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poke111's comments

poke111 | 6 years ago | on: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven't come true

Not exactly. If the market-clearing price for low-skill labor is already above the minimum wage, it will have no effect. If the market price is far below the minimum wage, it will have a large effect - positive for the workers with jobs, negative for the ones who are priced out or have their hours cut.

poke111 | 6 years ago | on: Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

I hate when people use this metaphor. Not because it's inaccurate to say that speech can cause imminent harm in some circumstances. But because its origin was a Supreme Court opinion that argued against the right to speak out against the draft in WW1, which I don't think too many people using this analogy today would agree with. Also, this legal argument has been rejected since then.

Point is, this exact argument could be (and has been) used to justify some pretty bad ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

poke111 | 6 years ago | on: Ditch Your Database for a Key-Value DB

uch... what a headache when a user needs to change their email. The mania for "schema-less" KV stores is so puzzling to me. It just takes all the stuff that used to be handled natively and seamlessly by the DB engine and forces you to reimplement it in code, only with more bugs, less efficiency, and less flexibility. I fought this battle on my current team and lost, and we have been paying a steep price ever since.

poke111 | 7 years ago | on: Twitter Permanently Bans Alex Jones and Infowars

LGBT being a protected class or not was not at issue in the cake shop decision, since they were not denied service in general (they had been regular customers of that shop, and were always served). The issue was whether designing a custom cake for their wedding was considered artistic expression, and as such he had a right to refuse under the 1st amendment since you cannot compel speech.

poke111 | 8 years ago | on: Rent Control Needs Retirement, Not a Comeback

I propose a new law that people with my SSN don't have to pay taxes. It would help me out a lot.

Every policy helps some people at the expense of others. Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs. You need to weigh both sides, not just the benefits. (edited)

poke111 | 8 years ago | on: Dow plunges 1000 points

No. The gambler's fallacy is when we ascribe dependency to independent events. Stock performance tomorrow is very much NOT independent of stock performance today, e.g. "market correction"

poke111 | 8 years ago | on: Please Don't Show Us Another “Typical Family Earning $270,000 a Year”

I think this is often a dumb complaint and it shows itself in other contexts sometimes. There's a natural floor to income, it's $0. But there is no ceiling. So naturally if you want to give a sampling of scenarios covering most people, most examples will be high earners (even if there are fewer of those) because how many meaningfully different scenarios are there between $0 and $50k of income?

EDIT: Another corollary of this explains part of why income inequality increases over time. As markets become more global, the upside for successful enterprises goes up - there are a lot more potential customers. So today someone at the top of their field can have a much higher income than he could in the past, whereas the income floor at $0 is unchanging.

poke111 | 8 years ago | on: Silicon Valley Struggles to Add Conservatives to Its Ranks

It's true that Eich resigned, under extreme pressure. Is that a good thing? It just underscores my point - that even with legal protections, there still needs to be a cultural shift towards acceptance (or at least tolerance) of people with heterodox views.

poke111 | 8 years ago | on: Silicon Valley Struggles to Add Conservatives to Its Ranks

All I'm saying is that a position, which until the day before yesterday was so mainstream that even a fairly liberal politician in a liberal party agreed with it, is today considered so out of bounds that you may face consequences for publicly stating it.
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