy the "business" of tech, it means you've reached your ceiling where it requires influencing other people as direct reports, as a tech leader or both.

If you're in this boat, and a lot of tech people are IME, then my advice is to make your bag while you can because you will be the first to be discarded and you will suffer at the dark, ugly side of tech, which is ageism.

Avoiding ageism is largely a social exercise. If the leadership at your company likes you, they'll keep you. If they don't, they won't. You'll find yourself randomly picked on a round of layoffs sooner or later.


Thanks. I already retired once at 39 with this exact view in mind. I'm frankly amazed I'm still overemployed at 48. But yes, I've been super bearish on the remaining chapters in my career. I've hedged by paying off a (argh, low-interest) mortgage, stacking the bank, and I have a very well developed and near-tech-money side hustle that is ageism resistant.

I keep waiting for this shoe to drop. It hasn't yet. Now the pendulum has swung far enough that I want to preserve my time more than I want to stack more bricks. Amusingly, it's a source of tension with my wife who plans to work for another 15 years and will not be excited to see me out playing without her. (her people live into 100 on the regular. My people die in their 40s and 50s with alarming frequency -- our horizon perspectives are very different :D )

All good problems. If I lose all my tech jobs tomorrow, I will be grateful for the run and not be going hungry. I half expect I'd be relieved.


It's a shame posts like this get a negative reception here because there's a valid case to be made that Starship is in the very least troubled or possibly even a doomed boondoggle.

We've had 9 flights and are still pretty far from entering commercial usage. This is expensive too. I've seen estimates that each launch is costing ~$500 million.

One can make the case that Starship is a classic second system effect [1]. Just like IPv6, which decided it was making breaking changes anyway so why not break all the things (all while not solving the one real problem but that's another story). We see this all the time.

The question is: what problem is Starship solving? Yes it has a larger LEO and geostationary payload but this seems to be a pretty limited market thus far as demonstrated by there only being 11 Falcon Heavy launches total thus far. Launching multiple satellites at once only works for launching on the same or very similar orbit for the same constellation like Starlink. As soon as you drastically change the required orbit, you're talking about a separate launch.

Is it to go to the Moon or Mars? Notably, Elon called the Moon "a distraction" [2]. That doesn't bode well. After all, if your launch system was suited for that, wouldn't you want NASA to pay for it to prove it, basically? Fundamentally, it doesn't make sense to have a vehicle like this to land on the Moon (or Mars) and have your astronauts be 40 meters in the air, having to get down and back up.

And going to Mars I don't htink will happen for decades, if ever commercially. With the right political circumstances we may get Apollo like flights to demonstrate superiority but I think colonization is a joke. Mars is actually a terrible place to colonize. It's like the moon but worse in every single way.

And to even get there SpaceX needs to perfect in-orbit refueling, which is technically challenging and not something they've even started yet since they haven't even got to stable orbit yet.

Oh I disagree with the author about NASA doing this earlier, talking about Saturn rockets. Saturn was an expensive low-yield bespoke rocket not suited for mass production. Every Saturn V was essentially a one-off.

The industry workhorse here is the Falcon 9. It's reliable and high volume (>100 launches a year). Starship may yet sink SpaceX.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

[2]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875023335891026324


If you look at it through the eyes of just Starlink though it makes a lot of sense. The new v3 sats do solve a lot of the problems with Starlink in more (suburban) areas with much more capacity per sat.

In a happy path if Starship works and v3 works, each Starship launch would launch ~60Tbit/sec of downstream capacity and ~10Tbit/sec of upstream (ideal world figures yada yada).

With falcon 9 and v2 mini, each launch provides ~2Tbit/sec of downstream and ~0.2Tbit/sec of upstream.

So roughly 30x the downstream and 50x the upstream.

The upstream is probably the critical part to improve as well for congestion (usually upstream gets saturated before downstream in most retail ISP configs, on asymmetrical technologies like DOCSIS and causes terrible user experience).

So Spaceship could be ~40x the cost per launch of Falcon 9 and it would still make sense financially. I assume it won't be anywhere near that. And this doesn't take into account how much further Starlink will be on all the other competitors that are trying to spring up.

I think if you ignore everything else and just focus on Starlink (which has the potential to be a $100bn/yr business easily) it is worth them rolling the dice. Whether it actually works or not is interesting to discuss - but figures like $500m/launch is really pocket change for the scale/potential scale that Starlink operates in.


There is probably huge military potential for orbital weapons nobody wants to talk about out in public.

I don't mind the negative reception. "Starship is such a moronic project..." It's a negative article that deserves it really.

This is basically what happened after 2008. The entry level jobs college grads did basically disappeared and didn't really come back for many years. So we kind of lost half a generation. Those who missed out are the ones who weren't able to buy a house or start a family and are now in their 40s, destined to be permanent renters who can never retire.

The same thing will happen to Gen Z because of AI.

In both cases, the net effect of this (and the desired outcome) is to suppress wages. Not only of entry-level job but every job. The tech sector is going to spend the next decade clawing back the high costs of tech people from the last 15-20 years.

The hubris here is that we've had a unprecedented boom such that many in the workforce have never experienced a recession, what I'd call "children of summer" (to borrow a George RR Martin'ism). People have fallen into the trap of the myth of meritocracy. Too many people thing that those who are living paycheck to paycheck (or are outright unhoused) are somehow at fault when spiralling housing costs, limited opportunities and stagnant real wages are pretty much responsible for everything.

All of this is a giant wealth transfer to the richest 0.01% who are already insanely wealthy. I'm convinced we're beyond the point where we can solve the problems of runaway capitalism with electoral politics. This only ends in tyranny of a permanent underclass or revolution.


I've long held that climbing Everest has become a gross display of wealth and vanity and basically nobody should do it. There's no glory in being the 4000th person to do so. It's not glamorous. You're basically climbing over trash and dead bodies to do it.

Often inexperienced people with too much money are putting themselves, their sherpas and other climbers are risk by doing so.

Using bottled oxygen already made this substantially easier. But this Xenon is on a whole new level. I went looking for the cost and found [1]:

> After a week, the Brits could be back at their desks at home. They still pay an introductory price of an undisclosed amount. In future, such a short trip to Everest will cost around 150,000 euros.

From my understanding, that's 50-100,000 more than usual. The whole thing just reeks of Oceangate.

And for what? To take a selfie at the top and to brag to you're equally vacous and wealthy friends? It would be more ethical to stay home and just Photoshop yourself into a photo. ChatGPT can probably do it for you.

Nepal is a very poor country. Being a sherpa is one of the few (locally) high paying jobs there are. Sherpas risk their lives for this. At least on K2 or Annapurna you're more likely to find experiernced and technically capable mountaineers who won't endanger your life for a selfie.

Everest is not a technically difficult climb, as far as I understand it. The death zone and general conditions make it a challenge. Negate those with Xenon and it's just a really expensive walk.

[1]: https://abenteuer-berg.de/en/with-xenon-to-mount-everest-and...


100%

I've climbed some mountains, and while I don't know if I would be capable of doing Everest, I do know that I wouldn't want to (unless I could do it like Goran Kropp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göran_Kropp). I guess I could brag if I doped myself, took a helicopter past the Khumbu Icefall, and had servants carrying my stuff the whole way to the summit, but I could never be proud of myself for doing that.


It's kind of amazing that the Stanndard Model, which by any objective measure has been a stunningly successful theory, can be both incredibly accurate and ludicrously inaccurate. The magnetic moment, which you mention, is an example of the latter, accurate to 8-10 significant digits. An example of the latter is the so-called "vacuum catastrophe" where QFT predicts the energy of a vacuum and is off... by 120 orders of magnitude.

Like no one really knows why we have three generations of particles and what that means or why they're so massive.

I only found out about hyperons [1] last year, where (at least) one down quark is replaced with a strange quark. And this matter has weird properties. IIRC the nuclei get smaller.

Many years ago I'd assumed it was only a matter of time until we make significant progress merging quantum mechanics and gravity but honestly, I'm starting to have doubts. The universe is under no obligation to make sense or give up its secrets. Just like in maths, some things may be unknowable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperon


This idea that the president has unrestricted ability to set foreign policy is an invention of this particular administration. In truth, powers are split between the executive and legislative branches [1].

Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century and why, for example, the Korean War wasn't technically a war (it was a "police action") and why the Vietnam War wasn't either. The First and Second Gulf Wars and the War in Afghanistan at least had explicit war resolutions passed by Congress, however misguided.

Brown pelicans typically lay three eggs. Some bird species can employ "deferred incubation" such that even when eggs are born on separate days, the eggs will hatch at the same time. Brown pelicans don't do this so the chicks hatch 2-3 days apart each. The eldest gets fed more so there ends up being a size difference. What inevitably happens is the eldest two conspire to push the youngest out of the nest. If it falls out, the parents won't feed it and it will die. Then after awhile the oldest pushes and second out. 90%+ of the time only the eldest ever fledges.

Why did I tell this story? Because it basically mirros what's going on with our government. We have, at least theoretically, three branches of government that are meant to balance each other. There has been a conservative takeover of the executive and judicial branches such as to neuter the legislative branch. This Supreme Court has both stripped Congress of power (eg overturning Chevron) and empowered the presidency (eg the presidential immunity decision that had absolutely zero basis in anything; it was simply invented). They've invented doctrines to allow them to overturn basically anything Congress does (eg "major questions" and "historical tradition"). This is a coup d'etat and the end result of the 50+ year Republican Project.

What happens next, just like the pelicans, is the courts gets neutered. Conservatives now push the "unitary executive" philosophy, which is a fancy way of saying they want a dictator, not beholden to any courts or lawmkaing body. The second chick is getting pushed out of the nest. The administration is openly defying the courts on many matters (eg Kilmer Abrego Garcia) and this Supreme Court has given them the immunity to do that.

I, personally, think we are beyond the point of no return. Electoral politics cannot possibly fix this situation. At the same time, the American empire is decline. We are going to see firsthand waht a dying empire looks like and I guarantee you it won't be pretty.

[1]: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-foreign-policy-powers-co...


> Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century and why, for example, the Korean War wasn't technically a war (it was a "police action") and why the Vietnam War wasn't either.

I keep seeing this brought up as some kind of "gotcha" point, but those wars involved conscription and billions of dollars of additonal military funding, all of which was presumably approved by congress. I find it hard to imagine a congress that is approving a draft would be averse to signing a war declaration.


It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam.

If anything it demonstrates a more recent trend where the executive oversteps its authority to engage in military action and to bypass Congress.

As for conscription, this was enabled by Congress in WW2 by "selective service" [1]. The administration maintains the authority to draft male citizens of a certain age into the military without explicit Congressional approval.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta...


>It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam.

Yeah. Not so much.

While the Korean conflict was not explicitly authorized by Congress, it was tacitly approved by Congress by passing several bills that both directly and indirectly appropriated funds to prosecute the Korean conflict.

That this wasn't followed up by a vote in Congress to make that official is definitely a constitutional issue, but one that SCOTUS did not address directly.

You're quite correct that Congress didn't declare war or provide explicit authorization for the use of military force. That said, it's not quite as cut and dried as you make it out to be.[0][1][2]

Congress gave the Executive branch explicit authorization for the use of military force in Vietnam with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution[3].

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C11-2...

[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/korea-war-powers-preced...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution

Edit: To clarify, I'm not arguing that Congress was correct in not providing explicit authorization for the Korean conflict, nor am I arguing that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations shouldn't have gone to Congress sooner to obtain authorization ala the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Rather, I'm pointing out that the situation was much more complicated than you make out WRT the Korean Conflict and that there was, in fact, explicit authorization from Congress for prosecuting the war in Vietnam.


The gotcha is that, given the thing is described as a war by more or less everyone in the world, clearly the power to declare a “war” has little to do with the power to start or join wars.


> Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century

Sticking point? Where in the Constitution does it say a declaration of war is required to wage war?

We didn't have a literal declaration of war for the Quasi War (1798-1800), the First Barbary War (1801–1805), the Second Barbary War (1815), any of the many American Indian wars, etc. That clearly didn't seem to be a sticking point for George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.


Chevron decision told Congress to do its fucking job and stop delegating it to the for-profit entities the regulations are supposed to apply to, unchecked.

The story of how it made it to the supreme court is a good one, about having to pay an inspector to ride on every fishing trip...

I don't see how this diminishes congressional power, unless you consider delegate count a sign of power.


This is a conservative talking point to justify stripping Congress of power.

The whole reason Chevron came into existence is because it's impossible for Congress to pass explicit regulations for every little thing as soon as it's needed. So agencies were instead given broad legislative mandates like "keep the water clean" or "manage fish stocks" because it was impossible to enumerate every circumstance.

So for 40 years through 7 presidents (4 Republican, 3 Democrat) with both parties controlling the House and the Senate at different times, Congress passed laws with Chevron in mind. Congress had the ability to roll back Chevron and declined to do so.

The backers of overturning Chevron know it's impossible. That's why they did it. It's just unadulterated greed to deregulate so companies can wantonly pollute the water and overfish without any sort or oversight, compliance and repercussions for slightly higher profits... temporarily. And when there's a mess that needs cleaning up, they'll get the taxpayers to pay for it.


Filling in “details” was the conceit of Chevron, but that’s not how it was used in practice. The agencies were creating vast new programs from whole cloth and demanding that courts defer to their interpretation of the statute as allowing it. Moreover, it has the effect of making it impossible for the legislature to count on the executive actually honoring compromises and trade offs baked into the legislation.


>> The whole reason Chevron came into existence is because it's impossible for Congress to pass explicit regulations for every little thing as soon as it's needed. So agencies were instead given broad legislative mandates like "keep the water clean" or "manage fish stocks" because it was impossible to enumerate every circumstance.

This misunderstands Chevron and the effect of its abandonment. Chevron stood for the proposition that the executive branch could generally interpret laws without judicial review (subject to a minimal standard which was nearly always met). What this meant in practice was that any agency could change its view on what the law means (and therefore change what the law is because courts were generally required to accept the new interpretation) whenever it wanted and that new view was binding law. This undermines two core principles of the American system: separation of powers (the judiciary says what the law is) and the rule of law (laws should be applied equally and consistently).

Eliminating Chevron returns us to the proper state of the law: the executive branch proposes a reading of the law, the other side proposes another, and an independent court considers both and states what the law is. And that’s the law going forward. It cannot be changed absent legislation. Congress passes a law, the judiciary says what the law is, and the executive executes it. If the executive wants to enforce a different law then it must get the legislative branch to pass that different law.

This is not a conservative talking point, it’s a talking point for anyone that thinks the President is not a king. It just seems like a conservative talking point to you because it was overturned during the Biden administration. Recall that Chevron came to be because of a Reagan administration interpretation.

Consider what the state of reality would be if Chevron remained good law today under the Trump administration. Trump’s interpretation of a statute would be what the statute says.

For example, 8 USC 1401 provides that “The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: (g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years: Provided, That any periods of honorable service in the Armed Forces of the United States, or periods of employment with the United States Government or with an international organization as that term is defined in section 288 of title 22 by such citizen parent, or any periods during which such citizen parent is physically present abroad as the dependent unmarried son or daughter and a member of the household of a person (A) honorably serving with the Armed Forces of the United States, or (B) employed by the United States Government or an international organization as defined in section 288 of title 22, may be included in order to satisfy the physical-presence requirement of this paragraph. This proviso shall be applicable to persons born on or after December 24, 1952, to the same extent as if it had become effective in its present form on that date;”

Do you really want the Trump administration to be able to what any of the ambiguous terms mean in this provision? What do you think Trump’s interpretation of the “geographical limits of the United States” is? What about what “honorable service” means?


This is incorrect. Chevron deference wasn't giving the executive branch sole power to interpret ambiguous statutes as you claim (despite your scary example). The so-called Chevron deference doctrine was simply that the Supreme Court ruled (~40 years ago in the Reagan administration) that if an agency is responsible for administering a statute that's ambiguous, that agency's interpretation should be deferred to.

But the real problem comes in because 40 years of laws were written both both parties with Chevron deference in mind. Not only did Congress not take action to overrule Chevron, consistently for 40 years, they intentionally wrote ambiguous statutes to give agency's the power to interpret those statutes, mostly because enumerating every possible circumstance was impossible.

Take managing fish stocks. What fish stocks? When should fishing seasons be? What's the inspection mechanism? How are licenses and quotas issues? How are they enforced? How should all this be reported to the public, Congress and the president? What about fish stocks that border international waters? How should they be managed?

Chevron acknowledged what was already happening: it was impossible to write legislation that way. Congress didn't have the bandwidth to initially write it, let alone maintain it as circumstances change.

The Supreme Court (rightly) recognized that without Chevron deference it would be impossible to an agency manage anything because any ambiguities or any simply unofreseen gaps would be used to neuter the agency in the courts. It made it impossible to have such agencies and that's the whole point of overturning Chevron. The very wealthy don't want Fedearl agencies. The whole thing is a libertarian wet dream and over the coming years we'll see the consequences as the same people poison the water supply and the food supply, overfish alal fishing stocks, crash the economy through unregulated financial markets and so on.


>> The so-called Chevron deference doctrine was simply that the Supreme Court ruled (~40 years ago in the Reagan administration) that if an agency is responsible for administering a statute that's ambiguous, that agency's interpretation should be deferred to.

This is a misstatement of what the law was. Under Chevron, the agency’s interpretation MUST be deferred to, not should. This is an affront to the separation of powers.

Agencies are not neutered. Nor are they prevented from interpreting ambiguous statutes post-Chevron. They are prevented from being the final say on interpretation. This is good, just, and in line with America’s constitutional regime.


> I don't see how this diminishes congressional power

Congress is too incompetent to assert its power.


The President and the courts didn't neuter Congress. Congress neutered itself.

Over the past several decades, Congress has been less and less able to pass legislation, less and less able to work with itself, eventually even unable to pass a budget (which is their most fundamental, basic duty). How many years of the last decade has Congress passed a budget? That would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.

Congress is broken, not because the President broke it, not because the courts broke it, but because party politics and the primary system broke it.

The President has ruled more and more by executive order, partly by overreach, and partly by necessity, because Congress can't or won't do their job.

I don't think that the courts stripped power from Congress by overturning Chevron. They stripped it from the executive branch.


The courts are mostly responsible for breaking Congress. Why? Citizens United. This is the case that decided "money equals speech" and allowed for unlimited dark money to be spent buying Congress.


I would say that plus Roe v. Wade. That created for people to be ideologically interested in controlling the Supreme Court. And Congress was a way to get that. So Roe v. Wade created the reason, and Citizens United created the means.

Overturning Chevron isn’t stripping Congressional power so much as it’s forcing Congress to explicitly use its power not to lose it. De facto, it does strip Congressional power, but that’s solely because Congress is too incompetent to fulfill its role.

Likewise, it also strips Executive power. Executive agencies can no longer fill in the obvious gaps in what Congress passed.


Well said! I also would like to note that something similar happened during the slow decline of the Roman Empire, where it morphed from a representative republic with a powerful senate to a dictatorial regime with one or at most three men in charge.

The only solace one can take from that historical precedent is that the full collapse took centuries, far longer than our lifetimes.

Our grandchildren may live in a time of the New American Empire that is ruled by an Emperor Trump III. It'll have a strange tradition of emperors painting their faces orange in the same manner as Roman emperors had a tradition of wearing purple robes.


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