Salutations Mr. Prince Bakare Abacha,

I would love a direct massage on my next trip to Nigeria... In fact I have 401 reasons to look into your offer! I hope very much we can meet up for the direct massage and mutually enjoy being fondled under your expert care.

Also I will be traveling to the planet Luna in the upcoming Russian mining mission. I am looking for investors that are interested in sponsoring me in exchange for a percentage of my cut in the mining operation.

Please respond with your interest. I am very excited about the direct massage and the opportunity to work with you in a mutually beneficial business opportunity!

Sincerely,

Sr. Cosmosnot Andropov Niet Bing Zhou

I take it you are a young person... First max out your company 401K with as much contribution to the ROTH option as you can afford... invest it in the lowest fee broad market matching index fund (Hint: S&P500) you can find. OK... now hopefully you are down with this and you still aren't eating into that 80K... If you don't need this money for a house, Well... over the long haul investment in the broader stock market "historically" doubles investments every 7 years. So, I'd suggest you open a cheap online brokerage account and first invest as much as you can into a ROTH and drop both ROTH and excess into an (again S&P500?) index mutual fund with the lowest expense ratio that you can find... and... try not to look at it again for the next 30 years except to convert as much each year into ROTH as possible. After 30 years you will hopefully look back into your account and have about $1.5M in that account with... being able to pull some significant amount of that investment out _tax free_. If you do need some of it for a house try to avoid 30 year loans and elect for 10-20 year loans.

But this is how the Hong Kong government has traditionally made its money. Hong Kong’s tax structure is real-estate sales. This is why Hong Kong is all about huge sky rise developments of ultra-small apartments... and because the island is all hills, it is also why so many developments are built literally on a cliff.

Hong Kong is a geographically difficult place... building new plots is expensive - and the government makes it more expensive.

This is the most beautiful and tragic thing I have read all day. Is there a reputable place to donate?

In the comment section was “learn to code.” Totally Insensitive... and not that I agree, but nonetheless close to the point. The consolidation and automation of news is here to stay, and not just journalists/writers — all of us, in fact — need to be very careful to learn the new skills it takes to compete in an increasingly automated world.

The reason why that person said "learn to code" to the journalist was because when coal miners were losing their jobs, many articles were written condescendly implying that miners should "learn to code" and abandon the profession they've spent their entire lives in. Some examples [1]. It's less of an insensitive position and more of a reminder that what goes around comes around, that writing articles isn't any more secure of a profession than mining coal, and to not expect sympathy when you didn't show it to others who were previously in the same situation. I'm not saying that this writer was insensitive towards coal miners, but this is the sentiment behind the phrase.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyC-qmDWkAAKJvU?format=jpg&name=...

As someone who does code, I think most people would be worse off by learning to code.

It can be a rewarding job for someone who enjoys constantly solving crazy puzzles but, even for those who love to code, it can still be a miserable experience. Most people aren't particularly grabbed by the ability to control what a computer does the way that we "geeks" are. They would be bored out of their minds the second they have to do Fizz Buzz, which is why a lot of people never get off the ground with coding in the first place. The starting salary is barely livable; the national average is ~65k, and though I now make six figures, I started in the low 40ks. You won't get rich quick, perhaps at all, and unless you're talented or pick the right technologies, you might be stuck making mediocre pay while suffering the bad code of other learn-to-coders who are in it to strike it rich. After about 4 years, you begin to realize that your job is just like every other job, and that is to clean up the mess made by someone else. Unless you're part of the <10% that actually builds brand new stuff, your purpose is to be frequently astonished and make sense of the chaos. How fun.

Some people enjoy all of that, but it's a fallacy to believe that anyone could do it if they _just learned_. More people aren't coding(or choosing unemployment over coding) for the same reason that I and many of us didn't learn to become aerospace engineers, or CEOs, or HVAC technicians. Most of us probably wouldn't be that good at those things because we don't all have the drive for them, and I don't think that having more people who are mediocre at their jobs is a good thing for anyone.

65k is barely liveable now? What percent of the US do you think makes over that amount?

You're right. You can live on that amount, perhaps well depending on how and where you situate yourself. It's basically middle-income. How far that income will get you in a place like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York is another thing.

And sitting at a desk in a heated/air conditioned office is not just like every other job - especially those that involve cleaning.

But I agree that if you don't enjoy programming, you're probably not going to be especially good at it.

A dozen years from now, I'll be reading on HN(Health insurers' New - or a message board for professionals of some other parasitic tumour which still has a few years of decent living in our economy) a comment about how the consolidation, commodification, and semi-automation of programming is here to stay, and that not just software engineers - but all of us, in fact - need to be very careful to learn the new skills it takes to compete in an increasingly automated world.

Why one of those new skills is never 'march your politicians out, and make them mandate a 25-hour work week, to guarantee that anyone capable of working is able to find moderately dignified and remunerative work', is a question that will continue to haunt me.

How many people working 50 hours a week are being compensated such that they can retire in 15-20 years? I’d guess vanishingly few.

Very few for sure. Even if it were only 1 person, I would still object to a government mandate to bar that.

1. Mandate 1.5x overtime pay for any hour worked over 25, and companies will very quickly be incentivised to hire more people, instead of overworking the ones they have.

2. You'd rather take all the social ills of 30-40% of the population being out of work, or doing shitty gig economy jobs?

I’d happily pay a good SWE 40 hours for 35 hours of work. Less coordination and a smaller comms network is a win. Good SWEs would happily take that deal as they’d be making 4x the median instead of 2.5x the median and could live better and save more.

I don’t believe in restricting freedom of employees to work. If that means the hardest working and most skilled live meaningfully better than the median or 10th percentile, then yes I’m totally ok with that.

Just...I mean, really?

You have to feed the troll ("orange man") from a different website? It's so irritating that this shit still needs explained to people.

That’s the point actually of what Lewis is talking about - and it is a miracle that we have the translations that we do. It’s really not so difficult to understand the Bible — especially with modern translations like ESV, it’s today even easier to understand the ideas of the “common man’s Greek” and Hebrew/Arimaic that the Bible was written in. There is always room however for a scholar of ancient language to help others to understand nuance, figure of speech, or subtle cultural reference that may be difficult to translate directly... but the plain truth is that 99.9% of what you want to know is accessible today by the common reader. There is no excuse for not understanding the Bible - far from it... there is only the excuse that someone wants to ignore it.

Um. An overly socialized economy incentivizes counterproductive behavior. The early puritans in Massachusetts /started/ with the extremity of a socialist system of non-ownership with the hope that all would collectively contribute to a wonderful Christian society. They starved until they based their society on ownership and focus on equality of opportunity instead of equality of outcome.

My point is that once you start just giving money away - you shift to the early Massachusetts model...which leads to poverty and starvation. Even the most moral of men (can you argue that early puritans were more focused on morality than us?) will fail under a system that rewards sloth.

It is not useful to define a demographic of the destitute at a standard relative to the median. (Note: Advancement of inequality of outcome beyond poverty is a _virtue_ of free society.) It is more virtuous to define an absolute poverty value and seek to ensure that the societal wealth distribution minimum never reaches the minimum - then allow maximal opportunity for all individuals to achieve any outcome they desire. If this model is achieved, all are then maximally provided for and maximally contributing to the civil society.

Humans aren’t logical. We’re apes who evolved in the context of groups of 100 or so individuals. We pay attention to how others are doing. If there is too much of an imbalance, mob justice and violence are the means by which the scales are re-balanced. All sides of the political spectrum (and especially the rich) should acknowledge and accept this.

And I say this as somebody on the right.

I want 17.10 to be able to jailbreak and install on the Samsung 8+. Samsung is looking to provide a phone/pc in one device, but I use ubuntu as my os today and want to continue. Samsung is already doing all the hw and docking work... but their sw is bloated and locked down... I want the freedom that ubuntu provides on a great phone/pc.

This seems like an overly idealistic perspective.

but history has definitely proven that each one only enhances not only our productivity (and "fun") but also our social connectedness

I think history has shown that overlords like rent seeking until disenfranchised poor people revolt violently or nations fall into war, making all the normal societal conflicts irrelevant.

I am not sure social connectedness has improved. It may have improved in quantity, but not necessarily in quality. Check out how well people in cities know each other compared to decades ago. Of course, you need to compare apples to apples. Comparing disenfranchised situations yesterday to nice situations today is the same as comparing disenfranchised situations today to nice situations yesterday. Compare nice to nice.

The whole idea about robotics and AI freeing people from mundane tasks is not new. Automation throughout history has always had good and bad consequences, but it's also fairly certain that such industrial revolutions have always been accompanied by upheaval and uncertainty, as power players try to use new technologies for both good and bad.

The Victorian Internet about the invention of the telegraph is an excellent read for an example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

My argument is simply.... If you leave technical advancement alone and provide people freedom - not government oppression or try to kill innovation underneath of some set social theory... It works out, and it works out better in the long run. What would have happened if someone was regulating our speech right now in this forum? Would you stand for such oppression in the name of social correctness? It's going to work out... Just not in the old framework of the way you envision. Have a little faith.

I'm not sure what is this old framework I supposedly envision, and I'm not sure how the example of regulating speech in this forum relates to or helps to explain anything. We used to be talking about the effects of new technology by itself on society, nothing else. Just not sure where you're going with this if you want to start bringing up all that other stuff.

Why do robotics help the lower skilled (aka the largest mass of people)?

Well if communist theories are correct at a certain time the robots will be owned by the government (the people), and produce unlimited bounty. The idea being that people will only need to do minimal work. Now whether that works and we can figure out equitable distributions of that bounty remains to be seen (I'm pretty pessimistic it'll work, human greed will just get in the way).